Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 989
  • Araújo, S., Reis, A., Faísca, L., & Petersson, K. M. (in press). Brain sensitivity to words and the “word recognition potential”. In D. Marques, & J. H. Toscano (Eds.), De las neurociencias a la neuropsicologia: el estúdio del cerebro humano. Barranquilla, Colombia: Corporación Universitaria Reformada.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (in press). Evolution of counting systems. In E. Aldridge, A. Breitbarth, K. É. Kiss, A. Ledgeway, J. Salmon, & A. Simonenko (Eds.), Wiley Blackwell companion to diachronic linguistics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
  • Bazzi, L., Brouwer, S., Khan, Z. N., Verdonschot, R. G., & Foucart, A. (in press). War feels less horrid in a foreign accent: Exploring the impact of the foreign accent on emotionality. Frontiers in Language Sciences. doi:10.3389/flang.2024.1357828.
  • Fitz, H., Hagoort, P., & Petersson, K. M. (in press). Neurobiological causal models of language processing. Neurobiology of Language.
  • Tamaoka, K., Yu, S., Zhang, J., Otsuka, Y., Lim, H., Koizumi, M., & Verdonschot, R. G. (in press). Syntactic structures in motion: Investigating word order variations in verb-final (Korean) and verb-initial (Tongan) languages. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1360191.

    Abstract

    This study explored sentence processing in two typologically distinct languages: Korean, a verb-final language, and Tongan, a verb-initial language. The first experiment revealed that in Korean, sentences arranged in the scrambled OSV (Object, Subject, Verb) order were processed more slowly than those in the canonical SOV order, highlighting a scrambling effect. It also found that sentences with subject topicalization in the SOV order were processed as swiftly as those in the canonical form, whereas sentences with object topicalization in the OSV order were processed with speeds and accuracy comparable to scrambled sentences. However, since topicalization and scrambling in Korean use the same OSV order, independently distinguishing the effects of topicalization is challenging. In contrast, Tongan allows for a clear separation of word orders for topicalization and scrambling, facilitating an independent evaluation of topicalization effects. The second experiment, employing a maze task, confirmed that Tongan’s canonical VSO order was processed more efficiently than the VOS scrambled order, thereby verifying a scrambling effect. The third experiment investigated the effects of both scrambling and topicalization in Tongan, finding that the canonical VSO order was processed most efficiently in terms of speed and accuracy, unlike the VOS scrambled and SVO topicalized orders. Notably, the OVS object-topicalized order was processed as efficiently as the VSO canonical order, while the SVO subject-topicalized order was slower than VSO but faster than VOS. By independently assessing the effects of topicalization apart from scrambling, this study demonstrates that both subject and object topicalization in Tongan facilitate sentence processing, contradicting the predictions based on movement-based anticipation.
  • Ahn, D., & Ferreira, V. S. (2024). Shared vs separate structural representations: Evidence from cumulative cross-language structural priming. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(1), 174-190. doi:10.1177/17470218231160942.

    Abstract

    How do bilingual speakers represent the information that guides the assembly of words into sentences for their two languages? The shared-syntax account argues that bilinguals have a single, shared representation of the sentence structures that exist in both languages. Structural priming has been shown to be equal within and across languages, providing support for the shared-syntax account. However, equivalent levels of structural priming within and across languages could be observed even if structural representations are separate and connected, due to frequent switches between languages, which is a property of standard structural priming paradigms. Here, we investigated whether cumulative structural priming (i.e., structural priming across blocks rather than trial-by-trial), which does not involve frequent switches between languages, also shows equivalent levels of structural priming within- and cross-languages. Mixed results point towards a possibility that cumulative structural priming can be more persistent within- compared to cross-languages, suggesting a separate-and-connected account of bilingual structural representations. We discuss these results in terms of the current literature on bilingual structural representations and highlight the value of diversity in paradigms and less-studied languages.
  • Ahn, D., Ferreira, V. S., & Gollan, T. H. (2024). Structural representation in the native language after extended second-language immersion: Evidence from acceptability judgment and memory-recall. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. Advance online publication. doi:10.1017/S1366728923000950.

    Abstract

    Knowing the sentence structures (i.e., information that guides the assembly of words into sentences) is crucial in language knowledge. This knowledge must be stable for successful communication, but when learning another language that uses different structures, speakers must adjust their structural knowledge. Here, we examine how newly acquired second language (L2) knowledge influences first language (L1) structure knowledge. We compared two groups of Korean speakers: Korean-immersed speakers living in Korea (with little English exposure) versus English-immersed speakers who acquired English late and were living in the US (with more English exposure). We used acceptability judgment and sentence production tasks on Korean sentences in English and Korean word orders. Results suggest that acceptability and structural usage in L1 change after exposure to L2, but not in a way that matches L2 structures. Instead, L2 exposure might lead to increased difficulties in the selection and retrieval of word orders while using L1.
  • Giglio, L., Ostarek, M., Sharoh, D., & Hagoort, P. (2024). Diverging neural dynamics for syntactic structure building in naturalistic speaking and listening. PNAS, 121(11): e2310766121. doi:10.1073/pnas.2310766121.

    Abstract

    The neural correlates of sentence production have been mostly studied with constraining task paradigms that introduce artificial task effects. In this study, we aimed to gain a better understanding of syntactic processing in spontaneous production vs. naturalistic comprehension. We extracted word-by-word metrics of phrase-structure building with top-down and bottom-up parsers that make different hypotheses about the timing of structure building. In comprehension, structure building proceeded in an integratory fashion and led to an increase in activity in posterior temporal and inferior frontal areas. In production, structure building was anticipatory and predicted an increase in activity in the inferior frontal gyrus. Newly developed production-specific parsers highlighted the anticipatory and incremental nature of structure building in production, which was confirmed by a converging analysis of the pausing patterns in speech. Overall, the results showed that the unfolding of syntactic processing diverges between speaking and listening.
  • Hagoort, P., & Özyürek, A. (2024). Extending the architecture of language from a multimodal perspective. Topics in Cognitive Science. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/tops.12728.

    Abstract

    Language is inherently multimodal. In spoken languages, combined spoken and visual signals (e.g., co-speech gestures) are an integral part of linguistic structure and language representation. This requires an extension of the parallel architecture, which needs to include the visual signals concomitant to speech. We present the evidence for the multimodality of language. In addition, we propose that distributional semantics might provide a format for integrating speech and co-speech gestures in a common semantic representation.
  • Kakimoto, N., Wongratwanich, P., Shimamoto, H., Kitisubkanchana, J., Tsujimoto, T., Shimabukuro, K., Verdonschot, R. G., Hasegawa, Y., & Murakami, S. (2024). Comparison of T2 values of the displaced unilateral disc and retrodiscal tissue of temporomandibular joints and their implications. Scientific Reports, 14: 1705. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-52092-6.

