Publications

Displaying 101 - 200 of 9396
  • Hartmann, S., Wacewicz, S., Ravignani, A., Valente, D., Rodrigues, E. D., Asano, R., & Jadoul, Y. (2024). Delineating the field of language evolution research: A quantitative analysis of peer-review patterns at the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE 2022). Interaction studies, 25(1), 100-117. doi:10.1075/is.00024.har.

    Abstract

    Research on language evolution is an established subject area yet permeated by terminological controversies about which topics should be considered pertinent to the field and which not. By consequence, scholars focusing on language evolution struggle in providing precise demarcations of the discipline, where even the very central notions of evolution and language are elusive. We aimed at providing a data-driven characterisation of language evolution as a field of research by relying on quantitative analysis of data drawn from 697 reviews on 255 submissions from the Joint Conference on Language Evolution 2022 (Kanazawa, Japan). Our results delineate a field characterized by a core of main research topics such as iconicity, sign language, multimodality. Despite being explored within the framework of language evolution research, only very recently these topics became popular in linguistics. As a result, language evolution has the potential to emerge as a forefront of linguistic research, bringing innovation to the study of language. We also see the emergence of more recent topics like rhythm, music, and vocal learning. Furthermore, the community identifies cognitive science, primatology, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, and genetics as key areas, encouraging empirical rather than theoretical work. With new themes, models, and methodologies emerging, our results depict an intrinsically multidisciplinary and evolving research field, likely adapting as language itself.
  • Hegemann, L., Corfield, E. C., Askelund, A. D., Allegrini, A. G., Askeland, R. B., Ronald, A., Ask, H., St Pourcain, B., Andreassen, O. A., Hannigan, L. J., & Havdahl, A. (2024). Genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity in early neurodevelopmental traits in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study. Molecular Autism, 15: 25. doi:10.1186/s13229-024-00599-0.

    Abstract

    Background
    Autism and different neurodevelopmental conditions frequently co-occur, as do their symptoms at sub-diagnostic threshold levels. Overlapping traits and shared genetic liability are potential explanations.

    Methods
    In the population-based Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child Cohort study (MoBa), we leverage item-level data to explore the phenotypic factor structure and genetic architecture underlying neurodevelopmental traits at age 3 years (N = 41,708–58,630) using maternal reports on 76 items assessing children’s motor and language development, social functioning, communication, attention, activity regulation, and flexibility of behaviors and interests.

    Results
    We identified 11 latent factors at the phenotypic level. These factors showed associations with diagnoses of autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. Most shared genetic liabilities with autism, ADHD, and/or schizophrenia. Item-level GWAS revealed trait-specific genetic correlations with autism (items rg range = − 0.27–0.78), ADHD (items rg range = − 0.40–1), and schizophrenia (items rg range = − 0.24–0.34). We find little evidence of common genetic liability across all neurodevelopmental traits but more so for several genetic factors across more specific areas of neurodevelopment, particularly social and communication traits. Some of these factors, such as one capturing prosocial behavior, overlap with factors found in the phenotypic analyses. Other areas, such as motor development, seemed to have more heterogenous etiology, with specific traits showing a less consistent pattern of genetic correlations with each other.

    Conclusions
    These exploratory findings emphasize the etiological complexity of neurodevelopmental traits at this early age. In particular, diverse associations with neurodevelopmental conditions and genetic heterogeneity could inform follow-up work to identify shared and differentiating factors in the early manifestations of neurodevelopmental traits and their relation to autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. This in turn could have implications for clinical screening tools and programs.
  • Heim, F., Scharff, C., Fisher, S. E., Riebel, K., & Ten Cate, C. (2024). Auditory discrimination learning and acoustic cue weighing in female zebra finches with localized FoxP1 knockdowns. Journal of Neurophysiology, 131, 950-963. doi:10.1152/jn.00228.2023.

    Abstract

    Rare disruptions of the transcription factor FOXP1 are implicated in a human neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by autism and/or intellectual disability with prominent problems in speech and language abilities. Avian orthologues of this transcription factor are evolutionarily conserved and highly expressed in specific regions of songbird brains, including areas associated with vocal production learning and auditory perception. Here, we investigated possible contributions of FoxP1 to song discrimination and auditory perception in juvenile and adult female zebra finches. They received lentiviral knockdowns of FoxP1 in one of two brain areas involved in auditory stimulus processing, HVC (proper name) or CMM (caudomedial mesopallium). Ninety-six females, distributed over different experimental and control groups were trained to discriminate between two stimulus songs in an operant Go/Nogo paradigm and subsequently tested with an array of stimuli. This made it possible to assess how well they recognized and categorized altered versions of training stimuli and whether localized FoxP1 knockdowns affected the role of different features during discrimination and categorization of song. Although FoxP1 expression was significantly reduced by the knockdowns, neither discrimination of the stimulus songs nor categorization of songs modified in pitch, sequential order of syllables or by reversed playback were affected. Subsequently, we analyzed the full dataset to assess the impact of the different stimulus manipulations for cue weighing in song discrimination. Our findings show that zebra finches rely on multiple parameters for song discrimination, but with relatively more prominent roles for spectral parameters and syllable sequencing as cues for song discrimination.

    NEW & NOTEWORTHY In humans, mutations of the transcription factor FoxP1 are implicated in speech and language problems. In songbirds, FoxP1 has been linked to male song learning and female preference strength. We found that FoxP1 knockdowns in female HVC and caudomedial mesopallium (CMM) did not alter song discrimination or categorization based on spectral and temporal information. However, this large dataset allowed to validate different cue weights for spectral over temporal information for song recognition.
  • Hersh, T. A., Ravignani, A., & Whitehead, H. (2024). Cetaceans are the next frontier for vocal rhythm research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(25): e2313093121. doi:10.1073/pnas.2313093121.

    Abstract

    While rhythm can facilitate and enhance many aspects of behavior, its evolutionary trajectory in vocal communication systems remains enigmatic. We can trace evolutionary processes by investigating rhythmic abilities in different species, but research to date has largely focused on songbirds and primates. We present evidence that cetaceans—whales, dolphins, and porpoises—are a missing piece of the puzzle for understanding why rhythm evolved in vocal communication systems. Cetaceans not only produce rhythmic vocalizations but also exhibit behaviors known or thought to play a role in the evolution of different features of rhythm. These behaviors include vocal learning abilities, advanced breathing control, sexually selected vocal displays, prolonged mother–infant bonds, and behavioral synchronization. The untapped comparative potential of cetaceans is further enhanced by high interspecific diversity, which generates natural ranges of vocal and social complexity for investigating various evolutionary hypotheses. We show that rhythm (particularly isochronous rhythm, when sounds are equally spaced in time) is prevalent in cetacean vocalizations but is used in different contexts by baleen and toothed whales. We also highlight key questions and research areas that will enhance understanding of vocal rhythms across taxa. By coupling an infraorder-level taxonomic assessment of vocal rhythm production with comparisons to other species, we illustrate how broadly comparative research can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the prevalence, evolution, and possible functions of rhythm in animal communication.

    Additional information

    supporting information
  • Hintz, F., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2024). Using psychometric network analysis to examine the components of spoken word recognition. Journal of Cognition, 7(1): 10. doi:10.5334/joc.340.

    Abstract

    Using language requires access to domain-specific linguistic representations, but also draws on domain-general cognitive skills. A key issue in current psycholinguistics is to situate linguistic processing in the network of human cognitive abilities. Here, we focused on spoken word recognition and used an individual differences approach to examine the links of scores in word recognition tasks with scores on tasks capturing effects of linguistic experience, general processing speed, working memory, and non-verbal reasoning. 281 young native speakers of Dutch completed an extensive test battery assessing these cognitive skills. We used psychometric network analysis to map out the direct links between the scores, that is, the unique variance between pairs of scores, controlling for variance shared with the other scores. The analysis revealed direct links between word recognition skills and processing speed. We discuss the implications of these results and the potential of psychometric network analysis for studying language processing and its embedding in the broader cognitive system.

    Additional information

    network analysis of dataset A and B
  • Hintz, F., & Meyer, A. S. (Eds.). (2024). Individual differences in language skills [Special Issue]. Journal of Cognition, 7(1).
  • Hintz, F., Shkaravska, O., Dijkhuis, M., Van 't Hoff, V., Huijsmans, M., Van Dongen, R. C., Voeteé, L. A., Trilsbeek, P., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2024). IDLaS-NL – A platform for running customized studies on individual differences in Dutch language skills via the internet. Behavior Research Methods, 56(3), 2422-2436. doi:10.3758/s13428-023-02156-8.

    Abstract

    We introduce the Individual Differences in Language Skills (IDLaS-NL) web platform, which enables users to run studies on individual differences in Dutch language skills via the internet. IDLaS-NL consists of 35 behavioral tests, previously validated in participants aged between 18 and 30 years. The platform provides an intuitive graphical interface for users to select the tests they wish to include in their research, to divide these tests into different sessions and to determine their order. Moreover, for standardized administration the platform
    provides an application (an emulated browser) wherein the tests are run. Results can be retrieved by mouse click in the graphical interface and are provided as CSV-file output via email. Similarly, the graphical interface enables researchers to modify and delete their study configurations. IDLaS-NL is intended for researchers, clinicians, educators and in general anyone conducting fundaental research into language and general cognitive skills; it is not intended for diagnostic purposes. All platform services are free of charge. Here, we provide a
    description of its workings as well as instructions for using the platform. The IDLaS-NL platform can be accessed at www.mpi.nl/idlas-nl.
  • Hintz, F., Voeten, C. C., Dobó, D., Lukics, K. S., & Lukács, Á. (2024). The role of general cognitive skills in integrating visual and linguistic information during sentence comprehension: Individual differences across the lifespan. Scientific Reports, 14: 17797. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-68674-3.

    Abstract

    Individuals exhibit massive variability in general cognitive skills that affect language processing. This variability is partly developmental. Here, we recruited a large sample of participants (N = 487), ranging from 9 to 90 years of age, and examined the involvement of nonverbal processing speed (assessed using visual and auditory reaction time tasks) and working memory (assessed using forward and backward Digit Span tasks) in a visual world task. Participants saw two objects on the screen and heard a sentence that referred to one of them. In half of the sentences, the target object could be predicted based on verb-selectional restrictions. We observed evidence for anticipatory processing on predictable compared to non-predictable trials. Visual and auditory processing speed had main effects on sentence comprehension and facilitated predictive processing, as evidenced by an interaction. We observed only weak evidence for the involvement of working memory in predictive sentence comprehension. Age had a nonlinear main effect (younger adults responded faster than children and older adults), but it did not differentially modulate predictive and non-predictive processing, nor did it modulate the involvement of processing speed and working memory. Our results contribute to delineating the cognitive skills that are involved in language-vision interactions.

