Displaying 101 - 200 of 574
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Cutler, A. (1980). Syllable omission errors and isochrony. In H. W. Dechet, & M. Raupach (
Eds. ), Temporal variables in speech: studies in honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler (pp. 183-190). The Hague: Mouton. -
Cutler, A. (1994). The perception of rhythm in language. Cognition, 50, 79-81. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(94)90021-3.
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Cutler, A., & Isard, S. D. (1980). The production of prosody. In B. Butterworth (
Ed. ), Language production (pp. 245-269). London: Academic Press. -
Cutler, A., & Fay, D. (1975). You have a Dictionary in your Head, not a Thesaurus. Texas Linguistic Forum, 1, 27-40.
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D'Avis, F.-J., & Gretsch, P. (1994). Variations on "Variation": On the Acquisition of Complementizers in German. In R. Tracy, & E. Lattey (
Eds. ), How Tolerant is Universal Grammar? (pp. 59-109). Tübingen, Germany: Max-Niemeyer-Verlag.Files private
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Dietrich, W., & Drude, S. (2015). Variation in Tupi languages: Genealogy, language change, and typology: Introduction. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi:Ciencias Humanas, 10, 213-215. doi:10.1590/1981-81222015000200002.
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Dimitrova, D. V., Stowe, L. A., & Hoeks, J. C. (2015). When correction turns positive: Processing corrective prosody in Dutch. PLoS One, 10(5): e0126299. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0126299.
Abstract
Current research on spoken language does not provide a consistent picture as to whether prosody, the melody and rhythm of speech, conveys a specific meaning. Perception studies show that English listeners assign meaning to prosodic patterns, and, for instance, associate some accents with contrast, whereas Dutch listeners behave more controversially. In two ERP studies we tested how Dutch listeners process words carrying two types of accents, which either provided new information (new information accents) or corrected information (corrective accents), both in single sentences (experiment 1) and after corrective and new information questions (experiment 2). In both experiments corrective accents elicited a sustained positivity as compared to new information accents, which started earlier in context than in single sentences. The positivity was not modulated by the nature of the preceding question, suggesting that the underlying neural mechanism likely reflects the construction of an interpretation to the accented word, either by identifying an alternative in context or by inferring it when no context is present. Our experimental results provide strong evidence for inferential processes related to prosodic contours in Dutch -
Dimroth, C. (1998). Indiquer la portée en allemand L2: Une étude longitudinale de l'acquisition des particules de portée. AILE (Acquisition et Interaction en Langue étrangère), 11, 11-34.
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Dingemanse, M., & Enfield, N. J. (2015). Ungeschriebene Gesetze. Gehirn und Geist, 8, 34-39.
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Dingemanse, M., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2015). Boekoeboekoe is mollig: Taal als samenspel van de zintuigen. Onze Taal, (12), 344-345.
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Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D. E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(10), 603-615. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2015.07.013.
Abstract
The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested form to meaning correspondences in the world’s languages. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Experimental evidence suggests these form to meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development and communication: systematicity facilities category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. Processes of cultural evolution help explain how these competing motivations shape vocabulary structure. -
Dingemanse, M. (2015). Folk definitions in linguistic fieldwork. In J. Essegbey, B. Henderson, & F. Mc Laughlin (
Eds. ), Language documentation and endangerment in Africa (pp. 215-238). Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/clu.17.09din.Abstract
Informal paraphrases by native speaker consultants are crucial tools in linguistic fieldwork. When recorded, archived, and analysed, they offer rich data that can be mined for many purposes, from lexicography to semantic typology and from ethnography to the investigation of gesture and speech. This paper describes a procedure for the collection and analysis of folk definitions that are native (in the language under study rather than the language of analysis), informal (spoken rather than written), and multi-modal (preserving the integrity of gesture-speech composite utterances). The value of folk definitions is demonstrated using the case of ideophones, words that are notoriously hard to study using traditional elicitation methods. Three explanatory strategies used in a set of folk definitions of ideophones are examined: the offering of everyday contexts of use, the use of depictive gestures, and the use of sense relations as semantic anchoring points. Folk definitions help elucidate word meanings that are hard to capture, bring to light cultural background knowledge that often remains implicit, and take seriously the crucial involvement of native speaker consultants in linguistic fieldwork. They provide useful data for language documentation and are an essential element of any toolkit for linguistic and ethnographic field research. -
Dingemanse, M. (2015). Ideophones and Reduplication: Depiction, Description, and the Interpretation of Repeated Talk in Discourse. Studies in Language, 39(4), 946-970. doi:10.1075/sl.39.4.05din.
Abstract
Repetition is one of the most basic operations on talk, often discussed for its iconic meanings. Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery, often identified by their reduplicated forms. Yet not all reduplication is iconic, and not all ideophones are reduplicated. This paper discusses the semantics and pragmatics of repeated talk (repetition as well as reduplication), with special focus on the intersection of reduplicative processes and ideophonic words. Various formal features of ideophones suggest that it is fruitful to distinguish two modes of representation in language —description and depiction— along with cues like prosodic foregrounding that can steer listeners’ interpretation from one to the other. What is special about reduplication is that it can naturally partake in both of these modes of representation, which is why it is so common in ideophones as well as in other areas of grammar. Using evidence from Siwu, Korean, Semai and a range of other languages, this paper shows how the study of ideophones sheds light on the interpretation of repeated talk and can lead to a more holistic understanding of reduplicative phenomena in language. -
Dingemanse, M., & Enfield, N. J. (2015). Other-initiated repair across languages: Towards a typology of conversational structures. Open Linguistics, 1, 98-118. doi:10.2478/opli-2014-0007.
Abstract
This special issue reports on a cross-linguistic study of other-initiated repair, a domain at the crossroads of language, mind, and social life. Other-initiated repair is part of a system of practices that people use to deal with problems of speaking, hearing and understanding. The contributions in this special issue describe the linguistic resources and interactional practices associated with other-initiated repair in ten different languages. Here we provide an overview of the research methods and the conceptual framework. The empirical base for the project consists of corpora of naturally occurring conversations, collected in fieldsites around the world. Methodologically, we combine qualitative analysis with a comparative-typological perspective, and we formulate principles for the cross-linguistic comparison of conversational structures. A key move, of broad relevance to pragmatic typology, is the recognition that formats for repair initiation form paradigm-like systems that are ultimately language-specific, and that comparison is best done at the level of the constitutive properties of these formats. These properties can be functional (concerning aspects of linguistic formatting) as well as sequential (concerning aspects of the interactional environment). We show how functional and sequential aspects of conversational structure can capture patterns of commonality and diversity in conversational structures within and across languages -
Dingemanse, M. (2015). Other-initiated repair in Siwu. Open Linguistics, 1, 232-255. doi:10.1515/opli-2015-0001.
Abstract
This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with other-initiated repair in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in eastern Ghana. Other-initiated repair is the set of techniques used by people to deal with problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. Formats for repair initiation in Siwu exploit language-specific resources like question words and noun class morphology. At the same time, the basic structure of the system bears a strong similarity other-initiated repair in other languages. Practices described for Siwu thus are potentially of broader relevance to the study of other-initiated repair. This article documents how different prosodic realisations of repair initiators may index social actions and features of the speech event; how two distinct roles of repetition in repair initiators are kept apart by features of turn design; and what kinds of items can be treated as ‘dispensable’ in resayings. By charting how other-initiated repair uses local linguistic resources and yet is shaped by interactional needs that transcend particular languages, this study contributes to the growing field of pragmatic typology: the study of systems of language use and the principles that shape them -
Dingemanse, M., Roberts, S. G., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Drew, P., Floyd, S., Gisladottir, R. S., Kendrick, K. H., Levinson, S. C., Manrique, E., Rossi, G., & Enfield, N. J. (2015). Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems. PLoS One, 10(9): e0136100. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0136100.
Abstract
There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of ‘other-initiated repair’, where the recipient of an unclear message can signal trouble and the sender can repair the original message. We find that this system is frequently used (on average about once per 1.4 minutes in any language), and that it has detailed common properties, contrary to assumptions of radical cultural variation. Unrelated languages share the same three functionally distinct types of repair initiator for signalling problems and use them in the same kinds of contexts. People prefer to choose the type that is the most specific possible, a principle that minimizes cost both for the sender being asked to fix the problem and for the dyad as a social unit. Disruption to the conversation is kept to a minimum, with the two-utterance repair sequence being on average no longer that the single utterance which is being fixed. The findings, controlled for historical relationships, situation types and other dependencies, reveal the fundamentally cooperative nature of human communication and offer support for the pragmatic universals hypothesis: while languages may vary in the organization of grammar and meaning, key systems of language use may be largely similar across cultural groups. They also provide a fresh perspective on controversies about the core properties of language, by revealing a common infrastructure for social interaction which may be the universal bedrock upon which linguistic diversity rests.
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Dittmar, N., Reich, A., Skiba, R., Schumacher, M., & Terborg, H. (1990). Die Erlernung modaler Konzepte des Deutschen durch erwachsene polnische Migranten: Eine empirische Längsschnittstudie. Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache: Info DaF, 17(2), 125-172.
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Dittmar, N., & Klein, W. (1975). Untersuchungen zum Pidgin-Deutsch spanischer und italienischer Arbeiter in der Bundesrepublik: Ein Arbeitsbericht. In A. Wierlacher (
Ed. ), Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache (pp. 170-194). Heidelberg: Groos. -
Duarri, A., Meng-Chin, A. L., Fokkens, M. R., Meijer, M., Smeets, C. J. L. M., Nibbeling, E. A. R., Boddeke, E., Sinke, R. J., Kampinga, H. H., Papazian, D. M., & Verbeek, D. S. (2015). Spinocerebellar ataxia type 19/22 mutations alter heterocomplex Kv4.3 channel function and gating in a dominant manner. Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, 72(17), 3387-3399. doi:10.1007/s00018-015-1894-2.
Abstract
The dominantly inherited cerebellar ataxias are a heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders caused by Purkinje cell loss in the cerebellum. Recently, we identified loss-of-function mutations in the KCND3 gene as the cause of spinocerebellar ataxia type 19/22 (SCA19/22), revealing a previously unknown role for the voltage-gated potassium channel, Kv4.3, in Purkinje cell survival. However, how mutant Kv4.3 affects wild-type Kv4.3 channel functioning remains unknown. We provide evidence that SCA19/22-mutant Kv4.3 exerts a dominant negative effect on the trafficking and surface expression of wild-type Kv4.3 in the absence of its regulatory subunit, KChIP2. Notably, this dominant negative effect can be rescued by the presence of KChIP2. We also found that all SCA19/22-mutant subunits either suppress wild-type Kv4.3 current amplitude or alter channel gating in a dominant manner. Our findings suggest that altered Kv4.3 channel localization and/or functioning resulting from SCA19/22 mutations may lead to Purkinje cell loss, neurodegeneration and ataxia. -
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., Senft, B., & Senft, G. (1998). Trobriander (Ost-Neuguinea, Trobriand Inseln, Kaile'una) Fadenspiele 'ninikula'. In Ethnologie - Humanethologische Begleitpublikationen von I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt und Mitarbeitern. Sammelband I, 1985-1987. Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film.
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Eisenbeiß, S., Bartke, S., Weyerts, H., & Clahsen, H. (1994). Elizitationsverfahren in der Spracherwerbsforschung: Nominalphrasen, Kasus, Plural, Partizipien. Theorie des Lexikons, 57.
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Enfield, N. J. (2015). Linguistic relativity from reference to agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 44, 207-224. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014053.
Abstract
How are language, thought, and reality related? Interdisciplinary research on this question over the past two decades has made significant progress. Most of the work has been Neo-Whorfian in two senses: One, it has been driven by research questions that were articulated most explicitly and most famously by the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, and two, it has limited the scope of inquiry to Whorf's narrow interpretations of the key terms “language,” “thought,” and “reality.” This article first reviews some of the ideas and results of Neo-Whorfian work, concentrating on the special role of linguistic categorization in heuristic decision making. It then considers new and potential directions in work on linguistic relativity, taken broadly to mean the ways in which the perspective offered by a given language can affect thought (or mind) and reality. New lines of work must reconsider the idea of linguistic relativity by exploring the range of available interpretations of the key terms: in particular, “language” beyond reference, “thought” beyond nonsocial processing, and “reality” beyond brute, nonsocial facts. -
Enfield, N. J. (2015). Other-initiated repair in Lao. Open linguistics, 1(1), 119-144. doi:10.2478/opli-2014-0006.
Abstract
This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Lao language (a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia). The article reports findings specific to the Lao language from the comparative project that is the topic of this special issue. While the scope is general to the overall pattern of other-initiated repair as a set of practices and a system of semiotic resources, special attention is given to (1) the range of repair operations that are elicited by open other-initiators of repair in Lao, especially the subtle changes made when problem turns are repeated, and (2) the use of phrase-final particles—a characteristic feature of Lao grammar—in the marking of both other-initiations of repair and repair solution turns -
Erard, M. (2015). What's in a name? Science, 347(6225), 941-943. doi:10.1126/science.347.6225.941.