    Abstract

    Unilateral anterior disc displacement (uADD) has been shown to affect the contralateral joints qualitatively. This study aims to assess the quantitative T2 values of the articular disc and retrodiscal tissue of patients with uADD at 1.5 Tesla (T). The study included 65 uADD patients and 17 volunteers. The regions of interest on T2 maps were evaluated. The affected joints demonstrated significantly higher articular disc T2 values (31.5 ± 3.8 ms) than those of the unaffected joints (28.9 ± 4.5 ms) (P < 0.001). For retrodiscal tissue, T2 values of the unaffected (37.8 ± 5.8 ms) and affected joints (41.6 ± 7.1 ms) were significantly longer than those of normal volunteers (34.4 ± 3.2 ms) (P < 0.001). Furthermore, uADD without reduction (WOR) joints (43.3 ± 6.8 ms) showed statistically higher T2 values than the unaffected joints of both uADD with reduction (WR) (33.9 ± 3.8 ms) and uADDWOR (38.9 ± 5.8 ms), and the affected joints of uADDWR (35.8 ± 4.4 ms). The mean T2 value of the unaffected joints of uADDWOR was significantly longer than that of healthy volunteers (P < 0.001). These results provided quantitative evidence for the influence of the affected joints on the contralateral joints.
  • Kram, L., Ohlerth, A.-K., Ille, S., Meyer, B., & Krieg, S. M. (2024). CompreTAP: Feasibility and reliability of a new language comprehension mapping task via preoperative navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation. Cortex, 171, 347-369. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2023.09.023.

    Abstract

    Objective: Stimulation-based language mapping approaches that are used pre- and intra-operatively employ predominantly overt language tasks requiring sufficient language pro-duction abilities. Yet, these production-based setups are often not feasible in brain tumor patients with severe expressive aphasia. This pilot study evaluated the feasibility and reliability of a newly developed language comprehension task with preoperative navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (nTMS).
    Methods: Fifteen healthy subjects and six brain tumor patients with severe expressiven aphasia unable to perform classic overt naming tasks underwent preoperative nTMS language mapping based on an auditory single-word Comprehension TAsk for Perioperative mapping (CompreTAP). Comprehension was probed by button-press responses to auditory stimuli, hence not requiring overt language responses. Positive comprehension areas were identified when stimulation elicited an incorrect or delayed button press. Error categories,case-wise cortical error rate distribution and inter-rater reliability between two experienced specialists were examined.
    Results: Overall, the new setup showed to be feasible. Comprehension-disruptions induced by nTMS manifested in no responses, delayed or hesitant responses, searching behavior or selection of wrong target items across all patients and controls and could be performed even in patients with severe expressive aphasia. The analysis agreement between both specialists was substantial for classifying comprehension-positive and -negative sites. Extensive left-hemispheric individual cortical comprehension sites were identified for all patients. Apart from one case presenting with transient worsening of aphasic symptoms.
  • Mishra, C. (2024). The face says it all: Investigating gaze and affective behaviors of social robots. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen.
  • Ozker, M., Yu, L., Dugan, P., Doyle, W., Friedman, D., Devinsky, O., & Flinker, A. (2024). Speech-induced suppression and vocal feedback sensitivity in human cortex. eLife. Advance online publication. doi:10.7554/eLife.94198.1.

    Abstract

    Across the animal kingdom, neural responses in the auditory cortex are suppressed during vocalization, and humans are no exception. A common hypothesis is that suppression increases sensitivity to auditory feedback, enabling the detection of vocalization errors. This hypothesis has been previously confirmed in non-human primates, however a direct link between auditory suppression and sensitivity in human speech monitoring remains elusive. To address this issue, we obtained intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings from 35 neurosurgical participants during speech production. We first characterized the detailed topography of auditory suppression, which varied across superior temporal gyrus (STG). Next, we performed a delayed auditory feedback (DAF) task to determine whether the suppressed sites were also sensitive to auditory feedback alterations. Indeed, overlapping sites showed enhanced responses to feedback, indicating sensitivity. Importantly, there was a strong correlation between the degree of auditory suppression and feedback sensitivity, suggesting suppression might be a key mechanism that underlies speech monitoring. Further, we found that when participants produced speech with simultaneous auditory feedback, posterior STG was selectively activated if participants were engaged in a DAF paradigm, suggesting that increased attentional load can modulate auditory feedback sensitivity.
  • Seijdel, N., Schoffelen, J.-M., Hagoort, P., & Drijvers, L. (2024). Attention drives visual processing and audiovisual integration during multimodal communication. The Journal of Neuroscience. Advance online publication. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0870-23.2023.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    link to preprint
  • Takashima, A., Carota, F., Schoots, V., Redmann, A., Jehee, J., & Indefrey, P. (2024). Tomatoes are red: The perception of achromatic objects elicits retrieval of associated color knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(1), 24-45. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_02068.

    Abstract

    When preparing to name an object, semantic knowledge about the object and its attributes is activated, including perceptual properties. It is unclear, however, whether semantic attribute activation contributes to lexical access or is a consequence of activating a concept irrespective of whether that concept is to be named or not. In this study, we measured neural responses using fMRI while participants named objects that are typically green or red, presented in black line drawings. Furthermore, participants underwent two other tasks with the same objects, color naming and semantic judgment, to see if the activation pattern we observe during picture naming is (a) similar to that of a task that requires accessing the color attribute and (b) distinct from that of a task that requires accessing the concept but not its name or color. We used representational similarity analysis to detect brain areas that show similar patterns within the same color category, but show different patterns across the two color categories. In all three tasks, activation in the bilateral fusiform gyri (“Human V4”) correlated with a representational model encoding the red–green distinction weighted by the importance of color feature for the different objects. This result suggests that when seeing objects whose color attribute is highly diagnostic, color knowledge about the objects is retrieved irrespective of whether the color or the object itself have to be named.
  • Ter Bekke, M., Drijvers, L., & Holler, J. (2024). Hand gestures have predictive potential during conversation: An investigation of the timing of gestures in relation to speech. Cognitive Science, 48(1): e13407. doi:10.1111/cogs.13407.