    Additional information

    supplementary information
  • Hope, T. M. H., Neville, D., Talozzi, L., Foulon, C., Forkel, S. J., Thiebaut de Schotten, M., & Price, C. J. (2024). Testing the disconnectome symptom discoverer model on out-of-sample post-stroke language outcomes. Brain, 147(2), e11-e13. doi:10.1093/brain/awad352.

    Abstract

    Stroke is common, and its consequent brain damage can cause various cognitive impairments. Associations between where and how much brain lesion damage a patient has suffered, and the particular impairments that injury has caused (lesion-symptom associations) offer potentially compelling insights into how the brain implements cognition.1 A better understanding of those associations can also fill a gap in current stroke medicine by helping us to predict how individual patients might recover from post-stroke impairments.2 Most recent work in this area employs machine learning models trained with data from stroke patients whose mid-to-long-term outcomes are known.2-4 These machine learning models are tested by predicting new outcomes—typically scores on standardized tests of post-stroke impairment—for patients whose data were not used to train the model. Traditionally, these validation results have been shared in peer-reviewed publications describing the model and its training. But recently, and for the first time in this field (as far as we know), one of these pre-trained models has been made public—The Disconnectome Symptom Discoverer model (DSD) which draws its predictors from structural disconnection information inferred from stroke patients’ brain MRI.5

    Here, we test the DSD model on wholly independent data, never seen by the model authors, before they published it. Specifically, we test whether its predictive performance is just as accurate as (i.e. not significantly worse than) that reported in the original (Washington University) dataset, when predicting new patients’ outcomes at a similar time post-stroke (∼1 year post-stroke) and also in another independent sample tested later (5+ years) post-stroke. A failure to generalize the DSD model occurs if it performs significantly better in the Washington data than in our data from patients tested at a similar time point (∼1 year post-stroke). In addition, a significant decrease in predictive performance for the more chronic sample would be evidence that lesion-symptom associations differ at ∼1 year post-stroke and >5 years post-stroke.
  • De Hoyos, L., Barendse, M. T., Schlag, F., Van Donkelaar, M. M. J., Verhoef, E., Shapland, C. Y., Klassmann, A., Buitelaar, J., Verhulst, B., Fisher, S. E., Rai, D., & St Pourcain, B. (2024). Structural models of genome-wide covariance identify multiple common dimensions in autism. Nature Communications, 15: 1770. doi:10.1038/s41467-024-46128-8.

    Abstract

    Common genetic variation has been associated with multiple symptoms in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, our knowledge of shared genetic factor structures contributing to this highly heterogeneous neurodevelopmental condition is limited. Here, we developed a structural equation modelling framework to directly model genome-wide covariance across core and non-core ASD phenotypes, studying autistic individuals of European descent using a case-only design. We identified three independent genetic factors most strongly linked to language/cognition, behaviour and motor development, respectively, when studying a population-representative sample (N=5,331). These analyses revealed novel associations. For example, developmental delay in acquiring personal-social skills was inversely related to language, while developmental motor delay was linked to self-injurious behaviour. We largely confirmed the three-factorial structure in independent ASD-simplex families (N=1,946), but uncovered simplex-specific genetic overlap between behaviour and language phenotypes. Thus, the common genetic architecture in ASD is multi-dimensional and contributes, in combination with ascertainment-specific patterns, to phenotypic heterogeneity.
  • Huettig, F., & Hulstijn, J. (2024). The Enhanced Literate Mind Hypothesis. Topics in Cognitive Science. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/tops.12731.

    Abstract

    In the present paper we describe the Enhanced Literate Mind (ELM) hypothesis. As individuals learn to read and write, they are, from then on, exposed to extensive written-language input and become literate. We propose that acquisition and proficient processing of written language (‘literacy’) leads to, both, increased language knowledge as well as enhanced language and non-language (perceptual and cognitive) skills. We also suggest that all neurotypical native language users, including illiterate, low literate, and high literate individuals, share a Basic Language Cognition (BLC) in the domain of oral informal language. Finally, we discuss the possibility that the acquisition of ELM leads to some degree of ‘knowledge parallelism’ between BLC and ELM in literate language users, which has implications for empirical research on individual and situational differences in spoken language processing.
  • Huettig, F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2024). Can large language models counter the recent decline in literacy levels? An important role for cognitive science. Cognitive Science, 48(8): e13487. doi:10.1111/cogs.13487.

    Abstract

    Literacy is in decline in many parts of the world, accompanied by drops in associated cognitive skills (including IQ) and an increasing susceptibility to fake news. It is possible that the recent explosive growth and widespread deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) might exacerbate this trend, but there is also a chance that LLMs can help turn things around. We argue that cognitive science is ideally suited to help steer future literacy development in the right direction by challenging and informing current educational practices and policy. Cognitive scientists have the right interdisciplinary skills to study, analyze, evaluate, and change LLMs to facilitate their critical use, to encourage turn-taking that promotes rather than hinders literacy, to support literacy acquisition in diverse and equitable ways, and to scaffold potential future changes in what it means to be literate. We urge cognitive scientists to take up this mantle—the future impact of LLMs on human literacy skills is too important to be left to the large, predominately US-based tech companies.
  • Jadoul, Y., De Boer, B., & Ravignani, A. (2024). Parselmouth for bioacoustics: Automated acoustic analysis in Python. Bioacoustics, 33(1), 1-19. doi:10.1080/09524622.2023.2259327.

    Abstract

    Bioacoustics increasingly relies on large datasets and computational methods. The need to batch-process large amounts of data and the increased focus on algorithmic processing require software tools. To optimally assist in a bioacoustician’s workflow, software tools need to be as simple and effective as possible. Five years ago, the Python package Parselmouth was released to provide easy and intuitive access to all functionality in the Praat software. Whereas Praat is principally designed for phonetics and speech processing, plenty of bioacoustics studies have used its advanced acoustic algorithms. Here, we evaluate existing usage of Parselmouth and discuss in detail several studies which used the software library. We argue that Parselmouth has the potential to be used even more in bioacoustics research, and suggest future directions to be pursued with the help of Parselmouth.
  • Jansen, M. G., Zwiers, M. P., Marques, J. P., Chan, K.-S., Amelink, J., Altgassen, M., Oosterman, J. M., & Norris, D. G. (2024). The Advanced BRain Imaging on ageing and Memory (ABRIM) data collection: Study protocol and rationale. PLOS ONE, 19(6): e0306006. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0306006.

    Abstract

    To understand the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie heterogeneity in cognitive ageing, recent scientific efforts have led to a growing public availability of imaging cohort data. The Advanced BRain Imaging on ageing and Memory (ABRIM) project aims to add to these existing datasets by taking an adult lifespan approach to provide a cross-sectional, normative database with a particular focus on connectivity, myelinization and iron content of the brain in concurrence with cognitive functioning, mechanisms of reserve, and sleep-wake rhythms. ABRIM freely shares MRI and behavioural data from 295 participants between 18–80 years, stratified by age decade and sex (median age 52, IQR 36–66, 53.20% females). The ABRIM MRI collection consists of both the raw and pre-processed structural and functional MRI data to facilitate data usage among both expert and non-expert users. The ABRIM behavioural collection includes measures of cognitive functioning (i.e., global cognition, processing speed, executive functions, and memory), proxy measures of cognitive reserve (e.g., educational attainment, verbal intelligence, and occupational complexity), and various self-reported questionnaires (e.g., on depressive symptoms, pain, and the use of memory strategies in daily life and during a memory task). In a sub-sample (n = 120), we recorded sleep-wake rhythms using an actigraphy device (Actiwatch 2, Philips Respironics) for a period of 7 consecutive days. Here, we provide an in-depth description of our study protocol, pre-processing pipelines, and data availability. ABRIM provides a cross-sectional database on healthy participants throughout the adult lifespan, including numerous parameters relevant to improve our understanding of cognitive ageing. Therefore, ABRIM enables researchers to model the advanced imaging parameters and cognitive topologies as a function of age, identify the normal range of values of such parameters, and to further investigate the diverse mechanisms of reserve and resilience.
  • Jara-Ettinger, J., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). Demonstratives as attention tools: Evidence of mentalistic representations in language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(32): e2402068121. doi:10.1073/pnas.2402068121.

    Abstract

    Linguistic communication is an intrinsically social activity that enables us to share thoughts across minds. Many complex social uses of language can be captured by domain-general representations of other minds (i.e., mentalistic representations) that externally modulate linguistic meaning through Gricean reasoning. However, here we show that representations of others’ attention are embedded within language itself. Across ten languages, we show that demonstratives—basic grammatical words (e.g.,“this”/“that”) which are evolutionarily ancient, learned early in life, and documented in all known languages—are intrinsic attention tools. Beyond their spatial meanings, demonstratives encode both joint attention and the direction in which the listenermmust turn to establish it. Crucially, the frequency of the spatial and attentional uses of demonstratives varies across languages, suggesting that both spatial and mentalistic representations are part of their conventional meaning. Using computational modeling, we show that mentalistic representations of others’ attention are internally encoded in demonstratives, with their effect further boosted by Gricean reasoning. Yet, speakers are largely unaware of this, incorrectly reporting that they primarily capture spatial representations. Our findings show that representations of other people’s cognitive states (namely, their attention) are embedded in language and suggest that the most basic building blocks of the linguistic system crucially rely on social cognition.

    Additional information

    pnas.2402068121.sapp.pdf
  • Joshi, A., Mohanty, R., Kanakanti, M., Mangla, A., Choudhary, S., Barbate, M., & Modi, A. (2024). iSign: A benchmark for Indian Sign Language processing. In L.-W. Ku, A. Martins, & V. Srikumar (Eds.), Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024 (pp. 10827-10844). Bangkok, Thailand: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    Indian Sign Language has limited resources for developing machine learning and data-driven approaches for automated language processing. Though text/audio-based language processing techniques have shown colossal research interest and tremendous improvements in the last few years, Sign Languages still need to catch up due to the need for more resources. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose iSign: a benchmark for Indian Sign Language (ISL) Processing. We make three primary contributions to this work. First, we release one of the largest ISL-English datasets with more than video-sentence/phrase pairs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest sign language dataset available for ISL. Second, we propose multiple NLP-specific tasks (including SignVideo2Text, SignPose2Text, Text2Pose, Word Prediction, and Sign Semantics) and benchmark them with the baseline models for easier access to the research community. Third, we provide detailed insights into the proposed benchmarks with a few linguistic insights into the working of ISL. We streamline the evaluation of Sign Language processing, addressing the gaps in the NLP research community for Sign Languages. We release the dataset, tasks and models via the following website: https://exploration-lab.github.io/iSign/

    Additional information

    dataset, tasks, models
  • Josserand, M., Pellegrino, F., Grosseck, O., Dediu, D., & Raviv, L. (2024). Adapting to individual differences: An experimental study of variation in language evolution. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 286-289). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Kakimoto, N., Wongratwanich, P., Shimamoto, H., Kitisubkanchana, J., Tsujimoto, T., Shimabukuro, K., Verdonschot, R. G., Hasegawa, Y., & Murakami, S. (2024). Comparison of T2 values of the displaced unilateral disc and retrodiscal tissue of temporomandibular joints and their implications. Scientific Reports, 14: 1705. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-52092-6.

