Publications

Abstract

Spoken word recognition consists of two major component processes. First, at the prelexical stage, an abstract description of the utterance is generated from the information in the speech signal. Second, at the lexical stage, this description is used to activate all the words stored in the mental lexicon which match the input. These multiple candidate words then compete with each other. We review evidence which suggests that positive (match) and negative (mismatch) information of both a segmental and a suprasegmental nature is used to constrain this activation and competition process. We then ask whether, in addition to the necessary influence of the prelexical stage on the lexical stage, there is also feedback from the lexicon to the prelexical level. In two phonetic categorization experiments, Dutch listeners were asked to label both syllable-initial and syllable-final ambiguous fricatives (e.g., sounds ranging from [f] to [s]) in the word–nonword series maf–mas, and the nonword–word series jaf–jas. They tended to label the sounds in a lexically consistent manner (i.e., consistent with the word endpoints of the series). These lexical effects became smaller in listeners’ slower responses, even when the listeners were put under pressure to respond as fast as possible. Our results challenge models of spoken word recognition in which feedback modulates the prelexical analysis of the component sounds of a word whenever that word is heard

Abstract

On the basis of evidence from studies of the naming and reading of numerals, Ferrand (1999) argued that the naming of objects is slower than reading their names, due to a greater response uncertainty in naming than in reading, rather than to an obligatory conceptual preparation for naming, but not for reading. We manipulated the need for conceptual preparation, while keeping response uncertainty constant in the naming and reading of complex numerals. In Experiment 1, participants named three-digit Arabic numerals either as house numbers or clock times. House number naming latencies were determined mostly by morphophonological factors, such as morpheme frequency and the number of phonemes, whereas clock time naming latencies revealed an additional conceptual involvement. In Experiment 2, the numerals were presented in alphabetic format and had to be read aloud. Reading latencies were determined mostly by morphophonological factors in both modes. These results suggest that conceptual preparation, rather than response uncertainty, is responsible for the difference between naming and reading latencies.

Abstract

Recent work has claimed that (non-tonal) phonological patterns are subregular (Heinz 2011a,b, 2018; Heinz and Idsardi 2013), occupying a delimited proper subregion of the regular functions—the weakly deterministic (WD) functions (Heinz and Lai 2013; Jardine 2016). Whether or not it is correct (McCollum et al. 2020a), this claim can only be properly assessed given a complete and accurate definition of WD functions. We propose such a definition in this article, patching unintended holes in Heinz and Lai’s (2013) original definition that we argue have led to the incorrect classification of some phonological patterns as WD. We start from the observation that WD patterns share a property that we call unbounded semiambience, modeled after the analogous observation by Jardine (2016) about non-deterministic (ND) patterns and their unbounded circumambience. Both ND and WD functions can be broken down into compositions of deterministic (subsequential) functions (Elgot and Mezei 1965; Heinz and Lai 2013) that read an input string from opposite directions; we show that WD functions are those for which these deterministic composands do not interact in a way that is familiar from the theoretical phonology literature. To underscore how this concept of interaction neatly separates the WD class of functions from the strictly more expressive ND class, we provide analyses of the vowel harmony patterns of two Eastern Nilotic languages, Maasai and Turkana, using bimachines, an automaton type that represents unbounded bidirectional dependencies explicitly. These analyses make clear that there is interaction between deterministic composands when (and only when) the output of a given input element of a string is simultaneously dependent on information from both the left and the right: ND functions are those that involve interaction, while WD functions are those that do not.

Abstract

Scientific convergence is a phenomenon where the distance between hitherto distinct scientific fields narrows and the fields gradually overlap over time. It is creating important potential for research, development, and innovation. Although scientific convergence is crucial for the development of radically new technology, the identification of emerging scientific convergence is particularly difficult since the underlying knowledge flows are rather fuzzy and unstable in the early convergence stage. Nevertheless, novel scientific publications emerging at the intersection of different knowledge fields may reflect convergence processes. Thus, in this article, we exploit the growing number of research and digital libraries providing bibliographic metadata to propose an automated analysis of science dynamics. We utilize and adapt machine-learning methods (DeepWalk) to automatically learn a similarity measure between scientific fields from graphs constructed on bibliographic metadata. With a time-based perspective, we apply our approach to analyze the trajectories of evolving similarities between scientific fields. We validate the learned similarity measure by evaluating it within the well-explored case of cholesterol-lowering ingredients in which scientific convergence between the distinct scientific fields of nutrition and pharmaceuticals has partially taken place. Our results confirm that the similarity trajectories learned by our approach resemble the expected behavior, indicating that our approach may allow researchers and practitioners to detect and predict scientific convergence early.

Abstract

While it is well established that grammar learning success varies with age, the cause of this developmental change is largely unknown. This study examined functional MRI activation across a broad developmental sample of 165 Dutch-speaking individuals (8-25 years) as they were implicitly learning a new grammatical system. This approach allowed us to assess the direct effects of age on grammar learning ability while exploring its neural correlates. In contrast to the alleged advantage of children language learners over adults, we found that adults outperformed children. Moreover, our behavioral data showed a sharp discontinuity in the relationship between age and grammar learning performance: there was a strong positive linear correlation between 8 and 15.4 years of age, after which age had no further effect. Neurally, our data indicate two important findings: (i) during grammar learning, adults and children activate similar brain regions, suggesting continuity in the neural networks that support initial grammar learning; and (ii) activation level is age-dependent, with children showing less activation than older participants. We suggest that these age-dependent processes may constrain developmental effects in grammar learning. The present study provides new insights into the neural basis of age-related differences in grammar learning in second language acquisition.

Abstract

According to Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) speakers generate the phonological and phonetic representations of successive syllables of a word in sequence and only begin to speak after having fully planned at least one complete phonological word. Therefore, speech onset latencies should be longer for long than for short words. We tested this prediction in four experiments in which Dutch participants named or categorized objects with monosyllabic or disyllabic names. Experiment 1 yielded a length effect on production latencies when objects with long and short names were tested in separate blocks, but not when they were mixed. Experiment 2 showed that the length effect was not due to a difference in the ease of object recognition. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using a within-participants design. In Experiment 4, the long and short target words appeared in a phrasal context. In addition to the speech onset latencies, we obtained the viewing times for the target objects, which have been shown to depend on the time necessary to plan the form of the target names. We found word length effects for both dependent variables, but only when objects with short and long names were presented in separate blocks. We argue that in pure and mixed blocks speakers used different response deadlines, which they tried to meet by either generating the motor programs for one syllable or for all syllables of the word before speech onset. Computer simulations using WEAVER++ support this view.

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence suggests that learning a new foreign language (FL) makes you forget previously learned FLs. To seek empirical evidence for this claim, we tested whether learning words in a previously unknown L3 hampers subsequent retrieval of their L2 translation equivalents. In two experiments, Dutch native speakers with knowledge of English (L2), but not Spanish (L3), first completed an English vocabulary test, based on which 46 participant-specific, known English words were chosen. Half of those were then learned in Spanish. Finally, participants’ memory for all 46 English words was probed again in a picture naming task. In Experiment 1, all tests took place within one session. In Experiment 2, we separated the English pre-test from Spanish learning by a day and manipulated the timing of the English post-test (immediately after learning vs. 1 day later). By separating the post-test from Spanish learning, we asked whether consolidation of the new Spanish words would increase their interference strength. We found significant main effects of interference in naming latencies and accuracy: Participants speeded up less and were less accurate to recall words in English for which they had learned Spanish translations, compared with words for which they had not. Consolidation time did not significantly affect these interference effects. Thus, learning a new language indeed comes at the cost of subsequent retrieval ability in other FLs. Such interference effects set in immediately after learning and do not need time to emerge, even when the other FL has been known for a long time.

Abstract

With the recent advancements in the field of robotics and the increased focus on having general-purpose robots widely available to the general public, it has become increasingly necessary to pursue research into Human-robot interaction (HRI). While there have been a lot of works discussing frameworks for teaching HRI in educational institutions with a few institutions already offering courses to students, a consensus on the course content still eludes the field. In this work, we highlight a few challenges and opportunities while designing an HRI course from an Indian perspective. These topics warrant further deliberations as they have a direct impact on the design of HRI courses and wider implications for the entire field.

