Publications

Abstract

Concepts are so fundamental to human cognition that Fodor declared the heart of a cognitive science to be its theory of concepts. To study concepts, though, cognitive scientists need to be able to identify some. The prevailing assumption has been that they are revealed by words such as triangle, table, and robin. But languages vary dramatically in how they carve up the world with names. Either ordinary concepts must be heavily language dependent, or names cannot be a direct route to concepts. We asked speakers of English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese to name a set of 36 video clips of human locomotion and to judge the similarities among them. We investigated what name inventories, name extensions, scaling solutions on name similarity, and scaling solutions on nonlinguistic similarity from the groups, individually and together, suggest about the underlying concepts. Aggregated naming data and similarity solutions converged on results distinct from individual languages.

Abstract

Practices of other initiated repair deal with problems of hearing or understanding what another person has said in the fast-moving turn-by-turn flow of conversation. As such, other-initiated repair plays a fundamental role in the maintenance of intersubjectivity in social interaction. This study finds and analyses a special type of other initiated repair that is used in turn-by-turn conversation in a sign language: Argentine Sign Language (Lengua de Sehas Argentina or LSA). We describe a type of response termed a "freeze-look,' which occurs when a person has just been asked a direct question: instead of answering the question in the next turn position, the person holds still while looking directly at the questioner. In these cases it is clear that the person is aware of having just been addressed and is not otherwise accounting for their delay in responding (e.g., by displaying a "thinking" face or hesitation, etc.). We find that this behavior functions as a way for an addressee to initiate repair by the person who asked the question. The "freeze-look" results in the questioner "re-doing" their action of asking a question, for example by repeating or rephrasing it Thus, we argue that the "freeze-look" is a practice for other-initiation of repair. In addition, we argue that it is an "off-record" practice, thus contrasting with known on record practices such as saying "Huh?" or equivalents. The findings aim to contribute to research on human understanding in everyday turn-by-turn conversation by looking at an understudied sign language, with possible implications for our understanding of visual bodily communication in spoken languages as wel

Abstract

Speech produced in noise (Lombard speech) is more intelligible than speech produced in quiet (plain speech). Previous research on the Lombard intelligibility benefit focused almost entirely on how native speakers produce and perceive Lombard speech. In this study, we investigate the size of the Lombard intelligibility benefit of both native (American-English) and non-native (native Dutch) English for native and non-native listeners (Dutch and Spanish). We used a glimpsing metric to measure the energetic masking potential of speech, which predicted that both native and non-native Lombard speech could withstand greater amounts of masking to a similar extent, compared to plain speech. In an intelligibility experiment, native English, Spanish, and Dutch listeners listened to the same words, mixed with noise. While the non-native listeners appeared to benefit more from Lombard speech than the native listeners did, each listener group experienced a similar benefit for native and non-native Lombard speech. Energetic masking, as captured by the glimpsing metric, only accounted for part of the Lombard benefit, indicating that the Lombard intelligibility benefit does not only result from a shift in spectral distribution. Despite subtle native language influences on non-native Lombard speech, both native and non-native speech provides a Lombard benefit.

Abstract

The effect of stimulation history on the perception of a current event can yield two opposite effects, namely: adaptation or hysteresis. The perception of the current event thus goes in the opposite or in the same direction as prior stimulation, respectively. In audiovisual (AV) synchrony perception, adaptation effects have primarily been reported. Here, we tested if perceptual hysteresis could also be observed over adaptation in AV timing perception by varying different experimental conditions. Participants were asked to judge the synchrony of the last (test) stimulus of an AV sequence with either constant or gradually changing AV intervals (constant and dynamic condition, respectively). The onset timing of the test stimulus could be cued or not (prospective vs. retrospective condition, respectively). We observed hysteretic effects for AV synchrony judgments in the retrospective condition that were independent of the constant or dynamic nature of the adapted stimuli; these effects disappeared in the prospective condition. The present findings suggest that knowing when to estimate a stimulus property has a crucial impact on perceptual simultaneity judgments. Our results extend beyond AV timing perception, and have strong implications regarding the comparative study of hysteresis and adaptation phenomena.

Abstract

Information structure is a subfield of linguistic research dealing with the ways speakers encode instructions to the hearer on how to process the message relative to their temporary mental states. To this end, sentences are segmented into parts conveying known and yet-unknown information, usually labeled ‘topic’ and ‘focus.’ Many languages have developed specialized grammatical and lexical means of indicating this segmentation.

Abstract

In the following self-paced reading study, we assess the cognitive realism of six widely used corpus-derived measures of association strength between words (collocated modifier–noun combinations like vast majority): MI, MI3, Dice coefficient, T-score, Z-score, and log-likelihood. The ability of these collocation metrics to predict reading times is tested against predictors of lexical processing cost that are widely established in the psycholinguistic and usage-based literature, respectively: forward/backward transition probability and bigram frequency. In addition, the experiment includes the treatment variable of task: it is split into two blocks which only differ in the format of interleaved comprehension questions (multiple choice vs. typed free response). Results show that the traditional corpus-linguistic metrics are outperformed by both backward transition probability and bigram frequency. Moreover, the multiple-choice condition elicits faster overall reading times than the typed condition, and the two winning metrics show stronger facilitation on the critical word (i.e. the noun in the bigrams) in the multiple-choice condition. In the typed condition, we find an effect that is weaker and, in the case of bigram frequency, longer lasting, continuing into the first spillover word. We argue that insufficient attention to task effects might have obscured the cognitive correlates of association scores in earlier research.

Abstract

Scientists who study the brain try to understand how it performs everyday behaviors like language, memory, and emotion. Scientists learn a lot by studying how these behaviors change when the brain is damaged. Over the past 200 years, they have made many discoveries by studying individuals with brain damage. For example, one patient could not form sentences after damaging a specific area of his brain. The scientist who studied him concluded that the damaged brain area was important for producing speech. This approach is called the lesion method, and it has taught us a lot about the brain. In this article, we introduce five patients throughout history who forever changed our understanding of the brain. We describe how researchers use these early discoveries to ask new questions about the brain, and we conclude by discussing how the lesion method is used today.

Abstract

This paper presents a succinct reconstruction of the segmental phonology of Proto-Maweti-Guarani, the hypothetical protolanguage from which modern Mawe, Aweti and the Tupi-Guarani branches of the Tupi linguistic family have evolved. Based on about 300 cognate sets from the authors' field data (for Mawe and Aweti) and from Mello's reconstruction (2000) for Proto-Tupi-Guarani (with additional information from other works; and with a few changes concerning certain doubtful features, such as the status of stem-final lenis consonants ∗r and ∗β, and the distinction of ∗c and ∗č), the consonants and vowels of Proto-Maweti-Guarani were reconstructed with the help of the traditional historical-comparative method. The development of the reconstructed segments is then traced from the protolanguage to each of the modern branches. A comparison with other claims made about Proto-Maweti-Guarani is given in the conclusion

Abstract

Language is a unique trait of the human species, of which the genetic architecture remains largely unknown. Through language disorders studies, many candidate genes were identified. However, such complex and multifactorial trait is unlikely to be driven by only few genes and case-control studies, suffering from a lack of power, struggle to uncover significant variants. In parallel, neuroimaging has significantly contributed to the understanding of structural and functional aspects of language in the human brain and the recent availability of large scale cohorts like UK Biobank have made possible to study language via image-derived endophenotypes in the general population. Because of its strong relationship with task-based fMRI (tbfMRI) activations and its easiness of acquisition, resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) have been more popularised, making it a good surrogate of functional neuronal processes. Taking advantage of such a synergistic system by aggregating effects across spatially distributed traits, we performed a multivariate genome-wide association study (mvGWAS) between genetic variations and resting-state functional connectivity (FC) of classical brain language areas in the inferior frontal (pars opercularis, triangularis and orbitalis), temporal and inferior parietal lobes (angular and supramarginal gyri), in 32,186 participants from UK Biobank. Twenty genomic loci were found associated with language FCs, out of which three were replicated in an independent replication sample. A locus in 3p11.1, regulating EPHA3 gene expression, is found associated with FCs of the semantic component of the language network, while a locus in 15q14, regulating THBS1 gene expression is found associated with FCs of the perceptual-motor language processing, bringing novel insights into the neurobiology of language.

Abstract

Background

While it is well established that second language (L2) learning success changes with age and across individuals, the underlying neural mechanisms responsible for this developmental shift and these individual differences are largely unknown. We will study the behavioral and neural factors that subserve new grammar and word learning in a large cross-sectional developmental sample. This study falls under the NWO (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [Dutch Research Council]) Language in Interaction consortium (website: https://www.languageininteraction.nl/).
Methods

We will sample 360 healthy individuals across a broad age range between 8 and 25 years. In this paper, we describe the study design and protocol, which involves multiple study visits covering a comprehensive behavioral battery and extensive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) protocols. On the basis of these measures, we will create behavioral and neural fingerprints that capture age-based and individual variability in new language learning. The behavioral fingerprint will be based on first and second language proficiency, memory systems, and executive functioning. We will map the neural fingerprint for each participant using the following MRI modalities: T1‐weighted, diffusion-weighted, resting-state functional MRI, and multiple functional-MRI paradigms. With respect to the functional MRI measures, half of the sample will learn grammatical features and half will learn words of a new language. Combining all individual fingerprints allows us to explore the neural maturation effects on grammar and word learning.
Discussion

This will be one of the largest neuroimaging studies to date that investigates the developmental shift in L2 learning covering preadolescence to adulthood. Our comprehensive approach of combining behavioral and neuroimaging data will contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms influencing this developmental shift and individual differences in new language learning. We aim to answer: (I) do these fingerprints differ according to age and can these explain the age-related differences observed in new language learning? And (II) which aspects of the behavioral and neural fingerprints explain individual differences (across and within ages) in grammar and word learning? The results of this study provide a unique opportunity to understand how the development of brain structure and function influence new language learning success.

Abstract

During speech processing, neural activity in non-autistic adults and infants tracks the speech envelope. Recent research in adults indicates that this neural tracking relates to linguistic knowledge and may be reduced in autism. Such reduced tracking, if present already in infancy, could impede language development. In the current study, we focused on children with a family history of autism, who often show a delay in first language acquisition. We investigated whether differences in tracking of sung nursery rhymes during infancy relate to language development and autism symptoms in childhood. We assessed speech-brain coherence at either 10 or 14 months of age in a total of 22 infants with high likelihood of autism due to family history and 19 infants without family history of autism. We analyzed the relationship between speech-brain coherence in these infants and their vocabulary at 24 months as well as autism symptoms at 36 months. Our results showed significant speech-brain coherence in the 10- and 14-month-old infants. We found no evidence for a relationship between speech-brain coherence and later autism symptoms. Importantly, speech-brain coherence in the stressed syllable rate (1–3 Hz) predicted later vocabulary. Follow-up analyses showed evidence for a relationship between tracking and vocabulary only in 10-month-olds but not 14-month-olds and indicated possible differences between the likelihood groups. Thus, early tracking of sung nursery rhymes is related to language development in childhood.