    Abstract

    Unilateral anterior disc displacement (uADD) has been shown to affect the contralateral joints qualitatively. This study aims to assess the quantitative T2 values of the articular disc and retrodiscal tissue of patients with uADD at 1.5 Tesla (T). The study included 65 uADD patients and 17 volunteers. The regions of interest on T2 maps were evaluated. The affected joints demonstrated significantly higher articular disc T2 values (31.5 ± 3.8 ms) than those of the unaffected joints (28.9 ± 4.5 ms) (P < 0.001). For retrodiscal tissue, T2 values of the unaffected (37.8 ± 5.8 ms) and affected joints (41.6 ± 7.1 ms) were significantly longer than those of normal volunteers (34.4 ± 3.2 ms) (P < 0.001). Furthermore, uADD without reduction (WOR) joints (43.3 ± 6.8 ms) showed statistically higher T2 values than the unaffected joints of both uADD with reduction (WR) (33.9 ± 3.8 ms) and uADDWOR (38.9 ± 5.8 ms), and the affected joints of uADDWR (35.8 ± 4.4 ms). The mean T2 value of the unaffected joints of uADDWOR was significantly longer than that of healthy volunteers (P < 0.001). These results provided quantitative evidence for the influence of the affected joints on the contralateral joints.
  • Karaca, F., Brouwer, S., Unsworth, S., & Huettig, F. (2024). Morphosyntactic predictive processing in adult heritage speakers: Effects of cue availability and spoken and written language experience. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 39(1), 118-135. doi:10.1080/23273798.2023.2254424.

    Abstract

    We investigated prediction skills of adult heritage speakers and the role of written and spoken language experience on predictive processing. Using visual world eye-tracking, we focused on predictive use of case-marking cues in verb-medial and verb-final sentences in Turkish with adult Turkish heritage speakers (N = 25) and Turkish monolingual speakers (N = 24). Heritage speakers predicted in verb-medial sentences (when verb-semantic and case-marking cues were available), but not in verb-final sentences (when only case-marking cues were available) while monolinguals predicted in both. Prediction skills of heritage speakers were modulated by their spoken language experience in Turkish and written language experience in both languages. Overall, these results strongly suggest that verb-semantic information is needed to scaffold the use of morphosyntactic cues for prediction in heritage speakers. The findings also support the notion that both spoken and written language experience play an important role in predictive spoken language processing.
  • Karadöller, D. Z., Peeters, D., Manhardt, F., Özyürek, A., & Ortega, G. (2024). Iconicity and gesture jointly facilitate learning of second language signs at first exposure in hearing non-signers. Language Learning. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/lang.12636.

    Abstract

    When learning a spoken second language (L2), words overlapping in form and meaning with one’s native language (L1) help break into the new language. When non-signing speakers learn a sign language as L2, such forms are absent because of the modality differences (L1:speech, L2:sign). In such cases, non-signing speakers might use iconic form-meaning mappings in signs or their own gestural experience as gateways into the to-be-acquired sign language. Here, we investigated how both these factors may contribute jointly to the acquisition of sign language vocabulary by hearing non-signers. Participants were presented with three types of sign in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands): arbitrary signs, iconic signs with high or low gesture overlap. Signs that were both iconic and highly overlapping with gestures boosted learning most at first exposure, and this effect remained the day after. Findings highlight the influence of modality-specific factors supporting the acquisition of a signed lexicon.
  • Karadöller, D. Z., Sumer, B., Ünal, E., & Özyürek, A. (2024). Sign advantage: Both children and adults’ spatial expressions in sign are more informative than those in speech and gestures combined. Journal of Child Language, 51(4), 876-902. doi:10.1017/S0305000922000642.

    Abstract

    Expressing Left-Right relations is challenging for speaking-children. Yet, this challenge was absent for signing-children, possibly due to iconicity in the visual-spatial modality of expression. We investigate whether there is also a modality advantage when speaking-children’s co-speech gestures are considered. Eight-year-old child and adult hearing monolingual Turkish speakers and deaf signers of Turkish-Sign-Language described pictures of objects in various spatial relations. Descriptions were coded for informativeness in speech, sign, and speech-gesture combinations for encoding Left-Right relations. The use of co-speech gestures increased the informativeness of speakers’ spatial expressions compared to speech-only. This pattern was more prominent for children than adults. However, signing-adults and children were more informative than child and adult speakers even when co-speech gestures were considered. Thus, both speaking- and signing-children benefit from iconic expressions in visual modality. Finally, in each modality, children were less informative than adults, pointing to the challenge of this spatial domain in development.
  • Karsan, Ç., Ocak, F., & Bulut, T. (2024). Characterization of speech and language phenotype in the 8p23.1 syndrome. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s00787-024-02448-0.

    Abstract

    The 8p23.1 duplication syndrome is a rare genetic condition with an estimated prevalence rate of 1 out of 58,000. Although the syndrome was associated with speech and language delays, a comprehensive assessment of speech and language functions has not been undertaken in this population. To address this issue, the present study reports rigorous speech and language, in addition to oral-facial and developmental, assessment of a 50-month-old Turkish-speaking boy who was diagnosed with the 8p23.1 duplication syndrome. Standardized tests of development, articulation and phonology, receptive and expressive language and a language sample analysis were administered to characterize speech and language skills in the patient. The language sample was obtained in an ecologically valid, free play and conversation context. The language sample was then analyzed and compared to a database of age-matched typically-developing children (n = 33) in terms of intelligibility, morphosyntax, semantics/vocabulary, discourse, verbal facility and percentage of errors at word and utterance levels. The results revealed mild to severe problems in articulation and phonology, receptive and expressive language skills, and morphosyntax (mean length of utterance in morphemes). Future research with larger sample sizes and employing detailed speech and language assessment is needed to delineate the speech and language profile in individuals with the 8p23.1 duplication syndrome, which will guide targeted speech and language interventions.
  • Kimmel, M., Schneider, S. M., & Fisher, V. J. (2024). "Introjecting" imagery: A process model of how minds and bodies are co-enacted. Language Sciences, 102: 101602. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2023.101602.

    Abstract

    Somatic practices frequently use imagery, typically via verbal instructions, to scaffold sensorimotor organization and experience, a phenomenon we term “introjection”. We argue that introjection is an imagery practice in which sensorimotor and conceptual aspects are co-orchestrated, suggesting the necessity of crosstalk between somatics, phenomenology, psychology, embodied-enactive cognition, and linguistic research on embodied simulation. We presently focus on the scarcely addressed details of the process necessary to enact instructions of a literal or metaphoric nature through the body. Based on vignettes from dance, Feldenkrais, and Taichi practice, we describe introjection as a complex form of processual sense-making, in which context-interpretive, mental, attentional and physical sub-processes recursively braid. Our analysis focuses on how mental and body-related processes progressively align, inform and augment each other. This dialectic requires emphasis on the active body, which implies that uni-directional models (concept ⇒ body) are inadequate and should be replaced by interactionist alternatives (concept ⇔ body). Furthermore, we emphasize that both the source image itself and the body are specifically conceptualized for the context through constructive operations, and both evolve through their interplay. At this level introjection employs representational operations that are embedded in enactive dynamics of a fully situated person.
  • Knol, M. J., Poot, R. A., Evans, T. E., Satizabal, C. L., Mishra, A., Sargurupremraj, M., Van der Auwera, S., Duperron, M.-G., Jian, X., Hostettler, I. C., Van Dam-Nolen, D. H. K., Lamballais, S., Pawlak, M. A., Lewis, C. E., Carrion Castillo, A., Van Erp, T. G. M., Reinbold, C. S., Shin, J., Sholz, M., Håberg, A. K. Knol, M. J., Poot, R. A., Evans, T. E., Satizabal, C. L., Mishra, A., Sargurupremraj, M., Van der Auwera, S., Duperron, M.-G., Jian, X., Hostettler, I. C., Van Dam-Nolen, D. H. K., Lamballais, S., Pawlak, M. A., Lewis, C. E., Carrion Castillo, A., Van Erp, T. G. M., Reinbold, C. S., Shin, J., Sholz, M., Håberg, A. K., Kämpe, A., Li, G. H. Y., Avinun, R., Atkins, J. R., Hsu, F.-C., Amod, A. R., Lam, M., Tsuchida, A., Teunissen, M. W. A., Aygün, N., Patel, Y., Liang, D., Beiser, A. S., Beyer, F., Bis, J. C., Bos, D., Bryan, R. N., Bülow, R., Caspers, S., Catheline, G., Cecil, C. A. M., Dalvie, S., Dartigues, J.-F., DeCarli, C., Enlund-Cerullo, M., Ford, J. M., Franke, B., Freedman, B. I., Friedrich, N., Green, M. J., Haworth, S., Helmer, C., Hoffmann, P., Homuth, G., Ikram, M. K., Jack, C. R., Jahanshad, N., Jockwitz, C., Kamatani, Y., Knodt, A. R., Li, S., Lim, K., Longstreth, W. T., Macciardi, F., The Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium, The Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium, Mäkitie, O., Mazoyer, B., Medland, S. E., Miyamoto, S., Moebus, S., Mosley, T. H., Muetzel, R., Mühleisen, T. W., Nagata, M., Nakahara, S., Palmer, N. D., Pausova, Z., Preda, A., Quidé, Y., Reay, W. R., Roshchupkin, G. V., Schmidt, R., Schreiner, P. J., Setoh, K., Shapland, C. Y., Sidney, S., St Pourcain, B., Stein, J. L., Tabara, Y., Teumer, A., Uhlmann, A., Van de Lught, A., Vernooij, M. W., Werring, D. J., Windham, B. G., Witte, A. V., Wittfeld, K., Yang, Q., Yoshida, K., Brunner, H. G., Le Grand, Q., Sim, K., Stein, D. J., Bowden, D. W., Cairns, M. J., Hariri, A. R., Cheung, C.-L., Andersson, S., Villringer, A., Paus, T., Chichon, S., Calhoun, V. D., Crivello, F., Launer, L. J., White, T., Koudstaal, P. J., Houlden, H., Fornage, M., Matsuda, F., Grabe, H. J., Ikram, M. A., Debette, S., Thompson, P. M., Seshadri, S., & Adams, H. H. H. (2024). Genetic variants for head size share genes and pathways with cancer. Cell Reports Medicine, 5(5): 101529. doi:10.1016/j.xcrm.2024.101529.