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Ernestus, M., & Cutler, A. (2015). BALDEY: A database of auditory lexical decisions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68, 1469-1488. doi:10.1080/17470218.2014.984730.
Abstract
In an auditory lexical decision experiment, 5,541 spoken content words and pseudo-words were presented to 20 native speakers of Dutch. The words vary in phonological makeup and in number of syllables and stress pattern, and are further representative of the native Dutch vocabulary in that most are morphologically complex, comprising two stems or one stem plus derivational and inflectional suffixes, with inflections representing both regular and irregular paradigms; the pseudo-words were matched in these respects to the real words. The BALDEY data file includes response times and accuracy rates, with for each item morphological information plus phonological and acoustic information derived from automatic phonemic segmentation of the stimuli. Two initial analyses illustrate how this data set can be used. First, we discuss several measures of the point at which a word has no further neighbors, and compare the degree to which each measure predicts our lexical decision response outcomes. Second, we investigate how well four different measures of frequency of occurrence (from written corpora, spoken corpora, subtitles and frequency ratings by 70 participants) predict the same outcomes. These analyses motivate general conclusions about the auditory lexical decision task. The (publicly available) BALDEY database lends itself to many further analyses. -
Ernestus, M., & Giezenaar, G. (2015). Een goed verstaander heeft maar een half woord nodig. In B. Bossers (
Ed. ), Klassiek vakwerk II: Achtergronden van het NT2-onderwijs (pp. 143-155). Amsterdam: Boom. -
Ernestus, M., Hanique, I., & Verboom, E. (2015). The effect of speech situation on the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants. Journal of Phonetics, 48, 60-75. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2014.08.001.
Abstract
This article presents two studies investigating how the situation in which speech is uttered affects the frequency with which words are reduced. Study 1 is based on the Spoken Dutch Corpus, which consists of 15 components, nearly all representing a different speech situation. This study shows that the components differ in how often ten semantically weak words are highly reduced. The differences are especially large between the components with scripted and unscripted speech. Within the component group of unscripted speech, the formality of the situation shows an effect. Study 2 investigated segment reduction in a shadowing experiment in which participants repeated Dutch carefully and casually articulated sentences. Prefixal schwa and suffixal /t/ were absent in participants' responses to both sentences types as often as in formal interviews. If a segment was absent, this appeared to be mostly due to extreme co-articulation, unlike in speech produced in less formal situations. Speakers thus adapted more to the formal situation of the experiment than to the stimuli to be shadowed. We conclude that speech situation affects the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants, which should be accounted for by psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension -
Everett, C., Blasi, D. E., & Roberts, S. G. (2015). Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112, 1322-1327. doi:10.1073/pnas.1417413112.
Abstract
We summarize a number of findings in laryngology demonstrating that perturbations of phonation, including increased jitter and shimmer, are associated with desiccated ambient air. We predict that, given the relative imprecision of vocal fold vibration in desiccated versus humid contexts, arid and cold ecologies should be less amenable, when contrasted to warm and humid ecologies, to the development of languages with phonemic tone, especially complex tone. This prediction is supported by data from two large independently coded databases representing 3,700+ languages. Languages with complex tonality have generally not developed in very cold or otherwise desiccated climates, in accordance with the physiologically based predictions. The predicted global geographic–linguistic association is shown to operate within continents, within major language families, and across language isolates. Our results offer evidence that human sound systems are influenced by environmental factors.Additional information
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/14/1417413112/suppl/DCSupplemental -
Fawcett, C., & Liszkowski, U. (2015). Social referencing during infancy and early childhood across cultures. In J. D. Wright (
Ed. ), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (2nd ed., pp. 556-562). doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.23169-3. -
Filippi, P. (2015). Before Babel: The Evolutionary Roots of Human Language. In E. Velmezova, K. Kull, & S. J. Cowley (
Eds. ), Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics (pp. 191-204). Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20663-9_10.Abstract
The aim of the present work is to identify the evolutionary origins of the ability to speak and understand a natural language. I will adopt Botha’s “Windows Approach” (Language and Communication, 2006, 26, pp. 129–143) in order to justify the following two assumptions, which concern the evolutionary continuity between human language and animals’ communication systems: (a) despite the uniqueness of human language in sharing and conveying utterances with an open-ended structure, some isolated components of our linguistic competence are shared with non- human primates, grounding a line of evolutionary continuity; (b) the very first “linguistic” utterances were holistic, that is, whole bunches of sounds able to convey information despite their lack of modern syntax. I will address such suppositions through the comparative analysis of three constitutive features of human language: syntax, the semantic value of utterances, and the ability to attribute mental states to conspecifics, i.e. the theory of mind. -
Fisher, S. E., & Vernes, S. C. (2015). Genetics and the Language Sciences. Annual Review of Linguistics, 1, 289-310. doi:10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-125024.
Abstract
Theories addressing the biological basis of language must be built on
an appreciation of the ways that molecular and neurobiological substrates
can contribute to aspects of human cognition. Here, we lay out
the principles by which a genome could potentially encode the necessary
information to produce a language-ready brain. We describe
what genes are; how they are regulated; and how they affect the formation,
function, and plasticity of neuronal circuits. At each step,
we give examples of molecules implicated in pathways that are important
for speech and language. Finally, we discuss technological advances
in genomics that are revealing considerable genotypic variation in
the human population, from rare mutations to common polymorphisms,
with the potential to relate this variation to natural variability
in speech and language skills. Moving forward, an interdisciplinary
approach to the language sciences, integrating genetics, neurobiology,
psychology, and linguistics, will be essential for a complete understanding
of our unique human capacities. -
Fisher, S. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K. E., Monaco, A. P., & Pembrey, M. E. (1998). Localisation of a gene implicated in a severe speech and language disorder. Nature Genetics, 18, 168 -170. doi:10.1038/ng0298-168.
Abstract
Between 2 and 5% of children who are otherwise unimpaired have significant difficulties in acquiring expressive and/or receptive language, despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. While twin studies indicate a significant role for genetic factors in developmental disorders of speech and language, the majority of families segregating such disorders show complex patterns of inheritance, and are thus not amenable for conventional linkage analysis. A rare exception is the KE family, a large three-generation pedigree in which approximately half of the members are affected with a severe speech and language disorder which appears to be transmitted as an autosomal dominant monogenic trait. This family has been widely publicised as suffering primarily from a defect in the use of grammatical suffixation rules, thus supposedly supporting the existence of genes specific to grammar. The phenotype, however, is broader in nature, with virtually every aspect of grammar and of language affected. In addition, affected members have a severe orofacial dyspraxia, and their speech is largely incomprehensible to the naive listener. We initiated a genome-wide search for linkage in the KE family and have identified a region on chromosome 7 which co-segregates with the speech and language disorder (maximum lod score = 6.62 at theta = 0.0), confirming autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance. Further analysis of microsatellites from within the region enabled us to fine map the locus responsible (designated SPCH1) to a 5.6-cM interval in 7q31, thus providing an important step towards its identification. Isolation of SPCH1 may offer the first insight into the molecular genetics of the developmental process that culminates in speech and language. -
Fisher, S. E., Black, G. C. M., Lloyd, S. E., Wrong, O. M., Thakker, R. V., & Craig, I. W. (1994). Isolation and partial characterization of a chloride channel gene which is expressed in kidney and is a candidate for Dent's disease (an X-linked hereditary nephrolithiasis). Human Molecular Genetics, 3, 2053-2059.
Abstract
Dent's disease, an X-linked renal tubular disorder, is a form of Fanconi syndrome which is characterized by proteinuria, hypercalciuria, nephrocalcinosis, kidney stones and renal failure. Previous studies localised the gene responsible to Xp11.22, within a microdeletion involving the hypervariable locus DXS255. Further analysis using new probes which flank this locus indicate that the deletion is less than 515 kb. A 185 kb YAC containing DXS255 was used to screen a cDNA library from adult kidney in order to isolate coding sequences falling within the deleted region which may be implicated in the disease aetiology. We identified two clones which are evolutionarily conserved, and detect a 9.5 kb transcript which is expressed predominantly in the kidney. Sequence analysis of 780 bp of ORF from the clones suggests that the identified gene, termed hCIC-K2, encodes a new member of the CIC family of voltage-gated chloride channels. Genomic fragments detected by the cDNA clones are completely absent in patients who have an associated microdeletion. On the basis of the expression pattern, proposed function and deletion mapping, hCIC-K2 is a strong candidate for Dent's disease. -
Fisher, S. E. (2015). Translating the genome in human neuroscience. In G. Marcus, & J. Freeman (
Eds. ), The future of the brain: Essays by the world's leading neuroscientists (pp. 149-159). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. -
Flecken, M., Carroll, M., Weimar, K., & Von Stutterheim, C. (2015). Driving along the road or heading for the village? Conceptual differences underlying motion event encoding in French, German, and French-German L2 users. Modern Language Journal, 99(S1), 100-122. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2015.12181.x.
Abstract
The typological contrast between verb- and satellite-framed languages (Talmy, 1985) has set the basis for many empirical studies on L2 acquisition. The current analysis goes beyond this typology by looking in detail at the conceptualization of the path of motion in a motion event. We take as a starting point the cognitive salience of specific elements of motion events that are relevant when conceptualizing space. When expressing direction in French, specific spatial relations involving the entity in motion (its alignment and its distance toward a [potential] endpoint) are relevant, given a variety of path verbs in the lexicon expressing this information (e.g., se diriger vers, avancer to direct oneself toward,' to advance'). This is not the case in German (manner verbs in the lexicon mainly). In German, spatial information is packaged in adjuncts and particles and the path of motion is typically structured via features of the ground (entlanglaufen/fahren to walk/drive along') or endpoints (to walk/drive to/toward'). We investigate those fundamental differences in spatial conceptualization in French and German, as reflected in pre-articulatory patterns of attention allocation (measured with eye tracking) to moving entities and endpoints in motion scenes in an event description task. Our focus is on spatial conceptualization in an L2 (French L2 users of German), analyzing the extent to which these L2 users display target-like patterns or traces of L1 conceptualization transfer. Findings show that, in line with directional concepts expressed in verbs, L1 French speakers allocate more attention to entities in motion and endpoints, before utterance onset, than L1 German speakers do. The L2 German speakers pattern with L1 German speakers in the use of manner verbs, but they have not fully acquired the spatial concepts and means that structure the path of motion in the L2. This is reflected in pre-articulatory attention allocation patterns, according to which the L2 speakers pattern with native speakers of their L1 (French). The findings show a continued deep entrenchment of L1-based processing patterns and spatial frames of reference when speakers prepare for speech in an L2 -
Flecken, M., Gerwien, J., Carroll, M., & von Stutterheim, C. (2015). Analyzing gaze allocation during language planning: A cross-linguistic study on dynamic events. Language and Cognition, 7(1), 138-166. doi:10.1017/langcog.2014.20.
Abstract
Studies on gaze allocation during sentence production have recently begun to implement cross-linguistic analyses in the investigation of visual and linguistic processing. The underlying assumption is that the aspects of a scene that attract attention prior to articulation are, in part, linked to the specifi c linguistic system and means used for expression. The present study concerns naturalistic, dynamic scenes (video clips) showing causative events (agent acting on an object) and exploits grammatical diff erences in the domain of verbal aspect, and the way in which the status of an event (a specifi c vs. habitual instance of an event) is encoded in English and German. Fixations in agent and action areas of interest were timelocked to utterance onset, and we focused on the pre-articulatory time span to shed light on sentence planning processes, involving message generation and scene conceptualization. -
Flecken, M., Walbert, K., & Dijkstra, T. (2015). ‘Right now, Sophie ∗swims in the pool?!’: Brain potentials of grammatical aspect processing. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 1764. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01764.
Abstract
We investigated whether brain potentials of grammatical aspect processing resemble semantic or morpho-syntactic processing, or whether they instead are characterized by an entirely distinct pattern in the same individuals. We studied aspect from the perspective of agreement between the temporal information in the context (temporal adverbials, e.g., Right now) and a morpho-syntactic marker of grammatical aspect (e.g., progressive is swimming). Participants read questions providing a temporal context that was progressive (What is Sophie doing in the pool right now?) or habitual (What does Sophie do in the pool every Monday?). Following a lead-in sentence context such as Right now, Sophie…, we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) time-locked to verb phrases in four different conditions, e.g., (a) is swimming (control); (b) ∗is cooking (semantic violation); (c) ∗are swimming (morpho-syntactic violation); or (d)?swims (aspect mismatch); …in the pool.” The collected ERPs show typical N400 and P600 effects for semantics and morpho-syntax, while aspect processing elicited an Early Negativity (250–350 ms). The aspect-related Negativity was short-lived and had a central scalp distribution with an anterior onset. This differentiates it not only from the semantic N400 effect, but also from the typical LAN (Left Anterior Negativity), that is frequently reported for various types of agreement processing. Moreover, aspect processing did not show a clear P600 modulation. We argue that the specific context for each item in this experiment provided a trigger for agreement checking with temporal information encoded on the verb, i.e., morphological aspect marking. The aspect-related Negativity obtained for aspect agreement mismatches reflects a violated expectation concerning verbal inflection (in the example above, the expected verb phrase was Sophie is X-ing rather than Sophie X-s in condition d). The absence of an additional P600 for aspect processing suggests that the mismatch did not require additional reintegration or processing costs. This is consistent with participants’ post hoc grammaticality judgements of the same sentences, which overall show a high acceptability of aspect mismatch sentences.Additional information
data sheet 1.docx -
Flecken, M., Athanasopoulos, P., Kuipers, J. R., & Thierry, G. (2015). On the road to somewhere: Brain potentials reflect language effects on motion event perception. Cognition, 141, 41-51. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.006.
