Publications

Abstract

Rhythm and language-related traits are phenotypically correlated, but their genetic overlap is largely unknown. Here, we leveraged two large-scale genome-wide association studies performed to shed light on the shared genetics of rhythm (N=606,825) and dyslexia (N=1,138,870). Our results reveal an intricate shared genetic and neurobiological architecture, and lay groundwork for resolving longstanding debates about the potential co-evolution of human language and musical traits.

Abstract

Humans acquire word knowledge through producing and comprehending spoken and written language. Word learning continues into adulthood and knowledge accumulates across the lifespan. Therefore, receptive vocabulary size is often conceived of as a proxy for linguistic experience and plays a central role in assessing individuals’ language proficiency. There is currently no valid open access test available for assessing receptive vocabulary size in German-speaking adults. We addressed this gap and developed the German Auditory and Image Vocabulary Test (GAudI). In the GAudI, participants are presented with spoken test words and have to indicate their meanings by selecting the corresponding picture from a set of four alternatives. Here we describe the development of the test and provide evidence for its validity. Specifically, we report a study in which 168 German-speaking participants completed the GAudI and five other tests tapping into linguistic experience: one test measuring print exposure, two tests measuring productive vocabulary, one test assessing knowledge of book language grammar, and a test of receptive vocabulary that was normed in adolescents. The psychometric properties of the GAudI and its relationships to the other tests demonstrate that it is a suitable tool for measuring receptive vocabulary size. We offer an open-access digital test environment that can be used for research purposes, accessible via https://ems13.mpi.nl/bq4_customizable_de/researchers_welcome.php.

Abstract

Human communication is inherently multimodal. Auditory speech, but also visual cues can be used to understand another talker. Most studies of audiovisual speech perception have focused on the perception of speech segments (i.e., speech sounds). However, less is known about the influence of visual information on the perception of suprasegmental aspects of speech like lexical stress. In two experiments, we investigated the influence of different visual cues (e.g., facial articulatory cues and beat gestures) on the audiovisual perception of lexical stress. We presented auditory lexical stress continua of disyllabic Dutch stress pairs together with videos of a speaker producing stress on the first or second syllable (e.g., articulating VOORnaam or voorNAAM). Moreover, we combined and fully crossed the face of the speaker producing lexical stress on either syllable with a gesturing body producing a beat gesture on either the first or second syllable. Results showed that people successfully used visual articulatory cues to stress in muted videos. However, in audiovisual conditions, we were not able to find an effect of visual articulatory cues. In contrast, we found that the temporal alignment of beat gestures with speech robustly influenced participants' perception of lexical stress. These results highlight the importance of considering suprasegmental aspects of language in multimodal contexts.

Abstract

Studies of perception have long shown that the brain adds information to its sensory analysis of the physical environment. A touchstone example for humans is language use: to comprehend a physical signal like speech, the brain must add linguistic knowledge, including syntax. Yet, syntactic rules and representations are widely assumed to be atemporal (i.e., abstract and not bound by time), so they must be translated into time-varying signals for speech comprehension and production. Here, we test 3 different models of the temporal spell-out of syntactic structure against brain activity of people listening to Dutch stories: an integratory bottom-up parser, a predictive top-down parser, and a mildly predictive left-corner parser. These models build exactly the same structure but differ in when syntactic information is added by the brain—this difference is captured in the (temporal distribution of the) complexity metric “incremental node count.” Using temporal response function models with both acoustic and information-theoretic control predictors, node counts were regressed against source-reconstructed delta-band activity acquired with magnetoencephalography. Neural dynamics in left frontal and temporal regions most strongly reflect node counts derived by the top-down method, which postulates syntax early in time, suggesting that predictive structure building is an important component of Dutch sentence comprehension. The absence of strong effects of the left-corner model further suggests that its mildly predictive strategy does not represent Dutch language comprehension well, in contrast to what has been found for English. Understanding when the brain projects its knowledge of syntax onto speech, and whether this is done in language-specific ways, will inform and constrain the development of mechanistic models of syntactic structure building in the brain.