    Abstract

    The size of the human head is highly heritable, but genetic drivers of its variation within the general population remain unmapped. We perform a genome-wide association study on head size (N = 80,890) and identify 67 genetic loci, of which 50 are novel. Neuroimaging studies show that 17 variants affect specific brain areas, but most have widespread effects. Gene set enrichment is observed for various cancers and the p53, Wnt, and ErbB signaling pathways. Genes harboring lead variants are enriched for macrocephaly syndrome genes (37-fold) and high-fidelity cancer genes (9-fold), which is not seen for human height variants. Head size variants are also near genes preferentially expressed in intermediate progenitor cells, neural cells linked to evolutionary brain expansion. Our results indicate that genes regulating early brain and cranial growth incline to neoplasia later in life, irrespective of height. This warrants investigation of clinical implications of the link between head size and cancer.

    Additional information

    link to supplemental information
  • Kocsis, K., Düngen, D., Jadoul, Y., & Ravignani, A. (2024). Harbour seals use rhythmic percussive signalling in interaction and display. Animal Behaviour, 207, 223-234. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2023.09.014.

    Abstract

    Multimodal rhythmic signalling abounds across animal taxa. Studying its mechanisms and functions can highlight adaptive components in highly complex rhythmic behaviours, like dance and music. Pinnipeds, such as the harbour seal, Phoca vitulina, are excellent comparative models to assess rhythmic capacities. Harbour seals engage in rhythmic percussive behaviours which, until now, have not been described in detail. In our study, eight zoo-housed harbour seals (two pups, two juveniles and four adults) were passively monitored by audio and video during their pupping/breeding season. All juvenile and adult animals performed percussive signalling with their fore flippers in agonistic conditions, both on land and in water. Flipper slap sequences produced on the ground or on the seals' bodies were often highly regular in their interval duration, that is, were quasi-isochronous, at a 200–600 beats/min pace. Three animals also showed significant lateralization in slapping. In contrast to slapping on land, display slapping in water, performed only by adult males, showed slower tempo by one order of magnitude, and a rather motivic temporal structure. Our work highlights that percussive communication is a significant part of harbour seals' behavioural repertoire. We hypothesize that its forms of rhythm production may reflect adaptive functions such as regulating internal states and advertising individual traits.
  • Koutamanis, E. (2024). Spreading the word: Cross-linguistic influence in the bilingual child's lexicon. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Koutamanis, E., Kootstra, G. J., Dijkstra, T., & Unsworth, S. (2024). Cognate facilitation in single- and dual-language contexts in bilingual children’s word processing. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 14(4), 577-608. doi:10.1075/lab.23009.kou.

    Abstract

    We examined the extent to which cognate facilitation effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s production and comprehension and how these were modulated by language dominance and language context. Bilingual Dutch-German children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to German-dominant, performed picture naming and auditory lexical decision tasks in single-language and dual-language contexts. Language context was manipulated with respect to the language of communication (with the experimenter and in instructional videos) and by means of proficiency tasks. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both production and comprehension and interacted with both dominance and context. In a single-language context, stronger cognate facilitation effects were found for picture naming in children’s less dominant language, in line with previous studies on individual differences in lexical activation. In the dual-language context, this pattern was reversed, suggesting inhibition of the dominant language at the decision level. Similar effects were observed in lexical decision. These findings provide evidence for an integrated bilingual lexicon in simultaneous bilingual children and shed more light on the complex interplay between lexicon-internal and lexicon-external factors modulating the extent of lexical cross-linguistic influence more generally.
  • Koutamanis, E., Kootstra, G. J., Dijkstra, T., & Unsworth, S. (2024). Cross-linguistic influence in the simultaneous bilingual child's lexicon: An eye-tracking and primed picture selection study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 27(3), 377-387. doi:10.1017/S136672892300055X.

    Abstract

    In a between-language lexical priming study, we examined to what extent the two languages in a simultaneous bilingual child's lexicon interact, while taking individual differences in language exposure into account. Primary-school-aged Dutch–Greek bilinguals performed a primed picture selection task combined with eye-tracking. They matched pictures to auditorily presented Dutch target words preceded by Greek prime words. Their reaction times and eye movements were recorded. We tested for effects of between-language phonological priming, translation priming, and phonological priming through translation. Priming effects emerged in reaction times and eye movements in all three conditions, at different stages of processing, and unaffected by language exposure. These results extend previous findings for bilingual toddlers and bilingual adults. Processing similarities between these populations indicate that, across different stages of development, bilinguals have an integrated lexicon that is accessed in a language-nonselective way and is susceptible to interactions within and between different types of lexical representation.
  • Kram, L., Ohlerth, A.-K., Ille, S., Meyer, B., & Krieg, S. M. (2024). CompreTAP: Feasibility and reliability of a new language comprehension mapping task via preoperative navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation. Cortex, 171, 347-369. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2023.09.023.

    Abstract

    Objective: Stimulation-based language mapping approaches that are used pre- and intra-operatively employ predominantly overt language tasks requiring sufficient language pro-duction abilities. Yet, these production-based setups are often not feasible in brain tumor patients with severe expressive aphasia. This pilot study evaluated the feasibility and reliability of a newly developed language comprehension task with preoperative navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (nTMS).
    Methods: Fifteen healthy subjects and six brain tumor patients with severe expressiven aphasia unable to perform classic overt naming tasks underwent preoperative nTMS language mapping based on an auditory single-word Comprehension TAsk for Perioperative mapping (CompreTAP). Comprehension was probed by button-press responses to auditory stimuli, hence not requiring overt language responses. Positive comprehension areas were identified when stimulation elicited an incorrect or delayed button press. Error categories,case-wise cortical error rate distribution and inter-rater reliability between two experienced specialists were examined.
    Results: Overall, the new setup showed to be feasible. Comprehension-disruptions induced by nTMS manifested in no responses, delayed or hesitant responses, searching behavior or selection of wrong target items across all patients and controls and could be performed even in patients with severe expressive aphasia. The analysis agreement between both specialists was substantial for classifying comprehension-positive and -negative sites. Extensive left-hemispheric individual cortical comprehension sites were identified for all patients. Apart from one case presenting with transient worsening of aphasic symptoms.
  • Kubota, M., Alonso, J. G., Anderssen, M., Jensen, I. N., Luque, A., Pereira Soares, S. M., Prystauka, Y., Vangsnes, Ø. A., Sandstedt, J. J., & Rothman, J. (2024). Bilectal exposure modulates neural signatures to conflicting grammatical properties: Norway as a natural laboratory. Language Learning, 74(2), 436-467. doi:10.1111/lang.12608.

    Abstract

    The current study investigated gender (control) and number (target) agreement processing in Northern and non-Northern Norwegians living in Northern Norway. Participants varied in exposure to Northern Norwegian (NN) dialect(s), where number marking differs from most other Norwegian dialects. In a comprehension task involving reading NN dialect writing, P600 effects for number agreement were significantly affected by NN exposure. The more exposure the NN nonnatives had, the larger the P600 was, driven by the presence of number agreement (ungrammatical in NN). In contrast, less exposure correlated to the inverse: P600 driven by the absence of number agreement (ungrammatical in most other dialects). The NN natives showed P600 driven by the presence of number agreement regardless of exposure. These findings suggests that bilectalism entails the representation of distinct mental grammars for each dialect. However, like all instances of bilingualism, bilectalism exists on a continuum whereby linguistic processing is modulated by linguistic experience.
  • Kumarage, S., Donnelly, S., & Kidd, E. (2024). A meta-analysis of syntactic priming experiments in children. Journal of Memory and Language, 138: 104532. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2024.104532.

    Abstract

    A substantial literature exists using the syntactic priming methodology with children to test hypotheses regarding the acquisition of syntax, under the assumption that priming effects reveal both the presence of syntactic knowledge and the underlying nature of learning mechanisms supporting the acquisition of grammar. Here we present the first meta-analysis of syntactic priming studies in children. We identified 37 eligible studies and extracted 108 effect sizes corresponding to 76 samples of 2,378 unique participants. Our analysis confirmed a medium-to-large syntactic priming effect. The overall estimate of the priming effect was a log odds ratio of 1.44 (Cohen’s d = 0.80). This is equivalent to a structure that occurs 50 % of the time when unprimed occurring 81 % of the time when primed. Several variables moderated the magnitude of priming in children, including (i) within- or between-subjects design, (ii) lexical overlap, (iii) structural alternation investigated and, (iv) the animacy configuration of syntactic arguments. There was little evidence of publication bias in the size of the main priming effect, however, power analyses showed that, while studies typically have enough power to identify the basic priming effect, they are typically underpowered when their focus is on moderators of priming. The results provide a foundation for future research, suggesting several avenues of enquiry.
  • Kurth, F., Schijven, D., Van den Heuvel, O. A., Hoogman, M., Van Rooij, D., Stein, D. J., Buitelaar, J. K., Bölte, S., Auzias, G., Kushki, A., Venkatasubramanian, G., Rubia, K., Bollmann, S., Isaksson, J., Jaspers-Fayer, F., Marsh, R., Batistuzzo, M. C., Arnold, P. D., Bressan, R. A., Stewart, E. S. Kurth, F., Schijven, D., Van den Heuvel, O. A., Hoogman, M., Van Rooij, D., Stein, D. J., Buitelaar, J. K., Bölte, S., Auzias, G., Kushki, A., Venkatasubramanian, G., Rubia, K., Bollmann, S., Isaksson, J., Jaspers-Fayer, F., Marsh, R., Batistuzzo, M. C., Arnold, P. D., Bressan, R. A., Stewart, E. S., Gruner, P., Sorensen, L., Pan, P. M., Silk, T. J., Gur, R. C., Cubillo, A. I., Haavik, J., O'Gorman Tuura, R. L., Hartman, C. A., Calvo, R., McGrath, J., Calderoni, S., Jackowski, A., Chantiluke, K. C., Satterthwaite, T. D., Busatto, G. F., Nigg, J. T., Gur, R. E., Retico, A., Tosetti, M., Gallagher, L., Szeszko, P. R., Neufeld, J., Ortiz, A. E., Ghisleni, C., Lazaro, L., Hoekstra, P. J., Anagnostou, E., Hoekstra, L., Simpson, B., Plessen, J. K., Deruelle, C., Soreni, N., James, A., Narayanaswamy, J., Reddy, J. Y. C., Fitzgerald, J., Bellgrove, M. A., Salum, G. A., Janssen, J., Muratori, F., Vila, M., Garcia Giral, M., Ameis, S. H., Bosco, P., Lundin Remnélius, K., Huyser, C., Pariente, J. C., Jalbrzikowski, M., Rosa, P. G. P., O'Hearn, K. M., Ehrlich, S., Mollon, J., Zugman, A., Christakou, A., Arango, C., Fisher, S. E., Kong, X., Franke, B., Medland, S. E., Thomopoulos, S. I., Jahanshad, N., Glahn, D. C., Thompson, P. M., Francks, C., & Luders, E. (2024). Large-scale analysis of structural brain asymmetries during neurodevelopment: Age effects and sex differences in 4,265 children and adolescents. Human Brain Mapping, 45(11): e26754. doi:10.1002/hbm.26754.