Abstract
Recent studies have identified neural correlates of language effects on perception in static domains of experience such as colour and objects. The generalization of such effects to dynamic domains like motion events remains elusive. Here, we focus on grammatical differences between languages relevant for the description of motion events and their impact on visual scene perception. Two groups of native speakers of German or English were presented with animated videos featuring a dot travelling along a trajectory towards a geometrical shape (endpoint). English is a language with grammatical aspect in which attention is drawn to trajectory and endpoint of motion events equally. German, in contrast, is a non-aspect language which highlights endpoints. We tested the comparative perceptual saliency of trajectory and endpoint of motion events by presenting motion event animations (primes) followed by a picture symbolising the event (target): In 75% of trials, the animation was followed by a mismatching picture (both trajectory and endpoint were different); in 10% of trials, only the trajectory depicted in the picture matched the prime; in 10% of trials, only the endpoint matched the prime; and in 5% of trials both trajectory and endpoint were matching, which was the condition requiring a response from the participant. In Experiment 1 we recorded event-related brain potentials elicited by the picture in native speakers of German and native speakers of English. German participants exhibited a larger P3 wave in the endpoint match than the trajectory match condition, whereas English speakers showed no P3 amplitude difference between conditions. In Experiment 2 participants performed a behavioural motion matching task using the same stimuli as those used in Experiment 1. German and English participants did not differ in response times showing that motion event verbalisation cannot readily account for the difference in P3 amplitude found in the first experiment. We argue that, even in a non-verbal context, the grammatical properties of the native language and associated sentence-level patterns of event encoding influence motion event perception, such that attention is automatically drawn towards aspects highlighted by the grammar. -
Floyd, S. (2015). Other-initiated repair in Cha’palaa. Open linguistics, 1(1), 467-489. doi:10.1515/opli-2015-0014.
Abstract
This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Cha’palaa (a Barbacoan language spoken in north-western Ecuador). Special attention is given to the relation of repair formats to the morphosyntactic and intonational systems of the language. It examines the distinctive falling intonation observed with interjections and content question formats and the pattern of a held mid-high tone observed in polarity questions, as well as the function of Cha’palaa grammatical features such as the case marking system, the nominal classifiers and the verb classification system as formats for repair initiation. It considers a selection of examples from a video corpus to illustrate a broad range of sequence types of opened and restricted other-initiated repair, noting that Cha’palaa had the highest relative rate of open repair in the cross-linguistic sample. It also considers the extension of OIR to other practices such as news uptake and disagreement in the Cha’palaa corpus. -
Floyd, S. (2015). Transparência semântica e o ‘calque’ cultural no noroeste amazônico [Portuguese transl. of Semantic transparency and cultural calquing in the Northwest Amazon, 2013]. Wamon: Revista dos alunos do PpGas/UFAM, 1(1), 95-117. Retrieved from http://www.periodicos.ufam.edu.br/index.php/wamon/article/view/946.
Abstract
The ethnographic literature has described the northwest Amazon as an area of shared culture across linguistic groups. This paper illustrates how a principle of semantic transparency across languages is a key means of establishing elements of a common regional culture through practices like the calquing of ethnonyms and toponyms so that they are semantically, but not phonologically, equivalent across languages. It places the northwest Amazon in a general discussion of cross-linguistic naming practices in South America and considers the extent to which a preference for semantic transparency can be linked to cases of widespread cultural “calquing”. It also addresses the principle of semantic transparency beyond specific referential phrases and into larger discourse structures. It concludes that an attention to semiotic practices in multilingual settings can provide new and more complex ways of thinking about the idea of shared culture -
Forkel, S. J. (2015). Heinrich Sachs (1863–1928). Journal of Neurology, 262, 498-500. doi:10.1007/s00415-014-7517-2.
Abstract
The nineteenth century witnessed some of the greatest neuroanatomists of all times. Amongst them is the largely forgotten Heinrich Sachs, a student of Carl Wernicke in Breslau. -
Forkel, S. J., Mahmood, S., Vergani, F., & Catani, M. (2015). The white matter of the human cerebrum: Part I The occipital lobe by Heinrich Sachs. Cortex, 62, 182-202. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2014.10.023.
Abstract
This is the first complete translation of Heinrich Sachs' outstanding white matter atlas dedicated to the occipital lobe. This work is accompanied by a prologue by Prof Carl Wernicke who for many years was Sachs' mentor in Breslau and enthusiastically supported his work. -
Francken, J. C., Meijs, E. L., Ridderinkhof, O. M., Hagoort, P., de Lange, F. P., & van Gaal, S. (2015). Manipulating word awareness dissociates feed-forward from feedback models of language-perception interactions. Neuroscience of consciousness, 1. doi:10.1093/nc/niv003.
Abstract
Previous studies suggest that linguistic material can modulate visual perception, but it is unclear at which level of processing these interactions occur. Here we aim to dissociate between two competing models of language–perception interactions: a feed-forward and a feedback model. We capitalized on the fact that the models make different predictions on the role of feedback. We presented unmasked (aware) or masked (unaware) words implying motion (e.g. “rise,” “fall”), directly preceding an upward or downward visual motion stimulus. Crucially, masking leaves intact feed-forward information processing from low- to high-level regions, whereas it abolishes subsequent feedback. Under this condition, participants remained faster and more accurate when the direction implied by the motion word was congruent with the direction of the visual motion stimulus. This suggests that language–perception interactions are driven by the feed-forward convergence of linguistic and perceptual information at higher-level conceptual and decision stages. -
Francken, J. C., Meijs, E. L., Hagoort, P., van Gaal, S., & de Lange, F. P. (2015). Exploring the automaticity of language-perception interactions: Effects of attention and awareness. Scientific Reports, 5: 17725. doi:10.1038/srep17725.
Abstract
Previous studies have shown that language can modulate visual perception, by biasing and/
or enhancing perceptual performance. However, it is still debated where in the brain visual and
linguistic information are integrated, and whether the effects of language on perception are
automatic and persist even in the absence of awareness of the linguistic material. Here, we aimed
to explore the automaticity of language-perception interactions and the neural loci of these
interactions in an fMRI study. Participants engaged in a visual motion discrimination task (upward
or downward moving dots). Before each trial, a word prime was briefly presented that implied
upward or downward motion (e.g., “rise”, “fall”). These word primes strongly influenced behavior:
congruent motion words sped up reaction times and improved performance relative to incongruent
motion words. Neural congruency effects were only observed in the left middle temporal gyrus,
showing higher activity for congruent compared to incongruent conditions. This suggests that higherlevel
conceptual areas rather than sensory areas are the locus of language-perception interactions.
When motion words were rendered unaware by means of masking, they still affected visual motion
perception, suggesting that language-perception interactions may rely on automatic feed-forward
integration of perceptual and semantic material in language areas of the brain.Additional information
srep17725-s1.pdf http://www.nature.com/articles/srep17725#supplementary-information -
Francken, J. C., Kok, P., Hagoort, P., & De Lange, F. P. (2015). The behavioral and neural effects of language on motion perception. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27(1), 175-184. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00682.
Abstract
Perception does not function as an isolated module but is tightly linked with other cognitive functions. Several studies have demonstrated an influence of language on motion perception, but it remains debated at which level of processing this modulation takes place. Some studies argue for an interaction in perceptual areas, but it is also possible that the interaction is mediated by "language areas" that integrate linguistic and visual information. Here, we investigated whether language-perception interactions were specific to the language-dominant left hemisphere by comparing the effects of language on visual material presented in the right (RVF) and left visual fields (LVF). Furthermore, we determined the neural locus of the interaction using fMRI. Participants performed a visual motion detection task. On each trial, the visual motion stimulus was presented in either the LVF or in the RVF, preceded by a centrally presented word (e.g., "rise"). The word could be congruent, incongruent, or neutral with regard to the direction of the visual motion stimulus that was presented subsequently. Participants were faster and more accurate when the direction implied by the motion word was congruent with the direction of the visual motion stimulus. Interestingly, the speed benefit was present only for motion stimuli that were presented in the RVF. We observed a neural counterpart of the behavioral facilitation effects in the left middle temporal gyrus, an area involved in semantic processing of verbal material. Together, our results suggest that semantic information about motion retrieved in language regions may automatically modulate perceptual decisions about motion. -
Francks, C. (2015). Exploring human brain lateralization with molecular genetics and genomics. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1359, 1-13. doi:10.1111/nyas.12770.
Abstract
Lateralizations of brain structure and motor behavior have been observed in humans as early as the first trimester of gestation, and are likely to arise from asymmetrical genetic–developmental programs, as in other animals. Studies of gene expression levels in postmortem tissue samples, comparing the left and right sides of the human cerebral cortex, have generally not revealed striking transcriptional differences between the hemispheres. This is likely due to lateralization of gene expression being subtle and quantitative. However, a recent re-analysis and meta-analysis of gene expression data from the adult superior temporal and auditory cortex found lateralization of transcription of genes involved in synaptic transmission and neuronal electrophysiology. Meanwhile, human subcortical mid- and hindbrain structures have not been well studied in relation to lateralization of gene activity, despite being potentially important developmental origins of asymmetry. Genetic polymorphisms with small effects on adult brain and behavioral asymmetries are beginning to be identified through studies of large datasets, but the core genetic mechanisms of lateralized human brain development remain unknown. Identifying subtly lateralized genetic networks in the brain will lead to a new understanding of how neuronal circuits on the left and right are differently fine-tuned to preferentially support particular cognitive and behavioral functions. -
Franken, M. K., Hagoort, P., & Acheson, D. J. (2015). Modulations of the auditory M100 in an Imitation Task. Brain and Language, 142, 18-23. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2015.01.001.
Abstract
Models of speech production explain event-related suppression of the auditory cortical
response as reflecting a comparison between auditory predictions and feedback. The present MEG
study was designed to test two predictions from this framework: 1) whether the reduced auditory
response varies as a function of the mismatch between prediction and feedback; 2) whether individual
variation in this response is predictive of speech-motor adaptation.
Participants alternated between online imitation and listening tasks. In the imitation task, participants
began each trial producing the same vowel (/e/) and subsequently listened to and imitated auditorilypresented
vowels varying in acoustic distance from /e/.
Results replicated suppression, with a smaller M100 during speaking than listening. Although we did
not find unequivocal support for the first prediction, participants with less M100 suppression were
better at the imitation task. These results are consistent with the enhancement of M100 serving as an
error signal to drive subsequent speech-motor adaptation. -
Frazier, T., Embacher, R., Tilot, A. K., Koenig, K., Mester, J., & Eng, C. (2015). Molecular and phenotypic abnormalities in individuals with germline heterozygous PTEN mutations and autism. Molecular Psychiatry., 20, 1132-1138. doi:10.1038/mp.2014.125.
Abstract
PTEN is a tumor suppressor associated with an inherited cancer syndrome and an important regulator of ongoing neural connectivity and plasticity. The present study examined molecular and phenotypic characteristics of individuals with germline heterozygous PTEN mutations and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (PTEN-ASD), with the aim of identifying pathophysiologic markers that specifically associate with PTEN-ASD and that may serve as targets for future treatment trials. PTEN-ASD patients (n=17) were compared with idiopathic (non-PTEN) ASD patients with (macro-ASD, n=16) and without macrocephaly (normo-ASD, n=38) and healthy controls (n=14). Group differences were evaluated for PTEN pathway protein expression levels, global and regional structural brain volumes and cortical thickness measures, neurocognition and adaptive behavior. RNA expression patterns and brain characteristics of a murine model of Pten mislocalization were used to further evaluate abnormalities observed in human PTEN-ASD patients. PTEN-ASD had a high proportion of missense mutations and showed reduced PTEN protein levels. Compared with the other groups, prominent white-matter and cognitive abnormalities were specifically associated with PTEN-ASD patients, with strong reductions in processing speed and working memory. White-matter abnormalities mediated the relationship between PTEN protein reductions and reduced cognitive ability. The Ptenm3m4 murine model had differential expression of genes related to myelination and increased corpus callosum. Processing speed and working memory deficits and white-matter abnormalities may serve as useful features that signal clinicians that PTEN is etiologic and prompting referral to genetic professionals for gene testing, genetic counseling and cancer risk management; and could reveal treatment targets in trials of treatments for PTEN-ASD.Additional information
http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/mp2014125x1.doc -
Friederici, A., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1990). Spatial reference in weightlessness: Perceptual factors and mental representations. Perception and Psychophysics, 47, 253-266.