Abstract

Distributional semantic models capture word-level meaning that is useful in many natural language processing tasks and have even been shown to capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. The majority of these models are purely text based, even though the human sensory experience is much richer. In this paper we create visually grounded word embeddings by combining English text and images and compare them to popular text-based methods, to see if visual information allows our model to better capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. Our analysis shows that visually grounded embedding similarities are more predictive of the human reaction times in a large priming experiment than the purely text-based embeddings. The visually grounded embeddings also correlate well with human word similarity ratings.Importantly, in both experiments we show that he grounded embeddings account for a unique portion of explained variance, even when we include text-based embeddings trained on huge corpora. This shows that visual grounding allows our model to capture information that cannot be extracted using text as the only source of information.

Abstract

Skeletal muscle remodelling and contractile dysfunction occur through both acute and chronic disease processes. These include the accumulation of insoluble aggregates of mis- folded amyloid proteins that is a pathological feature of Huntington ’ s disease (HD). While HD has been described primarily as a neurological disease, HD patients ’ exhibit pro- nounced skeletal muscle atrophy. Given that huntingtin is a ubiquitously expressed protein, skeletal muscle fibres may be at risk of a cell autonomous HD-related dysfunction. However the mechanism leading to skeletal muscle abnormalities in the clinical and pre-clinical HD settings remains unknown. To unravel this mechanism, we employed the R6/2 transgenic and Hdh Q150 knock-in mouse models of HD. We found that symptomatic animals devel- oped a progressive impairment of the contractile characteristics of the hind limb muscles tibialis anterior (TA) and extensor digitorum longus (EDL), accompanied by a significant loss of motor units in the EDL. In symptomatic animals, these pronounced functional changes were accompanied by an aberrant deregulation of contractile protein transcripts and their up-stream transcriptional regulators. In addition, HD mouse models develop a sig- nificant reduction in muscle force, possibly as a result of a deterioration in energy metabo- lism and decreased oxidation that is accompanied by the re-expression of the HDAC4- DACH2-myogenin axis. These results show that muscle dysfunction is a key pathological feature of HD.

Abstract

In everyday life, we actively engage in different activities from a first-person perspective. However, experimental psychological research in the field of event perception is often limited to relatively passive, third-person computer-based paradigms. In the present study, we tested the feasibility of using immersive virtual reality in combination with eye tracking with participants in active motion. Behavioral research has shown that speakers of aspectual and non-aspectual languages attend to goals (endpoints) in motion events differently, with speakers of non-aspectual languages showing relatively more attention to goals (endpoint bias). In the current study, native speakers of German (non-aspectual) and English (aspectual) walked on a treadmill across 3-D terrains in VR, while their eye gaze was continuously tracked. Participants encountered landmark objects on the side of the road, and potential endpoint objects at the end of it. Using growth curve analysis to analyze fixation patterns over time, we found no differences in eye gaze behavior between German and English speakers. This absence of cross-linguistic differences was also observed in behavioral tasks with the same participants. Methodologically, based on the quality of the data, we conclude that our dynamic eye-tracking setup can be reliably used to study what people look at while moving through rich and dynamic environments that resemble the real world.

Abstract

Gaze cues play an important role in human communication and are used to coordinate turn-taking and joint attention, as well as to regulate intimacy. In order to have fluent conversations with people, social robots need to exhibit humanlike gaze behavior. Previous Gaze Control Systems (GCS) in HRI have automated robot gaze using data-driven or heuristic approaches. However, these systems tend to be mainly reactive in nature. Planning the robot gaze ahead of time could help in achieving more realistic gaze behavior and better eye-head coordination. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel planning-based GCS. We evaluate our system in a comparative within-subjects user study (N=26) between a reactive system and our proposed system. The results show that the users preferred the proposed system and that it was significantly more interpretable and better at regulating intimacy.

Abstract

Frequent and predictable words are generally pronounced with less effort and are therefore acoustically more reduced than less frequent or unpredictable words. Local predictability can be operationalised by Transitional Probability (TP), which indicates how likely a word is to occur given its immediate context. We investigated whether and how probabilistic reduction effects on word durations change with adult age when reading aloud content words embedded in sentences. The results showed equally large frequency effects on verb and noun durations for both younger (Mage = 20 years) and older (Mage = 68 years) adults. Backward TP also affected word duration for younger and older adults alike. ForwardTP, however, had no significant effect on word duration in either age group. Our results resemble earlier findings of more robust BackwardTP effects compared to ForwardTP effects. Furthermore, unlike often reported decline in predictive processing with aging, probabilistic reduction effects remain stable across adulthood.

Abstract

It has been observed by several researchers that the Khoisan palate tends to lack a prominent alveolar ridge. A preliminary biomechanical model of click production was created to examine if these sounds might be subject to an anatomical bias associated with alveolar ridge size. Results suggest the bias is plausible, taking the form of decreased articulatory effort and improved volume change characteristics, however, further modelling and experimental research is required to solidify the claim.

Abstract

Autosomal recessive Achromatopsia (ACHM) is a rare inherited disorder associated with dysfunctional cone photoreceptors resulting in a congenital absence of cone input to visual cortex. This might lead to distinct changes in cortical architecture with a negative impact on the success of gene augmentation therapies. To investigate the status of the visual cortex in these patients, we performed a multi-centre study focusing on the cortical structure of regions that normally receive predominantly cone input. Using high-resolution T1-weighted MRI scans and surface-based morphometry, we compared cortical thickness, surface area and grey matter volume in foveal, parafoveal and paracentral representations of primary visual cortex in 15 individuals with ACHM and 42 normally sighted, healthy controls (HC). In ACHM, surface area was reduced in all tested representations, while thickening of the cortex was found highly localized to the most central representation. These results were comparable to more widespread changes in brain structure reported in congenitally blind individuals, suggesting similar developmental processes, i.e., irrespective of the underlying cause and extent of vision loss. The cortical differences we report here could limit the success of treatment of ACHM in adulthood. Interventions earlier in life when cortical structure is not different from normal would likely offer better visual outcomes for those with ACHM.

Abstract

Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word-learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category-level as well as individual word level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more accurately than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning.

Abstract

Increasing evidence implicates the sensorimotor systems with high-level cognition, but the extent to which these systems play a functional role remains debated. Using an elegant design, Shebani and Pulvermüller (2013) reported that carrying out a demanding rhythmic task with the hands led to selective impairment of working memory for hand-related words (e.g., clap), while carrying out the same task with the feet led to selective memory impairment for foot-related words (e.g., kick). Such a striking double dissociation is acknowledged even by critics to constitute strong evidence for an embodied account of working memory. Here, we report on an attempt at a direct replication of this important finding. We followed a sequential sampling design and stopped data collection at N=77 (more than five times the original sample size), at which point the evidence for the lack of the critical selective interference effect was very strong (BF01 = 91). This finding constitutes strong evidence against a functional contribution of the motor system to keeping action words in working memory. Our finding fits into the larger emerging picture in the field of embodied cognition that sensorimotor simulations are neither required nor automatic in high-level cognitive processes, but that they may play a role depending on the task. Importantly, we urge researchers to engage in transparent, high-powered, and fully pre-registered experiments like the present one to ensure the field advances on a solid basis.

Abstract

Much research has been dedicated to the effects of bilingualism on executive control (EC). For bilinguals with aphasia, the interplay with EC is complex. In this systematic review, we synthesize research on this topic and provide an overview of the current state of the field. First, we examine the evidence for EC deficits in bilingual persons with aphasia (bPWA). We then discuss the domain generality of bilingual language control impairments. Finally, we evaluate the bilingual advantage hypothesis in bPWA. We conclude that (1) EC impairments in bPWA are frequently observed, (2) experimental results on the relationship between linguistic and domain-general control are mixed, (3) bPWA with language control problems in everyday communication have domain-general EC problems, and (4) there are indications for EC advantages in bPWA. We end with directions for experimental work that could provide better insight into the intricate relationship between EC and bilingual aphasia.

Abstract

Background

Glioma (brain tumour) patients can suffer from mild linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive problems when the glioma is localised in an eloquent brain area. Word-finding problems are among the most frequently reported complaints. However, mild problems are difficult to measure with standard language tests because they are generally designed for more severe aphasic patients.

Aims

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether word-finding problems reported by patients with a glioma can be objectified with a standard object naming test, and a linguistic processing speed test. In addition, we examined whether word-finding problems and linguistic processing speed are related to non-verbal cognitive abilities.

Methods & Procedures

We tested glioma patients (N=36) as part of their standard pre-treatment clinical work-up. Word-finding problems were identified by a clinical linguist during the anamnesis. Linguistic processing speed was assessed with a newly designed sentence judgment test (SJT) as part of the Diagnostic Instrument for Mild Aphasia (DIMA), lexical retrieval with the Boston Naming Test (BNT), presence of aphasia with a Token Test (TT), and non-verbal processing with the Trail Making Test A and B (TMT). Test performances of glioma patients were compared to those of healthy control participants (N=35).

Outcomes & Results

The results show that many glioma patients (58%) report word-finding problems; these complaints were in only half of the cases supported by deviant scores on the BNT. Moreover, the presence of reported word-finding problems did not correlate with the BNT scores. However, word-finding problems were significantly correlated with reaction times on the SJT and the TMT. Although there were no significant differences between the patient and control group on the SJT, a subgroup of patients with a glioma in the frontal lobe of the language-dominant hemisphere was slower on the SJT. Finally, performance on the SJT and TMT were significantly correlated in the patient group but not in the control group.

Conclusions

Linguistic processing speed appears to be an important factor in explaining reported word-finding problems. Moreover, the overlap between speed of language processing and non-verbal processing indicates that patients may rely on more domain-general cognitive abilities as compared to healthy participants. The variability observed between patients emphasises the need for tailored neuro-linguistic assessments including an extensive anamnesis regarding language problems in clinical work-up.

Abstract

This paper investigated the learnability and generalizability of French schwa alternation by Dutch low-proficiency second language learners. We trained 40 participants on 24 new schwa words by exposing them equally often to the reduced and full forms of these words. We then assessed participants' accuracy and reaction times to these newly learnt words as well as 24 previously encountered schwa words with an auditory lexical decision task. Our results show learning of the new words in both forms. This suggests that lack of exposure is probably the main cause of learners' difficulties with reduced forms. Nevertheless, the full forms were slightly better recognized than the reduced ones, possibly due to phonetic and phonological properties of the reduced forms. We also observed no generalization to previously encountered words, suggesting that our participants stored both of the learnt word forms and did not create a rule that applies to all schwa words.