    Abstract

    Only a small number of studies have assessed structural differences between the two hemispheres during childhood and adolescence. However, the existing findings lack consistency or are restricted to a particular brain region, a specific brain feature, or a relatively narrow age range. Here, we investigated associations between brain asymmetry and age as well as sex in one of the largest pediatric samples to date (n = 4265), aged 1–18 years, scanned at 69 sites participating in the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) consortium. Our study revealed that significant brain asymmetries already exist in childhood, but their magnitude and direction depend on the brain region examined and the morphometric measurement used (cortical volume or thickness, regional surface area, or subcortical volume). With respect to effects of age, some asymmetries became weaker over time while others became stronger; sometimes they even reversed direction. With respect to sex differences, the total number of regions exhibiting significant asymmetries was larger in females than in males, while the total number of measurements indicating significant asymmetries was larger in males (as we obtained more than one measurement per cortical region). The magnitude of the significant asymmetries was also greater in males. However, effect sizes for both age effects and sex differences were small. Taken together, these findings suggest that cerebral asymmetries are an inherent organizational pattern of the brain that manifests early in life. Overall, brain asymmetry appears to be relatively stable throughout childhood and adolescence, with some differential effects in males and females.
  • Lai, J., Chan, A., & Kidd, E. (2024). Production of relative clauses in Cantonese-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder. Brain and Language, 254: 105425. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2024.105425.

    Abstract

    Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) has been explained as either a deficit deriving from an abstract representational deficit or as emerging from difficulties in acquiring and coordinating multiple interacting cues guiding learning. These competing explanations are often difficult to decide between when tested on European languages. This paper reports an experimental study of relative clause (RC) production in Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD, which enabled us to test multiple developmental predictions derived from one prominent theory − emergentism. Children with DLD (N = 22; aged 6;6–9;7) were compared with age-matched typically-developing peers (N = 23) and language-matched, typically-developing children (N = 21; aged 4;7–7;6) on a sentence repetition task. Results showed that children’s production across multiple RC types was influenced by structural frequency, general semantic complexity, and the linear order of constituents, with the DLD group performing worse than their age-matched and language-matched peers. The results are consistent with the emergentist explanation of DLD.
  • Lameira, A. R., Hardus, M. E., Ravignani, A., Raimondi, T., & Gamba, M. (2024). Recursive self-embedded vocal motifs in wild orangutans. eLife, 12: RP88348. doi:10.7554/eLife.88348.3.

    Abstract

    Recursive procedures that allow placing a vocal signal inside another of a similar kind provide a neuro-computational blueprint for syntax and phonology in spoken language and human song. There are, however, no known vocal sequences among nonhuman primates arranged in self-embedded patterns that evince vocal recursion or potential incipient or evolutionary transitional forms thereof, suggesting a neuro-cognitive transformation exclusive to humans. Here, we uncover that wild flanged male orangutan long calls feature rhythmically isochronous call sequences nested within isochronous call sequences, consistent with two hierarchical strata. Remarkably, three temporally and acoustically distinct call rhythms in the lower stratum were not related to the overarching rhythm at the higher stratum by any low multiples, which suggests that these recursive structures were neither the result of parallel non-hierarchical procedures nor anatomical artifacts of bodily constraints or resonances. Findings represent a case of temporally recursive hominid vocal combinatorics in the absence of syntax, semantics, phonology, or music. Second-order combinatorics, ‘sequences within sequences’, involving hierarchically organized and cyclically structured vocal sounds in ancient hominids may have preluded the evolution of recursion in modern language-able humans.
  • Lammertink, I., De Heer Kloots, M., Bazioni, M., & Raviv, L. (2024). Learnability effects in children: Are more structured languages easier to learn? In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 320-323). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Lee, S.-H.-y., Ünal, E., & Papafragou, A. (2024). Forming event units in language and cognition: A cross-linguistic investigation. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 1885-1892).

    Abstract

    Humans are surrounded by dynamic, continuous streams of stimuli, yet the human mind segments these stimuli and organizes them into discrete event units. Theories of language production assume that segmenting and construing an event provides a starting point for speaking about the event (Levelt, 1989; Konopka & Brown-Schmidt, 2018). However, the precise units of event representation and their mapping to language remain elusive. In this work, we examine event unit formation in linguistic and conceptual event representations. Given cross-linguistic differences in motion event encoding (satellite vs. verb-framed languages), we investigate the extent to which such differences in forming linguistic motion event units affect how speakers of different languages form cognitive event units in non-linguistic tasks. We test English (satellite-framed) and Turkish (verb-framed) speakers on verbal and non-verbal motion event tasks. Our results show that speakers do not rely on the same event unit representations when verbalizing motion vs. identifying motion event units in non-verbal tasks. Therefore, we suggest that conceptual and linguistic event representations are related but distinct levels of event structure.
  • Leitner, C., D’Este, G., Verga, L., Rahayel, S., Mombelli, S., Sforza, M., Casoni, F., Zucconi, M., Ferini-Strambi, L., & Galbiati, A. (2024). Neuropsychological changes in isolated REM sleep behavior disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Neuropsychology Review, 34(1), 41-66. doi:10.1007/s11065-022-09572-1.

    Abstract

    The aim of this meta-analysis is twofold: (a) to assess cognitive impairments in isolated rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) patients compared to healthy controls (HC); (b) to quantitatively estimate the risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease in iRBD patients according to baseline cognitive assessment. To address the first aim, cross-sectional studies including polysomnography-confirmed iRBD patients, HC, and reporting neuropsychological testing were included. To address the second aim, longitudinal studies including polysomnography-confirmed iRBD patients, reporting baseline neuropsychological testing for converted and still isolated patients separately were included. The literature search was conducted based on PRISMA guidelines and the protocol was registered at PROSPERO (CRD42021253427). Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies were searched from PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Embase databases. Publication bias and statistical heterogeneity were assessed respectively by funnel plot asymmetry and using I2. Finally, a random-effect model was performed to pool the included studies. 75 cross-sectional (2,398 HC and 2,460 iRBD patients) and 11 longitudinal (495 iRBD patients) studies were selected. Cross-sectional studies showed that iRBD patients performed significantly worse in cognitive screening scores (random-effects (RE) model = –0.69), memory (RE model = –0.64), and executive function (RE model = –0.50) domains compared to HC. The survival analyses conducted for longitudinal studies revealed that lower executive function and language performance, as well as the presence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), at baseline were associated with an increased risk of conversion at follow-up. Our study underlines the importance of a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment in the context of iRBD.

    Additional information

    figure 1 tables
  • Leonetti, S., Cimarelli, G., Hersh, T. A., & Ravignani, A. (2024). Why do dogs wag their tails? Biology Letters, 20(1): 20230407. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2023.0407.

    Abstract

    Tail wagging is a conspicuous behaviour in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Despite how much meaning humans attribute to this display, its quantitative description and evolutionary history are rarely studied. We summarize what is known about the mechanism, ontogeny, function and evolution of this behaviour. We suggest two hypotheses to explain its increased occurrence and frequency in dogs compared to other canids. During the domestication process, enhanced rhythmic tail wagging behaviour could have (i) arisen as a by-product of selection for other traits, such as docility and tameness, or (ii) been directly selected by humans, due to our proclivity for rhythmic stimuli. We invite testing of these hypotheses through neurobiological and ethological experiments, which will shed light on one of the most readily observed yet understudied animal behaviours. Targeted tail wagging research can be a window into both canine ethology and the evolutionary history of characteristic human traits, such as our ability to perceive and produce rhythmic behaviours.
  • Leonetti, S., Ravignani, A., & Pouw, W. (2024). A cross-species framework for classifying sound-movement couplings. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. Advance online publication. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105911.

    Abstract

    Sound and movement are entangled in animal communication. This is obviously true in the case of sound-constituting vibratory movements of biological structures which generate acoustic waves. A little less obvious is that other moving structures produce the energy required to sustain these vibrations. In many species, the respiratory system moves to generate the expiratory flow which powers the sound-constituting movements (sound-powering movements). The sound may acquire additional structure via upper tract movements, such as articulatory movements or head raising (sound-filtering movements). Some movements are not necessary for sound production, but when produced, impinge on the sound-producing process due to weak biomechanical coupling with body parts (e.g., respiratory system) that are necessary for sound production (sound-impinging movements). Animals also produce sounds contingent with movement, requiring neuro-physiological control regimes allowing to flexibly couple movements to a produced sound, or coupling movements to a perceived external sound (sound-contingent movement). Here, we compare and classify the variety of ways sound and movements are coupled in animal communication; our proposed framework should help structure previous and future studies on this topic.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2024). The dark matter of pragmatics: Known unknowns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009489584.

    Abstract

    This Element tries to discern the known unknowns in the field
    of pragmatics, the ‘Dark Matter’ of the title. We can identify a key
    bottleneck in human communication, the sheer limitation on the speed
    of speech encoding: pragmatics occupies the niche nestled between
    slow speech encoding and fast comprehension. Pragmatic strategies
    are tricks for evading this tight encoding bottleneck by meaning more
    than you say. Five such tricks are reviewed, which are all domains where
    we have made considerable progress. We can then ask for each of these
    areas, where have we neglected to push the frontier forward? These are
    the known unknowns of pragmatics, key areas, and topics for future
    research. The Element thus offers a brief review of some central areas of
    pragmatics, and a survey of targets for future research.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2024). Culture as cognitive technology: An evolutionary perspective. In G. Bennardo, V. C. De Munck, & S. Chrisomalis (Eds.), Cognition in and out of the mind: Advances in cultural model theory (pp. 241-265). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Abstract

    Cognitive anthropology is in need of a theory that extends beyond cultural model theory and explains both how culture has transformed human cognition and the curious ontology of culture itself, for, as Durkheim insisted, culture cannot be reduced to psychology. This chapter promotes a framework that deals with both the evolutionary question and the ontological problem. It is argued that at least a central part of culture should be conceived of in terms of cognitive technology. Beginning with obvious examples of cognitive artifacts, like those used in measurement, way-finding, time-reckoning and numerical calculation, the chapter goes on to consider extensions to our communication systems, emotion-modulating systems and the cognitive division of labor. Cognitive artifacts form ‘coupled systems’ that amplify individual psychology, lying partly outside the head, and are honed by cultural evolution. They make clear how culture gave human cognition an evolutionary edge.
  • Levshina, N., Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M., & Östling, R. (2024). Revered and reviled: A sentiment analysis of female and male referents in three languages. Frontiers in Communication, 9: 1266407. doi:10.3389/fcomm.2024.1266407.