Abstract
The role of gravity in spatial coordinate assignment and the mental representation of space were studiedin three experiments, varying different perceptual cues systematically: the retinal, the visual background, the vestibular, and proprioceptive information. Verbal descriptions of visually presented arrays were required under different head positions (straight/tilt) and under different gravitational conditions (gravity present/gravity absent). The results of two experiments conducted with 2 subjects who participated in a space flight revealed that subjects are able to adequately assign positions in space in the absence of gravitational information, and that they do this by using their head—retinal coordinates as primary references. This indicates that they cognitively adapted to the perceptually new situation.The findings from a third experiment conducted with a larger group of subjects under a condition in which the gravitational information was present but irrelevant to the task being solved (subjects were in a-horizontal 8upine-position) show that subjects, in general, are flexible in using cues other than gravitational ones as references when the latter cannot serve as a referential system. These findings, together with the observation that consistent spatial assignment is possible evenimmediately after first exposure to the perceptually totally novel situation of weightlessness, seem to suggest that the mental representation of space, onto which given perceptual information is mapped, is independent of a particular percept. -
Fusaroli, R., Perlman, M., Mislove, A., Paxton, A., Matlock, T., & Dale, R. (2015). Timescales of massive human entrainment. PLoS One, 10: e0122742. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0122742.
Abstract
The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend the concept of entrainment to the dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation of the unfolding of human entrainment—as expressed by the content and patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter—during the 2012 US presidential debates. By time-locking these data sources, we quantify the impact of the unfolding debate on human attention at three time scales. We show that collective social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover, interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient content during the debates: Across well-known remarks in each debate, mentions in social media start within 5–10 seconds after it occurs; peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of large-scale human entrainment.Additional information
Fusaroli_etal_2015_supporing information.zip -
Galizia, E. C., Myers, C. T., Leu, C., De Kovel, C. G. F., Afrikanova, T., Cordero-Maldonado, M. L., Martins, T. G., Jacmin, M., Drury, S., Chinthapalli, V. K., Muhle, H., Pendziwiat, M., Sander, T., Ruppert, A. K., Moller, R. S., Thiele, H., Krause, R., Schubert, J., Lehesjoki, A. E., Nurnberg, P. and 28 moreGalizia, E. C., Myers, C. T., Leu, C., De Kovel, C. G. F., Afrikanova, T., Cordero-Maldonado, M. L., Martins, T. G., Jacmin, M., Drury, S., Chinthapalli, V. K., Muhle, H., Pendziwiat, M., Sander, T., Ruppert, A. K., Moller, R. S., Thiele, H., Krause, R., Schubert, J., Lehesjoki, A. E., Nurnberg, P., Lerche, H., Palotie, A., Coppola, A., Striano, S., Del Gaudio, L., Boustred, C., Schneider, A. L., Lench, N., Jocic-Jakubi, B., Covanis, A., Capovilla, G., Veggiotti, P., Piccioli, M., Parisi, P., Cantonetti, L., Sadleir, L. G., Mullen, S. A., Berkovic, S. F., Stephani, U., Helbig, I., Crawford, A. D., Esguerra, C. V., Trenite, D., Koeleman, B. P. C., Mefford, H. C., Scheffer, I. E., Sisodiya, S. M., & EURO Epinomics CoGIE Consortium (2015). CHD2 variants are a risk factor for photosensitivity in epilepsy. Brain, 138(5), 1198-1207. doi:10.1093%2Fbrain%2Fawv052.
Abstract
Photosensitivity is a heritable abnormal cortical response to flickering light, manifesting as particular electroencephalographic changes, with or without seizures. Photosensitivity is prominent in a very rare epileptic encephalopathy due to de novo CHD2 mutations, but is also seen in epileptic encephalopathies due to other gene mutations. We determined whether CHD2 variation underlies photosensitivity in common epilepsies, specific photosensitive epilepsies and individuals with photosensitivity without seizures. We studied 580 individuals with epilepsy and either photosensitive seizures or abnormal photoparoxysmal response on electroencephalography, or both, and 55 individuals with photoparoxysmal response but no seizures. We compared CHD2 sequence data to publicly available data from 34 427 individuals, not enriched for epilepsy. We investigated the role of unique variants seen only once in the entire data set. We sought CHD2 variants in 238 exomes from familial genetic generalized epilepsies, and in other public exome data sets. We identified 11 unique variants in the 580 individuals with photosensitive epilepsies and 128 unique variants in the 34 427 controls: unique CHD2 variation is over-represented in cases overall (P = 2·17 × 10−5). Among epilepsy syndromes, there was over-representation of unique CHD2 variants (3/36 cases) in the archetypal photosensitive epilepsy syndrome, eyelid myoclonia with absences (P = 3·50 × 10−4). CHD2 variation was not over-represented in photoparoxysmal response without seizures. Zebrafish larvae with chd2 knockdown were tested for photosensitivity. Chd2 knockdown markedly enhanced mild innate zebrafish larval photosensitivity. CHD2 mutation is the first identified cause of the archetypal generalized photosensitive epilepsy syndrome, eyelid myoclonia with absences. Unique CHD2 variants are also associated with photosensitivity in common epilepsies. CHD2 does not encode an ion channel, opening new avenues for research into human cortical excitability. -
Galucio, A. V., Meira, S., Birchall, J., Moore, D., Gabas Junior, N., Drude, S., Storto, L., Picanço, G., & Rodrigues, C. R. (2015). Genealogical relations and lexical distances within the Tupian linguistic family. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi:Ciencias Humanas, 10, 229-274. doi:10.1590/1981-81222015000200004.
Abstract
In this paper we present the first results of the application of computational methods, inspired by the ideas in McMahon & McMahon (2005), to a dataset collected from languages of every branch of the Tupian family (including all living non-Tupí-Guaraní languages) in order to produce a classification of the family based on lexical distance. We used both a Swadesh list (with historically stabler terms) and a list of animal and plant names for results comparison. In addition, we also selected more (HiHi) and less (LoLo) stable terms from the Swadesh list to form sublists for indepedent treatment. We compared the resulting NeighborNet networks and neighbor-joining cladograms and drew conclusions about their significance for the current understanding of the classification of Tupian languages. One important result is the lack of support for the currently discussed idea of an Eastern-Western division within Tupí -
Gascoyne, D. M., Spearman, H., Lyne, L., Puliyadi, R., Perez-Alcantara, M., Coulton, L., Fisher, S. E., Croucher, P. I., & Banham, A. H. (2015). The forkhead transcription factor FOXP2 is required for regulation of p21 WAF1/CIP1 in 143B osteosarcoma cell growth arrest. PLoS One, 10(6): e0128513. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0128513.
Abstract
Mutations of the forkhead transcription factor FOXP2 gene have been implicated in inherited speech-and-language disorders, and specific Foxp2 expression patterns in neuronal populations and neuronal phenotypes arising from Foxp2 disruption have been described. However, molecular functions of FOXP2 are not completely understood. Here we report a requirement for FOXP2 in growth arrest of the osteosarcoma cell line 143B. We observed endogenous expression of this transcription factor both transiently in normally developing murine osteoblasts and constitutively in human SAOS-2 osteosarcoma cells blocked in early osteoblast development. Critically, we demonstrate that in 143B osteosarcoma cells with minimal endogenous expression, FOXP2 induced by growth arrest is required for up-regulation of p21WAF1/CIP1. Upon growth factor withdrawal, FOXP2 induction occurs rapidly and precedes p21WAF1/CIP1 activation. Additionally, FOXP2 expression could be induced by MAPK pathway inhibition in growth-arrested 143B cells, but not in traditional cell line models of osteoblast differentiation (MG-63, C2C12, MC3T3-E1). Our data are consistent with a model in which transient upregulation of Foxp2 in pre-osteoblast mesenchymal cells regulates a p21-dependent growth arrest checkpoint, which may have implications for normal mesenchymal and osteosarcoma biologyAdditional information
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0128513#sec020 -
Genetics of Personality Consortium (2015). Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for neuroticism, and the polygenic association with major depressive disorder. JAMA Psychiatry, 72(7), 642-650. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2015.0554.
Abstract
Importance
Neuroticism is a pervasive risk factor for psychiatric conditions. It genetically overlaps with major depressive disorder (MDD) and is therefore an important phenotype for psychiatric genetics. The Genetics of Personality Consortium has created a resource for genome-wide association analyses of personality traits in more than 63 000 participants (including MDD cases).Objectives
To identify genetic variants associated with neuroticism by performing a meta-analysis of genome-wide association results based on 1000 Genomes imputation; to evaluate whether common genetic variants as assessed by single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) explain variation in neuroticism by estimating SNP-based heritability; and to examine whether SNPs that predict neuroticism also predict MDD.Design, Setting, and Participants
Genome-wide association meta-analysis of 30 cohorts with genome-wide genotype, personality, and MDD data from the Genetics of Personality Consortium. The study included 63 661 participants from 29 discovery cohorts and 9786 participants from a replication cohort. Participants came from Europe, the United States, or Australia. Analyses were conducted between 2012 and 2014.Main Outcomes and Measures
Neuroticism scores harmonized across all 29 discovery cohorts by item response theory analysis, and clinical MDD case-control status in 2 of the cohorts.Results
A genome-wide significant SNP was found on 3p14 in MAGI1 (rs35855737; P = 9.26 × 10−9 in the discovery meta-analysis). This association was not replicated (P = .32), but the SNP was still genome-wide significant in the meta-analysis of all 30 cohorts (P = 2.38 × 10−8). Common genetic variants explain 15% of the variance in neuroticism. Polygenic scores based on the meta-analysis of neuroticism in 27 cohorts significantly predicted neuroticism (1.09 × 10−12 <} P {<} .05) and MDD (4.02 × 10−9 {<} P {< .05) in the 2 other cohorts.Conclusions and Relevance
This study identifies a novel locus for neuroticism. The variant is located in a known gene that has been associated with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in previous studies. In addition, the study shows that neuroticism is influenced by many genetic variants of small effect that are either common or tagged by common variants. These genetic variants also influence MDD. Future studies should confirm the role of the MAGI1 locus for neuroticism and further investigate the association of MAGI1 and the polygenic association to a range of other psychiatric disorders that are phenotypically correlated with neuroticism.Additional information
http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2294268#tab12Files private
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Gerwien, J., & Flecken, M. (2015). There is no prime for time: the missing link between form and concept of progressive aspect in L2 production. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 18(5), 561-587. doi:10.1080/13670050.2015.1027144.
Abstract
The acquisition of linguistic structures that require perspective-taking at the level of message generation is challenging. We investigate use of progressive aspect in L2 event encoding, using a sentence priming paradigm. We focus on Dutch, in which use of progressive aspect is optional. The progressive consists of a prepositional phrase (‘aan het,’ at-the), plus a verbal infinitive. We ask, to what extent L2 speakers, in comparison to native speakers, show priming effects in relation to form (prepositional phrase) or conceptual (progressive aspect) prime sentences. In native Dutch speakers we find a priming effect for the ‘progressive prime,’ compared to a ‘neutral prime’ (aspectually neutral event description). In L2 speakers this effect was absent. For the form prime, no priming effects were obtained in native speakers, rather, we find evidence for a partial blocking effect in L2 speakers. Results suggest that the strength of the link between concept and form of progressive aspect differs in native and L2 speakers. Specific factors contributed to the L2 findings, e.g., level of L2 proficiency and degree of L2 exposure. We conclude that (1) the conceptual basis of grammatical aspect can be primed in native speakers, and (2) in L2 speakers, access to conceptual information is less automatized.Files private
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Geurts, B., & Rubio-Fernández, P. (2015). Pragmatics and processing. Ratio: an international journal of analytic philosophy, 28(4), 446-469. doi:10.1111/rati.12113.
Abstract
Gricean pragmatics has often been criticised for being implausible from a psychological point of view. This line of criticism is never backed up by empirical evidence, but more importantly, it ignores the fact that Grice never meant to advance a processing theory, in the first place. Taking our lead from Marr (1982), we distinguish between two levels of explanation: at the W-level, we are concerned with what agents do and why; at the H-level, we ask how agents do whatever it is they do. Whereas pragmatics is pitched at the W-level, processing theories are at the H-level. This is not to say that pragmatics has no implications for psychology at all, but it is to say that its implications are less direct than is often supposed. -
Ghatan, P. H., Hsieh, J. C., Petersson, K. M., Stone-Elander, S., & Ingvar, M. (1998). Coexistence of attention-based facilitation and inhibition in the human cortex. NeuroImage, 7, 23-29.