Abstract

Statistical learning ability has been found to relate to children’s reading skills. Yet, statistical learning is also known to be vital for developing oral language skills, and oral language and reading skills relate strongly. These connections raise the question of whether statistical learning ability affects reading via oral language or directly. Statistical learning is multifaceted, and so different aspects of statistical learning might influence oral language and reading skills distinctly. In a longitudinal study, we determined how two aspects of statistical learning from an artificial language tested on 70 17-month-old infants—segmenting sequences from speech and generalizing the sequence structure—related to oral language skills measured at 54 months and reading skills measured at approximately 75 months. Statistical learning segmentation did not relate significantly to oral language or reading, whereas statistical learning generalization related to oral language, but only indirectly related to reading. Our results showed that children’s early statistical learning ability was associated with learning to read via the children’s oral language skills.

Abstract

Background

Forced switching between languages poses demands on control abilities, which may be difficult to meet for bilinguals with aphasia. Freely choosing languages has been shown to increase naming efficiency in healthy bilinguals, and lexical accessibility was found to be a predictor for language choice. The overlap between bilingual language switching and other types of switching is yet unclear.

Aims

This study aimed to examine the benefits of free language choice for bilinguals with aphasia and to investigate the overlap of between- and within-language switching abilities.

Methods & Procedures

Seventeen bilinguals with aphasia completed a questionnaire and four web-based picture naming tasks: single-language naming in the first and second language separately; voluntary switching between languages; cued and predictable switching between languages; cued and predictable switching between phrase types in the first language. Accuracy and naming latencies were analysed using (generalised) linear mixed-effects models.

Outcomes & Results

The results showed higher accuracy and faster naming for the voluntary switching condition compared to single-language naming and cued switching. Both voluntary and cued language switching yielded switch costs, and voluntary switch costs were larger. Ease of lexical access was a reliable predictor for voluntary language choice. We obtained no statistical evidence for differences or associations between switch costs in between- and within-language switching.

Conclusions

Several results point to benefits of voluntary language switching for bilinguals with aphasia. Freely mixing languages improved naming accuracy and speed, and ease of lexical access affected language choice. There was no statistical evidence for overlap of between- and within-language switching abilities. This study highlights the benefits of free language choice for bilinguals with aphasia.

Abstract

Previous research examining the factors that determine language choice and voluntary switching mainly involved early bilinguals. Here, using picture naming, we investigated language choice and switching in late Dutch–English bilinguals. We found that naming was overall slower in cued than in voluntary switching, but switch costs occurred in both types of switching. The magnitude of switch costs differed depending on the task and language, and was moderated by L2 proficiency. Self-rated rather than objectively assessed proficiency predicted voluntary switching and ease of lexical access was associated with language choice. Between-language and within-language switch costs were not correlated. These results highlight self-rated proficiency as a reliable predictor of voluntary switching, with language modulating switch costs. As in early bilinguals, ease of lexical access was related to word-level language choice of late bilinguals.

Abstract

Daily experiences are conceptualized as events involving multiple participants and their relations (i.e., thematic roles). When describing events, speakers often do not include all event participants involved. Here, we explore how underlying conceptual requirements and language-specific encoding options influence the content of event descriptions in speech and gesture in two typologically different languages (English,
Turkish). Focusing on conceptually peripheral instruments whose status is highly debated, we manipulated the conceptual status of event participants by including events that ‘require’ or ‘allow’ otherwise syntactically optional instruments. Results showed that the require-allow distinction did not manifest uniformly in Turkish and English in speech, gesture, or when both modalities were considered. However, mention of highly optional event participants (e.g., allowed instruments) was
affected by language-specific syntactic encoding options. We conclude that, under more naturalistic elicitation conditions, planning descriptions of instrument events is more heavily affected by language-specific encoding than conceptual prominence of the roles.

Abstract

How we combine minimal linguistic units into larger structures remains an unresolved topic in neuroscience. Language processing involves the abstract construction of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ information simultaneously (e.g., phrase structure, morphological agreement), but previous paradigms have been constrained in isolating only one type of composition and have utilized poor spatiotemporal resolution. Using intracranial recordings, we report multiple experiments designed to separate phrase structure from morphosyntactic agreement. Epilepsy patients (n = 10) were presented with auditory two-word phrases grouped into pseudoword-verb (‘trab run’) and pronoun-verb either with or without Person agreement (‘they run’ vs. ‘they runs’). Phrase composition and Person violations both resulted in significant increases in broadband high gamma activity approximately 300ms after verb onset in posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), followed by inferior frontal cortex (IFC) at 500ms. While sites sensitive to only morphosyntactic violations were distributed, those sensitive to both composition types were generally confined to pSTS/pMTG and IFC. These results indicate that posterior temporal cortex shows the earliest sensitivity for hierarchical linguistic structure across multiple dimensions, providing neural resources for distinct windows of composition. This region is comprised of sparsely interwoven heterogeneous constituents that afford cortical search spaces for dissociable syntactic relations.

Abstract

English, and a variety of Germanic languages, allow constructions such as the bottle floated into the cave , whereas languages such as Spanish, French, and Hindi are highly restricted in allowing manner of motion verbs to occur with path phrases. This typological observation has been accounted for in terms of the conflation of complex meaning in basic or derived verbs [Talmy, L., 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Shopen, T. (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57–149; Levin, B., Rappaport-Hovav, M., 1995. Unaccusativity: At the Syntax–Lexical Semantics Interface. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA], or the presence of path “satellites” with special grammatical properties in the lexicon of languages such as English, which allow such phrasal combinations [cf. Talmy, L., 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Shopen, T. (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57–149; Talmy, L., 1991. Path to realisation: via aspect and result. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, pp. 480–520]. I use data from Hindi to show that there is little empirical support for the claim that the constraint on the phrasal combination is correlated with differences in verb meaning or the presence of satellites in the lexicon of a language. However, proposals which eschew lexicalization accounts for more general aspectual constraints on the manner verb + path phrase combination in Spanish-type languages (Aske, J., 1989. Path Predicates in English and Spanish: A Closer look. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, pp. 1–14) cannot account for the full range of data in Hindi either. On the basis of these facts, I argue that an empirically adequate account can be formulated in terms of a general mapping constraint, formulated in terms of whether the lexical requirements of the verb strictly or weakly constrain its syntactic privileges of occurrence. In Hindi, path phrases can combine with manner of motion verbs only to the degree that they are compatible with the semantic profile of the verb. Path phrases in English, on the other hand, can extend the verb's “semantic profile” subject to certain constraints. I suggest that path phrases are licensed in English by the semantic requirements of the “construction” in which they appear rather than by the selectional requirements of the verb (Fillmore, C., Kay, P., O'Connor, M.C., 1988, Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions. Language 64, 501–538; Jackendoff, 1990, Semantic Structures. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; Goldberg, 1995, Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London).

Abstract

Prediction errors have a prominent role in many forms of learning. For example, in reinforcement learning, agents learn by updating the association between states and outcomes as a function of the prediction error elicited by the event. One paradigm often used to study error-driven learning is blocking. In forward blocking, participants are first presented with stimulus A, followed by outcome X (A→X). In the second phase, A and B are presented together, followed by X (AB→X). Here, A→X blocks the formation of B→X, given that X is already fully predicted by A. In backward blocking, the order of phases is reversed. Here, the association between B and X that is formed during the first learning phase of AB→X is weakened when participants learn exclusively A→X in the second phase. The present study asked the question whether forward and backward blocking occur during visual statistical learning, i.e., the incidental learning of the statistical structure of the environment. In a series of studies, using both forward and backward blocking, we observed statistical learning of temporal associations among pairs of images. While we found no forward blocking, we observed backward blocking, thereby suggesting a retrospective revaluation process in statistical learning and supporting a functional similarity between statistical learning and reinforcement learning.