Abstract

EEG mu rhythms (8-13Hz) recorded at fronto-central electrodes are generally considered as markers of motor cortical activity in humans, because they are modulated when participants perform an action, when they observe another’s action or even when they imagine performing an action. In this study, we analyzed the time-frequency (TF) modulation of mu rhythms while participants read action language (“You will cut the strawberry cake”), abstract language (“You will doubt the patient´s argument”), and perceptive language (“You will notice the bright day”). The results indicated that mu suppression at fronto-central sites is associated with action language rather than with abstract or perceptive language. Also, the largest difference between conditions occurred quite late in the sentence, while reading the first noun, (contrast Action vs. Abstract), or the second noun following the action verb (contrast Action vs. Perceptive). This suggests that motor activation is associated with the integration of words across the sentence beyond the lexical processing of the action verb. Source reconstruction localized mu suppression associated with action sentences in premotor cortex (BA 6). The present study suggests (1) that the understanding of action language activates motor networks in the human brain, and (2) that this activation occurs online based on semantic integration across multiple words in the sentence.

Abstract

The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.g., toward) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (e.g., Art gave you the pen describes action toward you). We report on a pre- registered, multi-lab replication of one version of the ACE. The results show that none of the 18 labs involved in the study observed a reliable ACE, and that the meta-analytic estimate of the size of the ACE was essentially zero.

Abstract

We considered the role of orthography and task-related processing mechanisms in the activation of morphologically related complex words during bilingual word processing. So far, it has only been shown that such morphologically related words (i.e., morphological family members) are activated through the semantic and morphological overlap they share with the target word. In this study, we investigated family size effects in Dutch-English identical cognates (e.g., tent in both languages), non-identical cognates (e.g., pil and pill, in English and Dutch, respectively), and non-cognates (e.g., chicken in English). Because of their cross-linguistic overlap in orthography, reading a cognate can result in activation of family members both languages. Cognates are therefore well-suited for studying mechanisms underlying bilingual activation of morphologically complex words. We investigated family size effects in an English lexical decision task and a Dutch-English language decision task, both performed by Dutch-English bilinguals. English lexical decision showed a facilitatory effect of English and Dutch family size on the processing of English-Dutch cognates relative to English non-cognates. These family size effects were not dependent on cognate type. In contrast, for language decision, in which a bilingual context is created, Dutch and English family size effects were inhibitory. Here, the combined family size of both languages turned out to better predict reaction time than the separate family size in Dutch or English. Moreover, the combined family size interacted with cognate type: the response to identical cognates was slowed by morphological family members in both languages. We conclude that (1) family size effects are sensitive to the task performed on the lexical items, and (2) depend on both semantic and formal aspects of bilingual word processing. We discuss various mechanisms that can explain the observed family size effects in a spreading activation framework.

Abstract

In speech, words are often reduced rather than fully pronounced (e.g., (/ˈsʌmri/ for /ˈsʌməri/, summary). Non-native listeners may have problems in processing these reduced forms, because they have encountered them less often. This paper addresses the question whether this also holds for highly proficient non-natives and for words with similar forms and meanings in the non-natives' mother tongue (i.e., cognates). In an English auditory lexical decision task, natives and highly proficient Dutch non-natives of English listened to cognates and non-cognates that were presented in full or without their post-stress schwa. The data show that highly proficient learners are affected by reduction as much as native speakers. Nevertheless, the two listener groups appear to process reduced forms differently, because non-natives produce more errors on reduced cognates than on non-cognates. While listening to reduced forms, non-natives appear to be hindered by the co-activated lexical representations of cognate forms in their native language.

Abstract

We examined the effect of word stress position on bilingual auditory cognate processing. Turkish–Dutch early bilinguals who are dominant in their L2 (Dutch) performed an auditory lexical decision task in Turkish or Dutch. While Dutch has variable word stress, with a tendency for penultimate stress, stress in Turkish is mostly predictable and usually falls on the ultimate syllable. Our tasks included two-syllable cognates with penultimate stress in both languages, ultimate stress in both languages, or ultimate stress in Turkish and penultimate stress in Dutch. Some cognate facilitation effects arose in Dutch, while inhibition was found in Turkish. Cognates with ultimate stress were processed faster than cognates with penultimate stress, in both languages. This shows that in Turkish–Dutch early bilinguals, cognate processing depends on Turkish stress position, although Dutch is dominant. Together, the findings support the view that cognates have separate, though linked representations.

Abstract

The ability to comprehend phrases is an essential integrative property of the brain. Here we evaluate the neural processes that enable the transition from single word processing to a minimal compositional scheme. Previous research has reported conflicting timing effects of composition, and disagreement persists with respect to inferior frontal and posterior temporal contributions. To address these issues, 19 patients (10 male, 19 female) implanted with penetrating depth or surface subdural intracranial electrodes heard auditory recordings of adjective-noun, pseudoword-noun and adjective-pseudoword phrases and judged whether the phrase matched a picture. Stimulus-dependent alterations in broadband gamma activity, low frequency power and phase-locking values across the language-dominant left hemisphere were derived. This revealed a mosaic located on the lower bank of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), in which closely neighboring cortical sites displayed exclusive sensitivity to either lexicality or phrase structure, but not both. Distinct timings were found for effects of phrase composition (210–300 ms) and pseudoword processing (approximately 300–700 ms), and these were localized to neighboring electrodes in pSTS. The pars triangularis and temporal pole encoded anticipation of composition in broadband low frequencies, and both regions exhibited greater functional connectivity with pSTS during phrase composition. Our results suggest that the pSTS is a highly specialized region comprised of sparsely interwoven heterogeneous constituents that encodes both lower and higher level linguistic features. This hub in pSTS for minimal phrase processing may form the neural basis for the human-specific computational capacity for forming hierarchically organized linguistic structures.

Abstract

Using individual differences approaches, a growing body of literature finds positive associations between musicality and language-related abilities, complementing prior findings of links between musical training and language skills. Despite these associations, musicality has been often overlooked in mainstream models of individual differences in language acquisition and development. To better understand the biological basis of these individual differences, we propose the Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) framework. This novel integrative framework posits that musical and language-related abilities likely share some common genetic architecture (i.e., genetic pleiotropy) in addition to some degree of overlapping neural endophenotypes, and genetic influences on musically and linguistically enriched environments. Drawing upon recent advances in genomic methodologies for unraveling pleiotropy, we outline testable predictions for future research on language development and how its underlying neurobiological substrates may be supported by genetic pleiotropy with musicality. In support of the MAPLE framework, we review and discuss findings from over seventy behavioral and neural studies, highlighting that musicality is robustly associated with individual differences in a range of speech-language skills required for communication and development. These include speech perception-in-noise, prosodic perception, morphosyntactic skills, phonological skills, reading skills, and aspects of second/foreign language learning. Overall, the current work provides a clear agenda and framework for studying musicality-language links using individual differences approaches, with an emphasis on leveraging advances in the genomics of complex musicality and language traits.

Abstract

Statistical learning plays a key role in language processing, e.g., for speech segmentation. Older adults have been reported to show less statistical learning on the basis of visual input than younger adults. Given age-related changes in perception and cognition, we investigated whether statistical learning is also impaired in the auditory modality in older compared to younger adults and whether individual learning ability is associated with measures of perceptual (i.e., hearing sensitivity) and cognitive functioning in both age groups. Thirty younger and thirty older adults performed an auditory artificial-grammar-learning task to assess their statistical learning ability. In younger adults, perceptual effort came at the cost of processing resources required for learning. Inhibitory control (as indexed by Stroop colornaming performance) did not predict auditory learning. Overall, younger and older adults showed the same amount of auditory learning, indicating that statistical learning ability is preserved over the adult life span.

Abstract

Auditory discrimination of speech stimuli is an essential tool in speech and language therapy, e.g., in dysarthria rehabilitation. It is unclear, however, which listener characteristics are associated with the ability to perceive differences between one's own utterance and target speech. Knowledge about such associations may help to support patients participating in speech and language therapy programs that involve auditory discrimination tasks.
Discrimination performance was evaluated in 96 healthy participants over 60 years of age as individuals with dysarthria are typically in this age group. Participants compared meaningful words and sentences on the dimensions of loudness, pitch and speech rate. Auditory abilities were assessed using pure-tone audiometry, speech audiometry and speech understanding in noise. Cognitive measures included auditory short-term memory, working memory and processing speed. Linguistic functioning was assessed by means of vocabulary knowledge and language proficiency.
Exploratory factor analyses showed that discrimination performance was primarily associated with cognitive and linguistic skills, rather than auditory abilities. Accordingly, older adults’ discrimination performance was mainly predicted by cognitive and linguistic skills. Discrimination accuracy was higher in older adults with better speech understanding in noise, faster processing speed, and better language proficiency, but accuracy decreased with age. This raises the question whether these associations generalize to clinical populations and, if so, whether patients with better cognitive or linguistic skills may benefit more from discrimination-based therapeutic approaches than patients with poorer cognitive or linguistic abilities.

Abstract

Substantial genetic correlations have been reported across psychiatric disorders and numerous cross-disorder genetic variants have been detected. To identify the genetic variants underlying general psychopathology in childhood, we performed a genome-wide association study using a total psychiatric problem score. We analyzed 6,844,199 common SNPs in 38,418 school-aged children from 20 population-based cohorts participating in the EAGLE consortium. The SNP heritability of total psychiatric problems was 5.4% (SE = 0.01) and two loci reached genome-wide significance: rs10767094 and rs202005905. We also observed an association of SBF2, a gene associated with neuroticism in previous GWAS, with total psychiatric problems. The genetic effects underlying the total score were shared with common psychiatric disorders only (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, depression, insomnia) (rG > 0.49), but not with autism or the less common adult disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or eating disorders) (rG < 0.01). Importantly, the total psychiatric problem score also showed at least a moderate genetic correlation with intelligence, educational attainment, wellbeing, smoking, and body fat (rG > 0.29). The results suggest that many common genetic variants are associated with childhood psychiatric symptoms and related phenotypes in general instead of with specific symptoms. Further research is needed to establish causality and pleiotropic mechanisms between related traits.