Abstract
A key function of attention is to select an appropriate subset of available information by facilitation of attended processes and/or inhibition of irrelevant processing. Functional imaging studies, using positron emission tomography, have during different experimental tasks revealed decreased neuronal activity in areas that process input from unattended sensory modalities. It has been hypothesized that these decreases reflect a selective inhibitory modulation of nonrelevant cortical processing. In this study we addressed this question using a continuous arithmetical task with and without concomitant disturbing auditory input (task-irrelevant speech). During the arithmetical task, irrelevant speech did not affect task-performance but yielded decreased activity in the auditory and midcingulate cortices and increased activity in the left posterior parietal cortex. This pattern of modulation is consistent with a top down inhibitory modulation of a nonattended input to the auditory cortex and a coexisting, attention-based facilitation of taskrelevant processing in higher order cortices. These findings suggest that task-related decreases in cortical activity may be of functional importance in the understanding of both attentional mechanisms and taskrelated information processing. -
Gilbers, S., Fuller, C., Gilbers, D., Broersma, M., Goudbeek, M., Free, R., & Başkent, D. (2015). Normal-hearing listeners' and cochlear implant users' perception of pitch cues in emotional speech. i-Perception, 6(5), 1-19. doi:0.1177/0301006615599139.
Abstract
In cochlear implants (CIs), acoustic speech cues, especially for pitch, are delivered in a degraded form. This study's aim is to assess whether due to degraded pitch cues, normal-hearing listeners and CI users employ different perceptual strategies to recognize vocal emotions, and, if so, how these differ. Voice actors were recorded pronouncing a nonce word in four different emotions: anger, sadness, joy, and relief. These recordings' pitch cues were phonetically analyzed. The recordings were used to test 20 normal-hearing listeners' and 20 CI users' emotion recognition. In congruence with previous studies, high-arousal emotions had a higher mean pitch, wider pitch range, and more dominant pitches than low-arousal emotions. Regarding pitch, speakers did not differentiate emotions based on valence but on arousal. Normal-hearing listeners outperformed CI users in emotion recognition, even when presented with CI simulated stimuli. However, only normal-hearing listeners recognized one particular actor's emotions worse than the other actors'. The groups behaved differently when presented with similar input, showing that they had to employ differing strategies. Considering the respective speaker's deviating pronunciation, it appears that for normal-hearing listeners, mean pitch is a more salient cue than pitch range, whereas CI users are biased toward pitch range cues -
Gingras, B., Honing, H., Peretz, I., Trainor, L. J., & Fisher, S. E. (2015). Defining the biological bases of individual differences in musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 370: 20140092. doi:10.1098/rstb.2014.0092.
Abstract
Advances in molecular technologies make it possible to pinpoint genomic factors associated with complex human traits. For cognition and behaviour, identification of underlying genes provides new entry points for deciphering the key neurobiological pathways. In the past decade, the search for genetic correlates of musicality has gained traction. Reports have documented familial clustering for different extremes of ability, including amusia and absolute pitch (AP), with twin studies demonstrating high heritability for some music-related skills, such as pitch perception. Certain chromosomal regions have been linked to AP and musical aptitude, while individual candidate genes have been investigated in relation to aptitude and creativity. Most recently, researchers in this field started performing genome-wide association scans. Thus far, studies have been hampered by relatively small sample sizes and limitations in defining components of musicality, including an emphasis on skills that can only be assessed in trained musicians. With opportunities to administer standardized aptitude tests online, systematic large-scale assessment of musical abilities is now feasible, an important step towards high-powered genome-wide screens. Here, we offer a synthesis of existing literatures and outline concrete suggestions for the development of comprehensive operational tools for the analysis of musical phenotypes. -
Gisladottir, R. S., Chwilla, D., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Conversation electrified: ERP correlates of speech act recognition in underspecified utterances. PLoS One, 10(3): e0120068. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0120068.
Abstract
The ability to recognize speech acts (verbal actions) in conversation is critical for everyday interaction. However, utterances are often underspecified for the speech act they perform, requiring listeners to rely on the context to recognize the action. The goal of this study was to investigate the time-course of auditory speech act recognition in action-underspecified utterances and explore how sequential context (the prior action) impacts this process. We hypothesized that speech acts are recognized early in the utterance to allow for quick transitions between turns in conversation. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants listened to spoken dialogues and performed an action categorization task. The dialogues contained target utterances that each of which could deliver three distinct speech acts depending on the prior turn. The targets were identical across conditions, but differed in the type of speech act performed and how it fit into the larger action sequence. The ERP results show an early effect of action type, reflected by frontal positivities as early as 200 ms after target utterance onset. This indicates that speech act recognition begins early in the turn when the utterance has only been partially processed. Providing further support for early speech act recognition, actions in highly constraining contexts did not elicit an ERP effect to the utterance-final word. We take this to show that listeners can recognize the action before the final word through predictions at the speech act level. However, additional processing based on the complete utterance is required in more complex actions, as reflected by a posterior negativity at the final word when the speech act is in a less constraining context and a new action sequence is initiated. These findings demonstrate that sentence comprehension in conversational contexts crucially involves recognition of verbal action which begins as soon as it can.Additional information
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120068#sec024 -
Gisladottir, R. S. (2015). Other-initiated repair in Icelandic. Open Linguistics, 1(1), 309-328. doi:10.1515/opli-2015-0004.
Abstract
The ability to repair problems with hearing or understanding in conversation is critical for successful communication. This article describes the linguistic practices of other-initiated repair (OIR) in Icelandic through quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of video-recorded conversations. The study draws on the conceptual distinctions developed in the comparative project on repair described in the introduction to this issue. The main aim is to give an overview of the formats for OIR in Icelandic and the type of repair practices engendered by them. The use of repair initiations in social actions not aimed at solving comprehension problems is also briefly discussed. In particular, the interjection ha has a rich usage extending beyond open other-initiation of repair. By describing the linguistic machinery for other-initiated repair in Icelandic, this study contributes to the typology of conversational structure and to the still nascent field of Icelandic social interaction studies. -
Goldin-Meadow, S., Namboodiripad, S., Mylander, C., Ozyurek, A., & Sancar, B. (2015). The resilience of structure built around the predicate: Homesign gesture systems in Turkish and American deaf children. Journal of Cognition and Development, 16, 55-80. doi:10.1080/15248372.2013.803970.
Abstract
Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called homesigns, which have many of the properties of natural language—the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built around the predicate—in particular, how manner and path are mapped onto the verb—in homesign systems developed by deaf children in Turkey and the United States. We also asked whether the Turkish homesigners exhibit sentence-level structures previously identified as resilient in American and Chinese homesigners. We found that the Turkish and American deaf children used not only the same production probability and ordering patterns to indicate who does what to whom, but also used the same segmentation and conflation patterns to package manner and path. The gestures that the hearing parents produced did not, for the most part, display the patterns found in the children's gestures. Although cospeech gesture may provide the building blocks for homesign, it does not provide the blueprint for these resilient properties of language. -
Goncharova, M. V., Klenova, A. V., & Bragina, E. V. (2015). Development of cues to individuality and sex in calls of three crane species: when is it good to be recognizable? Journal of Ethology, 33, 165-175. doi:10.1007/s10164-015-0428-6.
Abstract
Vocal individuality provides a method of personalization for multiple avian species. However, expression of individual vocal features depends on necessity of recognition. Here we focused on chick vocalizations of demoiselle, Siberian and red-crowned cranes that differ by their body size, developmental rates and some ecological traits. Cranes are territorial during summer, but gather in
large flocks during autumn and winter. Nevertheless, parents keep feeding their chicks, even on winter grounds, despite the potential of confusing their own and alien
chicks. Here we aimed to compare expression of individuality and sex in calls of three crane species between solitary and gregarious periods of a chick’s life, and between species. We found significant individual patterns of
acoustic variables in the calls of all three species both before and after fledging. However, only red-crowned crane chicks increased expression of individuality significantly after the fledging. Also, we found that chicks of all three species significantly increased occurrence of nonlinear phenomena, i.e., irregular oscillations of soundproducing membranes (biphonations, sidebands, and deterministic chaos), in their calls after fledging. Non-linear phenomena can be a way of increasing the potential for
individual recognition as well as avoiding habituation of parents to their chicks’ calls. The older chicks are, the less
their parents feed them, and chicks benefit from keeping the permanent attention.Files private
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Graham, S. A., Deriziotis, P., & Fisher, S. E. (2015). Insights into the genetic foundations of human communication. Neuropsychology Review, 25(1), 3-26. doi:10.1007/s11065-014-9277-2.
Abstract
The human capacity to acquire sophisticated language is unmatched in the animal kingdom. Despite the discontinuity in communicative abilities between humans and other primates, language is built on ancient genetic foundations, which are being illuminated by comparative genomics. The genetic architecture of the language faculty is also being uncovered by research into neurodevelopmental disorders that disrupt the normally effortless process of language acquisition. In this article, we discuss the strategies that researchers are using to reveal genetic factors contributing to communicative abilities, and review progress in identifying the relevant genes and genetic variants. The first gene directly implicated in a speech and language disorder was FOXP2. Using this gene as a case study, we illustrate how evidence from genetics, molecular cell biology, animal models and human neuroimaging has converged to build a picture of the role of FOXP2 in neurodevelopment, providing a framework for future endeavors to bridge the gaps between genes, brains and behavior -
Graham, S. A., & Fisher, S. E. (2015). Understanding language from a genomic perspective. Annual Review of Genetics, 49, 131-160. doi:10.1146/annurev-genet-120213-092236.
Abstract
Language is a defining characteristic of the human species, but its foundations remain mysterious. Heritable disorders offer a gateway into biological underpinnings, as illustrated by the discovery that FOXP2 disruptions cause a rare form of speech and language impairment. The genetic architecture underlying language-related disorders is complex, and although some progress has been made, it has proved challenging to pinpoint additional relevant genes with confidence. Next-generation sequencing and genome-wide association studies are revolutionizing understanding of the genetic bases of other neurodevelopmental disorders, like autism and schizophrenia, and providing fundamental insights into the molecular networks crucial for typical brain development. We discuss how a similar genomic perspective, brought to the investigation of language-related phenotypes, promises to yield equally informative discoveries. Moreover, we outline how follow-up studies of genetic findings using cellular systems and animal models can help to elucidate the biological mechanisms involved in the development of brain circuits supporting language.Files private
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Grünloh, T., & Liszkowski, U. (2015). Prelinguistic vocalizations distinguish pointing acts. Journal of Child Language, 42(6), 1312-1336. doi:10.1017/S0305000914000816.
Abstract
The current study investigated whether point-accompanying characteristics, like vocalizations and hand shape, differentiate infants' underlying motives of prelinguistic pointing. We elicited imperative (requestive) and declarative (expressive and informative) pointing acts in experimentally controlled situations, and analyzed accompanying characteristics. Experiment 1 revealed that prosodic characteristics of point-accompanying vocalizations distinguished requestive from both expressive and informative pointing acts, with little differences between the latter two. In addition, requestive points were more often realized with the whole hand than the index finger, while this was the opposite for expressive and informative acts. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1, revealing distinct prosodic characteristics for requestive pointing also when the referent was distal and when it had an index-finger shape. Findings reveal that beyond the social context, point-accompanying vocalizations give clues to infants' underlying intentions when pointing. -
Guadalupe, T., Zwiers, M. P., Wittfeld, K., Teumer, A., Vasquez, A. A., Hoogman, M., Hagoort, P., Fernandez, G., Buitelaar, J., van Bokhoven, H., Hegenscheid, K., Völzke, H., Franke, B., Fisher, S. E., Grabe, H. J., & Francks, C. (2015). Asymmetry within and around the human planum temporale is sexually dimorphic and influenced by genes involved in steroid hormone receptor activity. Cortex, 62, 41-55. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2014.07.015.
Abstract
The genetic determinants of cerebral asymmetries are unknown. Sex differences in asymmetry of the planum temporale, that overlaps Wernicke’s classical language area, have been inconsistently reported. Meta-analysis of previous studies has suggested that publication bias established this sex difference in the literature. Using probabilistic definitions of cortical regions we screened over the cerebral cortex for sexual dimorphisms of asymmetry in 2337 healthy subjects, and found the planum temporale to show the strongest sex-linked asymmetry of all regions, which was supported by two further datasets, and also by analysis with the Freesurfer package that performs automated parcellation of cerebral cortical regions. We performed a genome-wide association scan meta-analysis of planum temporale asymmetry in a pooled sample of 3095 subjects, followed by a candidate-driven approach which measured a significant enrichment of association in genes of the ´steroid hormone receptor activity´ and 'steroid metabolic process' pathways. Variants in the genes and pathways identified may affect the role of the planum temporale in language cognition.Additional information
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945214002469#appd001 -
Gubian, M., Torreira, F., & Boves, L. (2015). Using functional data analysis for investigating multidimensional dynamic phonetic contrasts. Journal of Phonetics, 49, 16-40. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2014.10.001.