Abstract

This study demonstrates that listeners use lexical knowledge in perceptual learning of speech sounds. Dutch listeners first made lexical decisions on Dutch words and nonwords. The final fricative of 20 critical words had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]-final words (e.g., [WI tlo?], from witlof, chicory) and unambiguous [s]-final words (e.g., naaldbos, pine forest). Another group heard the reverse (e.g., ambiguous [na:ldbo?], unambiguous witlof). Listeners who had heard [?] in [f]-final words were subsequently more likely to categorize ambiguous sounds on an [f]–[s] continuum as [f] than those who heard [?] in [s]-final words. Control conditions ruled out alternative explanations based on selective adaptation and contrast. Lexical information can thus be used to train categorization of speech. This use of lexical information differs from the on-line lexical feedback embodied in interactive models of speech perception. In contrast to on-line feedback, lexical feedback for learning is of benefit to spoken word recognition (e.g., in adapting to a newly encountered dialect).

Abstract

Regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are typically activated in many different cognitive functions. In most studies, the focus has been on the role of specific PFC regions in specific cognitive domains, but more recently similarities in PFC activations across cognitive domains have been stressed. Such similarities may suggest that a region mediates a common function across a variety of cognitive tasks. In this study, we compared the activation patterns associated with tests of working memory, semantic memory and episodic memory. The results converged on a general involvement of four regions across memory tests. These were located in left frontopolar cortex, left mid-ventrolateral PFC, left mid-dorsolateral PFC and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. These findings provide evidence that some PFC regions are engaged during many different memory tests. The findings are discussed in relation to theories about the functional contribition of the PFC regions and the architecture of memory.

Abstract

Cognitive studies show that both younger and older adults can increase their memory performance after training in using a visuospatial mnemonic, although age-related memory deficits tend to be magnified rather than reduced after training. Little is known about the changes in functional brain activity that accompany training-induced memory enhancement, and whether age-related activity changes are associated with the size of training-related gains. Here, we demonstrate that younger adults show increased activity during memory encoding in occipito-parietal and frontal brain regions after learning the mnemonic. Older adults did not show increased frontal activity, and only those elderly persons who benefited from the mnemonic showed increased occipitoparietal activity. These findings suggest that age-related differences in cognitive reserve capacity may reflect both a frontal processing deficiency and a posterior production deficiency.

Abstract

The highly polygenic and pleiotropic nature of behavioural traits, psychiatric disorders and structural and functional brain phenotypes complicate mechanistic interpretation of related genome-wide association study (GWAS) signals, thereby obscuring underlying causal biological processes. We propose genomic principal and independent component analysis (PCA, ICA) to decompose a large set of univariate GWAS statistics of multimodal brain traits into more interpretable latent genomic components. Here we introduce and evaluate this novel methods various analytic parameters and reproducibility across independent samples. Two UK Biobank GWAS summary statistic releases of 2240 imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs) were retrieved. Genome-wide beta-values and their corresponding standard-error scaled z-values were decomposed using genomic PCA/ICA. We evaluated variance explained at multiple dimensions up to 200. We tested the inter-sample reproducibility of output of dimensions 5, 10, 25 and 50. Reproducibility statistics of the respective univariate GWAS served as benchmarks. Reproducibility of 10-dimensional PCs and ICs showed the best trade-off between model complexity and robustness and variance explained (PCs: |rz − max| = 0.33, |rraw − max| = 0.30; ICs: |rz − max| = 0.23, |rraw − max| = 0.19). Genomic PC and IC reproducibility improved substantially relative to mean univariate GWAS reproducibility up to dimension 10. Genomic components clustered along neuroimaging modalities. Our results indicate that genomic PCA and ICA decompose genetic effects on IDPs from GWAS statistics with high reproducibility by taking advantage of the inherent pleiotropic patterns. These findings encourage further applications of genomic PCA and ICA as fully data-driven methods to effectively reduce the dimensionality, enhance the signal to noise ratio and improve interpretability of high-dimensional multitrait genome-wide analyses.

Abstract

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD [MIM 143465]) is a common, highly heritable neurobehavioral disorder of childhood onset, characterized by hyperactivity, impulsivity, and/or inattention. As part of an ongoing study of the genetic etiology of ADHD, we have performed a genomewide linkage scan in 204 nuclear families comprising 853 individuals and 270 affected sibling pairs (ASPs). Previously, we reported genomewide linkage analysis of a “first wave” of these families composed of 126 ASPs. A follow-up investigation of one region on 16p yielded significant linkage in an extended sample. The current study extends the original sample of 126 ASPs to 270 ASPs and provides linkage analyses of the entire sample, using polymorphic microsatellite markers that define an ∼10-cM map across the genome. Maximum LOD score (MLS) analysis identified suggestive linkage for 17p11 (MLS=2.98) and four nominal regions with MLS values >1.0, including 5p13, 6q14, 11q25, and 20q13. These data, taken together with the fine mapping on 16p13, suggest two regions as highly likely to harbor risk genes for ADHD: 16p13 and 17p11. Interestingly, both regions, as well as 5p13, have been highlighted in genomewide scans for autism.

Abstract

Animal vocal communication often relies on call sequences. The temporal patterns of such sequences can be adjusted to other callers, follow complex rhythmic structures or exhibit a metronome-like pattern (i.e., isochronous). How regular are the temporal patterns in animal signals, and what influences their precision? If present, are rhythms already there early in ontogeny? Here, we describe an exploratory study of Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) barks—a vocalisation type produced across many pinniped species in rhythmic, percussive bouts. This study is the first quantitative description of barking in Cape fur seal pups. We analysed the rhythmic structures of spontaneous barking bouts of pups and adult females from the breeding colony in Cape Cross, Namibia. Barks of adult females exhibited isochrony, that is they were produced at fairly regular points in time. Instead, intervals between pup barks were more variable, that is skipping a bark in the isochronous series occasionally. In both age classes, beat precision, that is how well the barks followed a perfect template, was worse when barking at higher rates. Differences could be explained by physiological factors, such as respiration or arousal. Whether, and how, isochrony develops in this species remains an open question. This study provides evidence towards a rhythmic production of barks in Cape fur seal pups and lays the groundwork for future studies to investigate the development of rhythm using multidimensional metrics.

Abstract

In this paper we describe a general scheme for internationalization of our talking head, Baldi, to speak other languages. We describe the modular structure of the auditory/visual synthesis software. As an example, we have created a synthetic Arabic talker, which is evaluated using a noisy word recognition task comparing this talker with a natural one.

Abstract

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

Abstract

Across the animal kingdom, neural responses in the auditory cortex are suppressed during vocalization, and humans are no exception. A common hypothesis is that suppression increases sensitivity to auditory feedback, enabling the detection of vocalization errors. This hypothesis has been previously confirmed in non-human primates, however a direct link between auditory suppression and sensitivity in human speech monitoring remains elusive. To address this issue, we obtained intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings from 35 neurosurgical participants during speech production. We first characterized the detailed topography of auditory suppression, which varied across superior temporal gyrus (STG). Next, we performed a delayed auditory feedback (DAF) task to determine whether the suppressed sites were also sensitive to auditory feedback alterations. Indeed, overlapping sites showed enhanced responses to feedback, indicating sensitivity. Importantly, there was a strong correlation between the degree of auditory suppression and feedback sensitivity, suggesting suppression might be a key mechanism that underlies speech monitoring. Further, we found that when participants produced speech with simultaneous auditory feedback, posterior STG was selectively activated if participants were engaged in a DAF paradigm, suggesting that increased attentional load can modulate auditory feedback sensitivity.

Abstract

Over the past three decades, functional neuroimaging has amassed abundant evidence of the intricate interplay between brain structure and function. However, the potential anatomical and experimental overlap, independence, granularity, and gaps between functions remain poorly understood. Here, we show the latent structure of the current brain-cognition knowledge and its organisation. Our approach utilises the most comprehensive meta-analytic fMRI database (Neurosynth) to compute a three-dimensional embedding space–morphospace capturing the relationship between brain functions as we currently understand them. The space structure enables us to statistically test the relationship between functions expressed as the degree to which the characteristics of each functional map can be anticipated based on its similarities with others–the predictability index. The morphospace can also predict the activation pattern of new, unseen functions and decode thoughts and inner states during movie watching. The framework defined by the morphospace will spur the investigation of novel functions and guide the exploration of the fabric of human cognition.

