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Highlights • There is a lack of evidence to motivate TBI treatment beyond the word level. • Some discourse-based treatments have improved language in TBI. • The treatment focuses on meta-cognitive and meta-linguistic strategies. • Participant demonstrated improve language ability following treatment. • The study's effects were maintained 1-month post treatment. Abstract Background Individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) present with numerous discourse deficits associated with impairments to the linguistic system and other cognitive systems. Individuals with TBI may produce discourse that is lacking important information and poorly organized, as well as containing numerous coherence disrupting elements. Yet there are few studies directly addressing discourse deficits in individuals with TBI to guide clinicians. Aims The purpose of the study was to determine if discourse processing treatment improved the discourse production in individual with TBI. Aims of the study included determining if the discourse processing treatment improved completeness and informativeness in TBI discourse samples. Methods & procedures The study included three participants with mild-to-moderate TBI. The study utilized an A-B with maintenance design that incorporated components of functional practice, structured cues in the form of comprehension questions and story guide, and meta-cognitive and meta-linguistic processes. Discourse samples were obtained for baseline, treatment, and maintenance one-week and one-month post treatment. Stimuli included 12 sequential pictures, as well as a single picture and a recount probe. Outcomes & results All participants demonstrated small gains in completeness and informativeness for treated items, and 2 of 3 participants demonstrated a medium therapeutic effect for untreated stimuli. Participants also produced discourse with fewer errors for both treated and untreated stimuli after treatment with no therapeutic effect to a small effect for the generalization stimuli. Conclusions The study demonstrated that the discourse processing treatment is capable of producing small therapeutic effects that persisted one-month post treatment in adults with mild-to-moderate TBI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We attempted to replicate a foundational study by Cutler and Fodor (1979). • Cutler and Fodor found shorter reaction times to words focused by preceding questions. • They argued that both discourse and prosody guide attention to new information. • We successfully replicated their findings using updated statistical analyses. We report the results of a replication attempt of a foundational study by Cutler and Fodor (1979). This study sparked several lines of research into the role of information structure in language comprehension, based on the proposal that discourse characteristics, prosodic focus, and syntactic focusing constructions may all guide the comprehender's attention to new important information. Using a phoneme monitoring task, Cutler and Fodor reported that word-initial phonemes in acoustically identical sentences were identified faster when the word had been focused, as opposed to de-focused, by a preceding question. This influential finding has not been replicated using current experimental and statistical standards. Additionally, later research on this topic has deviated considerably from Cutler and Fodor's original proposal and has led to contradictory results. We attempted to replicate the original study following current standards for performing statistical analyses and assessed whether the results of these analyses differ from those obtained from analyses more similar to those conducted originally. We found that in our data, the critical interaction between focus and target position reported by Cutler and Fodor replicates using both the original and the updated analyses, while the two (less important) main effects of focus and target position were only replicated using the updated analyses. This replication provides a stronger foundation to these diverging lines of research, and it is likely to spark new investigations into information structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury’s Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes modification of MacLaury’s VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract category of national identity. The analysis of data shows that in abstract categories coordinates can receive various strengths depending on the environmental pressures on the speaker. Also, unlike in the case of the physiologically-based category of colour, in the abstract category of identity the coordinates are hierarchically structured. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]