Abstract

Moving in synchrony to the beat is a fundamental component of musicality. Here we conducted a genome-wide association study to identify common genetic variants associated with beat synchronization in 606,825 individuals. Beat synchronization exhibited a highly polygenic architecture, with 69 loci reaching genome-wide significance (P < 5 × 10−8) and single-nucleotide-polymorphism-based heritability (on the liability scale) of 13%–16%. Heritability was enriched for genes expressed in brain tissues and for fetal and adult brain-specific gene regulatory elements, underscoring the role of central-nervous-system-expressed genes linked to the genetic basis of the trait. We performed validations of the self-report phenotype (through separate experiments) and of the genome-wide association study (polygenic scores for beat synchronization were associated with patients algorithmically classified as musicians in medical records of a separate biobank). Genetic correlations with breathing function, motor function, processing speed and chronotype suggest shared genetic architecture with beat synchronization and provide avenues for new phenotypic and genetic explorations.

Abstract

The study of adaptive individual behavior (“animal personality”) focuses on whether individuals differ consistently in (suites of correlated) behavior(s) and whether individual-level behavior is under selection. Evidence for selection acting on personality is biased toward species where behavioral and life-history information can readily be collected in the wild, such as ungulates and passerine birds. Here, we report estimates of repeatability and syndrome structure for behaviors that an insect (field cricket; Gryllus campestris ) expresses in the wild. We used mark-recapture models to estimate personality-related survival and encounter probability and focused on a life-history phase where all individuals could readily be sampled (the nymphal stage). As proxies for risky behaviors, we assayed maximum distance from burrow, flight initiation distance, and emergence time after disturbance; all behaviors were repeatable, but there was no evidence for strong syndrome structure. Flight initiation distance alone predicted both daily survival and encounter probability: bolder individuals were more easily observed but had a shorter life span. Individuals were also somewhat repeatable in the habitat temperature under which they were assayed. Such environment repeatability can lead to upward biases in estimates of repeatability in behavior; this was not the case. Behavioral assays were, however, conducted around the subject’s personal burrow, which could induce pseudorepeatability if burrow characteristics affected behavior. Follow-up translocation experiments allowed us to distinguish individual and burrow identity effects and provided conclusive evidence for individual repeatability of flight initiation distance. Our findings, therefore, forcefully demonstrate that personality variation exists in wild insects and that it is associated with components of fitness.

Abstract

How does knowledge of real-world events shape our understanding of incoming language? Do temporal terms like “before” and “after” impact the online recruitment of real-world event knowledge? These questions were addressed in two ERP experiments, wherein participants read sentences that started with “before” or “after” and contained a critical word that rendered each sentence true or false (e.g., “Before/After the global economic crisis, securing a mortgage was easy/harder”). The critical words were matched on predictability, rated truth value, and semantic relatedness to the words in the sentence. Regardless of whether participants explicitly verified the sentences or not, false-after-sentences elicited larger N400s than true-after-sentences, consistent with the well-established finding that semantic retrieval of concepts is facilitated when they are consistent with real-world knowledge. However, although the truth judgments did not differ between before- and after-sentences, no such sentence N400 truth value effect occurred in before-sentences, whereas false-before-sentences elicited an enhanced subsequent positive ERPs. The temporal term “before” itself elicited more negative ERPs at central electrode channels than “after.” These patterns of results show that, irrespective of ultimate sentence truth value judgments, semantic retrieval of concepts is momentarily facilitated when they are consistent with the known event outcome compared to when they are not. However, this inappropriate facilitation incurs later processing costs as reflected in the subsequent positive ERP deflections. The results suggest that automatic activation of event knowledge can impede the incremental semantic processes required to establish sentence truth value.

Abstract

When we read literary fiction, we are transported to fictional places, and we feel and think along with the characters. Despite the importance of narrative in adult life and during development, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying fiction comprehension are unclear. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how individuals differently employ neural networks important for understanding others’ beliefs and intentions (mentalizing), and for sensori-motor simulation while listening to excerpts from literary novels. Localizer tasks were used to localize both the cortical motor network and the mentalizing network in participants after they listened to excerpts from literary novels. Results show that participants who had high activation in anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC; part of the mentalizing network) when listening to mentalizing content of literary fiction, had lower motor cortex activity when they listened to action-related content of the story, and vice versa. This qualifies how people differ in their engagement with fiction: some people are mostly drawn into a story by mentalizing about the thoughts and beliefs of others, whereas others engage in literature by simulating more concrete events such as actions. This study provides on-line neural evidence for the existence of qualitatively different styles of moving into literary worlds, and adds to a growing body of literature showing the potential to study narrative comprehension with neuroimaging methods.

Abstract

This study compares the role of exemplars in native and non-native listening. Two English identity priming experiments were conducted with native English, Dutch non-native, and Spanish non-native listeners. In Experiment 1, primes and targets were spoken in the same or a different voice. Only the native listeners showed exemplar effects. In Experiment 2, primes and targets had the same or a different degree of vowel reduction. The Dutch, but not the Spanish, listeners were familiar with this reduction pattern from their L1 phonology. In this experiment, exemplar effects only arose for the Spanish listeners. We propose that in these lexical decision experiments the use of exemplars is co-determined by listeners’ available processing resources, which is modulated by the familiarity with the variation type from their L1 phonology. The use of exemplars differs between native and non-native listening, suggesting qualitative differences between native and non-native speech comprehension processes.

Abstract

This paper studies the influence of adverse listening conditions on exemplar effects in priming experiments that do not instruct participants to use their episodic memories. We conducted two lexical decision experiments, in which a prime and a target represented the same word type and could be spoken by the same or a different speaker. In Experiment 1, participants listened to clear speech, and showed no exemplar effects: they recognised repetitions by the same speaker as quickly as different speaker repetitions. In Experiment 2, the stimuli contained noise, and exemplar effects did arise. Importantly, Experiment 1 elicited longer average RTs than Experiment 2, a result that contradicts the time-course hypothesis, according to which exemplars only play a role when processing is slow. Instead, our findings support the hypothesis that exemplar effects arise under adverse listening conditions, when participants are stimulated to use their episodic memories in addition to their mental lexicons.

Abstract

An inference is defined as the information that is not expressed explicitly by the text but is derived on the basis of the understander's knowledge and is encoded in the mental representation of the text. Inferencing is considered as a central component in discourse understanding. Experimental methods to detect inferences, established findings, and some developments are reviewed. Attention is paid to the relation between inference processes and the brain.

Abstract

Recent years have seen a small but growing body of psycholinguistic research focused on typologically diverse languages. This represents an important development for the field, where theorising is still largely guided by the often implicit assumption of universality. This paper introduces a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience devoted to the topic of cross-linguistic and field-based approaches to the study of psycholinguistics. The papers in this issue draw on data from a variety of genetically and areally divergent languages, to address questions in the production and comprehension of phonology, morphology, words, and sentences. To contextualise these studies, we provide an overview of the field of cross-linguistic psycholinguistics, from its early beginnings to the present day, highlighting instances where cross-linguistic data have significantly contributed to psycholinguistic theorising.

Abstract

The scope of planning during sentence formulation is known to be flexible, as it can be influenced by speakers' communicative goals and language production pressures (among other factors). Two eye-tracked picture description experiments tested whether the time course of formulation is also modulated by grammatical structure and thus whether differences in linear word order across languages affect the breadth and order of conceptual and linguistic encoding operations. Native speakers of Tzeltal [a primarily verb–object–subject (VOS) language] and Dutch [a subject–verb–object (SVO) language] described pictures of transitive events. Analyses compared speakers' choice of sentence structure across events with more accessible and less accessible characters as well as the time course of formulation for sentences with different word orders. Character accessibility influenced subject selection in both languages in subject-initial and subject-final sentences, ruling against a radically incremental formulation process. In Tzeltal, subject-initial word orders were preferred over verb-initial orders when event characters had matching animacy features, suggesting a possible role for similarity-based interference in influencing word order choice. Time course analyses revealed a strong effect of sentence structure on formulation: In subject-initial sentences, in both Tzeltal and Dutch, event characters were largely fixated sequentially, while in verb-initial sentences in Tzeltal, relational information received priority over encoding of either character during the earliest stages of formulation. The results show a tight parallelism between grammatical structure and the order of encoding operations carried out during sentence formulation.

Abstract

To what extent are the planning processes involved in producing sentences fine-tuned to grammatical properties of specific languages? In this chapter we survey the small body of cross-linguistic research that bears on this question, focusing in particular on recent evidence from eye-tracking studies. Because eye-tracking methods provide a very fine-grained temporal measure of how conceptual and linguistic planning unfold in real time, they serve as an important complement to standard psycholinguistic methods. Moreover, the advent of portable eye-trackers in recent years has, for the first time, allowed eye-tracking techniques to be used with language populations that are located far away from university laboratories. This has created the exciting opportunity to extend the typological base of vision-based psycholinguistic research and address key questions in language production with new language comparisons.

Abstract

Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers' first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded both event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in relational encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a weakly hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders.

Abstract

Background: Perioperative assessment of language function in brain tumor patients commonly relies on administration of object naming during stimulation mapping. Ample research, however, points to the benefit of adding verb tasks to the testing paradigm in order to delineate and preserve postoperative language function more comprehensively. This research uses a case series approach to explore the feasibility and added value of a dual-task protocol that includes both a noun task (object naming) and a verb task (action naming) in perioperative delineation of language functions.

Materials and Methods: Seven neurosurgical cases underwent perioperative language assessment with both object and action naming. This entailed preoperative baseline testing, preoperative stimulation mapping with navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (nTMS) with subsequent white matter visualization, intraoperative mapping with Direct Electrical Stimulation (DES) in 4 cases, and postoperative imaging and examination of language change.

Results: We observed a divergent pattern of language organization and decline between cases who showed lesions close to the delineated language network and hence underwent DES mapping, and those that did not. The latter displayed no new impairment postoperatively consistent with an unharmed network for the neural circuits of both object and action naming. For the cases who underwent DES, on the other hand, a higher sensitivity was found for action naming over object naming. Firstly, action naming preferentially predicted the overall language state compared to aphasia batteries. Secondly, it more accurately predicted intraoperative positive language areas as revealed by DES. Thirdly, double dissociations between postoperatively unimpaired object naming and impaired action naming and vice versa indicate segregated skills and neural representation for noun versus verb processing, especially in the ventral stream. Overlaying postoperative imaging with object and action naming networks revealed that dual-task nTMS mapping can explain the drop in performance in those cases where the network appeared in proximity to the resection cavity.

Conclusion: Using a dual-task protocol for visualization of cortical and subcortical language areas through nTMS mapping proved to be able to capture network-to-deficit relations in our case series. Ultimately, adding action naming to clinical nTMS and DES mapping may help prevent postoperative deficits of this seemingly segregated skill.