Abstract

* These two authors contributed equally to this study
Statistical learning – the ability to extract distributional regularities from input – is suggested to be key to language acquisition. Yet, evidence for the human capacity for statistical learning comes mainly from studies conducted in carefully controlled settings without auditory distraction. While such conditions permit careful examination of learning, they do not reflect the naturalistic language learning experience, which is replete with auditory distraction – including competing talkers. Here, we examine how statistical language learning proceeds in a virtual cocktail party environment, where the to-be-learned input is presented alongside a competing speech stream with its own distributional regularities. During exposure, participants in the Dual Talker group concurrently heard two novel languages, one produced by a female talker and one by a male talker, with each talker virtually positioned at opposite sides of the listener (left/right) using binaural acoustic manipulations. Selective attention was manipulated by instructing participants to attend to only one of the two talkers. At test, participants were asked to distinguish words from part-words for both the attended and the unattended languages. Results indicated that participants’ accuracy was significantly higher for trials from the attended vs. unattended
language. Further, the performance of this Dual Talker group was no different compared to a control group who heard only one language from a single talker (Single Talker group). We thus conclude that statistical learning is modulated by selective attention, being relatively robust against the additional cognitive load provided by competing speech, emphasizing its efficiency in naturalistic language learning situations.

Abstract

We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6–7 years, 8–10 years, 11–12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.

Abstract

Natural speech involves repair. These repairs are often highlighted through prosodic marking (Levelt & Cutler, 1983). Prosodic marking usually entails an increase in pitch, loudness, and/or duration that draws attention to the corrected word. While it is established that natural self-repairs typically elicit prosodic marking, the exact cause of this is unclear. This study investigates whether producing a prosodic marking emerges from an automatic correction process or has a communicative purpose. In the current study, we elicit corrections to test whether all self-corrections elicit prosodic marking. Participants carried out a picture-naming task in which they described two images presented on-screen. To prompt self-correction, the second image was altered in some cases, requiring participants to abandon their initial utterance and correct their description to match the new image. This manipulation was compared to a control condition in which only the orientation of the object would change, eliciting no self-correction while still presenting a visual change. We found that the replacement of the item did not elicit a prosodic marking, regardless of the type of change. Theoretical implications and research directions are discussed, in particular theories of prosodic planning.

Abstract

The present study uses electroencephalography (EEG) with an N-back task (0-, 1-, and 2-back) to investigate if and how individual bilingual experiences modulate brain activity and cognitive processes. The N-back is an especially appropriate task given recent proposals situating bilingual effects on neurocognition within the broader attentional control system (Bialystok & Craik, 2022). Beyond its working memory component, the N-Back task builds in complexity incrementally, progressively taxing the attentional system. EEG, behavioral and language/social background data were collected from 60 bilinguals. Two cognitive loads were calculated: low (1-back minus 0-back) and high (2-back minus 0-back). Behavioral performance and brain recruitment were modeled as a function of individual differences in bilingual engagement. We predicted task performance as modulated by bilingual engagement would reflect cognitive demands of increased complexity: slower reaction times and lower accuracy, and increase in theta, decrease in alpha and modulated N2/P3 amplitudes. The data show no modulation of the expected behavioral effects by degree of bilingual engagement. However, individual differences analyses reveal significant correlations between non-societal language use in Social contexts and alpha in the low cognitive load condition and age of acquisition of the L2/2L1 with theta in the high cognitive load. These findings lend some initial support to Bialystok & Craik (2022), showing how certain adaptations at the brain level take place in order to deal with the cognitive demands associated with variations in bilingual language experience and increases in attentional load. Furthermore, the present data highlight how these effects can play out differentially depending on cognitive testing/modalities – that is, effects were found at the TFR level but not behaviorally or in the ERPs, showing how the choice of analysis can be deterministic when investigating bilingual effects.

Abstract

Purpose

The aim of this study is to establish which specific cognitive abilities are phenotypically related to reading skill in adolescence and determine whether this phenotypic correlation is explained by polygenetic overlap.

Method

In an Australian population sample of twins and non-twin siblings of European ancestry (734 ≤ N ≤ 1542 [50.7% < F < 66%], mean age = 16.7, range = 11–28 years) from the Brisbane Adolescent Twin Study, mixed-effects models were used to test the association between a dyslexia polygenic score (based on genome-wide association results from a study of 51,800 dyslexics versus >1 million controls) and quantitative cognitive measures. The variance in the cognitive measure explained by the polygenic score was compared to that explained by a reading difficulties phenotype (scores that were lower than 1.5 SD below the mean reading skill) to derive the proportion of the association due to genetic influences.

Results

The strongest phenotypic correlations were between poor reading and verbal tests (R2 up to 6.2%); visuo-spatial working memory was the only measure that did not show association with poor reading. Dyslexia polygenic scores could completely explain the phenotypic covariance between poor reading and most working memory tasks and were most predictive of performance on a test of arithmetic (R2=2.9%).

Conclusion

Shared genetic pathways are thus highlighted for the commonly found association between reading and mathematics abilities, and for the verbal short-term/working memory deficits often observed in dyslexia.

Abstract

In a within-subject design we investigated the levels-of-processing (LOP) effect using visual material in a behavioral and a corresponding PET study. In the behavioral study we characterize a generalized LOP effect, using pleasantness and graphical quality judgments in the encoding situation, with two types of visual material, figurative and nonfigurative line drawings. In the PET study we investigate the related pattern of brain activations along these two dimensions. The behavioral results indicate that instruction and material contribute independently to the level of recognition performance. Therefore the LOP effect appears to stem both from the relative relevance of the stimuli (encoding opportunity) and an altered processing of stimuli brought about by the explicit instruction (encoding mode). In the PET study, encoding of visual material under the pleasantness (deep) instruction yielded left lateralized frontoparietal and anterior temporal activations while surface-based perceptually oriented processing (shallow instruction) yielded right lateralized frontoparietal, posterior temporal, and occipitotemporal activations. The result that deep encoding was related to the left prefrontal cortex while shallow encoding was related to the right prefrontal cortex, holding the material constant, is not consistent with the HERA model. In addition, we suggest that the anterior medial superior frontal region is related to aspects of self-referential semantic processing and that the inferior parts of the anterior cingulate as well as the medial orbitofrontal cortex is related to affective processing, in this case pleasantness evaluation of the stimuli regardless of explicit semantic content. Finally, the left medial temporal lobe appears more actively engaged by elaborate meaning-based processing and the complex response pattern observed in different subregions of the MTL lends support to the suggestion that this region is functionally segregated.

Abstract

In animals, the rhythmical properties of calls are known to be shaped by physical constraints and the necessity of conveying information. As a consequence, investigating rhythmical properties in relation to different environmental conditions can help to shed light on the relationship between environment and species behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Sciaena umbra (fam. Sciaenidae) male fish emit reproductive calls characterized by a simple isochronous, i.e., metronome-like rhythm (the so-called R-pattern). Here, S. umbra R-pattern rhythm properties were assessed and compared between four different sites located along the Mediterranean basin (Mallorca, Venice, Trieste, Crete); furthermore, for one location, two datasets collected 10 years apart were available. Recording sites differed in habitat types, vessel density and acoustic richness; despite this, S. umbra R-calls were isochronous across all locations. A degree of variability was found only when considering the beat frequency, which was temporally stable, but spatially variable, with the beat frequency being faster in one of the sites (Venice). Statistically, the beat frequency was found to be dependent on the season (i.e. month of recording) and potentially influenced by the presence of soniferous competitors and human-generated underwater noise. Overall, the general consistency in the measured rhythmical properties (isochrony and beat frequency) suggests their nature as a fitness-related trait in the context of the S. umbra reproductive behavior and calls for further evaluation as a communicative cue.