    Abstract

    During face-to-face conversation, transitions between speaker turns are incredibly fast. These fast turn exchanges seem to involve next speakers predicting upcoming semantic information, such that next turn planning can begin before a current turn is complete. Given that face-to-face conversation also involves the use of communicative bodily signals, an important question is how bodily signals such as co-speech hand gestures play into these processes of prediction and fast responding. In this corpus study, we found that hand gestures that depict or refer to semantic information started before the corresponding information in speech, which held both for the onset of the gesture as a whole, as well as the onset of the stroke (the most meaningful part of the gesture). This early timing potentially allows listeners to use the gestural information to predict the corresponding semantic information to be conveyed in speech. Moreover, we provided further evidence that questions with gestures got faster responses than questions without gestures. However, we found no evidence for the idea that how much a gesture precedes its lexical affiliate (i.e., its predictive potential) relates to how fast responses were given. The findings presented here highlight the importance of the temporal relation between speech and gesture and help to illuminate the potential mechanisms underpinning multimodal language processing during face-to-face conversation.
  • Ter Bekke, M., Drijvers, L., & Holler, J. (2024). Gestures speed up responses to questions. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/23273798.2024.2314021.

    Abstract

    Most language use occurs in face-to-face conversation, which involves rapid turn-taking. Seeing communicative bodily signals in addition to hearing speech may facilitate such fast responding. We tested whether this holds for co-speech hand gestures by investigating whether these gestures speed up button press responses to questions. Sixty native speakers of Dutch viewed videos in which an actress asked yes/no-questions, either with or without a corresponding iconic hand gesture. Participants answered the questions as quickly and accurately as possible via button press. Gestures did not impact response accuracy, but crucially, gestures sped up responses, suggesting that response planning may be finished earlier when gestures are seen. How much gestures sped up responses was not related to their timing in the question or their timing with respect to the corresponding information in speech. Overall, these results are in line with the idea that multimodality may facilitate fast responding during face-to-face conversation.
  • Terporten, R., Huizeling, E., Heidlmayr, K., Hagoort, P., & Kösem, A. (2024). The interaction of context constraints and predictive validity during sentence reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(2), 225-238. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_02082.

    Abstract

    Words are not processed in isolation; instead, they are commonly embedded in phrases and sentences. The sentential context influences the perception and processing of a word. However, how this is achieved by brain processes and whether predictive mechanisms underlie this process remain a debated topic. Here, we employed an experimental paradigm in which we orthogonalized sentence context constraints and predictive validity, which was defined as the ratio of congruent to incongruent sentence endings within the experiment. While recording electroencephalography, participants read sentences with three levels of sentential context constraints (high, medium, and low). Participants were also separated into two groups that differed in their ratio of valid congruent to incongruent target words that could be predicted from the sentential context. For both groups, we investigated modulations of alpha power before, and N400 amplitude modulations after target word onset. The results reveal that the N400 amplitude gradually decreased with higher context constraints and cloze probability. In contrast, alpha power was not significantly affected by context constraint. Neither the N400 nor alpha power were significantly affected by changes in predictive validity.
  • Thothathiri, M., Basnakova, J., Lewis, A. G., & Briand, J. M. (2024). Fractionating difficulty during sentence comprehension using functional neuroimaging. Cerebral Cortex, 34(2): bhae032. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhae032.

    Abstract

    Sentence comprehension is highly practiced and largely automatic, but this belies the complexity of the underlying processes. We used functional neuroimaging to investigate garden-path sentences that cause difficulty during comprehension, in order to unpack the different processes used to support sentence interpretation. By investigating garden-path and other types of sentences within the same individuals, we functionally profiled different regions within the temporal and frontal cortices in the left hemisphere. The results revealed that different aspects of comprehension difficulty are handled by left posterior temporal, left anterior temporal, ventral left frontal, and dorsal left frontal cortices. The functional profiles of these regions likely lie along a spectrum of specificity to generality, including language-specific processing of linguistic representations, more general conflict resolution processes operating over linguistic representations, and processes for handling difficulty in general. These findings suggest that difficulty is not unitary and that there is a role for a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic processes in supporting comprehension.

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  • Wolna, A., Szewczyk, J., Diaz, M., Domagalik, A., Szwed, M., & Wodniecka, Z. (2024). Domain-general and language-specific contributions to speech production in a second language: An fMRI study using functional localizers. Scientific Reports, 14: 57. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-49375-9.

    Abstract

    For bilinguals, speaking in a second language (L2) compared to the native language (L1) is usually more difficult. In this study we asked whether the difficulty in L2 production reflects increased demands imposed on domain-general or core language mechanisms. We compared the brain response to speech production in L1 and L2 within two functionally-defined networks in the brain: the Multiple Demand (MD) network and the language network. We found that speech production in L2 was linked to a widespread increase of brain activity in the domain-general MD network. The language network did not show a similarly robust differences in processing speech in the two languages, however, we found increased response to L2 production in the language-specific portion of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). To further explore our results, we have looked at domain-general and language-specific response within the brain structures postulated to form a Bilingual Language Control (BLC) network. Within this network, we found a robust increase in response to L2 in the domain-general, but also in some language-specific voxels including in the left IFG. Our findings show that L2 production strongly engages domain-general mechanisms, but only affects language sensitive portions of the left IFG. These results put constraints on the current model of bilingual language control by precisely disentangling the domain-general and language-specific contributions to the difficulty in speech production in L2.

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  • Arana, S., Hagoort, P., Schoffelen, J.-M., & Rabovsky, M. (2023). Perceived similarity as a window into representations of integrated sentence meaning. Behavior Research Methods. Advance online publication. doi:10.3758/s13428-023-02129-x.

    Abstract

    When perceiving the world around us, we are constantly integrating pieces of information. The integrated experience consists of more than just the sum of its parts. For example, visual scenes are defined by a collection of objects as well as the spatial relations amongst them and sentence meaning is computed based on individual word semantic but also syntactic configuration. Having quantitative models of such integrated representations can help evaluate cognitive models of both language and scene perception. Here, we focus on language, and use a behavioral measure of perceived similarity as an approximation of integrated meaning representations. We collected similarity judgments of 200 subjects rating nouns or transitive sentences through an online multiple arrangement task. We find that perceived similarity between sentences is most strongly modulated by the semantic action category of the main verb. In addition, we show how non-negative matrix factorization of similarity judgment data can reveal multiple underlying dimensions reflecting both semantic as well as relational role information. Finally, we provide an example of how similarity judgments on sentence stimuli can serve as a point of comparison for artificial neural networks models (ANNs) by comparing our behavioral data against sentence similarity extracted from three state-of-the-art ANNs. Overall, our method combining the multiple arrangement task on sentence stimuli with matrix factorization can capture relational information emerging from integration of multiple words in a sentence even in the presence of strong focus on the verb.
  • Arana, S., Pesnot Lerousseau, J., & Hagoort, P. (2023). Deep learning models to study sentence comprehension in the human brain. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/23273798.2023.2198245.