    Abstract

    Our study contributes to the less explored domain of lexical typology, focusing on semantic prosody and connotation. Semantic derogation, or pejoration of nouns referring to women, whereby such words acquire connotations and further denotations of social pejoration, immorality and/or loose sexuality, has been a very prominent question in studies on gender and language (change). It has been argued that pejoration emerges due to the general derogatory attitudes toward female referents. However, the evidence for systematic differences in connotations of female- vs. male-related words is fragmentary and often fairly impressionistic; moreover, many researchers argue that expressed sentiments toward women (as well as men) often are ambivalent. One should also expect gender differences in connotations to have decreased in the recent years, thanks to the advances of feminism and social progress. We test these ideas in a study of positive and negative connotations of feminine and masculine term pairs such as woman - man, girl - boy, wife - husband, etc. Sentences containing these words were sampled from diachronic corpora of English, Chinese and Russian, and sentiment scores for every word were obtained using two systems for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: PyABSA, and OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3.5. The Generalized Linear Mixed Models of our data provide no indications of significantly more negative sentiment toward female referents in comparison with their male counterparts. However, some of the models suggest that female referents are more infrequently associated with neutral sentiment than male ones. Neither do our data support the hypothesis of the diachronic convergence between the genders. In sum, results suggest that pejoration is unlikely to be explained simply by negative attitudes to female referents in general.

    Additional information

    supplementary materials
  • Liesenfeld, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2024). Rethinking open source generative AI: open-washing and the EU AI Act. In The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24) (pp. 1774-1784). ACM.

    Abstract

    The past year has seen a steep rise in generative AI systems that claim to be open. But how open are they really? The question of what counts as open source in generative AI is poised to take on particular importance in light of the upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment. Here we use an evidence-based framework that distinguishes 14 dimensions of openness, from training datasets to scientific and technical documentation and from licensing to access methods. Surveying over 45 generative AI systems (both text and text-to-image), we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are `open weight' at best and many providers seek to evade scientific, legal and regulatory scrutiny by withholding information on training and fine-tuning data. We argue that openness in generative AI is necessarily composite (consisting of multiple elements) and gradient (coming in degrees), and point out the risk of relying on single features like access or licensing to declare models open or not. Evidence-based openness assessment can help foster a generative AI landscape in which models can be effectively regulated, model providers can be held accountable, scientists can scrutinise generative AI, and end users can make informed decisions.
  • Liesenfeld, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2024). Interactive probes: Towards action-level evaluation for dialogue systems. Discourse & Communication. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/17504813241267071.

    Abstract

    Measures of ‘humanness’, ‘coherence’ or ‘fluency’ are the mainstay of dialogue system evaluation, but they don’t target system capabilities and rarely offer actionable feedback. Reviewing recent work in this domain, we identify an opportunity for evaluation at the level of action sequences, rather than the more commonly targeted levels of whole conversations or single responses. We introduce interactive probes, an evaluation framework inspired by empirical work on social interaction that can help to systematically probe the capabilities of dialogue systems. We sketch some first probes in the domains of tellings and repair, two sequence types ubiquitous in human interaction and challenging for dialogue systems. We argue interactive probing can offer the requisite flexibility to keep up with developments in interactive language technologies and do justice to the open-endedness of action formation and ascription in interaction.
  • Loke*, J., Seijdel*, N., Snoek, L., Sorensen, L., Van de Klundert, R., Van der Meer, M., Quispel, E., Cappaert, N., & Scholte, H. S. (2024). Human visual cortex and deep convolutional neural network care deeply about object background. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(3), 551-566. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_02098.

    Abstract

    * These authors contributed equally/shared first author
    Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) are able to partially predict brain activity during object categorization tasks, but factors contributing to this predictive power are not fully understood. Our study aimed to investigate the factors contributing to the predictive power of DCNNs in object categorization tasks. We compared the activity of four DCNN architectures with EEG recordings obtained from 62 human participants during an object categorization task. Previous physiological studies on object categorization have highlighted the importance of figure-ground segregation—the ability to distinguish objects from their backgrounds. Therefore, we investigated whether figure-ground segregation could explain the predictive power of DCNNs. Using a stimulus set consisting of identical target objects embedded in different backgrounds, we examined the influence of object background versus object category within both EEG and DCNN activity. Crucially, the recombination of naturalistic objects and experimentally controlled backgrounds creates a challenging and naturalistic task, while retaining experimental control. Our results showed that early EEG activity (< 100 msec) and early DCNN layers represent object background rather than object category. We also found that the ability of DCNNs to predict EEG activity is primarily influenced by how both systems process object backgrounds, rather than object categories. We demonstrated the role of figure-ground segregation as a potential prerequisite for recognition of object features, by contrasting the activations of trained and untrained (i.e., random weights) DCNNs. These findings suggest that both human visual cortex and DCNNs prioritize the segregation of object backgrounds and target objects to perform object categorization. Altogether, our study provides new insights into the mechanisms underlying object categorization as we demonstrated that both human visual cortex and DCNNs care deeply about object background.

    Additional information

    link to preprint
  • Long, M., Rohde, H., Oraa Ali, M., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). The role of cognitive control and referential complexity on adults’ choice of referring expressions: Testing and expanding the referential complexity scale. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 50(1), 109-136. doi:10.1037/xlm0001273.

    Abstract

    This study aims to advance our understanding of the nature and source(s) of individual differences in pragmatic language behavior over the adult lifespan. Across four story continuation experiments, we probed adults’ (N = 496 participants, ages 18–82) choice of referential forms (i.e., names vs. pronouns to refer to the main character). Our manipulations were based on Fossard et al.’s (2018) scale of referential complexity which varies according to the visual properties of the scene: low complexity (one character), intermediate complexity (two characters of different genders), and high complexity (two characters of the same gender). Since pronouns signal topic continuity (i.e., that the discourse will continue to be about the same referent), the use of pronouns is expected to decrease as referential complexity increases. The choice of names versus pronouns, therefore, provides insight into participants’ perception of the topicality of a referent, and whether that varies by age and cognitive capacity. In Experiment 1, we used the scale to test the association between referential choice, aging, and cognition, identifying a link between older adults’ switching skills and optimal referential choice. In Experiments 2–4, we tested novel manipulations that could impact the scale and found both the timing of a competitor referent’s presence and emphasis placed on competitors modulated referential choice, leading us to refine the scale for future use. Collectively, Experiments 1–4 highlight what type of contextual information is prioritized at different ages, revealing older adults’ preserved sensitivity to (visual) scene complexity but reduced sensitivity to linguistic prominence cues, compared to younger adults.
  • Long, M., MacPherson, S. E., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). Prosocial speech acts: Links to pragmatics and aging. Developmental Psychology, 60(3), 491-504. doi:10.1037/dev0001725.

    Abstract

    This study investigated how adults over the lifespan flexibly adapt their use of prosocial speech acts when conveying bad news to communicative partners. Experiment 1a (N = 100 Scottish adults aged 18–72 years) assessed whether participants’ use of prosocial speech acts varied according to audience design considerations (i.e., whether or not the recipient of the news was directly affected). Experiment 1b (N = 100 Scottish adults aged 19–70 years) assessed whether participants adjusted for whether the bad news was more or less severe (an index of general knowledge). Younger adults displayed more flexible adaptation to the recipient manipulation, while no age differences were found for severity. These findings are consistent with prior work showing age-related decline in audience design but not in the use of general knowledge during language production. Experiment 2 further probed younger adults (N = 40, Scottish, aged 18–37 years) and older adults’ (N = 40, Scottish, aged 70–89 years) prosocial linguistic behavior by investigating whether health (vs. nonhealth-related) matters would affect responses. While older adults used prosocial speech acts to a greater extent than younger adults, they did not distinguish between conditions. Our results suggest that prosocial linguistic behavior is likely influenced by a combination of differences in audience design and communicative styles at different ages. Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of situating prosocial speech acts within the pragmatics and aging literature, allowing us to uncover the factors modulating prosocial linguistic behavior at different developmental stages.

    Additional information

    figures
  • Long, M., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). Beyond typicality: Lexical category affects the use and processing of color words. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 4925-4930).

    Abstract

    Speakers and listeners show an informativity bias in the use and interpretation of color modifiers. For example, speakers use color more often when referring to objects that vary in color than to objects with a prototypical color. Likewise, listeners look away from objects with prototypical colors upon hearing that color mentioned. Here we test whether speakers and listeners account for another factor related to informativity: the strength of the association between lexical categories and color. Our results demonstrate that speakers and listeners' choices are indeed influenced by this factor; as such, it should be integrated into current pragmatic theories of informativity and computational models of color reference.

    Additional information

    link to eScholarship
  • Lupyan, G., & Raviv, L. (2024). A cautionary note on sociodemographic predictors of linguistic complexity: Different measures and different analyses lead to different conclusions. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 345-348). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Lutzenberger, H., De Wael, L., Omardeen, R., & Dingemanse, M. (2024). Interactional infrastructure across modalities: A comparison of repair initiators and continuers in British Sign Language and British English. Sign Language Studies, 24(3), 548-581. doi:10.1353/sls.2024.a928056.

    Abstract

    Minimal expressions are at the heart of interaction: Interjections like "Huh?" and "Mhm" keep conversations flowing by establishing and reinforcing intersubjectivity among interlocutors. Crosslinguistic research has identified that similar interactional pressures can yield structurally similar words (e.g., to initiate repair across languages). While crosslinguistic comparisons that include signed languages remain uncommon, recent work has revealed similarities in discourse management strategies among signers and speakers that share much of their cultural background. This study contributes a crossmodal comparison of repair initiators and continuers in speakers of English and signers of British Sign Language (BSL). We combine qualitative and quantitative analyses of data from sixteen English speakers and sixteen BSL signers, resulting in the following: First, the interactional infrastructure drawn upon by speakers and signers overwhelmingly relies on behaviors of the head, face, and body; these are used alone or sometimes in combination with verbal elements (i.e., spoken words or manual signs), while verbal strategies alone are rare. Second, discourse management strategies are remarkably similar in form across the two languages: A held eye gaze or freeze-look is the predominant repair initiator and head nodding the main continuer. These results suggest a modality-agnostic preference for visual strategies that do not occupy the primary articulators, one that we propose is founded in recipiency; people maintain the flow of communication following principles of minimal effort and minimal interruption.
  • Lutzenberger, H., Casillas, M., Fikkert, P., Crasborn, O., & De Vos, C. (2024). More than looks: Exploring methods to test phonological discrimination in the sign language Kata Kolok. Language Learning and Development, 20(4), 297-323. doi:10.1080/15475441.2023.2277472.