Abstract

This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person marked subjects with third-person unmarked verbs and vice versa. Crucially, person violations with 1st person subjects (e.g., io *suona la chitarra “I plays-3rd-person the guitar”) yielded significantly shorter RTs in the SPRT and higher accuracy in the GJT than the opposite error type (e.g., il giornalista *esco spesso “the journalist go-1st-person out often”). This effect is consistent with the claim that when the first element in the dependency is marked (first person), the parser generates stronger predictions regarding upcoming agreeing elements. These results nicely align with work from the same populations investigating the impact of morphological markedness on grammatical gender agreement, suggesting that markedness impacts agreement similarly in two distinct grammatical domains and that sensitivity to markedness is more prevalent for HSs.

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been a slow but steady accumulation of psycholinguistic research focusing on typologically diverse languages. In this review, we provide an overview of the psycholinguistic research on Philippine languages at the sentence level. We first discuss the grammatical features of these languages that figure prominently in existing research. We identify four linguistic domains that have received attention from language researchers and summarize the empirical terrain. We advance two claims that emerge across these different domains: (a) The agent-first pressure plays a central role in many of the findings, and (b) the generalization that the patient argument is the syntactically privileged argument cannot be reduced to frequency, but instead is an emergent phenomenon caused by the alignment of competing pressures toward an optimal candidate. We connect these language-specific claims to language-general theories of sentence processing.

Abstract

The vocabularies of natural languages harbour many instances of iconicity, where words show a perceived resemblance between aspects of form and meaning. An open challenge in this domain is how to reconcile different operationalizations of iconicity and link them to an empirically grounded theory. Here we combine three ways of looking at iconicity using a set of 239 iconic words from 5 spoken languages (Japanese, Korean, Semai, Siwu and Ewe). Data on guessing accuracy serves as a baseline measure of probable iconicity and provides variation that we seek to explain and predict using structure-mapping theory and iconicity ratings. We systematically trace a range of cross-linguistically attested form-meaning correspondences in the dataset, yielding a word-level measure of cumulative iconicity that we find to be highly predictive of guessing accuracy. In a rating study, we collect iconicity judgments for all words from 78 participants. The ratings are well-predicted by our measure of cumulative iconicity and also correlate strongly with guessing accuracy, showing that rating tasks offer a scalable method to measure iconicity. Triangulating the measures reveals how structure-mapping can help open the black box of experimental measures of iconicity. While none of the methods is perfect, taken together they provide a well-rounded way to approach the meaning and measurement of iconicity in natural language vocabulary.

Abstract

To study patterns in behavior, fitness, and population dynamics, estimating the age of the individuals is often a necessity. Specifically, age estimation of young animals is very important for animal rehabilitation centers because it may determine if the animal should be taken in and, if so, what care is optimal for its rehabilitation. Accurate age estimation is also important to determine the growth pattern of an individual, and it is needed to correctly interpret the influence of early body condition on its growth trajectories. The purpose of our study was to find body measurements that function as good age estimators in young (up to 3 months old) harbor seals (Phoca vitulina vitulina), placing emphasis on noninvasive techniques that can be used in the field. To meet this goal, body mass (BM), dorsal standard length (DSL), upper canine length (CL), body condition (BC), and sex were determined from 45 Harbor Seal pups of known age. Generalized additive mixed models were fitted to find how well these morphometric measures predicted age, and the results from the selected model were used to compute growth curves and to create a practical table to determine the age of young animals in the field. We found that both DSL and CL—and to some extent sex—were useful predictors for estimating age in young harbor seals and that the growth rate of pups raised in captivity is significantly lower than for those raised in the wild. In addition, we found no evidence for compensatory growth, given that animals that arrived at the center with a poor BM or BC continued to show lower BM or BC throughout almost the entire rehabilitation period.

Abstract

We welcome Enfield and Zuckerman’s (E&Z’s) rich exposition on how people congregate around shared representations. Moorings are a useful addition to our tools for thinking about signs and their uses. As public fixtures to which actions, statuses, and experiences may be tied, moorings evoke Geertz’s (1973) webs of significance, Millikan’s (2005) public conventions, and Clark’s (2015) common ground, but they add to these accounts a focus on the sign and the promise of understanding in more detail how people come to share and calibrate experiences.

Abstract

Purpose

To perform a scoping review to investigate the psychosocial impact of having an altered facial expression in five neurological diseases.
Methods

A systematic literature search was performed. Studies were on Bell’s palsy, facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), Moebius syndrome, myotonic dystrophy type 1, or Parkinson’s disease patients; had a focus on altered facial expression; and had any form of psychosocial outcome measure. Data extraction focused on psychosocial outcomes.
Results

Bell’s palsy, myotonic dystrophy type 1, and Parkinson’s disease patients more often experienced some degree of psychosocial distress than healthy controls. In FSHD, facial weakness negatively influenced communication and was experienced as a burden. The psychosocial distress applied especially to women (Bell’s palsy and Parkinson’s disease), and patients with more severely altered facial expression (Bell’s palsy), but not for Moebius syndrome patients. Furthermore, Parkinson’s disease patients with more pronounced hypomimia were perceived more negatively by observers. Various strategies were reported to compensate for altered facial expression.
Conclusions

This review showed that patients with altered facial expression in four of five included neurological diseases had reduced psychosocial functioning. Future research recommendations include studies on observers’ judgements of patients during social interactions and on the effectiveness of compensation strategies in enhancing psychosocial functioning.
Implications for rehabilitation

Negative effects of altered facial expression on psychosocial functioning are common and more abundant in women and in more severely affected patients with various neurological disorders.

Health care professionals should be alert to psychosocial distress in patients with altered facial expression.

Learning of compensatory strategies could be a beneficial therapy for patients with psychosocial distress due to an altered facial expression.

Abstract

The objectives of this article are to characterize the performance and to discuss the performance differences between literate and illiterate participants in a well-defined study population.We describe the participant-selection procedure used to investigate this population. Three groups with similar sociocultural backgrounds living in a relatively homogeneous fishing community in southern Portugal were characterized in terms of socioeconomic and sociocultural background variables and compared on a simple neuropsychological test battery; specifically, a literate group with more than 4 years of education (n = 9), a literate group with 4 years of education (n = 26), and an illiterate group (n = 31) were included in this study.We compare and discuss our results with other similar studies on the effects of literacy and illiteracy. The results indicate that naming and identification of real objects, verbal fluency using ecologically relevant semantic criteria, verbal memory, and orientation are not affected by literacy or level of formal education. In contrast, verbal working memory assessed with digit span, verbal abstraction, long-term semantic memory, and calculation (i.e., multiplication) are significantly affected by the level of literacy. We indicate that it is possible, with proper participant-selection procedures, to exclude general cognitive impairment and to control important sociocultural factors that potentially could introduce bias when studying the specific effects of literacy and level of formal education on cognitive brain function.

Abstract

Is there a relation between socioeconomic factors and aphasia severity and recovery? Connor, Obler, Tocco, Fitzpatrick, and Albert (2001) describe correlations between the educational level and socioeconomic status of aphasic subjects with aphasia severity and subsequent recovery. As stated in the introduction by Connor et al. (2001), studies of the influence of educational level and literacy (or illiteracy) on aphasia severity have yielded conflicting results, while no significant link between socioeconomic status and aphasia severity and recovery has been established. In this brief note, we will comment on their findings and conclusions, beginning first with a brief review of literacy and aphasia research, and complexities encountered in these fields of investigation. This serves as a general background to our specific comments on Connor et al. (2001), which will be focusing on methodological issues and the importance of taking normative values in consideration when subjects with different socio-cultural or socio-economic backgrounds are assessed.

Abstract

Four form-preparation experiments investigated whether aspects of phonological encoding processes and representations are shared between languages in bilingual speakers. The participants were Dutch--English bilinguals. Experiment 1 showed that the basic rightward incrementality revealed in studies for the first language is also observed for second-language words. In Experiments 2 and 3, speakers were given words to produce that did or did not share onset segments, and that came or did not come from different languages. It was found that when onsets were shared among the response words, those onsets were prepared, even when the words came from different languages. Experiment 4 showed that preparation requires prior knowledge of the segments and that knowledge about their phonological features yields no effect. These results suggest that both first- and second-language words are phonologically planned through the same serial order mechanism and that the representations of segments common to the languages are shared.