Abstract

We conduct a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment (EA) in a sample of ~3 million individuals and identify 3,952 approximately uncorrelated genome-wide-significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A genome-wide polygenic predictor, or polygenic index (PGI), explains 12–16% of EA variance and contributes to risk prediction for ten diseases. Direct effects (i.e., controlling for parental PGIs) explain roughly half the PGI’s magnitude of association with EA and other phenotypes. The correlation between mate-pair PGIs is far too large to be consistent with phenotypic assortment alone, implying additional assortment on PGI-associated factors. In an additional GWAS of dominance deviations from the additive model, we identify no genome-wide-significant SNPs, and a separate X-chromosome additive GWAS identifies 57.

Abstract

The centrosome provides an intracellular anchor for the cytoskeleton, regulating cell division, cell migration, and cilia formation. We used spatial proteomics to elucidate protein interaction networks at the centrosome of human induced pluripotent stem cell–derived neural stem cells (NSCs) and neurons. Centrosome-associated proteins were largely cell type–specific, with protein hubs involved in RNA dynamics. Analysis of neurodevelopmental disease cohorts identified a significant overrepresentation of NSC centrosome proteins with variants in patients with periventricular heterotopia (PH). Expressing the PH-associated mutant pre-mRNA-processing factor 6 (PRPF6) reproduced the periventricular misplacement in the developing mouse brain, highlighting missplicing of transcripts of a microtubule-associated kinase with centrosomal location as essential for the phenotype. Collectively, cell type–specific centrosome interactomes explain how genetic variants in ubiquitous proteins may convey brain-specific phenotypes.

Abstract

Prediction is one characteristic of the human mind. But what does it mean to say the mind is a ’prediction machine’ and inherently forward looking as is frequently claimed? In natural languages, many contexts are not easily predictable in a forward fashion. In English for example many frequent verbs do not carry unique meaning on their own, but instead rely on another word or words that follow them to become meaningful. Upon reading take a the processor often cannot easily predict walk as the next word. But the system can ‘look back’ and integrate walk more easily when it follows take a (e.g., as opposed to make|get|have a walk). In the present paper we provide further evidence for the importance of both forward and backward looking in language processing. In two self-paced reading tasks and an eye-tracking reading task, we found evidence that adult English native speakers’ sensitivity to word forward and backward conditional probability significantly explained variance in reading times over and above psycholinguistic predictors of reading latencies. We conclude that both forward and backward-looking (prediction and integration) appear to be important characteristics of language processing. Our results thus suggest that it makes just as much sense to call the mind an ’integration machine’ which is inherently backward looking.

Abstract

This study asks how users of British Sign Language (BSL) recognize individual signs in connected sign sequences. We examined whether this is achieved through modality-specific or modality-general segmentation procedures. A modality-specific feature of signed languages is that, during continuous signing, there are salient transitions between sign locations. We used the sign-spotting task to ask if and how BSL signers use these transitions in segmentation. A total of 96 real BSL signs were preceded by nonsense signs which were produced in either the target location or another location (with a small or large transition). Half of the transitions were within the same major body area (e.g., head) and half were across body areas (e.g., chest to hand). Deaf adult BSL users (a group of natives and early learners, and a group of late learners) spotted target signs best when there was a minimal transition and worst when there was a large transition. When location changes were present, both groups performed better when transitions were to a different body area than when they were within the same area. These findings suggest that transitions do not provide explicit sign-boundary cues in a modality-specific fashion. Instead, we argue that smaller transitions help recognition in a modality-general way by limiting lexical search to signs within location neighbourhoods, and that transitions across body areas also aid segmentation in a modality-general way, by providing a phonotactic cue to a sign boundary. We propose that sign segmentation is based on modality-general procedures which are core language-processing mechanisms

Abstract

There is growing interest in learners’ cognitive capacities to process a second language (L2) at first exposure to the target language. Evidence suggests that L2 learners are capable of processing novel words by exploiting phonological information from their first language (L1). Hearing adult learners of a sign language, however, cannot fall back on their L1 to process novel signs because the modality differences between speech (aural–oral) and sign (visual-manual) do not allow for direct cross-linguistic influence. Sign language learners might use alternative strategies to process input expressed in the manual channel. Learners may rely on iconicity, the direct relationship between a sign and its referent. Evidence up to now has shown that iconicity facilitates learning in non-signers, but it is unclear whether it also facilitates sign production. In order to fill this gap, the present study investigated how iconicity influenced articulation of the phonological components of signs. In Study 1, hearing non-signers viewed a set of iconic and arbitrary signs along with their English translations and repeated the signs as accurately as possible immediately after. The results show that participants imitated iconic signs significantly less accurately than arbitrary signs. In Study 2, a second group of hearing non-signers imitated the same set of signs but without the accompanying English translations. The same lower accuracy for iconic signs was observed. We argue that learners rely on iconicity to process manual input because it brings familiarity to the target (sign) language. However, this reliance comes at a cost as it leads to a more superficial processing of the signs’ full phonetic form. The present findings add to our understanding of learners’ cognitive capacities at first exposure to a signed L2, and raises new theoretical questions in the field of second language acquisition

Abstract

The present study implemented a sign-repetition task at two points in time to hearing adult learners of British Sign Language and explored how each phonological parameter, sign complexity, and iconicity affected sign production over an 11-week (22-hour) instructional period. The results show that training improves articulation accuracy and that some sign components are produced more accurately than others: Handshape was the most difficult, followed by movement, then orientation, and finally location. Iconic signs were articulated less accurately than arbitrary signs because the direct sign-referent mappings and perhaps their similarity with iconic co-speech gestures prevented learners from focusing on the exact phonological structure of the sign. This study shows that multiple phonological features pose greater demand on the production of the parameters of signs and that iconicity interferes in the exact articulation of their constituents

Abstract

The present study investigated the priming effect of iconic signs in the mental lexicon of hearing adults. Non-signers and proficient British Sign Language (BSL) users took part in a cross-modal lexical decision task. The results indicate that iconic signs activated semantically related words in non-signers' lexicon. Activation occurred regardless of the type of referent because signs depicting actions and perceptual features of an object yielded the same response times. The pattern of activation was different in proficient signers because only action signs led to cross-modal activation. We suggest that non-signers process iconicity in signs in the same way as they do gestures, but after acquiring a sign language, there is a shift in the mechanisms used to process iconic manual structures

Abstract

The field of bioacoustics is rapidly developing and characterized by diverse methodologies, approaches and aims. For instance, bioacoustics encompasses studies on the perception of pure tones in meticulously controlled laboratory settings, documentation of species’ presence and activities using recordings from the field, and analyses of circadian calling patterns in animal choruses. Newcomers to the field are confronted with a vast and fragmented literature, and a lack of accessible reference papers or textbooks. In this paper we contribute towards filling this gap. Instead of a classical list of “dos” and “don’ts”, we review some key papers which, we believe, embody best practices in several bioacoustic subfields. In the first three case studies, we discuss how bioacoustics can help identify the ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘how many’ of animals within a given ecosystem. Specifically, we review cases in which bioacoustic methods have been applied with success to draw inferences regarding species identification, population structure, and biodiversity. In fourth and fifth case studies, we highlight how structural properties in signal evolution can emerge via ecological constraints or cultural transmission. Finally, in a sixth example, we discuss acoustic methods that have been used to infer predator–prey dynamics in cases where direct observation was not feasible. Across all these examples, we emphasize the importance of appropriate recording parameters and experimental design. We conclude by highlighting common best practices across studies as well as caveats about our own overview. We hope our efforts spur a more general effort in standardizing best practices across the subareas we’ve highlighted in order to increase compatibility among bioacoustic studies and inspire cross-pollination across the discipline.

Abstract

In this increasingly data-rich world, visual recordings of human behavior are often unable to be shared due to concerns about privacy. Consequently, data sharing in fields such as behavioral science, multimodal communication, and human movement research is often limited. In addition, in legal and other non-scientific contexts, privacy-related concerns may preclude the sharing of video recordings and thus remove the rich multimodal context that humans recruit to communicate. Minimizing the risk of identity exposure while preserving critical behavioral information would maximize utility of public resources (e.g., research grants) and time invested in audio–visual​ research. Here we present an open-source computer vision tool that masks the identities of humans while maintaining rich information about communicative body movements. Furthermore, this masking tool can be easily applied to many videos, leveraging computational tools to augment the reproducibility and accessibility of behavioral research. The tool is designed for researchers and practitioners engaged in kinematic and affective research. Application areas include teaching/education, communication and human movement research, CCTV, and legal contexts.

Abstract

Hearing one’s own voice is critical for fluent speech production as it allows for the detection and correction of vocalization errors in real time. This behavior known as the auditory feedback control of speech is impaired in various neurological disorders ranging from stuttering to aphasia; however, the underlying neural mechanisms are still poorly understood. Computational models of speech motor control suggest that, during speech production, the brain uses an efference copy of the motor command to generate an internal estimate of the speech output. When actual feedback differs from this internal estimate, an error signal is generated to correct the internal estimate and update necessary motor commands to produce intended speech. We were able to localize the auditory error signal using electrocorticographic recordings from neurosurgical participants during a delayed auditory feedback (DAF) paradigm. In this task, participants hear their voice with a time delay as they produced words and sentences (similar to an echo on a conference call), which is well known to disrupt fluency by causing slow and stutter-like speech in humans. We observed a significant response enhancement in auditory cortex that scaled with the duration of feedback delay, indicating an auditory speech error signal. Immediately following auditory cortex, dorsal precentral gyrus (dPreCG), a region that has not been implicated in auditory feedback processing before, exhibited a markedly similar response enhancement, suggesting a tight coupling between the 2 regions. Critically, response enhancement in dPreCG occurred only during articulation of long utterances due to a continuous mismatch between produced speech and reafferent feedback. These results suggest that dPreCG plays an essential role in processing auditory error signals during speech production to maintain fluency.

Abstract

Languages typically express semantic components of motion events such as manner (roll) and path (down) in separate lexical items. We explore how these combinatorial possibilities of language arise by focusing on (i) gestures produced by deaf children who lack access to input from a conventional language (homesign); (ii) gestures produced by hearing adults and children while speaking; and (iii) gestures used by hearing adults without speech when asked to do so in elicited descriptions of motion events with simultaneous manner and path. Homesigners tended to conflate manner and path in one gesture, but also used a mixed form, adding a manner and/or path gesture to the conflated form sequentially. Hearing speakers, with or without speech, used the conflated form, gestured manner, or path, but rarely used the mixed form. Mixed form may serve as an intermediate structure on the way to the discrete and sequenced forms found in natural languages.

Abstract

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a common drug-resistant epilepsy in adults, is primarily a limbic network disorder associated with predominant unilateral hippocampal pathology. Structural MRI has provided an in vivo window into whole-brain grey matter structural alterations in TLE relative to controls, by either mapping (i) atypical inter-hemispheric asymmetry or (ii) regional atrophy. However, similarities and differences of both atypical asymmetry and regional atrophy measures have not been systematically investigated.