    Abstract

    The lack of diversity in the language sciences has increasingly been criticized as it holds the potential for producing flawed theories. Research on (i) geographically diverse language communities and (ii) on sign languages is necessary to corroborate, sharpen, and extend existing theories. This study contributes a case study of adapting a well-established paradigm to study the acquisition of sign phonology in Kata Kolok, a sign language of rural Bali, Indonesia. We conducted an experiment modeled after the familiarization paradigm with child signers of Kata Kolok. Traditional analyses of looking time did not yield significant differences between signing and non-signing children. Yet, additional behavioral analyses (attention, eye contact, hand behavior) suggest that children who are signers and those who are non-signers, as well as those who are hearing and those who are deaf, interact differently with the task. This study suggests limitations of the paradigm due to the ecology of sign languages and the sociocultural characteristics of the sample, calling for a mixed-methods approach. Ultimately, this paper aims to elucidate the diversity of adaptations necessary for experimental design, procedure, and analysis, and to offer a critical reflection on the contribution of similar efforts and the diversification of the field.
  • Mai, A., Riès, S., Ben-Haim, S., Shih, J. J., & Gentner, T. Q. (2024). Acoustic and language-specific sources for phonemic abstraction from speech. Nature Communications, 15: 677. doi:10.1038/s41467-024-44844-9.

    Abstract

    Spoken language comprehension requires abstraction of linguistic information from speech, but the interaction between auditory and linguistic processing of speech remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the nature of this abstraction using neural responses recorded intracranially while participants listened to conversational English speech. Capitalizing on multiple, language-specific patterns where phonological and acoustic information diverge, we demonstrate the causal efficacy of the phoneme as a unit of analysis and dissociate the unique contributions of phonemic and spectrographic information to neural responses. Quantitive higher-order response models also reveal that unique contributions of phonological information are carried in the covariance structure of the stimulus-response relationship. This suggests that linguistic abstraction is shaped by neurobiological mechanisms that involve integration across multiple spectro-temporal features and prior phonological information. These results link speech acoustics to phonology and morphosyntax, substantiating predictions about abstractness in linguistic theory and providing evidence for the acoustic features that support that abstraction.

    Additional information

    supplementary information
  • Maldarelli, G., Dissegna, A., Ravignani, A., & Chiandetti, C. (2024). Chicks produce consonant, sometimes jazzy, sounds. Biology Letters, 20(9): 20240374. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2024.0374.

    Abstract

    Several animal species prefer consonant over dissonant sounds, a building block of musical scales and harmony. Could consonance and dissonance be linked, beyond music, to the emotional valence of vocalizations? We extracted the fundamental frequency from calls of young chickens with either positive or negative emotional valence, i.e. contact, brood and food calls. For each call, we calculated the frequency ratio between the maximum and the minimum values of the fundamental frequency, and we investigated which frequency ratios occurred with higher probability. We found that, for all call types, the most frequent ratios matched perfect consonance, like an arpeggio in pop music. These music-like intervals, based on the auditory frequency resolution of chicks, cannot be miscategorized into contiguous dissonant intervals. When we analysed frequency ratio distributions at a finer-grained level, we found some dissonant ratios in the contact calls produced during distress only, thus sounding a bit jazzy. Complementing the empirical data, our computational simulations suggest that physiological constraints can only partly explain both consonances and dissonances in chicks’ phonation. Our data add to the mounting evidence that the building blocks of human musical traits can be found in several species, even phylogenetically distant from us.
  • Mamus, E. (2024). Perceptual experience shapes how blind and sighted people express concepts in multimodal language. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Matteo, M., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). How to test gesture-speech integration in ten minutes. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 737-741). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-149.

    Abstract

    Human conversations are inherently multimodal, including auditory speech, visual articulatory cues, and hand gestures. Recent studies demonstrated that the timing of a simple up-and-down hand movement, known as a beat gesture, can affect speech perception. A beat gesture falling on the first syllable of a disyllabic word induces a bias to perceive a strong-weak stress pattern (i.e., “CONtent”), while a beat gesture falling on the second syllable combined with the same acoustics biases towards a weak-strong stress pattern (“conTENT”). This effect, termed the “manual McGurk effect”, has been studied in both in-lab and online studies, employing standard experimental sessions lasting approximately forty minutes. The present work tests whether the manual McGurk effect can be observed in an online short version (“mini-test”) of the original paradigm, lasting only ten minutes. Additionally, we employ two different response modalities, namely a two-alternative forced choice and a visual analog scale. A significant manual McGurk effect was observed with both response modalities. Overall, the present study demonstrates the feasibility of employing a ten-minute manual McGurk mini-test to obtain a measure of gesture-speech integration. As such, it may lend itself for inclusion in large-scale test batteries that aim to quantify individual variation in language processing.
  • Mazzini, S., Yadnik, S., Timmers, I., Rubio-Gozalbo, E., & Jansma, B. M. (2024). Altered neural oscillations in classical galactosaemia during sentence production. Journal of Inherited Metabolic Disease, 47(4), 575-833. doi:10.1002/jimd.12740.

    Abstract

    Classical galactosaemia (CG) is a hereditary disease in galactose metabolism that despite dietary treatment is characterized by a wide range of cognitive deficits, among which is language production. CG brain functioning has been studied with several neuroimaging techniques, which revealed both structural and functional atypicalities. In the present study, for the first time, we compared the oscillatory dynamics, especially the power spectrum and time–frequency representations (TFR), in the electroencephalography (EEG) of CG patients and healthy controls while they were performing a language production task. Twenty-one CG patients and 19 healthy controls described animated scenes, either in full sentences or in words, indicating two levels of complexity in syntactic planning. Based on previous work on the P300 event related potential (ERP) and its relation with theta frequency, we hypothesized that the oscillatory activity of patients and controls would differ in theta power and TFR. With regard to behavior, reaction times showed that patients are slower, reflecting the language deficit. In the power spectrum, we observed significant higher power in patients in delta (1–3 Hz), theta (4–7 Hz), beta (15–30 Hz) and gamma (30–70 Hz) frequencies, but not in alpha (8–12 Hz), suggesting an atypical oscillatory profile. The time-frequency analysis revealed significantly weaker event-related theta synchronization (ERS) and alpha desynchronization (ERD) in patients in the sentence condition. The data support the hypothesis that CG language difficulties relate to theta–alpha brain oscillations.

    Additional information

    table S1 and S2
  • Meinhardt, E., Mai, A., Baković, E., & McCollum, A. (2024). Weak determinism and the computational consequences of interaction. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 42, 1191-1232. doi:10.1007/s11049-023-09578-1.

    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.
  • Melnychuk, T., Galke, L., Seidlmayer, E., Bröring, S., Förstner, K. U., Tochtermann, K., & Schultz, C. (2024). Development of similarity measures from graph-structured bibliographic metadata: An application to identify scientific convergence. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 71, 9171 -9187. doi:10.1109/TEM.2023.3308008.

    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.
  • Menks, W. M., Ekerdt, C., Lemhöfer, K., Kidd, E., Fernández, G., McQueen, J. M., & Janzen, G. (2024). Developmental changes in brain activation during novel grammar learning in 8-25-year-olds. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 66: 101347. doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2024.101347.

    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.

    Additional information

    supplement
  • Mickan, A., Slesareva, E., McQueen, J. M., & Lemhöfer, K. (2024). New in, old out: Does learning a new language make you forget previously learned foreign languages? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(3), 530-550. doi:10.1177/17470218231181380.

    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.

    Additional information

    supplementary material
  • Mishra, C., Nandanwar, A., & Mishra, S. (2024). HRI in Indian education: Challenges opportunities. In H. Admoni, D. Szafir, W. Johal, & A. Sandygulova (Eds.), Designing an introductory HRI course (workshop at HRI 2024). ArXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2403.12223.

    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.
  • Mishra, C. (2024). The face says it all: Investigating gaze and affective behaviors of social robots. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Monaghan, P., Jago, L. S., Speyer, L., Turnbull, H., Alcock, K. J., Rowland, C. F., & Cain, K. (2024). Statistical learning ability at 17 months relates to early reading skills via oral language. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 246: 106002. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2024.106002.

    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.

    Additional information

    supplementary information
  • Mooijman, S., Schoonen, R., Roelofs, A., & Ruiter, M. B. (2024). Benefits of free language choice in bilingual individuals with aphasia. Aphasiology. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/02687038.2024.2326239.

    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.
  • Mooijman, S. (2024). Control of language in bilingual speakers with and without aphasia. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Moser, C., Tarakçı, B., Ünal, E., & Grigoroglou, M. (2024). Multimodal descriotion of Instrument events in English and Turkish. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 341-348).

    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.
  • Motiekaitytė, K., Grosseck, O., Wolf, L., Bosker, H. R., Peeters, D., Perlman, M., Ortega, G., & Raviv, L. (2024). Iconicity and compositionality in emerging vocal communication systems: a Virtual Reality approach. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 387-389). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Murphy, E., Rollo, P. S., Segaert, K., Hagoort, P., & Tandon, N. (2024). Multiple dimensions of syntactic structure are resolved earliest in posterior temporal cortex. Progress in Neurobiology, 241: 102669. doi:10.1016/j.pneurobio.2024.102669.

    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.
  • Nazlı, İ., Ferrari, A., Huber-Huber, C., & De Lange, F. P. (2024). Forward and backward blocking in statistical learning. PLOS ONE, 19(8): e0306797. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0306797.

    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.

    Additional information

    supporting information
  • Nölle, J., Raviv, L., Graham, K. E., Hartmann, S., Jadoul, Y., Josserand, M., Matzinger, T., Mudd, K., Pleyer, M., Slonimska, A., Wacewicz, S., & Watson, S. (Eds.). (2024). The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. doi:10.17617/2.3587960.
  • Oblong, L. M., Soheili-Nezhad, S., Trevisan, N., Shi, Y., Beckmann, C. F., & Sprooten, E. (2024). Principal and independent genomic components of brain structure and function. Genes, Brain and Behavior, 23(1): e12876. doi:10.1111/gbb.12876.

    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.
  • Osiecka, A. N., Fearey, J., Ravignani, A., & Burchardt, L. (2024). Isochrony in barks of Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) pups and adults. Ecology and Evolution, 14(3): e11085. doi:10.1002/ece3.11085.