Abstract

When language abilities in aphasia are assessed in clinical and research settings, the standard practice is to examine each language of a multilingual person separately. But many multilingual individuals, with and without aphasia, mix their languages regularly when they communicate with other speakers who share their languages. We applied a novel approach to scoring language production of a multilingual person with aphasia. Our aim was to discover whether the assessment outcome would differ meaningfully when we count accurate responses in only the target language of the assessment session versus when we apply a translanguaging framework, that is, count all accurate responses, regardless of the language in which they were produced. The participant is a Farsi-German-English speaking woman with chronic moderate aphasia. We examined the participant’s performance on two picture-naming tasks, an answering wh-question task, and an elicited narrative task. The results demonstrated that scores in English, the participant’s third-learned and least-impaired language did not differ between the two scoring methods. Performance in German, the participant’s moderately impaired second language benefited from translanguaging-based scoring across the board. In Farsi, her weakest language post-CVA, the participant’s scores were higher under the translanguaging-based scoring approach in some but not all of the tasks. Our findings suggest that whether a translanguaging-based scoring makes a difference in the results obtained depends on relative language abilities and on pragmatic constraints, with additional influence of the linguistic distances between the languages in question.

Abstract

We examined the morphosyntactic prediction ability of child heritage speakers and the role of reading skills and language experience in predictive processing. Using visual world eye-tracking, we focused on predictive use of case-marking cues in Turkish with monolingual (N=49, Mage=83 months) and heritage children, who were early bilinguals of Turkish and Dutch (N=30, Mage=90 months). We found quantitative differences in magnitude of the prediction ability of monolingual and heritage children; however, their overall prediction ability was on par. The heritage speakers’ prediction ability was facilitated by their reading skills in Dutch, but not in Turkish as well as by their heritage language exposure, but not by engagement in literacy activities. These findings emphasize the facilitatory role of reading skills and spoken language experience in predictive processing. This study is the first to show that in a developing bilingual mind, effects of reading-on-prediction can take place across modalities and across languages.

Abstract

Acknowledging that the parent–child attachment is a dyadic relationship, we investigated differences between pairs of parents and preschool children based on gender configurations in the association between attachment and problem behavior. We looked at mother–daughter, mother–son, father–daughter, and father–son dyads, but also compared mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, and same versus different gender pairs. We employed multigroup structural equation modeling to explore moderation effects of gender in a sample of 446 independent pairs of parents and preschool children (2–5 years old) from the Netherlands. A stronger association between both secure and avoidant attachment and internalizing problems was found for father–son dyads compared to father–daughter dyads. A stronger association between both secure and avoidant attachment and externalizing problems was found for mother–son dyads compared to mother–daughter and father–daughter dyads. Sons showed a stronger negative association between secure attachment and externalizing problems, a stronger positive association between avoidant attachment and externalizing problems, and a stronger negative association between secure attachment and internalizing problems compared to daughters. These results provide evidence for gender moderation and demonstrate that a dyadic approach can reveal patterns of associations that would not be recognized if parent and child gender effects were assessed separately.

Abstract

*All authors contributed equally to this work
Meaningful gestures enhance degraded speech comprehension in neurotypical adults, but it is unknown whether this is the case for neurodivergent populations, such as autistic individuals. Previous research demonstrated atypical multisensory and speech-gesture integration in autistic individuals, suggesting that integrating speech and gestures may be more challenging and less beneficial for speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions in comparison to neurotypicals. Conversely, autistic individuals could also benefit from additional cues to comprehend speech in noise, as they encounter difficulties in filtering relevant information from noise. We here investigated whether gestural enhancement of degraded speech comprehension differs for neurotypical (n = 40, mean age = 24.1) compared to autistic (n = 40, mean age = 26.8) adults. Participants watched videos of an actress uttering a Dutch action verb in clear or degraded speech accompanied with or without a gesture, and completed a free-recall task. Gestural enhancement was observed for both autistic and neurotypical individuals, and did not differ between groups. In contrast to previous literature, our results demonstrate that autistic individuals do benefit from gestures during degraded speech comprehension, similar to neurotypicals. These findings provide relevant insights to improve communication practices with autistic individuals and to develop new interventions for speech comprehension.