Here, we addressed this gap using the multi-site ENIGMA-Epilepsy dataset comprising MRI brain morphological measures in 732 TLE patients and 1,418 healthy controls. We compared spatial distributions of grey matter asymmetry and atrophy in TLE, contextualized their topographies relative to spatial gradients in cortical microstructure and functional connectivity calculated using 207 healthy controls obtained from Human Connectome Project and an independent dataset containing 23 TLE patients and 53 healthy controls, and examined clinical associations using machine learning.

We identified a marked divergence in the spatial distribution of atypical inter-hemispheric asymmetry and regional atrophy mapping. The former revealed a temporo-limbic disease signature while the latter showed diffuse and bilateral patterns. Our findings were robust across individual sites and patients. Cortical atrophy was significantly correlated with disease duration and age at seizure onset, while degrees of asymmetry did not show a significant relationship to these clinical variables.

Our findings highlight that the mapping of atypical inter-hemispheric asymmetry and regional atrophy tap into two complementary aspects of TLE-related pathology, with the former revealing primary substrates in ipsilateral limbic circuits and the latter capturing bilateral disease effects. These findings refine our notion of the neuropathology of TLE and may inform future discovery and validation of complementary MRI biomarkers in TLE.

Abstract

In many musical styles, vocalists manually gesture while they sing. Coupling between gesture kinematics and vocalization has been examined in speech contexts, but it is an open question how these couple in music making. We examine this in a corpus of South Indian, Karnatak vocal music that includes motion-capture data. Through peak magnitude analysis (linear mixed regression) and continuous time-series analyses (generalized additive modeling), we assessed whether vocal trajectories around peaks in vertical velocity, speed, or acceleration were coupling with changes in vocal acoustics (namely, F0 and amplitude). Kinematic coupling was stronger for F0 change versus amplitude, pointing to F0's musical significance. Acceleration was the most predictive for F0 change and had the most reliable magnitude coupling, showing a one-third power relation. That acceleration, rather than other kinematics, is maximally predictive for vocalization is interesting because acceleration entails force transfers onto the body. As a theoretical contribution, we argue that gesturing in musical contexts should be understood in relation to the physical connections between gesturing and vocal production that are brought into harmony with the vocalists’ (enculturated) performance goals. Gesture–vocal coupling should, therefore, be viewed as a neuro–bodily distributed aesthetic entanglement.

Abstract

In everyday human communication, we often express our communicative intentions by manually pointing out referents in the material world around us to an addressee, often in tight synchronization with referential speech. This study investigated whether and how the kinematic form of index finger pointing gestures is shaped by the gesturer's communicative intentions and how this is modulated by the presence of concurrently produced speech. Furthermore, we explored the neural mechanisms underpinning the planning of communicative pointing gestures and speech. Two experiments were carried out in which participants pointed at referents for an addressee while the informativeness of their gestures and speech was varied. Kinematic and electrophysiological data were recorded online. It was found that participants prolonged the duration of the stroke and poststroke hold phase of their gesture to be more communicative, in particular when the gesture was carrying the main informational burden in their multimodal utterance. Frontal and P300 effects in the ERPs suggested the importance of intentional and modality-independent attentional mechanisms during the planning phase of informative pointing gestures. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the complex interplay between action, attention, intention, and language in the production of pointing gestures, a communicative act core to human interaction.

Abstract

A fundamental property of language is that it can be used to refer to entities in the extra-linguistic physical context of a conversation in order to establish a joint focus of attention on a referent. Typological and psycholinguistic work across a wide range of languages has put forward at least two different theoretical views on demonstrative reference. Here we contrasted and tested these two accounts by investigating the electrophysiological brain activity underlying the construction of indexical meaning in comprehension. In two EEG experiments, participants watched pictures of a speaker who referred to one of two objects using speech and an index-finger pointing gesture. In contrast with separately collected native speakers’ linguistic intuitions, N400 effects showed a preference for a proximal demonstrative when speaker and addressee were in a face-to-face orientation and all possible referents were located in the shared space between them, irrespective of the physical proximity of the referent to the speaker. These findings reject egocentric proximity-based accounts of demonstrative reference, support a sociocentric approach to deixis, suggest that interlocutors construe a shared space during conversation, and imply that the psychological proximity of a referent may be more important than its physical proximity.

Abstract

Comprehension of pointing gestures is fundamental to human communication. However, the neural mechanisms
that subserve the integration of pointing gestures and speech in visual contexts in comprehension
are unclear. Here we present the results of an fMRI study in which participants watched images of an
actor pointing at an object while they listened to her referential speech. The use of a mismatch paradigm
revealed that the semantic unication of pointing gesture and speech in a triadic context recruits left
inferior frontal gyrus. Complementing previous ndings, this suggests that left inferior frontal gyrus
semantically integrates information across modalities and semiotic domains.

Abstract

Models on L3/Ln acquisition differ with respect to how they envisage degree (holistic
vs. selective transfer of the L1, L2 or both) and/or timing (initial stages vs. development) of how
the influence of source languages unfolds. This study uses EEG/ERPs to examine these models,
bringing together two types of bilinguals: heritage speakers (HSs) (Italian-German, n = 15) compared
to adult L2 learners (L1 German, L2 English, n = 28) learning L3/Ln Latin. Participants were trained
on a selected Latin lexicon over two sessions and, afterward, on two grammatical properties: case
(similar between German and Latin) and adjective–noun order (similar between Italian and Latin).
Neurophysiological findings show an N200/N400 deflection for the HSs in case morphology and a
P600 effect for the German L2 group in adjectival position. None of the current L3/Ln models predict
the observed results, which questions the appropriateness of this methodology. Nevertheless, the
results are illustrative of differences in how HSs and L2 learners approach the very initial stages of
additional language learning, the implications of which are discussed

Abstract

The present study uses EEG time-frequency representations (TFRs) with a Flanker task to investigate if and how individual differences in bilingual language experience modulate neurocognitive outcomes (oscillatory dynamics) in two bilingual group types: late bilinguals (L2 learners) and early bilinguals (heritage speakers—HSs). TFRs were computed for both incongruent and congruent trials. The difference between the two (Flanker effect vis-à-vis cognitive interference) was then (1) compared between the HSs and the L2 learners, (2) modeled as a function of individual differences with bilingual experience within each group separately and (3) probed for its potential (a)symmetry between brain and behavioral data. We found no differences at the behavioral and neural levels for the between-groups comparisons. However, oscillatory dynamics (mainly theta increase and alpha suppression) of inhibition and cognitive control were found to be modulated by individual differences in bilingual language experience, albeit distinctly within each bilingual group. While the results indicate adaptations toward differential brain recruitment in line with bilingual language experience variation overall, this does not manifest uniformly. Rather, earlier versus later onset to bilingualism—the bilingual type—seems to constitute an independent qualifier to how individual differences play out.

Abstract

Humans have the ability to learn surprisingly complicated statistical information in a variety of modalities and situations, often based on relatively little input. These statistical learning (SL) skills appear to underlie many kinds of learning, but despite their ubiquity, we still do not fully understand precisely what SL is and what individual differences on SL tasks reflect. Here, we present experimental work suggesting that at least some individual differences arise from stimulus-specific variation in perceptual fluency: the ability to rapidly or efficiently code and remember the stimuli that SL occurs over. Experiment 1 demonstrates that participants show improved SL when the stimuli are simple and familiar; Experiment 2 shows that this improvement is not evident for simple but unfamiliar stimuli; and Experiment 3 shows that for the same stimuli (Chinese characters), SL is higher for people who are familiar with them (Chinese speakers) than those who are not (English speakers matched on age and education level). Overall, our findings indicate that performance on a standard SL task varies substantially within the same (visual) modality as a function of whether the stimuli involved are familiar or not, independent of stimulus complexity. Moreover, test–retest correlations of performance in an SL task using stimuli of the same level of familiarity (but distinct items) are stronger than correlations across the same task with stimuli of different levels of familiarity. Finally, we demonstrate that SL performance is predicted by an independent measure of stimulus-specific perceptual fluency that contains no SL component at all. Our results suggest that a key component of SL performance may be related to stimulus-specific processing and familiarity.

Abstract

From an early age, people exhibit strong links between certain visual (e.g. size) and acoustic (e.g. duration) dimensions. Do people instinctively extend these crossmodal correspondences to vocalization? We examine the ability of congenitally deaf Chinese children and young adults (age M = 12.4 years, SD = 3.7 years) to generate iconic vocalizations to distinguish items with contrasting magnitude (e.g., big vs. small ball). Both deaf and hearing (M = 10.1 years, SD = 0.83 years) participants produced longer, louder vocalizations for greater magnitude items. However, only hearing participants used pitch—higher pitch for greater magnitude – which counters the hypothesized, innate size “frequency code”, but fits with Mandarin language and culture. Thus our results show that the translation of visible magnitude into the duration and intensity of vocalization transcends auditory experience, whereas the use of pitch appears more malleable to linguistic and cultural influence.

Abstract

Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that contrasted along concrete and abstract semantic dimensions of speed (e.g., a fast drive, slow career progress) and size (e.g., a small grasshopper, an important contract). Participants read fast stories at a faster rate than slow stories, and big stories with a lower pitch than small stories. The effect of speed was distributed across the stories, including portions that were identical across stories, whereas the size effect was localized to size-related words. Overall, these findings enrich the documentation of iconicity in spoken language and bear on our understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech.

Abstract

Studies of gestural communication systems find that they originate from spontaneously created iconic gestures. Yet, we know little about how people create vocal communication systems, and many have suggested that vocalizations do not afford iconicity beyond trivial instances of onomatopoeia. It is unknown whether people can generate vocal communication systems through a process of iconic creation similar to gestural systems. Here, we examine the creation and development of a rudimentary vocal symbol system in a laboratory setting. Pairs of participants generated novel vocalizations for 18 different meanings in an iterative ‘vocal’ charades communication game. The communicators quickly converged on stable vocalizations, and naive listeners could correctly infer their meanings in subsequent playback experiments. People's ability to guess the meanings of these novel vocalizations was predicted by how close the vocalization was to an iconic ‘meaning template’ we derived from the production data. These results strongly suggest that the meaningfulness of these vocalizations derived from iconicity. Our findings illuminate a mechanism by which iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols, analogous to the function of iconicity in gestural communication systems.