    Abstract

    Recent artificial neural networks that process natural language achieve unprecedented performance in tasks requiring sentence-level understanding. As such, they could be interesting models of the integration of linguistic information in the human brain. We review works that compare these artificial language models with human brain activity and we assess the extent to which this approach has improved our understanding of the neural processes involved in natural language comprehension. Two main results emerge. First, the neural representation of word meaning aligns with the context-dependent, dense word vectors used by the artificial neural networks. Second, the processing hierarchy that emerges within artificial neural networks broadly matches the brain, but is surprisingly inconsistent across studies. We discuss current challenges in establishing artificial neural networks as process models of natural language comprehension. We suggest exploiting the highly structured representational geometry of artificial neural networks when mapping representations to brain data.

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    link to preprint
  • Araujo, S., Narang, V., Misra, D., Lohagun, N., Khan, O., Singh, A., Mishra, R. K., Hervais-Adelman, A., & Huettig, F. (2023). A literacy-related color-specific deficit in rapid automatized naming: Evidence from neurotypical completely illiterate and literate adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(8), 2403-2409. doi:10.1037/xge0001376.

    Abstract

    There is a robust positive relationship between reading skills and the time to name aloud an array of letters, digits, objects, or colors as quickly as possible. A convincing and complete explanation for the direction and locus of this association remains, however, elusive. In this study we investigated rapid automatized naming (RAN) of every-day objects and basic color patches in neurotypical illiterate and literate adults. Literacy acquisition and education enhanced RAN performance for both conceptual categories but this advantage was much larger for (abstract) colors than every-day objects. This result suggests that (i) literacy/education may be causal for serial rapid naming ability of non-alphanumeric items, (ii) differences in the lexical quality of conceptual representations can underlie the reading-related differential RAN performance.

    Additional information

    supplementary text
  • Bastiaanse, R., & Ohlerth, A.-K. (2023). Presurgical language mapping: What are we testing? Journal of Personalized Medicine, 13: 376. doi:10.3390/jpm13030376.

    Abstract

    Gliomas are brain tumors infiltrating healthy cortical and subcortical areas that may host cognitive functions, such as language. If these areas are damaged during surgery, the patient might develop word retrieval or articulation problems. For this reason, many glioma patients are operated on awake, while their language functions are tested. For this practice, quite simple tests are used, for example, picture naming. This paper describes the process and timeline of picture naming (noun retrieval) and shows the timeline and localization of the distinguished stages. This is relevant information for presurgical language testing with navigated Magnetic Stimulation (nTMS). This novel technique allows us to identify cortical involved in the language production process and, thus, guides the neurosurgeon in how to approach and remove the tumor. We argue that not only nouns, but also verbs should be tested, since sentences are built around verbs, and sentences are what we use in daily life. This approach’s relevance is illustrated by two case studies of glioma patients.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2023). Multiplication, addition, and subtraction in numerals: Formal variation in Latin’s decads+ from an Indo-European perspective. Journal of Latin Linguistics, 22(1), 1-56. doi:10.1515/joll-2023-2001.

    Abstract

    While formal variation in Latin’s numerals is generally acknowledged, little is known about (relative) incidence, distribution, context, or linguistic productivity. Addressing this lacuna, this article examines “decads+” in Latin, which convey the numbers between the full decads: the teens (‘eleven’ through ‘nineteen’) as well as the numerals between the higher decads starting at ‘twenty-one’ through ‘ninety-nine’. Latin’s decads+ are compounds and prone to variation. The data, which are drawn from a variety of sources, reveal (a) substantial formal variation in Latin, both internally and typologically; (b) co-existence of several types of formation; (c) productivity of potential borrowings; (d) resilience of early formations; (e) patterns in structure and incidence that anticipate the Romance numerals; and (f) historical trends. From a typological and general linguistic perspective as well, Latin’s decads+ are most relevant because their formal variation involves sequence, connector, and arithmetical operations and because their historical depth shows a gradual shift away from widespread formal variation, eventually resulting in the relatively rigid system found in Romance. Moreover, the combined system attested in decads+ in Latin – based on a combination of inherited, innovative and borrowed patterns and reflecting different stages of development – presents a number of typological inconsistencies that require further assessment

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  • Benetti, S., Ferrari, A., & Pavani, F. (2023). Multimodal processing in face-to-face interactions: A bridging link between psycholinguistics and sensory neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 17: 1108354. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2023.1108354.

    Abstract

    In face-to-face communication, humans are faced with multiple layers of discontinuous multimodal signals, such as head, face, hand gestures, speech and non-speech sounds, which need to be interpreted as coherent and unified communicative actions. This implies a fundamental computational challenge: optimally binding only signals belonging to the same communicative action while segregating signals that are not connected by the communicative content. How do we achieve such an extraordinary feat, reliably, and efficiently? To address this question, we need to further move the study of human communication beyond speech-centred perspectives and promote a multimodal approach combined with interdisciplinary cooperation. Accordingly, we seek to reconcile two explanatory frameworks recently proposed in psycholinguistics and sensory neuroscience into a neurocognitive model of multimodal face-to-face communication. First, we introduce a psycholinguistic framework that characterises face-to-face communication at three parallel processing levels: multiplex signals, multimodal gestalts and multilevel predictions. Second, we consider the recent proposal of a lateral neural visual pathway specifically dedicated to the dynamic aspects of social perception and reconceive it from a multimodal perspective (“lateral processing pathway”). Third, we reconcile the two frameworks into a neurocognitive model that proposes how multiplex signals, multimodal gestalts, and multilevel predictions may be implemented along the lateral processing pathway. Finally, we advocate a multimodal and multidisciplinary research approach, combining state-of-the-art imaging techniques, computational modelling and artificial intelligence for future empirical testing of our model.
  • Bulut, T. (2023). Domain‐general and domain‐specific functional networks of Broca's area underlying language processing. Brain and Behavior, 13(7): e3046. doi:10.1002/brb3.3046.

    Abstract

    Introduction
    Despite abundant research on the role of Broca's area in language processing, there is still no consensus on language specificity of this region and its connectivity network.