Abstract

Speech is often accompanied by gestures. Since beat gestures—simple nonreferential up-and-down hand movements—frequently co-occur with prosodic prominence, they can indicate stress in a word and hence influence spoken-word recognition. However, little is known about the reverse influence of auditory speech on visual perception. The current study investigated whether lexical stress has an effect on the perceived timing of hand beats. We used videos in which a disyllabic word, embedded in a carrier sentence (Experiment 1) or in isolation (Experiment 2), was coupled with an up-and-down hand beat, while varying their degrees of asynchrony. Results from Experiment 1, a novel beat timing estimation task, revealed that gestures were estimated to occur closer in time to the pitch peak in a stressed syllable than their actual timing, hence reducing the perceived temporal distance between gestures and stress by around 60%. Using a forced-choice task, Experiment 2 further demonstrated that listeners tended to perceive a gesture, falling midway between two syllables, on the syllable receiving stronger cues to stress than the other, and this auditory effect was greater when gestural timing was most ambiguous. Our findings suggest that f0 and intensity are the driving force behind the temporal attraction effect of stress on perceived gestural timing. This study provides new evidence for auditory influences on visual perception, supporting bidirectionality in audiovisual interaction between speech-related signals that occur in everyday face-to-face communication.

Abstract

Background

The factors that contribute to language alternation by bilingual speakers with aphasia have been debated. Some studies suggest that atypical language mixing results from impairments in language control, while others posit that mixing is a way to enhance communicative effectiveness. To address this question, most prior research examined the appropriateness of language mixing in connected speech tasks.
Aims

The goal of this study was to provide new insight into the question whether language mixing in aphasia reflects a strategy to enhance verbal effectiveness or involuntary behaviour resulting from impaired language control.
Methods & procedures

Semi-structured web-based interviews with bilingual speakers with aphasia (N = 19) with varying language backgrounds were conducted. The interviews were transcribed and coded for: (1) Self-reports regarding language control and compensation, (2) instances of language mixing, and (3) in two cases, instances of repair initiation.
Outcomes & results

The results showed that several participants reported language control difficulties but that the knowledge of additional languages could also be recruited to compensate for lexical retrieval problems. Most participants showed no or very few instances of mixing and the observed mixes appeared to adhere to the pragmatic context and known functions of switching. Three participants exhibited more marked switching behaviour and reported corresponding difficulties with language control. Instances of atypical mixing did not coincide with clear problems initiating conversational repair.
Conclusions

Our study highlights the variability in language mixing patterns of bilingual speakers with aphasia. Furthermore, most of the individuals in the study appeared to be able to effectively control their languages, and to alternate between their languages for compensatory purposes. Control deficits resulting in atypical language mixing were observed in a small number of participants.

Abstract

Speakers sometimes produce lexical errors, such as saying “salt” instead of “pepper.” This study aimed to better understand the origin of lexical errors by assessing whether they arise from a hasty selection and premature decision to speak (premature selection hypothesis) or from momentary attentional disengagement from the task (attentional lapse hypothesis). We analyzed data from a speeded picture naming task (Lampe et al., 2023) and investigated whether lexical errors are produced as fast as target (i.e., correct) responses, thus arising from premature selection, or whether they are produced more slowly than target responses, thus arising from lapses of attention. Using ex-Gaussian analyses, we found that lexical errors were slower than targets in the tail, but not in the normal part of the response time distribution, with the tail effect primarily resulting from errors that were not coordinates, that is, members of the target’s semantic category. Moreover, we compared the coordinate errors and target responses in terms of their word-intrinsic properties and found that they were overall more frequent, shorter, and acquired earlier than targets. Given the present findings, we conclude that coordinate errors occur due to a premature selection but in the context of intact attentional control, following the same lexical constraints as targets, while other errors, given the variability in their nature, may vary in their origin, with one potential source being lapses of attention.