Abstract
The study of phonetic contrasts and related phenomena, e.g. inter- and intra-speaker variability, often requires to analyse data in the form of measured time series, like f0 contours and formant trajectories. As a consequence, the investigator has to find suitable ways to reduce the raw and abundant numerical information contained in a bundle of time series into a small but sufficient set of numerical descriptors of their shape. This approach requires one to decide in advance which dynamic traits to include in the analysis and which not. For example, a rising pitch gesture may be represented by its duration and slope, hence reducing it to a straight segment, or by a richer coding specifying also whether (and how much) the rising contour is concave or convex, the latter being irrelevant in some context but crucial in others. Decisions become even more complex when a phenomenon is described by a multidimensional time series, e.g. by the first two formants. In this paper we introduce a methodology based on Functional Data Analysis (FDA) that allows the investigator to delegate most of the decisions involved in the quantitative description of multidimensional time series to the data themselves. FDA produces a data-driven parametrisation of the main shape traits present in the data that is visually interpretable, in the same way as slopes or peak heights are. These output parameters are numbers that are amenable to ordinary statistical analysis, e.g. linear (mixed effects) models. FDA is also able to capture correlations among different dimensions of a time series, e.g. between formants F1 and F2. We present FDA by means of an extended case study on diphthong – hiatus distinction in Spanish, a contrast that involves duration, formant trajectories and pitch contours. -
Le Guen, O., Samland, J., Friedrich, T., Hanus, D., & Brown, P. (2015). Making sense of (exceptional) causal relations. A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 1645. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01645.
Abstract
In order to make sense of the world, humans tend to see causation almost everywhere. Although most causal relations may seem straightforward, they are not always construed in the same way cross-culturally. In this study, we investigate concepts of ‘chance’, ‘coincidence’ or ‘randomness’ that refer to assumed relations between intention, action, and outcome in situations, and we ask how people from different cultures make sense of such non-law-like connections. Based on a framework proposed by Alicke (2000), we administered a task that aims to be a neutral tool for investigating causal construals cross-culturally and cross-linguistically. Members of four different cultural groups, rural Mayan Yucatec and Tseltal speakers from Mexico and urban students from Mexico and Germany, were presented with a set of scenarios involving various types of causal and non-causal relations and were asked to explain the described events. Three links varied as to whether they were present or not in the scenarios: Intention to Action, Action to Outcome, and Intention to Outcome. Our results show that causality is recognized in all four cultural groups. However, how causality and especially non-law-like causality are interpreted depends on the type of links, the cultural background and the language used. In all three groups, Action to Outcome is the decisive link for recognizing causality. Despite the fact that the two Mayan groups share similar cultural backgrounds, they display different ideologies regarding concepts of non-law causality. The data suggests that the concept of ‘chance’ is not universal, but seems to be an explanation that only some cultural groups draw on to make sense of specific situations. Of particular importance is the existence of linguistic concepts in each language that trigger ideas of causality in the responses from each cultural groupAdditional information
LeGuen_etal_2015sup.docx -
Guggenheim, J. A., St Pourcain, B., McMahon, G., Timpson, N. J., Evans, D. M., & Williams, C. (2015). Assumption-free estimation of the genetic contribution to refractive error across childhood. Molecular Vision, 21, 621-632. Retrieved from http://www.molvis.org/molvis/v21/621.
Abstract
Studies in relatives have generally yielded high heritability estimates for refractive error: twins 75–90%, families 15–70%. However, because related individuals often share a common environment, these estimates are inflated (via misallocation of unique/common environment variance). We calculated a lower-bound heritability estimate for refractive error free from such bias.
Between the ages 7 and 15 years, participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) underwent non-cycloplegic autorefraction at regular research clinics. At each age, an estimate of the variance in refractive error explained by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genetic variants was calculated using genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA) using high-density genome-wide SNP genotype information (minimum N at each age=3,404).
The variance in refractive error explained by the SNPs (“SNP heritability”) was stable over childhood: Across age 7–15 years, SNP heritability averaged 0.28 (SE=0.08, p<0.001). The genetic correlation for refractive error between visits varied from 0.77 to 1.00 (all p<0.001) demonstrating that a common set of SNPs was responsible for the genetic contribution to refractive error across this period of childhood. Simulations suggested lack of cycloplegia during autorefraction led to a small underestimation of SNP heritability (adjusted SNP heritability=0.35; SE=0.09). To put these results in context, the variance in refractive error explained (or predicted) by the time participants spent outdoors was <0.005 and by the time spent reading was <0.01, based on a parental questionnaire completed when the child was aged 8–9 years old.
Genetic variation captured by common SNPs explained approximately 35% of the variation in refractive error between unrelated subjects. This value sets an upper limit for predicting refractive error using existing SNP genotyping arrays, although higher-density genotyping in larger samples and inclusion of interaction effects is expected to raise this figure toward twin- and family-based heritability estimates. The same SNPs influenced refractive error across much of childhood. Notwithstanding the strong evidence of association between time outdoors and myopia, and time reading and myopia, less than 1% of the variance in myopia at age 15 was explained by crude measures of these two risk factors, indicating that their effects may be limited, at least when averaged over the whole population. -
Gupta, C. N., Calhoun, V. D., Rachkonda, S., Chen, J., Patel, V., Liu, J., Segall, J., Franke, B., Zwiers, M. P., Arias-Vasquez, A., Buitelaar, J., Fisher, S. E., Fernández, G., van Erp, T. G. M., Potkin, S., Ford, J., Matalon, D., McEwen, S., Lee, H. J., Mueller, B. A. and 16 moreGupta, C. N., Calhoun, V. D., Rachkonda, S., Chen, J., Patel, V., Liu, J., Segall, J., Franke, B., Zwiers, M. P., Arias-Vasquez, A., Buitelaar, J., Fisher, S. E., Fernández, G., van Erp, T. G. M., Potkin, S., Ford, J., Matalon, D., McEwen, S., Lee, H. J., Mueller, B. A., Greve, D. N., Andreassen, O., Agartz, I., Gollub, R. L., Sponheim, S. R., Ehrlich, S., Wang, L., Pearlson, G., Glahn, D. S., Sprooten, E., Mayer, A. R., Stephen, J., Jung, R. E., Canive, J., Bustillo, J., & Turner, J. A. (2015). Patterns of gray matter abnormalities in schizophrenia based on an international mega-analysis. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 41(5), 1133-1142. doi:10.1093/schbul/sbu177.
Abstract
Analyses of gray matter concentration (GMC) deficits in patients with schizophrenia (Sz) have identified robust changes throughout the cortex. We assessed the relationships between diagnosis, overall symptom severity, and patterns of gray matter in the largest aggregated structural imaging dataset to date. We performed both source-based morphometry (SBM) and voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analyses on GMC images from 784 Sz and 936 controls (Ct) across 23 scanning sites in Europe and the United States. After correcting for age, gender, site, and diagnosis by site interactions, SBM analyses showed 9 patterns of diagnostic differences. They comprised separate cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar regions. Seven patterns showed greater GMC in Ct than Sz, while 2 (brainstem and cerebellum) showed greater GMC for Sz. The greatest GMC deficit was in a single pattern comprising regions in the superior temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and medial frontal cortex, which replicated over analyses of data subsets. VBM analyses identified overall cortical GMC loss and one small cluster of increased GMC in Sz, which overlapped with the SBM brainstem component. We found no significant association between the component loadings and symptom severity in either analysis. This mega-analysis confirms that the commonly found GMC loss in Sz in the anterior temporal lobe, insula, and medial frontal lobe form a single, consistent spatial pattern even in such a diverse dataset. The separation of GMC loss into robust, repeatable spatial patterns across multiple datasets paves the way for the application of these methods to identify subtle genetic and clinical cohort effects.Additional information
http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/12/21/schbul… -
Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (1994). Brain responses to lexical ambiguity resolution and parsing. In C. Clifton Jr, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (
Eds. ), Perspectives on sentence processing (pp. 45-81). Hilsdale NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. -
Hagoort, P. (1994). Afasie als een tekort aan tijd voor spreken en verstaan. De Psycholoog, 4, 153-154.
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Hagoort, P. (1998). De electrofysiologie van taal: Wat hersenpotentialen vertellen over het menselijk taalvermogen. Neuropraxis, 2, 223-229.
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Hagoort, P. (1998). De spreker als sprinter. Psychologie, 17, 48-49.
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Hagoort, P. (1990). [Review of the book Neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology: An introduction by David Caplan]. Linguistics, 5, 1069-1073.
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Hagoort, P. (1998). Hersenen en taal in onderzoek en praktijk. Neuropraxis, 6, 204-205.
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Hagoort, P. (1994). Het brein op een kier: Over hersenen gesproken. Psychologie, 13, 42-46.
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Hagoort, P. (2015). Het talige brein. In A. Aleman, & H. E. Hulshoff Pol (
Eds. ), Beeldvorming van het brein: Imaging voor psychiaters en psychologen (pp. 169-176). Utrecht: De Tijdstroom. -
Hagoort, P. (2015). Spiegelneuronen. In J. Brockmann (
Ed. ), Wetenschappelijk onkruid: 179 hardnekkige ideeën die vooruitgang blokkeren (pp. 455-457). Amsterdam: Maven Publishing. -
Hagoort, P. (1998). The shadows of lexical meaning in patients with semantic impairments. In B. Stemmer, & H. Whitaker (
Eds. ), Handbook of neurolinguistics (pp. 235-248). New York: Academic Press. -
Hall, M. L., Ahn, D., Mayberry, R. I., & Ferreira, V. S. (2015). Production and comprehension show divergent constituent order preferences: Evidence from elicited pantomime. Journal of Memory and Language, 81, 16-33. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2014.12.003.
Abstract
All natural languages develop devices to communicate who did what to whom. Elicited pantomime provides one model for studying this process, by providing a window into how humans (hearing non-signers) behave in a natural communicative modality (silent gesture) without established conventions from a grammar. Most studies in this paradigm focus on production, although they sometimes make assumptions about how comprehenders would likely behave. Here, we directly assess how naïve speakers of English (Experiments 1 & 2), Korean (Experiment 1), and Turkish (Experiment 2) comprehend pantomimed descriptions of transitive events, which are either semantically reversible (Experiments 1 & 2) or not (Experiment 2). Contrary to previous assumptions, we find no evidence that Person-Person-Action sequences are ambiguous to comprehenders, who simply adopt an agent-first parsing heuristic for all constituent orders. We do find that Person-Action-Person sequences yield the most consistent interpretations, even in native speakers of SOV languages. The full range of behavior in both production and comprehension provides counter-evidence to the notion that producers’ utterances are motivated by the needs of comprehenders. Instead, we argue that production and comprehension are subject to different sets of cognitive pressures, and that the dynamic interaction between these competing pressures can help explain synchronic and diachronic constituent order phenomena in natural human languages, both signed and spoken. -
Hall-Lew, L., Fairs, A., & Lew, A. D. (2015). Tourists' Attitudes towards Linguistic Variation in Scotland. In E. Togersen, S. Hårstad, B. Maehlum, & U. Røyneland (
Eds. ), Language Variation - European Perspectives V (pp. 99-110). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper joins studies of linguistic variation (e.g. Labov 1972; Dubois & Horvath 2000) and discourse (e.g. Jaworski & Lawson 2005; Jaworski & Pritchard 2005; Thurlow & Jaworski 2010) that consider the intersection between language and tourism. By examining the language attitudes that tourists hold toward linguistic variability in their host community, we find that attitudes differ by context and with respect to tourists’ travel motivations. We suggest that these results are particularly likely in a context like Edinburgh, Scotland, where linguistic variation has an iconic link to place authenticity. We propose that the joint commodification of ‘intelligibility’ and ‘authenticity’ explains this variability. The results raise questions about how the commodity value of travel motivation and the associated context of language use influence language attitudes. -
Hammarström, H. (2015). Ethnologue 16/17/18th editions: A comprehensive review. Language, 91, 723-737. doi:10.1353/lan.2015.0038.
Abstract
Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com) is the most widely consulted inventory of the world’slanguages used today. The present review article looks carefully at the goals and description of the content of the Ethnologue’s 16th, 17th, and 18th editions, and reports on a comprehensive survey of the accuracy of the inventory itself. While hundreds of spurious and missing languages can be documented for Ethnologue, it is at present still better than any other nonderivative work of the same scope, in all aspects but one. Ethnologue fails to disclose the sources for the information presented, at odds with well-established scientific principles. The classification of languages into families in Ethnologue is also evaluated, and found to be far off from that argued in the specialist literature on the classification of individual languages. Ethnologue is frequently held to be splitting: that is, it tends to recognize more languages than an application of the criterion of mutual intelligibility would yield. By means of a random sample, we find that, indeed, with confidence intervals, the number of mutually unintelligible languages is on average 85% of the number found in Ethnologue. © 2015, Linguistic Society of America. All rights reserved. -
Hammarström, H. (2015). Ethnologue 16/17/18th editions: A comprehensive review: Online appendices. Language, 91(3), s1-s188. doi:10.1353/lan.2015.0049.