    Methods
    The present study employed the meta-analytic connectivity modeling procedure to identify and compare domain-specific (language-specific) and domain-general (shared between language and other domains) functional connectivity patterns of three subdivisions within the broadly defined Broca's area: pars opercularis (IFGop), pars triangularis (IFGtri), and pars orbitalis (IFGorb) of the left inferior frontal gyrus.

    Results
    The findings revealed a left-lateralized frontotemporal network for all regions of interest underlying domain-specific linguistic functions. The domain-general network, however, spanned frontoparietal regions that overlap with the multiple-demand network and subcortical regions spanning the thalamus and the basal ganglia.

    Conclusions
    The findings suggest that language specificity of Broca's area emerges within a left-lateralized frontotemporal network, and that domain-general resources are garnered from frontoparietal and subcortical networks when required by task demands.

    Additional information

    Supporting Information Data availability
  • Carota, F., Schoffelen, J.-M., Oostenveld, R., & Indefrey, P. (2023). Parallel or sequential? Decoding conceptual and phonological/phonetic information from MEG signals during language production. Cognitive Neuropsychology. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/02643294.2023.2283239.

    Abstract

    Speaking requires the temporally coordinated planning of core linguistic information, from conceptual meaning to articulation. Recent neurophysiological results suggested that these operations involve a cascade of neural events with subsequent onset times, whilst competing evidence suggests early parallel neural activation. To test these hypotheses, we examined the sources of neuromagnetic activity recorded from 34 participants overtly naming 134 images from 4 object categories (animals, tools, foods and clothes). Within each category, word length and phonological neighbourhood density were co-varied to target phonological/phonetic processes. Multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA) searchlights in source space decoded object categories in occipitotemporal and middle temporal cortex, and phonological/phonetic variables in left inferior frontal (BA 44) and motor cortex early on. The findings suggest early activation of multiple variables due to intercorrelated properties and interactivity of processing, thus raising important questions about the representational properties of target words during the preparatory time enabling overt speaking.
  • Coopmans, C. W. (2023). Triangles in the brain: The role of hierarchical structure in language use. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Coopmans, C. W., Struiksma, M. E., Coopmans, P. H. A., & Chen, A. (2023). Processing of grammatical agreement in the face of variation in lexical stress: A mismatch negativity study. Language and Speech, 66(1), 202-213. doi:10.1177/00238309221098116.

    Abstract

    Previous electroencephalography studies have yielded evidence for automatic processing of syntax and lexical stress. However, these studies looked at both effects in isolation, limiting their generalizability to everyday language comprehension. In the current study, we investigated automatic processing of grammatical agreement in the face of variation in lexical stress. Using an oddball paradigm, we measured the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) in Dutch-speaking participants while they listened to Dutch subject–verb sequences (linguistic context) or acoustically similar sequences in which the subject was replaced by filtered noise (nonlinguistic context). The verb forms differed in the inflectional suffix, rendering the subject–verb sequences grammatically correct or incorrect, and leading to a difference in the stress pattern of the verb forms. We found that the MMNs were modulated in both the linguistic and nonlinguistic condition, suggesting that the processing load induced by variation in lexical stress can hinder early automatic processing of grammatical agreement. However, as the morphological differences between the verb forms correlated with differences in number of syllables, an interpretation in terms of the prosodic structure of the sequences cannot be ruled out. Future research is needed to determine which of these factors (i.e., lexical stress, syllabic structure) most strongly modulate early syntactic processing.

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  • Coopmans, C. W., Mai, A., Slaats, S., Weissbart, H., & Martin, A. E. (2023). What oscillations can do for syntax depends on your theory of structure building. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 24, 723. doi:10.1038/s41583-023-00734-5.
  • Coopmans, C. W., Kaushik, K., & Martin, A. E. (2023). Hierarchical structure in language and action: A formal comparison. Psychological Review, 130(4), 935-952. doi:10.1037/rev0000429.

    Abstract

    Since the cognitive revolution, language and action have been compared as cognitive systems, with cross-domain convergent views recently gaining renewed interest in biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Language and action are both combinatorial systems whose mode of combination has been argued to be hierarchical, combining elements into constituents of increasingly larger size. This structural similarity has led to the suggestion that they rely on shared cognitive and neural resources. In this article, we compare the conceptual and formal properties of hierarchy in language and action using set theory. We show that the strong compositionality of language requires a particular formalism, a magma, to describe the algebraic structure corresponding to the set of hierarchical structures underlying sentences. When this formalism is applied to actions, it appears to be both too strong and too weak. To overcome these limitations, which are related to the weak compositionality and sequential nature of action structures, we formalize the algebraic structure corresponding to the set of actions as a trace monoid. We aim to capture the different system properties of language and action in terms of the distinction between hierarchical sets and hierarchical sequences and discuss the implications for the way both systems could be represented in the brain.
  • Coventry, K. R., Gudde, H. B., Diessel, H., Collier, J., Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Vulchanova, M., Vulchanov, V., Todisco, E., Reile, M., Breunesse, M., Plado, H., Bohnemeyer, J., Bsili, R., Caldano, M., Dekova, R., Donelson, K., Forker, D., Park, Y., Pathak, L. S., Peeters, D. and 25 moreCoventry, K. R., Gudde, H. B., Diessel, H., Collier, J., Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Vulchanova, M., Vulchanov, V., Todisco, E., Reile, M., Breunesse, M., Plado, H., Bohnemeyer, J., Bsili, R., Caldano, M., Dekova, R., Donelson, K., Forker, D., Park, Y., Pathak, L. S., Peeters, D., Pizzuto, G., Serhan, B., Apse, L., Hesse, F., Hoang, L., Hoang, P., Igari, Y., Kapiley, K., Haupt-Khutsishvili, T., Kolding, S., Priiki, K., Mačiukaitytė, I., Mohite, V., Nahkola, T., Tsoi, S. Y., Williams, S., Yasuda, S., Cangelosi, A., Duñabeitia, J. A., Mishra, R. K., Rocca, R., Šķilters, J., Wallentin, M., Žilinskaitė-Šinkūnienė, E., & Incel, O. D. (2023). Spatial communication systems across languages reflect universal action constraints. Nature Human Behaviour, 77, 2099-2110. doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01697-4.