Abstract

This article presents a new account of the color-word Stroop phenomenon ( J. R. Stroop, 1935) based on an implemented model of word production, WEAVER++ ( W. J. M. Levelt, A. Roelofs, & A. S. Meyer, 1999b; A. Roelofs, 1992, 1997c). Stroop effects are claimed to arise from processing interactions within the language-production architecture and explicit goal-referenced control. WEAVER++ successfully simulates 16 classic data sets, mostly taken from the review by C. M. MacLeod (1991), including incongruency, congruency, reverse-Stroop, response-set, semantic-gradient, time-course, stimulus, spatial, multiple-task, manual, bilingual, training, age, and pathological effects. Three new experiments tested the account against alternative explanations. It is shown that WEAVER++ offers a more satisfactory account of the data than other models.

Abstract

It has been shown that when speakers produce hand gestures, addressees are attentive towards these gestures, using them to facilitate speech processing. Even relatively simple “beat” gestures are taken into account to help process aspects of speech such as prosodic prominence. In fact, recent evidence suggests that the timing of a beat gesture can influence spoken word recognition. Termed the manual McGurk Effect, Dutch participants, when presented with lexical stress minimal pair continua in Dutch, were biased to hear lexical stress on the syllable that coincided with a beat gesture. However, little is known about how this manual McGurk effect would surface in languages other than Dutch, with different acoustic cues to prominence, and variable gestures. Therefore, this study tests the effect in Spanish where lexical stress is arguably even more important, being a contrastive cue in the regular verb conjugation system. Results from 24 participants corroborate the effect in Spanish, namely that when given the same auditory stimulus, participants were biased to perceive lexical stress on the syllable that visually co-occurred with a beat gesture. These findings extend the manual McGurk effect to a different language, emphasizing the impact of gestures' timing on prosody perception and spoken word recognition.

Abstract

Recent research on multimodal language production has revealed that prominence in speech and gesture go hand-in-hand. Specifically, peaks in gesture (i.e., the apex) seem to closely coordinate with peaks in fundamental frequency (F0). The nature of this relationship may also be bi-directional, as it has also been shown that the production of gesture directly affects speech acoustics. However, most studies on the topic have largely focused on stress-based languages, where fundamental frequency has a prominence-lending function. Less work has been carried out on lexical tone languages such as Mandarin, where F0 is lexically distinctive. In this study, four native Mandarin speakers were asked to produce single monosyllabic CV words, taken from minimal lexical tone triplets (e.g., /pi1/, /pi2/, /pi3/), either with or without a beat gesture. Our analyses of the timing of the gestures showed that the gesture apex most stably occurred near vowel onset, with consonantal duration being the strongest predictor of apex placement. Acoustic analyses revealed that words produced with gesture showed raised F0 contours, greater intensity, and shorter durations. These findings further our understanding of gesture-speech alignment in typologically diverse languages, and add to the discussion about multimodal prominence.

Abstract

People derive contrastive inferences when interpreting adjectives (e.g., inferring that ‘the short pencil’ is being contrasted with a longer one). However, classic eye-tracking studies revealed contrastive inferences with scalar and material adjectives, but not with color adjectives. This was explained as a difference in listeners’ informativity expectations, since color adjectives are often used descriptively (hence not warranting a contrastive interpretation). Here we hypothesized that, beyond these pragmatic factors, perceptual factors (i.e., the relative perceptibility of color, material and scalar contrast) and semantic factors (i.e., the difference between gradable and non-gradable properties) also affect the real-time derivation of contrastive inferences. We tested these predictions in three languages with prenominal modification (English, Hindi, and Hungarian) and found that people derive contrastive inferences for color and scalar adjectives, but not for material adjectives. In addition, the processing of scalar adjectives was more context dependent than that of color and material adjectives, confirming that pragmatic, perceptual and semantic factors affect the derivation of contrastive inferences.

Abstract

Studies investigating language commonly isolate one modality or process, focusing on comprehension or production. Here, we present a framework for a paradigm that combines both: the Concise Language Paradigm (CLaP), tapping into comprehension and production within one trial. The trial structure is identical across conditions, presenting a sentence followed by a picture to be named. We tested 21 healthy speakers with EEG to examine three time periods during a trial (sentence, pre-picture interval, picture onset), yielding contrasts of sentence comprehension, contextually and visually guided word retrieval, object recognition, and naming. In the CLaP, sentences are presented auditorily (constrained, unconstrained, reversed), and pictures appear as normal (constrained, unconstrained, bare) or scrambled objects. Imaging results revealed different evoked responses after sentence onset for normal and time-reversed speech. Further, we replicated the context effect of alpha-beta power decreases before picture onset for constrained relative to unconstrained sentences, and could clarify that this effect arises from power decreases following constrained sentences. Brain responses locked to picture-onset differed as a function of sentence context and picture type (normal vs. scrambled), and naming times were fastest for pictures in constrained sentences, followed by scrambled picture naming, and equally fast for bare and unconstrained picture naming. Finally, we also discuss the potential of the CLaP to be adapted to different focuses, using different versions of the linguistic content and tasks, in combination with electrophysiology or other imaging methods. These first results of the CLaP indicate that this paradigm offers a promising framework to investigate the language system.

Abstract

Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguistic factors; the syntactic function of the wh-word that heads the question and the semantic generality (or ‘lightness’) of the main verb (Bloom, Merkin & Wootten, 1982; Bloom, 1991). Another more recent view, however, is that acquisition is influenced by the relative frequency with which children hear particular wh-words and verbs in their input (e.g. Rowland & Pine, 2000). In the present study over 300 hours of naturalistic data from twelve two- to three-year-old children and their mothers were analysed in order to assess the relative contribution of complexity and input frequency to wh-question acquisition. The analyses revealed, first, that the acquisition order of wh-questions could be predicted successfully from the frequency with which particular wh-words and verbs occurred in the children's input and, second, that syntactic and semantic complexity did not reliably predict acquisition once input frequency was taken into account. These results suggest that the relationship between acquisition and complexity may be a by-product of the high correlation between complexity and the frequency with which mothers use particular wh-words and verbs. We interpret the results in terms of a constructivist view of language acquisition.

Abstract

Van Valin (Journal of Child Language29, 2002, 161–75) presents a critique of Rowland & Pine (Journal of Child Language27, 2000, 157–81) and argues that the wh-question data from Adam (in Brown, A first language, Cambridge, MA, 1973) cannot be explained in terms of input frequencies as we suggest. Instead, he suggests that the data can be more successfully accounted for in terms of Role and Reference Grammar. In this note we re-examine the pattern of inversion and uninversion in Adam's wh-questions and argue that the RRG explanation cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain.

Abstract

A strong predictor of children's language is performance on non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. However, the basis of this relationship remains unknown. Some suggest that NWR tasks measure phonological working memory, which then affects language growth. Others argue that children's knowledge of language/language experience affects NWR performance. A complicating factor is that most studies focus on school-aged children, who have already mastered key language skills. Here, we present a new NWR task for English-learning 2-year-olds, use it to assess the effect of NWR performance on concurrent and later vocabulary development, and compare the children's performance with that of an experience-based computational model (CLASSIC). The new NWR task produced reliable results; replicating wordlikeness effects, word-length effects, and the relationship with concurrent and later language ability we see in older children. The model also simulated all effects, suggesting that the relationship between vocabulary and NWR performance can be explained by language experience-/knowledge-based theories.

