The purpose of this study was to develop a picture description task for eliciting connected speech from children with motor speech disorders. The Park Play scene is a child-friendly picture description task aimed at augmenting current assessment protocols for childhood motor speech disorders. The design process included a literature review to: (1) establish optimal design features for child ass...

We describe the WordsEye Linguistics tool (WELT), a novel tool for the documentation and preservation of endangered languages. WELT is based on WordsEye (Coyne and Sproat, 2001), a text-toscene tool that automatically generates 3D scenes from written input. WELT has two modes of operation. In the first mode, English input automatically generates a picture which can be used to elicit a descripti...

This study explored the effect of thiamine deficiency during early infancy on the development of syntax and lexical retrieval. We tested syntactic comprehension and production, lexical retrieval abilities and conceptual abilities of 59 children aged 5-7 years who had been fed during their first year of life with a thiamine-deficient milk substitute. We compared them to 35 age-matched control ch...

This study investigates age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency effects in both spoken and written picture naming. In the first two experiments, reliable AoA effects on object naming speed, with objective word frequency controlled for, were found in both spoken (Experiment 1) and written picture naming (Experiment 2). In contrast, no reliable objective word frequency effects were observed o...

Language production requires multiple stages of processing (e.g., semantic retrieval, lexical selection), each of which may involve distinct brain regions. Distractor words can be combined with picture naming to examine factors that influence language production. Phonologically-related distractors have been found to speed picture naming (facilitation), while slower response times and decreased ...

This paper describes how a framework for user-programmable image interpretation has been implemented as a computer vision system capable of executing a declarative task description. The system has been applied to an industrial inspection task, and its performance has been compared with that of an existing procedural program written specifically for the same task. These show that the system is c...