    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.
  • Ozaki, Y., Tierney, A., Pfordresher, P. Q., McBride, J., Benetos, E., Proutskova, P., Chiba, G., Liu, F., Jacoby, N., Purdy, S. C., Opondo, P., Fitch, W. T., Hegde, S., Rocamora, M., Thorne, R., Nweke, F., Sadaphal, D. P., Sadaphal, P. M., Hadavi, S., Fujii, S. Ozaki, Y., Tierney, A., Pfordresher, P. Q., McBride, J., Benetos, E., Proutskova, P., Chiba, G., Liu, F., Jacoby, N., Purdy, S. C., Opondo, P., Fitch, W. T., Hegde, S., Rocamora, M., Thorne, R., Nweke, F., Sadaphal, D. P., Sadaphal, P. M., Hadavi, S., Fujii, S., Choo, S., Naruse, M., Ehara, U., Sy, L., Lenini Parselelo, M., Anglada-Tort, M., Hansen, N. C., Haiduk, F., Færøvik, U., Magalhães, V., Krzyżanowski, W., Shcherbakova, O., Hereld, D., Barbosa, B. S., Correa Varella, M. A., Van Tongeren, M., Dessiatnitchenko, P., Zar Zar, S., El Kahla, I., Muslu, O., Troy, J., Lomsadze, T., Kurdova, D., Tsope, C., Fredriksson, D., Arabadjiev, A., Sarbah, J. P., Arhine, A., Ó Meachair, T., Silva-Zurita, J., Soto-Silva, I., Muñoz Millalonco, N. E., Ambrazevičius, R., Loui, P., Ravignani, A., Jadoul, Y., Larrouy-Maestri, P., Bruder, C., Teyxokawa, T. P., Kuikuro, U., Natsitsabui, R., Sagarzazu, N. B., Raviv, L., Zeng, M., Varnosfaderani, S. D., Gómez-Cañón, J. S., Kolff, K., Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden, C., Chhatwal, M., David, R. M., Putu Gede Setiawan, I., Lekakul, G., Borsan, V. N., Nguqu, N., & Savage, P. E. (2024). Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower, higher, and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report. Science Advances, 10(20): eadm9797. doi:10.1126/sciadv.adm9797.

    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.

    Additional information

    supplementary materials
  • Ozker, M., Yu, L., Dugan, P., Doyle, W., Friedman, D., Devinsky, O., & Flinker, A. (2024). Speech-induced suppression and vocal feedback sensitivity in human cortex. eLife, 13: RP94198. doi:10.7554/eLife.94198.1.

    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.
  • Pacella, V., Nozais, V., Talozzi, L., Abdallah, M., Wassermann, D., Forkel, S. J., & Thiebaut de Schotten, M. (2024). The morphospace of the brain-cognition organisation. Nature Communications, 15: 8452. doi:10.1038/s41467-024-52186-9.

    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.

    Additional information

    supplementary material
  • Papoutsi*, C., Zimianiti*, E., Bosker, H. R., & Frost, R. L. A. (2024). Statistical learning at a virtual cocktail party. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31, 849-861. doi:10.3758/s13423-023-02384-1.

    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.

    Additional information

    supplementary file
  • Peirolo, M., Meyer, A. S., & Frances, C. (2024). Investigating the causes of prosodic marking in self-repairs: An automatic process? In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 1080-1084). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-218.

    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.
  • Pereira Soares, S. M., Prystauka, Y., DeLuca, V., Poch Pérez Botija, C., & Rothman, J. (2024). Brain correlates of attentional load processing reflect degree of bilingual engagement: Evidence from EEG. NeuroImage, 298: 120786. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2024.120786.

    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.

    Additional information

    scripts and data
  • Perugini, A., Fontanillas, P., Gordon, S. D., Fisher, S. E., Martin, N. G., Bates, T. C., & Luciano, M. (2024). Dyslexia polygenic scores show heightened prediction of verbal working memory and arithmetic. Scientific Studies of Reading, 28(5), 549-563. doi:10.1080/10888438.2024.2365697.

    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.

    Additional information

    supplementary materials
  • Picciulin, M., Bolgan, M., & Burchardt, L. (2024). Rhythmic properties of Sciaena umbra calls across space and time in the Mediterranean Sea. PLOS ONE, 19(2): e0295589. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295589.

    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.
  • Di Pisa, G., Pereira Soares, S. M., Rothman, J., & Marinis, T. (2024). Being a heritage speaker matters: the role of markedness in subject-verb person agreement in Italian. Frontiers in Psychology, 15: 1321614. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1321614.

    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.

    Additional information

    di_pisa_etal_2024_sup.DOCX
  • Pizarro-Guevara, J. S., & Garcia, R. (2024). Philippine Psycholinguistics. Annual Review of Linguistics, 10, 145-167. doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031522-102844.

    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.
  • Plate, L., Fisher, V. J., Nabibaks, F., & Feenstra, M. (2024). Feeling the traces of the Dutch colonial past: Dance as an affective methodology in Farida Nabibaks’s radiant shadow. In E. Van Bijnen, P. Brandon, K. Fatah-Black, I. Limon, W. Modest, & M. Schavemaker (Eds.), The future of the Dutch colonial past: From dialogues to new narratives (pp. 126-139). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
  • Quaresima, A. (2024). A Bridge not too far: Neurobiological causal models of word recognition. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Rasenberg, M., & Dingemanse, M. (2024). Drifting in a sea of semiosis. Current Anthropology, 65(3), 14-15.

    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.
  • Rasing, N. B., Van de Geest-Buit, W., Chan, O. Y. A., Mul, K., Lanser, A., Erasmus, C. E., Groothuis, J. T., Holler, J., Ingels, K. J. A. O., Post, B., Siemann, I., & Voermans, N. C. (2024). Psychosocial functioning in patients with altered facial expression: A scoping review in five neurological diseases. Disability and Rehabilitation, 46(17), 3772-3791. doi:10.1080/09638288.2023.2259310.

    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.
  • de Reus, K., Benítez-Burraco, A., Hersh, T. A., Groot, N., Lambert, M. L., Slocombe, K. E., Vernes, S. C., & Raviv, L. (2024). Self-domestication traits in vocal learning mammals. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 105-108). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Rivera-Olvera, A., Houwing, D. J., Ellegood, J., Masifi, S., Martina, S., Silberfeld, A., Pourquie, O., Lerch, J. P., Francks, C., Homberg, J. R., Van Heukelum, S., & Grandjean, J. (2024). The universe is asymmetric, the mouse brain too. Molecular Psychiatry. Advance online publication, 2023.09.01.555907. doi:10.1038/s41380-024-02687-2.

    Abstract

    Hemispheric brain asymmetry is a basic organizational principle of the human brain and has been implicated in various psychiatric conditions, including autism spectrum disorder. Brain asymmetry is not a uniquely human feature and is observed in other species such as the mouse. Yet, asymmetry patterns are generally nuanced, and substantial sample sizes are required to detect these patterns. In this pre-registered study, we use a mouse dataset from the Province of Ontario Neurodevelopmental Network, which comprises structural MRI data from over 2000 mice, including genetic models for autism spectrum disorder, to reveal the scope and magnitude of hemispheric asymmetry in the mouse. Our findings demonstrate the presence of robust hemispheric asymmetry in the mouse brain, such as larger right hemispheric volumes towards the anterior pole and larger left hemispheric volumes toward the posterior pole, opposite to what has been shown in humans. This suggests the existence of species-specific traits. Further clustering analysis identified distinct asymmetry patterns in autism spectrum disorder models, a phenomenon that is also seen in atypically developing participants. Our study shows potential for the use of mouse models in studying the biological bases of typical and atypical brain asymmetry but also warrants caution as asymmetry patterns seem to differ between humans and mice.

    Additional information

    tables link to preprint on BioRxiv
  • Rohrer, P. L., Bujok, R., Van Maastricht, L., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). The timing of beat gestures affects lexical stress perception in Spanish. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (Eds.), Proceedings Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 702-706). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-142.

    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.
  • Rohrer, P. L., Hong, Y., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). Gestures time to vowel onset and change the acoustics of the word in Mandarin. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 866-870). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-175.

    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.
  • Ronderos, C. R., Zhang, Y., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). Weighted parameters in demonstrative use: The case of Spanish teens and adults. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 3279-3286).
  • Roos, N. M., Chauvet, J., & Piai, V. (2024). The Concise Language Paradigm (CLaP), a framework for studying the intersection of comprehension and production: Electrophysiological properties. Brain Structure and Function. Advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s00429-024-02801-8.

    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.
  • Rowland, C. F., Bidgood, A., Jones, G., Jessop, A., Stinson, P., Pine, J. M., Durrant, S., & Peter, M. S. (2024). Simulating the relationship between nonword repetition performance and vocabulary growth in 2-Year-olds: Evidence from the language 0–5 project. Language Learning. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/lang.12671.

    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.

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  • Rubianes, M., Drijvers, L., Muñoz, F., Jiménez-Ortega, L., Almeida-Rivera, T., Sánchez-García, J., Fondevila, S., Casado, P., & Martín-Loeches, M. (2024). The self-reference effect can modulate language syntactic processing even without explicit awareness: An electroencephalography study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(3), 460-474. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_02104.

    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.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P. (2024). Cultural evolutionary pragmatics: Investigating the codevelopment and coevolution of language and social cognition. Psychological Review, 131(1), 18-35. doi:10.1037/rev0000423.

    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.
  • Rubio-Fernandez, P., Long, M., Shukla, V., Bhatia, V., Mahapatra, A., Ralekar, C., Ben-Ami, S., & Sinha, P. (2024). Multimodal communication in newly sighted children: An investigation of the relation between visual experience and pragmatic development. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 2560-2567).

    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.

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  • Sánchez-de la Vega, G., Gasca-Pineda, J., Martínez-Cárdenas, A., Vernes, S. C., Teeling, E. C., Mai, M., Aguirre-Planter, E., Eguiarte, L. E., Phillips, C. D., & Ortega, J. (2024). The genome sequence of the endemic Mexican common mustached Bat, Pteronotus mexicanus. Miller, 1902 [Mormoopidae; Pteronotus]. Gene, 929: 148821. doi:10.1016/j.gene.2024.148821.

    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.

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  • Sander, J., Çetinçelik, M., Zhang, Y., Rowland, C. F., & Harmon, Z. (2024). Why does joint attention predict vocabulary acquisition? The answer depends on what coding scheme you use. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 1607-1613).

    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.
  • Schijven, D., Soheili-Nezhad, S., Fisher, S. E., & Francks, C. (2024). Exome-wide analysis implicates rare protein-altering variants in human handedness. Nature Communications, 15: 2632. doi:10.1038/s41467-024-46277-w.

    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.
  • Schreiner, M. S., Zettersten, M., Bergmann, C., Frank, M. C., Fritzsche, T., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hamlin, K., Kartushina, N., Kellier, D. J., Mani, N., Mayor, J., Saffran, J., Shukla, M., Silverstein, P., Soderstrom, M., & Lippold, M. (2024). Limited evidence of test-retest reliability in infant-directed speech preference in a large pre-registered infant experiment. Developmental Science. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/desc.13551.

    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.

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