    Abstract

    The extent to which languages share properties reflecting the non-linguistic constraints of the speakers who speak them is key to the debate regarding the relationship between language and cognition. A critical case is spatial communication, where it has been argued that semantic universals should exist, if anywhere. Here, using an experimental paradigm able to separate variation within a language from variation between languages, we tested the use of spatial demonstratives—the most fundamental and frequent spatial terms across languages. In n = 874 speakers across 29 languages, we show that speakers of all tested languages use spatial demonstratives as a function of being able to reach or act on an object being referred to. In some languages, the position of the addressee is also relevant in selecting between demonstrative forms. Commonalities and differences across languages in spatial communication can be understood in terms of universal constraints on action shaping spatial language and cognition.
  • Dikshit, A. P., Mishra, C., Das, D., & Parashar, S. (2023). Frequency and temperature-dependence ZnO based fractional order capacitor using machine learning. Materials Chemistry and Physics, 307: 128097. doi:10.1016/j.matchemphys.2023.128097.

    Abstract

    This paper investigates the fractional order behavior of ZnO ceramics at different frequencies. ZnO ceramic was prepared by high energy ball milling technique (HEBM) sintered at 1300℃ to study the frequency response properties. The frequency response properties (impedance and phase
    angles) were examined by analyzing through impedance analyzer (100 Hz - 1 MHz). Constant phase angles (84°-88°) were obtained at low temperature ranges (25 ℃-125 ℃). The structural and
    morphological composition of the ZnO ceramic was investigated using X-ray diffraction techniques and FESEM. Raman spectrum was studied to understand the different modes of ZnO ceramics. Machine learning (polynomial regression) models were trained on a dataset of 1280
    experimental values to accurately predict the relationship between frequency and temperature with respect to impedance and phase values of the ZnO ceramic FOC. The predicted impedance values were found to be in good agreement (R2 ~ 0.98, MSE ~ 0.0711) with the experimental results.
    Impedance values were also predicted beyond the experimental frequency range (at 50 Hz and 2 MHz) for different temperatures (25℃ - 500℃) and for low temperatures (10°, 15° and 20℃)
    within the frequency range (100Hz - 1MHz).

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  • Doerig, A., Sommers, R. P., Seeliger, K., Richards, B., Ismael, J., Lindsay, G. W., Kording, K. P., Konkle, T., Van Gerven, M. A. J., Kriegeskorte, N., & Kietzmann, T. C. (2023). The neuroconnectionist research programme. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 24, 431-450. doi:10.1038/s41583-023-00705-w.

    Abstract

    Artificial neural networks (ANNs) inspired by biology are beginning to be widely used to model behavioural and neural data, an approach we call ‘neuroconnectionism’. ANNs have been not only lauded as the current best models of information processing in the brain but also criticized for failing to account for basic cognitive functions. In this Perspective article, we propose that arguing about the successes and failures of a restricted set of current ANNs is the wrong approach to assess the promise of neuroconnectionism for brain science. Instead, we take inspiration from the philosophy of science, and in particular from Lakatos, who showed that the core of a scientific research programme is often not directly falsifiable but should be assessed by its capacity to generate novel insights. Following this view, we present neuroconnectionism as a general research programme centred around ANNs as a computational language for expressing falsifiable theories about brain computation. We describe the core of the programme, the underlying computational framework and its tools for testing specific neuroscientific hypotheses and deriving novel understanding. Taking a longitudinal view, we review past and present neuroconnectionist projects and their responses to challenges and argue that the research programme is highly progressive, generating new and otherwise unreachable insights into the workings of the brain.
  • Drijvers, L., & Holler, J. (2023). The multimodal facilitation effect in human communication. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30(2), 792-801. doi:10.3758/s13423-022-02178-x.

    Abstract

    During face-to-face communication, recipients need to rapidly integrate a plethora of auditory and visual signals. This integration of signals from many different bodily articulators, all offset in time, with the information in the speech stream may either tax the cognitive system, thus slowing down language processing, or may result in multimodal facilitation. Using the classical shadowing paradigm, participants shadowed speech from face-to-face, naturalistic dyadic conversations in an audiovisual context, an audiovisual context without visual speech (e.g., lips), and an audio-only context. Our results provide evidence of a multimodal facilitation effect in human communication: participants were faster in shadowing words when seeing multimodal messages compared with when hearing only audio. Also, the more visual context was present, the fewer shadowing errors were made, and the earlier in time participants shadowed predicted lexical items. We propose that the multimodal facilitation effect may contribute to the ease of fast face-to-face conversational interaction.
  • Drijvers, L., & Mazzini, S. (2023). Neural oscillations in audiovisual language and communication. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190264086.013.455.

    Abstract

    How do neural oscillations support human audiovisual language and communication? Considering the rhythmic nature of audiovisual language, in which stimuli from different sensory modalities unfold over time, neural oscillations represent an ideal candidate to investigate how audiovisual language is processed in the brain. Modulations of oscillatory phase and power are thought to support audiovisual language and communication in multiple ways. Neural oscillations synchronize by tracking external rhythmic stimuli or by re-setting their phase to presentation of relevant stimuli, resulting in perceptual benefits. In particular, synchronized neural oscillations have been shown to subserve the processing and the integration of auditory speech, visual speech, and hand gestures. Furthermore, synchronized oscillatory modulations have been studied and reported between brains during social interaction, suggesting that their contribution to audiovisual communication goes beyond the processing of single stimuli and applies to natural, face-to-face communication.

    There are still some outstanding questions that need to be answered to reach a better understanding of the neural processes supporting audiovisual language and communication. In particular, it is not entirely clear yet how the multitude of signals encountered during audiovisual communication are combined into a coherent percept and how this is affected during real-world dyadic interactions. In order to address these outstanding questions, it is fundamental to consider language as a multimodal phenomenon, involving the processing of multiple stimuli unfolding at different rhythms over time, and to study language in its natural context: social interaction. Other outstanding questions could be addressed by implementing novel techniques (such as rapid invisible frequency tagging, dual-electroencephalography, or multi-brain stimulation) and analysis methods (e.g., using temporal response functions) to better understand the relationship between oscillatory dynamics and efficient audiovisual communication.
  • Eekhof, L. S., Van Krieken, K., Sanders, J., & Willems, R. M. (2023). Engagement with narrative characters: The role of social-cognitive abilities and linguistic viewpoint. Discourse Processes, 60(6), 411-439. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2023.2206773.