Abstract

Although it is well established that self-related information can rapidly capture our attention and bias cognitive functioning, whether this self-bias can affect language processing remains largely unknown. In addition, there is an ongoing debate as to the functional independence of language processes, notably regarding the syntactic domain. Hence, this study investigated the influence of self-related content on syntactic speech processing. Participants listened to sentences that could contain morphosyntactic anomalies while the masked face identity (self, friend, or unknown faces) was presented for 16 msec preceding the critical word. The language-related ERP components (left anterior negativity [LAN] and P600) appeared for all identity conditions. However, the largest LAN effect followed by a reduced P600 effect was observed for self-faces, whereas a larger LAN with no reduction of the P600 was found for friend faces compared with unknown faces. These data suggest that both early and late syntactic processes can be modulated by self-related content. In addition, alpha power was more suppressed over the left inferior frontal gyrus only when self-faces appeared before the critical word. This may reflect higher semantic demands concomitant to early syntactic operations (around 150–550 msec). Our data also provide further evidence of self-specific response, as reflected by the N250 component. Collectively, our results suggest that identity-related information is rapidly decoded from facial stimuli and may impact core linguistic processes, supporting an interactive view of syntactic processing. This study provides evidence that the self-reference effect can be extended to syntactic processing.

Abstract

Language and social cognition come together in communication, but their relation has been intensely contested. Here, I argue that these two distinctively human abilities are connected in a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one cognitive skill boosts the development of the other. More specifically, I hypothesize that language and social cognition codevelop in ontogeny and coevolve in diachrony through the acquisition, mature use, and cultural evolution of reference systems (e.g., demonstratives: “this” vs. “that”; articles: “a” vs. “the”; pronouns: “I” vs. “you”). I propose to study the connection between reference systems and communicative social cognition across three parallel timescales—language acquisition, language use, and language change, as a new research program for cultural evolutionary pragmatics. Within that framework, I discuss the coevolution of language and communicative social cognition as cognitive gadgets, and introduce a new methodological approach to study how universals and cross-linguistic differences in reference systems may result in different developmental pathways to human social cognition.

Abstract

We investigated the relationship between visual experience and pragmatic development by testing the socio-communicative skills of a unique population: the Prakash children of India, who received treatment for congenital cataracts after years of visual deprivation. Using two different referential communication tasks, our study investigated Prakash' children ability to produce sufficiently informative referential expressions (e.g., ‘the green pear' or ‘the small plate') and pay attention to their interlocutor's face during the task (Experiment 1), as well as their ability to recognize a speaker's referential intent through non-verbal cues such as head turning and pointing (Experiment 2). Our results show that Prakash children have strong pragmatic skills, but do not look at their interlocutor's face as often as neurotypical children do. However, longitudinal analyses revealed an increase in face fixations, suggesting that over time, Prakash children come to utilize their improved visual skills for efficient referential communication.

Abstract

In this article, we present the spatial logistics task (SLOT) platform for investigating multimodal communication between 2 human participants. Presented are the SLOT communication task and the software and hardware that has been developed to run SLOT experiments and record the participants’ multimodal behavior. SLOT offers a high level of flexibility in varying the context of the communication and is particularly useful in studies of the relationship between pen gestures and speech. We illustrate the use of the SLOT platform by discussing the results of some early experiments. The first is an experiment on negotiation with a one-way mirror between the participants, and the second is an exploratory study of automatic recognition of spontaneous pen gestures. The results of these studies demonstrate the usefulness of the SLOT platform for conducting multimodal communication research in both human– human and human–computer interactions.

Abstract

Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process.

Abstract

We describe here the first characterization of the genome of the bat Pteronotus mexicanus, an endemic species of Mexico, as part of the Mexican Bat Genome Project which focuses on the characterization and assembly of the genomes of endemic bats in Mexico. The genome was assembled from a liver tissue sample of an adult male from Jalisco, Mexico provided by the Texas Tech University Museum tissue collection. The assembled genome size was 1.9 Gb. The assembly of the genome was fitted in a framework of 110,533 scaffolds and 1,659,535 contigs. The ecological importance of bats such as P. mexicanus, and their diverse ecological roles, underscores the value of having complete genomes in addressing information gaps and facing challenges regarding their function in ecosystems and their conservation.

Abstract

Despite decades of study, we still know less than we would like about the association between joint attention (JA) and language acquisition. This is partly because of disagreements on how to operationalise JA. In this study, we examine the impact of applying two different, influential JA operationalisation schemes to the same dataset of child-caregiver interactions, to determine which yields a better fit to children's later vocabulary size. Two coding schemes— one defining JA in terms of gaze overlap and one in terms of social aspects of shared attention—were applied to video-recordings of dyadic naturalistic toy-play interactions (N=45). We found that JA was predictive of later production vocabulary when operationalised as shared focus (study 1), but also that its operationalisation as shared social awareness increased its predictive power (study 2). Our results emphasise the critical role of methodological choices in understanding how and why JA is associated with vocabulary size.

Abstract

This letter evaluates potential benefits of combining human speech recognition ~HSR! and automatic speech recognition by building a joint model of an automatic phone recognizer ~APR! and a computational model of HSR, viz., Shortlist @Norris, Cognition 52, 189–234 ~1994!#. Experiments based on ‘‘real-life’’ speech highlight critical limitations posed by some of the simplifying assumptions made in models of human speech recognition. These limitations could be overcome by avoiding hard phone decisions at the output side of the APR, and by using a match between the input and the internal lexicon that flexibly copes with deviations from canonical phonemic representations.

Abstract

In this paper, we present an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a computational model of human speech recognition – SpeM – that is capable of computing ‘word activations’ during the recognition process, in addition to doing normal speech recognition, a task in which conventional ASR architectures only provide output after the end of an utterance. We explain the notion of word activation and show that it can be used for ‘early recognition’, i.e. recognising a word before the end of the word is available. Our ASR system was tested on 992 continuous speech utterances, each containing at least one target word: a city name of at least two syllables. The results show that early recognition was obtained for 72.8% of the target words that were recognised correctly. Also, it is shown that word activation can be used as an effective confidence measure.

Abstract

We have recently developed a new model of human speech recognition, based on automatic speech recognition techniques [1]. The present paper has two goals. First, we show that the new model performs well in the recognition of lexically ambiguous input. These demonstrations suggest that the model is able to operate in the same optimal way as human listeners. Second, we discuss how to relate the behaviour of a recogniser, designed to discover the optimum path through a word lattice, to data from human listening experiments. We argue that this requires a metric that combines both path-based and word-based measures of recognition performance. The combined metric varies continuously as the input speech signal unfolds over time.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel computational model of human speech recognition – called SpeM – based on the theory underlying Shortlist. We will show that SpeM, in combination with an automatic phone recogniser (APR), is able to simulate the human speech recognition process from the acoustic signal to the ultimate recognition of words. This joint model takes an acoustic speech file as input and calculates the activation flows of candidate words on the basis of the degree of fit of the candidate words with the input. Experiments showed that SpeM outperforms Shortlist on the recognition of ‘real-life’ input. Furthermore, SpeM performs only slightly worse than an off-the-shelf full-blown automatic speech recogniser in which all words are equally probable, while it provides a transparent computationally elegant paradigm for modelling word activations in human word recognition.

Abstract

Handedness is a manifestation of brain hemispheric specialization. Left-handedness occurs at increased rates in neurodevelopmental disorders. Genome-wide association studies have identified common genetic effects on handedness or brain asymmetry, which mostly involve variants outside protein-coding regions and may affect gene expression. Implicated genes include several that encode tubulins (microtubule components) or microtubule-associated proteins. Here we examine whether left-handedness is also influenced by rare coding variants (frequencies ≤ 1%), using exome data from 38,043 left-handed and 313,271 right-handed individuals from the UK Biobank. The beta-tubulin gene TUBB4B shows exome-wide significant association, with a rate of rare coding variants 2.7 times higher in left-handers than right-handers. The TUBB4B variants are mostly heterozygous missense changes, but include two frameshifts found only in left-handers. Other TUBB4B variants have been linked to sensorineural and/or ciliopathic disorders, but not the variants found here. Among genes previously implicated in autism or schizophrenia by exome screening, DSCAM and FOXP1 show evidence for rare coding variant association with left-handedness. The exome-wide heritability of left-handedness due to rare coding variants was 0.91%. This study reveals a role for rare, protein-altering variants in left-handedness, providing further evidence for the involvement of microtubules and disorder-relevant genes.