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Hanique, I., Ernestus, M., & Boves, L. (2015). Choice and pronunciation of words: Individual differences within a homogeneous group of speakers. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 11, 161-185. doi:10.1515/cllt-2014-0025.
Abstract
This paper investigates whether individual speakers forming a homogeneous group differ in their choice and pronunciation of words when engaged in casual conversation, and if so, how they differ. More specifically, it examines whether the Balanced Winnow classifier is able to distinguish between the twenty speakers of the Ernestus Corpus of Spontaneous Dutch, who all have the same social background. To examine differences in choice and pronunciation of words, instead of characteristics of the speech signal itself, classification was based on lexical and pronunciation features extracted from hand-made orthographic and automatically generated broad phonetic transcriptions. The lexical features consisted of words and two-word combinations. The pronunciation features represented pronunciation variations at the word and phone level that are typical for casual speech. The best classifier achieved a performance of 79.9% and was based on the lexical features and on the pronunciation features representing single phones and triphones. The speakers must thus differ from each other in these features. Inspection of the relevant features indicated that, among other things, the words relevant for classification generally do not contain much semantic content, and that speakers differ not only from each other in the use of these words but also in their pronunciation. -
Hanique, I., Aalders, E., & Ernestus, M. (2015). How robust are exemplar effects in word comprehension? In G. Jarema, & G. Libben (
Eds. ), Phonological and phonetic considerations of lexical processing (pp. 15-39). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Abstract
This paper studies the robustness of exemplar effects in word comprehension by means of four long-term priming experiments with lexical decision tasks in Dutch. A prime and target represented the same word type and were presented with the same or different degree of reduction. In Experiment 1, participants heard only a small number of trials, a large proportion of repeated words, and stimuli produced by only one speaker. They recognized targets more quickly if these represented the same degree of reduction as their primes, which forms additional evidence for the exemplar effects reported in the literature. Similar effects were found for two speakers who differ in their pronunciations. In Experiment 2, with a smaller proportion of repeated words and more trials between prime and target, participants recognized targets preceded by primes with the same or a different degree of reduction equally quickly. Also, in Experiments 3 and 4, in which listeners were not exposed to one but two types of pronunciation variation (reduction degree and speaker voice), no exemplar effects arose. We conclude that the role of exemplars in speech comprehension during natural conversations, which typically involve several speakers and few repeated content words, may be smaller than previously assumed. -
Hannerfors, A.-K., Hellgren, C., Schijven, D., Iliadis, S. I., Comasco, E., Skalkidou, A., Olivier, J. D., & Sundström-Poromaa, I. (2015). Treatment with serotonin reuptake inhibitors during pregnancy is associated with elevated corticotropin-releasing hormone levels. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 58, 104-113. doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.04.009.
Abstract
Treatment with serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) has been associated with an increased risk of preterm birth, but causality remains unclear. While placental CRH production is correlated with gestational length and preterm birth, it has been difficult to establish if psychological stress or mental health problems are associated with increased CRH levels. This study compared second trimester CRH serum concentrations in pregnant women on SSRI treatment (n=207) with untreated depressed women (n=56) and controls (n=609). A secondary aim was to investigate the combined effect of SSRI treatment and CRH levels on gestational length and risk for preterm birth. Women on SSRI treatment had significantly higher second trimester CRH levels than controls, and untreated depressed women. CRH levels and SSRI treatment were independently associated with shorter gestational length. The combined effect of SSRI treatment and high CRH levels yielded the highest risk estimate for preterm birth. SSRI treatment during pregnancy is associated with increased CRH levels. However, the elevated risk for preterm birth in SSRI users appear not to be mediated by increased placental CRH production, instead CRH appear as an independent risk factor for shorter gestational length and preterm birth. -
Hardies, K., De Kovel, C. G. F., Weckhuysen, S., Asselbergh, B., Geuens, T., Deconinck, T., Azmi, A., May, P., Brilstra, E., Becker, F., Barisic, N., Craiu, D., Braun, K. P. J., Lal, D., Thiele, H., Schubert, J., Weber, Y., van't Slot, R., Nurnberg, P., Balling, R. and 8 moreHardies, K., De Kovel, C. G. F., Weckhuysen, S., Asselbergh, B., Geuens, T., Deconinck, T., Azmi, A., May, P., Brilstra, E., Becker, F., Barisic, N., Craiu, D., Braun, K. P. J., Lal, D., Thiele, H., Schubert, J., Weber, Y., van't Slot, R., Nurnberg, P., Balling, R., Timmerman, V., Lerche, H., Maudsley, S., Helbig, I., Suls, A., Koeleman, B. P. C., De Jonghe, P., & Euro Res Consortium, E. (2015). Recessive mutations in SLC13A5 result in a loss of citrate transport and cause neonatal epilepsy, developmental delay and teeth hypoplasia. Brain., 138(11), 3238-3250. doi:10.1093/brain/awv263.
Abstract
The epileptic encephalopathies are a clinically and aetiologically heterogeneous subgroup of epilepsy syndromes. Most epileptic encephalopathies have a genetic cause and patients are often found to carry a heterozygous de novo mutation in one of the genes associated with the disease entity. Occasionally recessive mutations are identified: a recent publication described a distinct neonatal epileptic encephalopathy (MIM 615905) caused by autosomal recessive mutations in the SLC13A5 gene. Here, we report eight additional patients belonging to four different families with autosomal recessive mutations in SLC13A5. SLC13A5 encodes a high affinity sodium-dependent citrate transporter, which is expressed in the brain. Neurons are considered incapable of de novo synthesis of tricarboxylic acid cycle intermediates; therefore they rely on the uptake of intermediates, such as citrate, to maintain their energy status and neurotransmitter production. The effect of all seven identified mutations (two premature stops and five amino acid substitutions) was studied in vitro, using immunocytochemistry, selective western blot and mass spectrometry. We hereby demonstrate that cells expressing mutant sodium-dependent citrate transporter have a complete loss of citrate uptake due to various cellular loss-of-function mechanisms. In addition, we provide independent proof of the involvement of autosomal recessive SLC13A5 mutations in the development of neonatal epileptic encephalopathies, and highlight teeth hypoplasia as a possible indicator for SLC13A5 screening. All three patients who tried the ketogenic diet responded well to this treatment, and future studies will allow us to ascertain whether this is a recurrent feature in this severe disorder.Additional information
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1093/brain/awv263/-/DC1 -
Heidlmayr, K., Hemforth, B., Moutier, S., & Isel, F. (2015). Neurodynamics of executive control processes in bilinguals: Evidence from ERP and source reconstruction analyses. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 821. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00821.
Abstract
The present study was designed to examine the impact of bilingualism on the neuronal activity in different executive control processes namely conflict monitoring, control implementation (i.e., interference suppression and conflict resolution) and overcoming of inhibition. Twenty-two highly proficient but non-balanced successive French–German bilingual adults and 22 monolingual adults performed a combined Stroop/Negative priming task while event-related potential (ERP) were recorded online. The data revealed that the ERP effects were reduced in bilinguals in comparison to monolinguals but only in the Stroop task and limited to the N400 and the sustained fronto-central negative-going potential time windows. This result suggests that bilingualism may impact the process of control implementation rather than the process of conflict monitoring (N200). Critically, our study revealed a differential time course of the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in conflict processing. While the ACC showed major activation in the early time windows (N200 and N400) but not in the latest time window (late sustained negative-going potential), the PFC became unilaterally active in the left hemisphere in the N400 and the late sustained negative-going potential time windows. Taken together, the present electroencephalography data lend support to a cascading neurophysiological model of executive control processes, in which ACC and PFC may play a determining role. -
Hervais-Adelman, A., Moser-Mercer, B., & Golestani, N. (2015). Brain functional plasticity associated with the emergence of expertise in extreme language control. NeuroImage, 114, 264-274. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.03.072.
Abstract
We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to longitudinally examine brain plasticity arising from long-term, intensive simultaneous interpretation training. Simultaneous interpretation is a bilingual task with heavy executive control demands. We compared brain responses observed during simultaneous interpretation with those observed during simultaneous speech repetition (shadowing) in a group of trainee simultaneous interpreters, at the beginning and at the end of their professional training program. Age, sex and language-proficiency matched controls were scanned at similar intervals. Using multivariate pattern classification, we found distributed patterns of changes in functional responses from the first to second scan that distinguished the interpreters from the controls. We also found reduced recruitment of the right caudate nucleus during simultaneous interpretation as a result of training. Such practice-related change is consistent with decreased demands on multilingual language control as the task becomes more automatized with practice. These results demonstrate the impact of simultaneous interpretation training on the brain functional response in a cerebral structure that is not specifically linguistic, but that is known to be involved in learning, in motor control, and in a variety of domain-general executive functions. Along with results of recent studies showing functional and structural adaptations in the caudate nuclei of experts in a broad range of domains, our results underline the importance of this structure as a central node in expertise-related networks. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. -
Hervais-Adelman, A., Moser-Mercer, B., Michel, C. M., & Golestani, N. (2015). fMRI of simultaneous interpretation reveals the neural basis of extreme language control. Cerebral Cortex, 25(12), 4727-4739. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhu158.
Abstract
We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural basis of extreme multilingual language control in a group of 50 multilingual participants. Comparing brain responses arising during simultaneous interpretation (SI) with those arising during simultaneous repetition revealed activation of regions known to be involved in speech perception and production, alongside a network incorporating the caudate nucleus that is known to be implicated in domain-general cognitive control. The similarity between the networks underlying bilingual language control and general executive control supports the notion that the frequently reported bilingual advantage on executive tasks stems from the day-to-day demands of language control in the multilingual brain. We examined neural correlates of the management of simultaneity by correlating brain activity during interpretation with the duration of simultaneous speaking and hearing. This analysis showed significant modulation of the putamen by the duration of simultaneity. Our findings suggest that, during SI, the caudate nucleus is implicated in the overarching selection and control of the lexico-semantic system, while the putamen is implicated in ongoing control of language output. These findings provide the first clear dissociation of specific dorsal striatum structures in polyglot language control, roles that are consistent with previously described involvement of these regions in nonlinguistic executive control. -
Hervais-Adelman, A., Legrand, L. B., Zhan, M. Y., Tamietto, M., de Gelder, B., & Pegna, A. J. (2015). Looming sensitive cortical regions without V1 input: Evidence from a patient with bilateral cortical blindness. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 9: 51. doi:10.3389/fnint.2015.00051.