    Abstract

    This article explores the role of text and reader characteristics in character engagement experiences. In an online study, participants completed several self-report and behavioral measures of social-cognitive abilities and read two literary narratives in which the presence of linguistic viewpoint markers was varied using a highly controlled manipulation strategy. Afterward, participants reported on their character engagement experiences. A principal component analysis on participants’ responses revealed the multidimensional nature of character engagement, which included both self- and other-oriented emotional responses (e.g., empathy, personal distress) as well as more cognitive responses (e.g., identification, perspective taking). Furthermore, character engagement was found to rely on a wide range of social-cognitive abilities but not on the presence of viewpoint markers. Finally, and most importantly, we did not find convincing evidence for an interplay between social-cognitive abilities and the presence of viewpoint markers. These findings suggest that readers rely on their social-cognitive abilities to engage with the inner worlds of fictional others, more so than on the lexical cues of those inner worlds provided by the text.
  • Ekerdt, C., Takashima, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). Memory consolidation in second language neurocognition. In K. Morgan-Short, & J. G. Van Hell (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and neurolinguistics. Oxfordshire: Routledge.

    Abstract

    Acquiring a second language (L2) requires newly learned information to be integrated with existing knowledge. It has been proposed that several memory systems work together to enable this process of rapidly encoding new information and then slowly incorporating it with existing knowledge, such that it is consolidated and integrated into the language network without catastrophic interference. This chapter focuses on consolidation of L2 vocabulary. First, the complementary learning systems model is outlined, along with the model’s predictions regarding lexical consolidation. Next, word learning studies in first language (L1) that investigate the factors playing a role in consolidation, and the neural mechanisms underlying this, are reviewed. Using the L1 memory consolidation literature as background, the chapter then presents what is currently known about memory consolidation in L2 word learning. Finally, considering what is already known about L1 but not about L2, future research investigating memory consolidation in L2 neurocognition is proposed.
  • Giglio, L. (2023). Speaking in the Brain: How the brain produces and understands language. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Hagoort, P. (2023). The language marker hypothesis. Cognition, 230: 105252. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105252.

    Abstract

    According to the language marker hypothesis language has provided homo sapiens with a rich symbolic system that plays a central role in interpreting signals delivered by our sensory apparatus, in shaping action goals, and in creating a powerful tool for reasoning and inferencing. This view provides an important correction on embodied accounts of language that reduce language to action, perception, emotion and mental simulation. The presence of a language system has, however, also important consequences for perception, action, emotion, and memory. Language stamps signals from perception, action, and emotional systems with rich cognitive markers that transform the role of these signals in the overall cognitive architecture of the human mind. This view does not deny that language is implemented by means of universal principles of neural organization. However, language creates the possibility to generate rich internal models of the world that are shaped and made accessible by the characteristics of a language system. This makes us less dependent on direct action-perception couplings and might even sometimes go at the expense of the veridicality of perception. In cognitive (neuro)science the pendulum has swung from language as the key to understand the organization of the human mind to the perspective that it is a byproduct of perception and action. It is time that it partly swings back again.
  • Hagoort, P. (2023). Zij zijn ons brein en andere beschouwingen. Nijmegen: Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguistiek.
  • Henke, L., Lewis, A. G., & Meyer, L. (2023). Fast and slow rhythms of naturalistic reading revealed by combined eye-tracking and electroencephalography. The Journal of Neuroscience, 43(24), 4461-4469. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1849-22.2023.

    Abstract

    Neural oscillations are thought to support speech and language processing. They may not only inherit acoustic rhythms, but might also impose endogenous rhythms onto processing. In support of this, we here report that human (both male and female) eye movements during naturalistic reading exhibit rhythmic patterns that show frequency-selective coherence with the EEG, in the absence of any stimulation rhythm. Periodicity was observed in two distinct frequency bands: First, word-locked saccades at 4-5 Hz display coherence with whole-head theta-band activity. Second, fixation durations fluctuate rhythmically at ∼1 Hz, in coherence with occipital delta-band activity. This latter effect was additionally phase-locked to sentence endings, suggesting a relationship with the formation of multi-word chunks. Together, eye movements during reading contain rhythmic patterns that occur in synchrony with oscillatory brain activity. This suggests that linguistic processing imposes preferred processing time scales onto reading, largely independent of actual physical rhythms in the stimulus.
  • De Hoop, H., Levshina, N., & Segers, M. (2023). The effect of the use of T and V pronouns in Dutch HR communication. Journal of Pragmatics, 203, 96-109. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2022.11.017.

    Abstract

    In an online experiment among native speakers of Dutch we measured addressees' responses to emails written in the informal pronoun T or the formal pronoun V in HR communication. 172 participants (61 male, mean age 37 years) read either the V-versions or the T-versions of two invitation emails and two rejection emails by four different fictitious recruiters. After each email, participants had to score their appreciation of the company and the recruiter on five different scales each, such as The recruiter who wrote this email seems … [scale from friendly to unfriendly]. We hypothesized that (i) the V-pronoun would be more appreciated in letters of rejection, and the T-pronoun in letters of invitation, and (ii) older people would appreciate the V-pronoun more than the T-pronoun, and the other way around for younger people. Although neither of these hypotheses was supported, we did find a small effect of pronoun: Emails written in V were more highly appreciated than emails in T, irrespective of type of email (invitation or rejection), and irrespective of the participant's age, gender, and level of education. At the same time, we observed differences in the strength of this effect across different scales.
  • Huizeling, E., Alday, P. M., Peeters, D., & Hagoort, P. (2023). Combining EEG and 3D-eye-tracking to study the prediction of upcoming speech in naturalistic virtual environments: A proof of principle. Neuropsychologia, 191: 108730. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108730.

    Abstract

    EEG and eye-tracking provide complementary information when investigating language comprehension. Evidence that speech processing may be facilitated by speech prediction comes from the observation that a listener's eye gaze moves towards a referent before it is mentioned if the remainder of the spoken sentence is predictable. However, changes to the trajectory of anticipatory fixations could result from a change in prediction or an attention shift. Conversely, N400 amplitudes and concurrent spectral power provide information about the ease of word processing the moment the word is perceived. In a proof-of-principle investigation, we combined EEG and eye-tracking to study linguistic prediction in naturalistic, virtual environments. We observed increased processing, reflected in theta band power, either during verb processing - when the verb was predictive of the noun - or during noun processing - when the verb was not predictive of the noun. Alpha power was higher in response to the predictive verb and unpredictable nouns. We replicated typical effects of noun congruence but not predictability on the N400 in response to the noun. Thus, the rich visual context that accompanied speech in virtual reality influenced language processing compared to previous reports, where the visual context may have facilitated processing of unpredictable nouns. Finally, anticipatory fixations were predictive of spectral power during noun processing and the length of time fixating the target could be predicted by spectral power at verb onset, conditional on the object having been fixated. Overall, we show that combining EEG and eye-tracking provides a promising new method to answer novel research questions about the prediction of upcoming linguistic input, for example, regarding the role of extralinguistic cues in prediction during language comprehension.
  • Hustá, C., Nieuwland, M. S., & Meyer, A. S. (2023). Effects of picture naming and categorization on concurrent comprehension: Evidence from the N400. Collabra: Psychology, 9(1): 88129. doi:10.1525/collabra.88129.