Abstract

We describe the repertoire of learned vocal and breathing-related behaviors (VBBs) performed by the enculturated gorilla Koko. We examined a large video corpus of Koko and observed 439 VBBs spread across 161 bouts. Our analysis shows that Koko exercises voluntary control over the performance of nine distinctive VBBs, which involve variable coordination of her breathing, larynx, and supralaryngeal articulators like the tongue and lips. Each of these behaviors is performed in the context of particular manual action routines and gestures. Based on these and other findings, we suggest that vocal learning and the ability to exercise volitional control over vocalization, particularly in a multimodal context, might have figured relatively early into the evolution of language, with some rudimentary capacity in place at the time of our last common ancestor with great apes.

Abstract

The spatial affordances of the visual modality give rise to a high degree of similarity between sign languages in the spatial domain. This stands in contrast to the vast structural and semantic diversity in linguistic encoding of space found in spoken languages. However, the possibility and nature of linguistic diversity in spatial encoding in sign languages has not been rigorously investigated by systematic crosslinguistic comparison. Here, we compare locative expression in two unrelated sign languages, Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili, TİD) and German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS), focusing on the expression of figure-ground (e.g. cup on table) and figure-figure (e.g. cup next to cup) relationships in a discourse context. In addition to similarities, we report qualitative and quantitative differences between the sign languages in the formal devices used (i.e. unimanual vs. bimanual; simultaneous vs. sequential) and in the degree of iconicity of the spatial devices. Our results suggest that sign languages may display more diversity in the spatial domain than has been previously assumed, and in a way more comparable with the diversity found in spoken languages. The study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of how space gets encoded in language

Abstract

For humans, the ability to communicate and use language is instantiated not only in the vocal modality but also in the visual modality. The main examples of this are sign languages and (co-speech) gestures. Sign languages, the natural languages of Deaf communities, use systematic and conventionalized movements of the hands, face, and body for linguistic expression. Co-speech gestures, though non-linguistic, are produced in tight semantic and temporal integration with speech and constitute an integral part of language together with speech. The articles in this issue explore and document how gestures and sign languages are similar or different and how communicative expression in the visual modality can change from being gestural to grammatical in nature through processes of conventionalization. As such, this issue contributes to our understanding of how the visual modality shapes language and the emergence of linguistic structure in newly developing systems. Studying the relationship between signs and gestures provides a new window onto the human ability to recruit multiple levels of representation (e.g., categorical, gradient, iconic, abstract) in the service of using or creating conventionalized communicative systems.

Abstract

Establishing and maintaining reference is a crucial part of discourse. In spoken languages, differential linguistic devices mark referents occurring in different referential contexts, that is, introduction, maintenance, and re-introduction contexts. Speakers using gestures as well as users of sign languages have also been shown to mark referents differentially depending on the referential context. This article investigates the modality-specific contribution of the visual modality in marking referential context by providing a direct comparison between sign language (German Sign Language; DGS) and co-speech gesture with speech (German) in elicited narratives. Across all forms of expression, we find that referents in subject position are referred to with more marking material in re-introduction contexts compared to maintenance contexts. Furthermore, we find that spatial modification is used as a modality-specific strategy in both DGS and German co-speech gesture, and that the configuration of referent locations in sign space and gesture space corresponds in an iconic and consistent way to the locations of referents in the narrated event. However, we find that spatial modification is used in different ways for marking re-introduction and maintenance contexts in DGS and German co-speech gesture. The findings are discussed in relation to the unique contribution of the visual modality to reference tracking in discourse when it is used in a unimodal system with full linguistic structure (i.e., as in sign) versus in a bimodal system that is a composite of speech and gesture

Abstract

Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages.

Abstract

Scholars have documented substantial classes of iconic vocabulary in many non-Indo-European languages. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English are assumed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments, we asked English speakers to rate the iconicity of words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. We found English—contrary to common belief—exhibits iconicity that correlates with age of acquisition and differs across lexical classes. Words judged as most iconic are learned earlier, in accord with findings that iconic words are easier to learn. We also find that adjectives and verbs are more iconic than nouns, supporting the idea that iconicity provides an extra cue in learning more difficult abstract meanings. Our results provide new evidence for a relationship between iconicity and word learning and suggest iconicity may be a more pervasive property of spoken languages than previously thought.

Abstract

In this study, we investigated when children develop adult-like verb–structure links, and examined two mechanisms, associative and error-based learning, that might explain how these verb–structure links are learned. Using structural priming, we tested children’s and adults’ ability to use verb–structure links in production in three ways; by manipulating: (1) verb overlap between prime and target, (2) target verb bias, and (3) prime verb bias. Children (aged 3–4 and 5–6 years old) and adults heard and produced double object dative (DOD) and prepositional object dative (PD) primes with DOD- and PD-biased verbs. Although all age groups showed significant evidence of structural priming, only adults showed increased priming when there was verb overlap between prime and target sentences (the lexical boost). The effect of target verb bias also grew with development. Critically, however, the effect of prime verb bias on the size of the priming effect (prime surprisal) was larger in children than in adults, suggesting that verb–structure links are present at the earliest age tested. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that children begin to acquire knowledge about verb-argument structure preferences early in acquisition, but that the ability to use adult-like verb bias in production gradually improves over development. We also argue that this pattern of results is best explained by a learning model that uses an error-based learning mechanism.

Abstract

Twin studies indicate that dyscalculia (or mathematical disability) is caused partly by a genetic component, which is yet to be understood at the molecular level. Recently, a coding variant (rs133885) in the myosin-18B gene was shown to be associated with mathematical abilities with a specific effect among children with dyslexia. This association represents one of the most significant genetic associations reported to date for mathematical abilities and the only one reaching genome-wide statistical significance.

We conducted a replication study in different cohorts to assess the effect of rs133885 maths-related measures. The study was conducted primarily using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), (N = 3819). We tested additional cohorts including the York Cohort, the Specific Language Impairment Consortium (SLIC) cohort and the Raine Cohort, and stratified them for a definition of dyslexia whenever possible.

We did not observe any associations between rs133885 in myosin-18B and mathematical abilities among individuals with dyslexia or in the general population. Our results suggest that the myosin-18B variant is unlikely to be a main factor contributing to mathematical abilities.

Abstract

Two major components form the basis of spoken word production: the access of conceptual and lexical/phonological information in long-term memory, and motor preparation and execution of an articulatory program. Whereas the motor aspects of word production have been well characterized as reflected in alpha-beta desynchronization, the memory aspects have remained poorly understood. Using magnetoencephalography, we investigated the neurophysiological signature of not only motor but also memory aspects of spoken-word production. Participants named or judged pictures after reading sentences. To probe the involvement of the memory component, we manipulated sentence context. Sentence contexts were either constraining or nonconstraining toward the final word, presented as a picture. In the judgment task, participants indicated with a left-hand button press whether the picture was expected given the sentence. In the naming task, they named the picture. Naming and judgment were faster with constraining than nonconstraining contexts. Alpha-beta desynchronization was found for constraining relative to nonconstraining contexts pre-picture presentation. For the judgment task, beta desynchronization was observed in left posterior brain areas associated with conceptual processing and in right motor cortex. For the naming task, in addition to the same left posterior brain areas, beta desynchronization was found in left anterior and posterior temporal cortex (associated with memory aspects), left inferior frontal cortex, and bilateral ventral premotor cortex (associated with motor aspects). These results suggest that memory and motor components of spoken word production are reflected in overlapping brain oscillations in the beta band.

Abstract

Previous dual-task studies examining the locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming have obtained diverging results. In these studies, participants manually responded to tones and named pictures while ignoring distractor words (picture-word interference, PWI) with varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between tone and PWI stimulus. Whereas some studies observed no semantic interference at short SOAs, other studies observed effects of similar magnitude at short and long SOAs. The absence of semantic interference in some studies may perhaps be due to better reading skill of participants in these than in the other studies. According to such a reading-ability account, participants' reading skill should be predictive of the magnitude of their interference effect at short SOAs. To test this account, we conducted a dual-task study with tone discrimination and PWI tasks and measured participants' reading ability. The semantic interference effect was of similar magnitude at both short and long SOAs. Participants' reading ability was predictive of their naming speed but not of their semantic interference effect, contrary to the reading ability account. We conclude that the magnitude of semantic interference in picture naming during dual-task performance does not depend on reading skill.

Abstract

Visual stimuli quickly activate a broad network of brain areas that often show reciprocal structural connections between them. Activity at short latencies (<100 ms) is thought to represent a feed-forward activation of widespread cortical areas, but fast activation combined with reciprocal connectivity between areas in principle allows for two-way, recurrent interactions to occur at short latencies after stimulus onset. Here we combined EEG source-imaging and Granger-causal modeling with high temporal resolution to investigate whether recurrent and top-down interactions between visual and attentional brain areas can be identified and distinguished at short latencies in humans. We investigated the directed interactions between widespread occipital, parietal and frontal areas that we localized within participants using fMRI. The connectivity results showed two-way interactions between area MT and V1 already at short latencies. In addition, the results suggested a large role for lateral parietal cortex in coordinating visual activity that may be understood as an ongoing top-down allocation of attentional resources. Our results support the notion that indirect pathways allow early, evoked driving from MT to V1 to highlight spatial locations of motion transients, while influence from parietal areas is continuously exerted around stimulus onset, presumably reflecting task-related attentional processes.

Abstract

Many word forms exist in multiple languages, and can have either the same meaning (cognates) or a different meaning (interlingual homographs). Previous experiments have shown that processing of interlingual homographs in a bilingual’s second language is slowed down by recent experience with these words in the bilingual’s native language, while processing of cognates can be speeded up (Poort et al., 2016; Poort & Rodd, 2019a). The current experiment replicated Poort and Rodd’s (2019a) Experiment 2 but switched the direction of priming: Dutch–English bilinguals (n = 106) made Dutch semantic relatedness judgements to probes related to cognates (n = 50), interlingual homographs (n = 50) and translation equivalents (n = 50) they had seen 15 minutes previously embedded in English sentences. The current experiment is the first to show that a single encounter with an interlingual homograph in one’s second language can also affect subsequent processing in one’s native language. Cross-lingual priming did not affect the cognates. The experiment also extended Poort and Rodd (2019a)’s finding of a large interlingual homograph inhibition effect in a semantic relatedness task in the participants’ L2 to their L1, but again found no evidence for a cognate facilitation effect in a semantic relatedness task. These findings extend the growing literature that emphasises the high level of interaction in a bilingual’s mental lexicon, by demonstrating the influence of L2 experience on the processing of L1 words. Data, scripts, materials and pre-registration available via https://osf.io/2swyg/?view_only=b2ba2e627f6f4eaeac87edab2b59b236.