Abstract
Fast and automatic behavioral responses are required to avoid collision with an approaching stimulus. Accordingly, looming stimuli have been found to be highly salient and efficient attractors of attention due to the implication of potential collision and potential threat. Here, we address the question of whether looming motion is processed in the absence of any functional primary visual cortex and consequently without awareness. For this, we investigated a patient (TN) suffering from complete, bilateral damage to his primary visual cortex. Using an fMRI paradigm, we measured TN's brain activation during the presentation of looming, receding, rotating, and static point lights, of which he was unaware. When contrasted with other conditions, looming was found to produce bilateral activation of the middle temporal areas, as well as the superior temporal sulcus and inferior parietal lobe (IPL). The latter are generally thought to be involved in multisensory processing of motion in extrapersonal space, as well as attentional capture and saliency. No activity was found close to the lesioned V1 area. This demonstrates that looming motion is processed in the absence of awareness through direct subcortical projections to areas involved in multisensory processing of motion and saliency that bypass V-1. -
Hibar, D. P., Stein, J. L., Renteria, M. E., Arias-Vasquez, A., Desrivières, S., Jahanshad, N., Toro, R., Wittfeld, K., Abramovic, L., Andersson, M., Aribisala, B. S., Armstrong, N. J., Bernard, M., Bohlken, M. M., Boks, M. P., Bralten, J., Brown, A. A., Chakravarty, M. M., Chen, Q., Ching, C. R. K. and 267 moreHibar, D. P., Stein, J. L., Renteria, M. E., Arias-Vasquez, A., Desrivières, S., Jahanshad, N., Toro, R., Wittfeld, K., Abramovic, L., Andersson, M., Aribisala, B. S., Armstrong, N. J., Bernard, M., Bohlken, M. M., Boks, M. P., Bralten, J., Brown, A. A., Chakravarty, M. M., Chen, Q., Ching, C. R. K., Cuellar-Partida, G., den Braber, A., Giddaluru, S., Goldman, A. L., Grimm, O., Guadalupe, T., Hass, J., Woldehawariat, G., Holmes, A. J., Hoogman, M., Janowitz, D., Jia, T., Kim, S., Klein, M., Kraemer, B., Lee, P. H., Olde Loohuis, L. M., Luciano, M., Macare, C., Mather, K. A., Mattheisen, M., Milaneschi, Y., Nho, K., Papmeyer, M., Ramasamy, A., Risacher, S. L., Roiz-Santiañez, R., Rose, E. J., Salami, A., Sämann, P. G., Schmaal, L., Schork, A. J., Shin, J., Strike, L. T., Teumer, A., Van Donkelaar, M. M. J., Van Eijk, K. R., Walters, R. K., Westlye, L. T., Whelan, C. D., Winkler, A. M., Zwiers, M. P., Alhusaini, S., Athanasiu, L., Ehrlich, S., Hakobjan, M. M. H., Hartberg, C. B., Haukvik, U. K., Heister, A. J. G. A. M., Hoehn, D., Kasperaviciute, D., Liewald, D. C. M., Lopez, L. M., Makkinje, R. R. R., Matarin, M., Naber, M. A. M., McKay, D. R., Needham, M., Nugent, A. C., Pütz, B., Royle, N. A., Shen, L., Sprooten, E., Trabzuni, D., Van der Marel, S. S. L., Van Hulzen, K. J. E., Walton, E., Wolf, C., Almasy, L., Ames, D., Arepalli, S., Assareh, A. A., Bastin, M. E., Brodaty, H., Bulayeva, K. B., Carless, M. A., Cichon, S., Corvin, A., Curran, J. E., Czisch, M., De Zubicaray, G. I., Dillman, A., Duggirala, R., Dyer, T. D., Erk, S., Fedko, I. O., Ferrucci, L., Foroud, T. M., Fox, P. T., Fukunaga, M., Gibbs, J. R., Göring, H. H. H., Green, R. C., Guelfi, S., Hansell, N. K., Hartman, C. A., Hegenscheid, K., Heinz, A., Hernandez, D. G., Heslenfeld, D. J., Hoekstra, P. J., Holsboer, F., Homuth, G., Hottenga, J.-J., Ikeda, M., Jack, C. R., Jenkinson, M., Johnson, R., Kanai, R., Keil, M., Kent, J. W., Kochunov, P., Kwok, J. B., Lawrie, S. M., Liu, X., Longo, D. L., McMahon, K. L., Meisenzahl, E., Melle, I., Mohnke, S., Montgomery, G. W., Mostert, J. C., Mühleisen, T. W., Nalls, M. A., Nichols, T. E., Nilsson, L. G., Nöthen, M. M., Ohi, K., Olvera, R. L., Perez-Iglesias, R., Pike, G. B., Potkin, S. G., Reinvang, I., Reppermund, S., Rietschel, M., Romanczuk-Seiferth, N., Rosen, G. D., Rujescu, D., Schnell, K., Schofield, P. R., Smith, C., Steen, V. M., Sussmann, J. E., Thalamuthu, A., Toga, A. W., Traynor, B. J., Troncoso, J., Turner, J. A., Valdes Hernández, M. C., van Ent, D. ’., Van der Brug, M., Van der Wee, N. J. A., Van Tol, M.-J., Veltman, D. J., Wassink, T. H., Westman, E., Zielke, R. H., Zonderman, A. B., Ashbrook, D. G., Hager, R., Lu, L., McMahon, F. J., Morris, D. W., Williams, R. W., Brunner, H. G., Buckner, R. L., Buitelaar, J. K., Cahn, W., Calhoun, V. D., Cavalleri, G. L., Crespo-Facorro, B., Dale, A. M., Davies, G. E., Delanty, N., Depondt, C., Djurovic, S., Drevets, W. C., Espeseth, T., Gollub, R. L., Ho, B.-C., Hoffmann, W., Hosten, N., Kahn, R. S., Le Hellard, S., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Müller-Myhsok, B., Nauck, M., Nyberg, L., Pandolfo, M., Penninx, B. W. J. H., Roffman, J. L., Sisodiya, S. M., Smoller, J. W., Van Bokhoven, H., Van Haren, N. E. M., Völzke, H., Walter, H., Weiner, M. W., Wen, W., White, T., Agartz, I., Andreassen, O. A., Blangero, J., Boomsma, D. I., Brouwer, R. M., Cannon, D. M., Cookson, M. R., De Geus, E. J. C., Deary, I. J., Donohoe, G., Fernández, G., Fisher, S. E., Francks, C., Glahn, D. C., Grabe, H. J., Gruber, O., Hardy, J., Hashimoto, R., Hulshoff Pol, H. E., Jönsson, E. G., Kloszewska, I., Lovestone, S., Mattay, V. S., Mecocci, P., McDonald, C., McIntosh, A. M., Ophoff, R. A., Paus, T., Pausova, Z., Ryten, M., Sachdev, P. S., Saykin, A. J., Simmons, A., Singleton, A., Soininen, H., Wardlaw, J. M., Weale, M. E., Weinberger, D. R., Adams, H. H. H., Launer, L. J., Seiler, S., Schmidt, R., Chauhan, G., Satizabal, C. L., Becker, J. T., Yanek, L., van der Lee, S. J., Ebling, M., Fischl, B., Longstreth, W. T., Greve, D., Schmidt, H., Nyquist, P., Vinke, L. N., Van Duijn, C. M., Xue, L., Mazoyer, B., Bis, J. C., Gudnason, V., Seshadri, S., Ikram, M. A., The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, The CHARGE Consortium, EPIGEN, IMAGEN, SYS, Martin, N. G., Wright, M. J., Schumann, G., Franke, B., Thompson, P. M., & Medland, S. E. (2015). Common genetic variants influence human subcortical brain structures. Nature, 520, 224-229. doi:10.1038/nature14101.
Abstract
The highly complex structure of the human brain is strongly shaped by genetic influences. Subcortical brain regions form circuits with cortical areas to coordinate movement, learning, memory and motivation, and altered circuits can lead to abnormal behaviour and disease. To investigate how common genetic variants affect the structure of these brain regions, here we conduct genome-wide association studies of the volumes of seven subcortical regions and the intracranial volume derived from magnetic resonance images of 30,717 individuals from 50 cohorts. We identify five novel genetic variants influencing the volumes of the putamen and caudate nucleus. We also find stronger evidence for three loci with previously established influences on hippocampal volume and intracranial volume. These variants show specific volumetric effects on brain structures rather than global effects across structures. The strongest effects were found for the putamen, where a novel intergenic locus with replicable influence on volume (rs945270; P = 1.08 × 10-33; 0.52% variance explained) showed evidence of altering the expression of the KTN1 gene in both brain and blood tissue. Variants influencing putamen volume clustered near developmental genes that regulate apoptosis, axon guidance and vesicle transport. Identification of these genetic variants provides insight into the causes of variability in human brain development, and may help to determine mechanisms of neuropsychiatric dysfunctionAdditional information
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Hilbrink, E., Gattis, M., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Early developmental changes in the timing of turn-taking: A longitudinal study of mother-infant interaction. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 1492. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01492.
Abstract
To accomplish a smooth transition in conversation from one speaker to the next, a tight coordination of interaction between speakers is required. Recent studies of adult conversation suggest that this close timing of interaction may well be a universal feature of conversation. In the present paper, we set out to assess the development of this close timing of turns in infancy in vocal exchanges between mothers and infants. Previous research has demonstrated an early sensitivity to timing in interactions (e.g. Murray & Trevarthen, 1985). In contrast, less is known about infants’ abilities to produce turns in a timely manner and existing findings are rather patchy. We conducted a longitudinal study of twelve mother-infant dyads in free-play interactions at the ages of 3, 4, 5, 9, 12 and 18 months. Based on existing work and the predictions made by the Interaction Engine Hypothesis (Levinson, 2006), we expected that infants would begin to develop the temporal properties of turn-taking early in infancy but that their timing of turns would slow down at 12 months, which is around the time when infants start to produce their first words. Findings were consistent with our predictions: Infants were relatively fast at timing their turn early in infancy but slowed down towards the end of the first year. Furthermore, the changes observed in infants’ turn-timing skills were not caused by changes in maternal timing, which remained stable across the 3-18 month period. However, the slowing down of turn-timing started somewhat earlier than predicted: at 9 months. -
Hintz, F., & Huettig, F. (2015). The complexity of the visual environment modulates language-mediated eye gaze. In R. Mishra, N. Srinivasan, & F. Huettig (
Eds. ), Attention and Vision in Language Processing (pp. 39-55). Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-81-322-2443-3_3.Abstract
Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the impact of the complexity of the visual environment on the likelihood of word-object mapping taking place at phonological, semantic and visual levels of representation during language-mediated visual search. Dutch participants heard spoken target words while looking at four objects embedded in displays of different complexity and indicated the presence or absence of the target object. During filler trials the target objects were present, but during experimental trials they were absent and the display contained various competitor objects. For example, given the target word “beaker”, the display contained a phonological (a beaver, bever), a shape (a bobbin, klos), a semantic (a fork, vork) competitor, and an unrelated distractor (an umbrella, paraplu). When objects were presented in simple four-object displays (Experiment 2), there were clear attentional biases to all three types of competitors replicating earlier research (Huettig and McQueen, 2007). When the objects were embedded in complex scenes including four human-like characters or four meaningless visual shapes (Experiments 1, 3), there were biases in looks to visual and semantic but not to phonological competitors. In both experiments, however, we observed evidence for inhibition in looks to phonological competitors, which suggests that the phonological forms of the objects nevertheless had been retrieved. These findings suggest that phonological word-object mapping is contingent upon the nature of the visual environment and add to a growing body of evidence that the nature of our visual surroundings induces particular modes of processing during language-mediated visual search. -
Hintz, F., & Meyer, A. S. (2015). Prediction and production of simple mathematical equations: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements. PLoS One, 10(7): e0130766. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0130766.
Abstract
The relationship between the production and the comprehension systems has recently become a topic of interest for many psycholinguists. It has been argued that these systems are tightly linked and in particular that listeners use the production system to predict upcoming content. In this study, we tested how similar production and prediction processes are in a novel version of the visual world paradigm. Dutch speaking participants (native speakers in Experiment 1; German-Dutch bilinguals in Experiment 2) listened to mathematical equations while looking at a clock face featuring the numbers 1 to 12. On alternating trials, they either heard a complete equation ("three plus eight is eleven") or they heard the first part ("three plus eight is") and had to produce the result ("eleven") themselves. Participants were encouraged to look at the relevant numbers throughout the trial. Their eye movements were recorded and analyzed. We found that the participants' eye movements in the two tasks were overall very similar. They fixated the first and second number of the equations shortly after they were mentioned, and fixated the result number well before they named it on production trials and well before the recorded speaker named it on comprehension trials. However, all fixation latencies were shorter on production than on comprehension trials. These findings suggest that the processes involved in planning to say a word and anticipating hearing a word are quite similar, but that people are more aroused or engaged when they intend to respond than when they merely listen to another person.Additional information
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Hoey, E. (2015). Lapses: How people arrive at, and deal with, discontinuities in talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 48(4), 430-453. doi:10.1080/08351813.2015.1090116.
Abstract
Interaction includes moments of silence. When all participants forgo the option to speak, the silence can be called a “lapse.” This article builds on existing work on lapses and other kinds of silences (gaps, pauses, and so on) to examine how participants reach a point where lapsing is a possibility and how they orient to the lapse that subsequently develops. Drawing from a wide range of activities and settings, I will show that participants may treat lapses as (a) the relevant cessation of talk, (b) the allowable development of silence, or (c) the conspicuous absence of talk. Data are in American and British English.
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Holler, J., Kendrick, K. H., Casillas, M., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Editorial: Turn-taking in human communicative interaction. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 1919. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01919.
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Holler, J., Kokal, I., Toni, I., Hagoort, P., Kelly, S. D., & Ozyurek, A. (2015). Eye’m talking to you: Speakers’ gaze direction modulates co-speech gesture processing in the right MTG. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience, 10, 255-261. doi:10.1093/scan/nsu047.
Abstract
Recipients process information from speech and co-speech gestures, but it is currently unknown how this processing is influenced by the presence of other important social cues, especially gaze direction, a marker of communicative intent. Such cues may modulate neural activity in regions associated either with the processing of ostensive cues, such as eye gaze, or with the processing of semantic information, provided by speech and gesture.
Participants were scanned (fMRI) while taking part in triadic communication involving two recipients and a speaker. The speaker uttered sentences that
were and were not accompanied by complementary iconic gestures. Crucially, the speaker alternated her gaze direction, thus creating two recipient roles: addressed (direct gaze) vs unaddressed (averted gaze) recipient. The comprehension of Speech&Gesture relative to SpeechOnly utterances recruited middle occipital, middle temporal and inferior frontal gyri, bilaterally. The calcarine sulcus and posterior cingulate cortex were sensitive to differences between direct and averted gaze. Most importantly, Speech&Gesture utterances, but not SpeechOnly utterances, produced additional activity in the right middle temporal gyrus when participants were addressed. Marking communicative intent with gaze direction modulates the processing of speech–gesture utterances in cerebral areas typically associated with the semantic processing of multi-modal communicative acts.
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