Abstract

When talking, speakers naturally produce hand movements (co-speech gestures) that contribute to communication. Evidence in Dutch suggests that the timing of simple up-and-down, non-referential “beat” gestures influences spoken word recognition: the same auditory stimulus was perceived as CONtent (noun, capitalized letters indicate stressed syllables) when a beat gesture occurred on the first syllable, but as conTENT (adjective) when the gesture occurred on the second syllable. However, these findings were based on a small number of minimal pairs in Dutch, limiting the generalizability of the findings. We therefore tested this effect in Spanish, where lexical stress is highly relevant in the verb conjugation system, distinguishing bailo, “I dance” with word-initial stress from bailó, “she danced” with word-final stress. Testing a larger sample (N = 100), we also assessed whether individual differences in working memory capacity modulated how much individuals relied on the gestures in spoken word recognition. The results showed that, similar to Dutch, Spanish participants were biased to perceive lexical stress on the syllable that visually co-occurred with a beat gesture, with the effect being strongest when the acoustic stress cues were most ambiguous. No evidence was found for by-participant effect sizes to be influenced by individual differences in phonological or visuospatial working memory. These findings reveal gestural-speech coordination impacts lexical stress perception in a language where listeners are regularly confronted with such lexical stress contrasts, highlighting the impact of gestures’ timing on prominence perception and spoken word recognition.

Abstract

We argue that language learning occurs in triadic interactions, where caregivers and children engage not only with each other but also with objects, actions and non-verbal cues that shape language acquisition. We illustrate this using two studies on real-time interactions in spoken and signed language. The first examines shared book reading, showing how caregivers use speech, gestures and gaze coordination to establish joint attention, facilitating word-object associations. The second study explores joint attention in spoken and signed interactions, demonstrating that signing dyads rely on a wider range of multimodal behaviours – such as touch, vibrations and peripheral gaze – compared to speaking dyads. Our data highlight how different language modalities shape attentional strategies. We advocate for research that fully incorporates the dynamic interplay between language, attention and environment.

Abstract

In face-to-face conversation, people use speech and gesture to convey meaning. Seeing gestures alongside speech facilitates comprehenders’ language processing, but crucially, the mechanisms underlying this facilitation remain unclear. We investigated whether comprehenders use the semantic information in gestures, typically preceding related speech, to predict upcoming meaning. Dutch adults listened to questions asked by a virtual avatar. Questions were accompanied by an iconic gesture (e.g., typing) or meaningless control movement (e.g., arm scratch) followed by a short pause and target word (e.g., “type”). A Cloze experiment showed that gestures improved explicit predictions of upcoming target words. Moreover, an EEG experiment showed that gestures reduced alpha and beta power during the pause, indicating anticipation, and reduced N400 amplitudes, demonstrating facilitated semantic processing. Thus, comprehenders use iconic gestures to predict upcoming meaning. Theories of linguistic prediction should incorporate communicative bodily signals as predictive cues to capture how language is processed in face-to-face interaction.

Abstract

Do aesthetic preferences for images of neatly organized compositions (e.g., images collected on blogs like Things Organized Neatly©) generalize across cultures? In an earlier study, focusing on stimulus and personal properties related to order and complexity, Western participants indicated their preference for one of two simultaneously presented images (100 pairs). In the current study, we compared the data of the native Dutch-speaking participants from this earlier sample (N = 356) to newly collected data from a native Chinese-speaking sample (N = 220). Overall, aesthetic preferences were quite similar across cultures. When relating preferences for each sample to ratings of order, complexity, soothingness, and fascination collected from a Western, mainly Dutch-speaking sample, the results hint at a cross-culturally consistent preference for images that Western participants rate as more ordered, but a cross-culturally diverse relation between preferences and complexity.