Abstract

Combining academics and athletics is challenging but important for the psychological and psychosocial development of those involved. However, little is known about how experiences in academics spill over and relate to athletics. Drawing on the enrichment mechanisms proposed by the Work-Home Resources model, we posit that study crafting behaviours are positively related to volatile personal resources, which, in turn, are related to higher athletic achievement. Via structural equation modelling, we examine a path model among 243 student-athletes, incorporating study crafting behaviours and personal resources (i.e., positive affect and study engagement), and self- and coach-rated athletic achievement measured two weeks later. Results show that optimising the academic environment by crafting challenging study demands relates positively to positive affect and study engagement. In turn, positive affect related positively to self-rated athletic achievement, whereas – unexpectedly – study engagement related negatively to coach-rated athletic achievement. Optimising the academic environment through cognitive crafting and crafting social study resources did not relate to athletic outcomes. We discuss how these findings offer new insights into the interplay between academics and athletics.

Abstract

Prediction-based theories of language comprehension assume that listeners predict both the meaning and phonological form of likely upcoming words. In alleged event-related potential (ERP) demonstrations of phonological prediction, prediction-mismatching words elicit a phonological mismatch negativity (PMN), a frontocentral negativity that precedes the centroparietal N400 component. However, classification and replicability of the PMN has proven controversial, with ongoing debate on whether the PMN is a distinct component or merely an early part of the N400. In this electroencephalography (EEG) study, we therefore attempted to replicate the PMN effect and its separability from the N400, using a participant sample size (N = 48) that was more than double that of previous studies. Participants listened to sentences containing either a predictable word or an unpredictable word with/without phonological overlap with the predictable word. Preregistered analyses revealed a widely distributed negative-going ERP in response to unpredictable words in both the early (150–250 ms) and the N400 (300–500 ms) time windows. Bayes factor analysis yielded moderate evidence against a different scalp distribution of the effects in the two time windows. Although our findings do not speak against phonological prediction during sentence comprehension, they do speak against the PMN effect specifically as a marker of phonological prediction mismatch. Instead of an PMN effect, our results demonstrate the early onset of the auditory N400 effect associated with unpredictable words. Our failure to replicate further highlights the risk associated with commonly employed data-contingent analyses (e.g., analyses involving time windows or electrodes that were selected based on visual inspection) and small sample sizes in the cognitive neuroscience of language.

Abstract

Peer behaviour plays an important role in the development of social adjustment, though little is known about its genetic architecture. We conducted a twin study combined with a genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA) and a genome-wide screen to characterise genetic influences on problematic peer behaviour during childhood and adolescence. This included a series of longitudinal measures (parent-reported Strengths-and-Difficulties Questionnaire) from a UK population-based birth-cohort (ALSPAC, 4–17 years), and a UK twin sample (TEDS, 4–11 years). Longitudinal twin analysis (TEDS; N ≤ 7,366 twin pairs) showed that peer problems in childhood are heritable (4–11 years, 0.60 < twin-h 2 ≤ 0.71) but genetically heterogeneous from age to age (4–11 years, twin-r g = 0.30). GCTA (ALSPAC: N ≤ 5,608, TEDS: N ≤ 2,691) provided furthermore little support for the contribution of measured common genetic variants during childhood (4–12 years, 0.02 < GCTA-h 2(Meta) ≤ 0.11) though these influences become stronger in adolescence (13–17 years, 0.14 < GCTA-h 2(ALSPAC) ≤ 0.27). A subsequent cross-sectional genome-wide screen in ALSPAC (N ≤ 6,000) focussed on peer problems with the highest GCTA-heritability (10, 13 and 17 years, 0.0002 < GCTA-P ≤ 0.03). Single variant signals (P ≤ 10−5) were followed up in TEDS (N ≤ 2835, 9 and 11 years) and, in search for autism quantitative trait loci, explored within two autism samples (AGRE: N Pedigrees = 793; ACC: N Cases = 1,453/N Controls = 7,070). There was, however, no evidence for association in TEDS and little evidence for an overlap with the autistic continuum. In summary, our findings suggest that problematic peer relationships are heritable but genetically complex and heterogeneous from age to age, with an increase in common measurable genetic variation during adolescence.

Abstract

Conversational turn taking in humans involves incredibly rapid responding. The timing mechanisms underpinning such responses have been heavily debated, including questions such as who is doing the timing. Similar to findings on rhythmic tapping to a metronome, we show that floor transfer offsets (FTOs) in telephone conversations are serially dependent, such that FTOs are lag-1 negatively autocorrelated. Finding this serial dependence on a turn-by-turn basis (lag-1) rather than on the basis of two or more turns, suggests a counter-adjustment mechanism operating at the level of the dyad in FTOs during telephone conversations, rather than a more individualistic self-adjustment within speakers. This finding, if replicated, has major implications for models describing turn taking, and confirms the joint, dyadic nature of human conversational dynamics. Future research is needed to see how pervasive serial dependencies in FTOs are, such as for example in richer communicative face-to-face contexts where visual signals affect conversational timing.

Abstract

Do communicative actions such as gestures fundamentally differ in their control mechanisms from other actions? Evidence for such fundamental differences comes from a classic gesture-speech coordination experiment performed with a person (IW) with deafferentation (McNeill, 2005). Although IW has lost both his primary source of information about body position (i.e., proprioception) and discriminative touch from the neck down, his gesture-speech coordination has been reported to be largely unaffected, even if his vision is blocked. This is surprising because, without vision, his object-directed actions almost completely break down. We examine the hypothesis that IW’s gesture-speech coordination is supported by the biomechanical effects of gesturing on head posture and speech. We find that when vision is blocked, there are micro-scale increases in gesture-speech timing variability, consistent with IW’s reported experience that gesturing is difficult without vision. Supporting the hypothesis that IW exploits biomechanical consequences of the act of gesturing, we find that: (1) gestures with larger physical impulses co-occur with greater head movement, (2) gesture-speech synchrony relates to larger gesture-concurrent head movements (i.e. for bimanual gestures), (3) when vision is blocked, gestures generate more physical impulse, and (4) moments of acoustic prominence couple more with peaks of physical impulse when vision is blocked. It can be concluded that IW’s gesturing ability is not based on a specialized language-based feedforward control as originally concluded from previous research, but is still dependent on a varied means of recurrent feedback from the body.

Abstract

This article aims to explore the scope of a Situated and Embodied Social Psychology (ESP). At first sight, social cognition seems embodied cognition par excellence. Social cognition is first and foremost a supra-individual, interactive, and dynamic process (Semin & Smith, 2013). Radical approaches in Situated/Embodied Cognitive Science (Enactivism) claim that social cognition consists in an emergent pattern of interaction between a continuously coupled organism and the (social) environment; it rejects representationalist accounts of cognition (Hutto & Myin, 2013). However, mainstream ESP (Barsalou, 1999, 2008) still takes a rather representation-friendly approach that construes embodiment in terms of specific bodily formatted representations used (activated) in social cognition. We argue that mainstream ESP suffers from vestiges of theoretical solipsism, which may be resolved by going beyond internalistic spirit that haunts mainstream ESP today.

Abstract

Gestures during speaking are typically understood in a representational framework: they represent absent or distal states of affairs by means of pointing, resemblance, or symbolic replacement. However, humans also gesture along with the rhythm of speaking, which is amenable to a non-representational perspective. Such a perspective centers on the phenomenon of vocal-entangled gestures and builds on evidence showing that when an upper limb with a certain mass decelerates/accelerates sufficiently, it yields impulses on the body that cascade in various ways into the respiratory–vocal system. It entails a physical entanglement between body motions, respiration, and vocal activities. It is shown that vocal-entangled gestures are realized in infant vocal–motor babbling before any representational use of gesture develops. Similarly, an overview is given of vocal-entangled processes in non-human animals. They can frequently be found in rats, bats, birds, and a range of other species that developed even earlier in the phylogenetic tree. Thus, the origins of human gesture lie in biomechanics, emerging early in ontogeny and running deep in phylogeny.

Abstract

There is considerable individual variability in the reported effectiveness of non-invasive brain stimulation. This variability has often been ascribed to differences in the neuroanatomy and resulting differences in the induced electric field inside the brain. In this study, we addressed the question whether individual differences in the induced electric field can predict the neurophysiological and behavioral consequences of gamma band tACS. In a within-subject experiment, bi-hemispheric gamma band tACS and sham stimulation was applied in alternating blocks to the participants’ superior temporal lobe, while task-evoked auditory brain activity was measured with concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a dichotic listening task. Gamma tACS was applied with different interhemispheric phase lags. In a recent study, we could show that anti-phase tACS (180° interhemispheric phase lag), but not in-phase tACS (0° interhemispheric phase lag), selectively modulates interhemispheric brain connectivity. Using a T1 structural image of each participant’s brain, an individual simulation of the induced electric field was computed. From these simulations, we derived two predictor variables: maximal strength (average of the 10,000 voxels with largest electric field values) and precision of the electric field (spatial correlation between the electric field and the task evoked brain activity during sham stimulation). We found considerable variability in the individual strength and precision of the electric fields. Importantly, the strength of the electric field over the right hemisphere predicted individual differences of tACS induced brain connectivity changes. Moreover, we found in both hemispheres a statistical trend for the effect of electric field strength on tACS induced BOLD signal changes. In contrast, the precision of the electric field did not predict any neurophysiological measure. Further, neither strength, nor precision predicted interhemispheric integration. In conclusion, we found evidence for the dose-response relationship between individual differences in electric fields and tACS induced activity and connectivity changes in concurrent fMRI. However, the fact that this relationship was stronger in the right hemisphere suggests that the relationship between the electric field parameters, neurophysiology, and behavior may be more complex for bi-hemispheric tACS.

Abstract

Which processes in the human brain lead to the categorical perception of speech sounds? Investigation of this question is hampered by the fact that categorical speech perception is normally confounded by acoustic differences in the stimulus. By using ambiguous sounds, however, it is possible to dissociate acoustic from perceptual stimulus representations. Twenty-seven normally hearing individuals took part in an fMRI study in which they were presented with an ambiguous syllable (intermediate between /da/ and /ga/) in one ear and with disambiguating acoustic feature (third formant, F3) in the other ear. Multi-voxel pattern searchlight analysis was used to identify brain areas that consistently differentiated between response patterns associated with different syllable reports. By comparing responses to different stimuli with identical syllable reports and identical stimuli with different syllable reports, we disambiguated whether these regions primarily differentiated the acoustics of the stimuli or the syllable report. We found that BOLD activity patterns in left perisylvian regions (STG, SMG), left inferior frontal regions (vMC, IFG, AI), left supplementary motor cortex (SMA/pre-SMA), and right motor and somatosensory regions (M1/S1) represent listeners’ syllable report irrespective of stimulus acoustics. Most of these regions are outside of what is traditionally regarded as auditory or phonological processing areas. Our results indicate that the process of speech sound categorization implicates decision-making mechanisms and auditory-motor transformations.