Abstract

During language production and comprehension, information about a word's syntactic properties is sometimes needed. While the decision about the grammatical gender of a word requires access to syntactic knowledge, it has also been hypothesized that semantic (i.e., biological gender) or phonological information (i.e., sound regularities) may influence this decision. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while native speakers of German processed written words that were or were not semantically and/or phonologically marked for gender. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants were faster in making a gender decision when words were semantically and/or phonologically gender marked than when this was not the case, although the phonological effects were less clear. In conclusion, our data provide evidence that even though participants performed a grammatical gender decision, this task can be influenced by semantic and phonological factors.

Abstract

This study investigated the time course of phonological encoding during speech production planning. Previous research has shown that conceptual/semantic information precedes syntactic information in the planning of speech production and that syntactic information is available earlier than phonological information. Here, we studied the relative time courses of the two different processes within phonological encoding, i.e. metrical encoding and syllabification. According to one prominent theory of language production, metrical encoding involves the retrieval of the stress pattern of a word, while syllabification is carried out to construct the syllabic structure of a word. However, the relative timing of these two processes is underspecified in the theory. We employed an implicit picture naming task and recorded event-related brain potentials to obtain fine-grained temporal information about metrical encoding and syllabification. Results revealed that both tasks generated effects that fall within the time window of phonological encoding. However, there was no timing difference between the two effects, suggesting that they occur approximately at the same time.

Abstract

In this study, we investigated grammatical feature selection during noun phrase production in German and Dutch. More specifically, we studied the conditions under which different grammatical genders select either the same or different determiners or suffixes. Pictures of one or two objects paired with a gender-congruent or a gender-incongruent distractor word were presented. Participants named the pictures using a singular or plural noun phrase with the appropriate determiner and/or adjective in German or Dutch. Significant effects of gender congruency were only obtained in the singular condition where the selection of determiners is governed by the target’s gender, but not in the plural condition where the determiner is identical for all genders. When different suffixes were to be selected in the gender-incongruent condition, no gender congruency effect was obtained. The results suggest that the so-called gender congruency effect is really a determiner congruency effect. The overall pattern of results is interpreted as indicating that grammatical feature selection is an automatic consequence of lexical node selection and therefore not subject to interference from other grammatical features. This implies that lexical node and grammatical feature selection operate with distinct principles.

Abstract

This study investigated the encoding of metrical information during speech production in Dutch. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g., LEpel 'spoon') than for targets with final stress (e.g., liBEL 'dragon fly'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables) and revealed that the monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the outcome of the first experiment with bi- and trisyllabic picture names. These results demonstrate that metrical information of words is encoded rightward incrementally during phonological encoding in speech production. The results of these experiments are in line with Levelt's model of phonological encoding.

Abstract

est-retest reliability—establishing that measurements remain consistent across multiple testing sessions—is critical to measuring, understanding, and predicting individual differences in infant language development. However, previous attempts to establish measurement reliability in infant speech perception tasks are limited, and reliability of frequently used infant measures is largely unknown. The current study investigated the test-retest reliability of infants’ preference for infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech in a large sample (N = 158) in the context of the ManyBabies1 collaborative research project. Labs were asked to bring in participating infants for a second appointment retesting infants on their preference for infant-directed speech. This approach allowed us to estimate test-retest reliability across three different methods used to investigate preferential listening in infancy: the head-turn preference procedure, central fixation, and eye-tracking. Overall, we found no consistent evidence of test-retest reliability in measures of infants’ speech preference (overall r = 0.09, 95% CI [−0.06,0.25]). While increasing the number of trials that infants needed to contribute for inclusion in the analysis revealed a numeric growth in test-retest reliability, it also considerably reduced the study’s effective sample size. Therefore, future research on infant development should take into account that not all experimental measures may be appropriate for assessing individual differences between infants.

Abstract

Based on a large-scale computational analysis of scholarly articles, this study investigates the dynamics of interdisciplinary research in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thereby, the study also analyses the reorientation effects away from other topics that receive less attention due to the high focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. The study aims to examine what can be learned from the (failing) interdisciplinarity of coronavirus research and its displacing effects for managing potential similar crises at the scientific level. To explore our research questions, we run several analyses by using the COVID-19++ dataset, which contains scholarly publications, preprints from the field of life sciences, and their referenced literature including publications from a broad scientific spectrum. Our results show the high impact and topic-wise adoption of research related to the COVID-19 crisis. Based on the similarity analysis of scientific topics, which is grounded on the concept embedding learning in the graph-structured bibliographic data, we measured the degree of interdisciplinarity of COVID-19 research in 2020. Our findings reveal a low degree of research interdisciplinarity. The publications’ reference analysis indicates the major role of clinical medicine, but also the growing importance of psychiatry and social sciences in COVID-19 research. A social network analysis shows that the authors’ high degree of centrality significantly increases her or his degree of interdisciplinarity.

Abstract

The basic idea behind this task is to find out how languages encode basic shape distinctions such as dimensionality, axial geometry, relative size, etc. More specifically, we want to find out (i) which formal means are used cross linguistically to encode basic shape distinctions, and (ii) which are the semantic distinctions that are made in this domain. In languages with many shape-classifiers, these distinctions are encoded (at least partially) in classifiers. In other languages, positional verbs, descriptive modifiers, such as “flat”, “round”, or nouns such as “cube”, “ball”, etc. might be the preferred means. In this context, we also want to investigate what other “grammatical work” shapeencoding expressions possibly do in a given language, e.g. unitization of mass nouns, or anaphoric uses of shape-encoding classifiers, etc. This task further seeks to determine the role of shape-related parameters which underlie the design of objects in the semantics of the system under investigation.

Abstract

During communication in real-life settings, our brain often needs to integrate auditory and visual information, and at the same time actively focus on the relevant sources of information, while ignoring interference from irrelevant events. The interaction between integration and attention processes remains poorly understood. Here, we use rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate how attention affects auditory and visual information processing and integration, during multimodal communication. We presented human participants (male and female) with videos of an actress uttering action verbs (auditory; tagged at 58 Hz) accompanied by two movie clips of hand gestures on both sides of fixation (attended stimulus tagged at 65 Hz; unattended stimulus tagged at 63 Hz). Integration difficulty was manipulated by a lower-order auditory factor (clear/degraded speech) and a higher-order visual semantic factor (matching/mismatching gesture). We observed an enhanced neural response to the attended visual information during degraded speech compared to clear speech. For the unattended information, the neural response to mismatching gestures was enhanced compared to matching gestures. Furthermore, signal power at the intermodulation frequencies of the frequency tags, indexing non-linear signal interactions, was enhanced in left frontotemporal and frontal regions. Focusing on LIFG (Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus), this enhancement was specific for the attended information, for those trials that benefitted from integration with a matching gesture. Together, our results suggest that attention modulates audiovisual processing and interaction, depending on the congruence and quality of the sensory input.

Abstract

The present study investigated to what extent children, compared to adults, benefit from gestures to disambiguate degraded speech by manipulating speech signals and manual modality. Dutch-speaking adults (N = 20) and 6- and 7-year-old children (N = 15) were presented with a series of video clips in which an actor produced a Dutch action verb with or without an accompanying iconic gesture. Participants were then asked to repeat what they had heard. The speech signal was either clear or altered into 4- or 8-band noise-vocoded speech. Children had more difficulty than adults in disambiguating degraded speech in the speech-only condition. However, when presented with both speech and gestures, children reached a comparable level of accuracy to that of adults in the degraded-speech-only condition. Furthermore, for adults, the enhancement of gestures was greater in the 4-band condition than in the 8-band condition, whereas children showed the opposite pattern. Gestures help children to disambiguate degraded speech, but children need more phonological information than adults to benefit from use of gestures. Children’s multimodal language integration needs to further develop to adapt flexibly to challenging situations such as degraded speech, as tested in our study, or instances where speech is heard with environmental noise or through a face mask.