    Abstract

    n conversations, interlocutors concurrently perform two related processes: speech comprehension and speech planning. We investigated effects of speech planning on comprehension using EEG. Dutch speakers listened to sentences that ended with expected or unexpected target words. In addition, a picture was presented two seconds after target onset (Experiment 1) or 50 ms before target onset (Experiment 2). Participants’ task was to name the picture or to stay quiet depending on the picture category. In Experiment 1, we found a strong N400 effect in response to unexpected compared to expected target words. Importantly, this N400 effect was reduced in Experiment 2 compared to Experiment 1. Unexpectedly, the N400 effect was not smaller in the naming compared to categorization condition. This indicates that conceptual preparation or the decision whether to speak (taking place in both task conditions of Experiment 2) rather than processes specific to word planning interfere with comprehension.
  • Kałamała, P., Chuderski, A., Szewczyk, J., Senderecka, M., & Wodniecka, Z. (2023). Bilingualism caught in a net: A new approach to understanding the complexity of bilingual experience. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(1), 157-174. doi:10.1037/xge0001263.

    Abstract

    The growing importance of research on bilingualism in psychology and neuroscience motivates the need for a psychometric model that can be used to understand and quantify this phenomenon. This research is the first to meet this need. We reanalyzed two data sets (N = 171 and N = 112) from relatively young adult language-unbalanced bilinguals and asked whether bilingualism is best described by the factor structure or by the network structure. The factor and network models were established on one data set and then validated on the other data set in a fully confirmatory manner. The network model provided the best fit to the data. This implies that bilingualism should be conceptualized as an emergent phenomenon arising from direct and idiosyncratic dependencies among the history of language acquisition, diverse language skills, and language-use practices. These dependencies can be reduced to neither a single universal quotient nor to some more general factors. Additional in-depth network analyses showed that the subjective perception of proficiency along with language entropy and language mixing were the most central indices of bilingualism, thus indicating that these measures can be especially sensitive to variation in the overall bilingual experience. Overall, this work highlights the great potential of psychometric network modeling to gain a more accurate description and understanding of complex (psycho)linguistic and cognitive phenomena.
  • Kösem, A., Dai, B., McQueen, J. M., & Hagoort, P. (2023). Neural envelope tracking of speech does not unequivocally reflect intelligibility. NeuroImage, 272: 120040. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120040.

    Abstract

    During listening, brain activity tracks the rhythmic structures of speech signals. Here, we directly dissociated the contribution of neural envelope tracking in the processing of speech acoustic cues from that related to linguistic processing. We examined the neural changes associated with the comprehension of Noise-Vocoded (NV) speech using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants listened to NV sentences in a 3-phase training paradigm: (1) pre-training, where NV stimuli were barely comprehended, (2) training with exposure of the original clear version of speech stimulus, and (3) post-training, where the same stimuli gained intelligibility from the training phase. Using this paradigm, we tested if the neural responses of a speech signal was modulated by its intelligibility without any change in its acoustic structure. To test the influence of spectral degradation on neural envelope tracking independently of training, participants listened to two types of NV sentences (4-band and 2-band NV speech), but were only trained to understand 4-band NV speech. Significant changes in neural tracking were observed in the delta range in relation to the acoustic degradation of speech. However, we failed to find a direct effect of intelligibility on the neural tracking of speech envelope in both theta and delta ranges, in both auditory regions-of-interest and whole-brain sensor-space analyses. This suggests that acoustics greatly influence the neural tracking response to speech envelope, and that caution needs to be taken when choosing the control signals for speech-brain tracking analyses, considering that a slight change in acoustic parameters can have strong effects on the neural tracking response.
  • Lei, A., Willems, R. M., & Eekhof, L. S. (2023). Emotions, fast and slow: Processing of emotion words is affected by individual differences in need for affect and narrative absorption. Cognition and Emotion, 37(5), 997-1005. doi:10.1080/02699931.2023.2216445.

    Abstract

    Emotional words have consistently been shown to be processed differently than neutral words. However, few studies have examined individual variability in emotion word processing with longer, ecologically valid stimuli (beyond isolated words, sentences, or paragraphs). In the current study, we re-analysed eye-tracking data collected during story reading to reveal how individual differences in need for affect and narrative absorption impact the speed of emotion word reading. Word emotionality was indexed by affective-aesthetic potentials (AAP) calculated by a sentiment analysis tool. We found that individuals with higher levels of need for affect and narrative absorption read positive words more slowly. On the other hand, these individual differences did not influence the reading time of more negative words, suggesting that high need for affect and narrative absorption are characterised by a positivity bias only. In general, unlike most previous studies using more isolated emotion word stimuli, we observed a quadratic (U-shaped) effect of word emotionality on reading speed, such that both positive and negative words were processed more slowly than neutral words. Taken together, this study emphasises the importance of taking into account individual differences and task context when studying emotion word processing.
  • Levshina, N. (2023). Communicative efficiency: Language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    All living beings try to save effort, and humans are no exception. This groundbreaking book shows how we save time and energy during communication by unconsciously making efficient choices in grammar, lexicon and phonology. It presents a new theory of 'communicative efficiency', the idea that language is designed to be as efficient as possible, as a system of communication. The new framework accounts for the diverse manifestations of communicative efficiency across a typologically broad range of languages, using various corpus-based and statistical approaches to explain speakers' bias towards efficiency. The author's unique interdisciplinary expertise allows her to provide rich evidence from a broad range of language sciences. She integrates diverse insights from over a hundred years of research into this comprehensible new theory, which she presents step-by-step in clear and accessible language. It is essential reading for language scientists, cognitive scientists and anyone interested in language use and communication.
  • Levshina, N., Namboodiripad, S., Allassonnière-Tang, M., Kramer, M., Talamo, L., Verkerk, A., Wilmoth, S., Garrido Rodriguez, G., Gupton, T. M., Kidd, E., Liu, Z., Naccarato, C., Nordlinger, R., Panova, A., & Stoynova, N. (2023). Why we need a gradient approach to word order. Linguistics, 61(4), 825-883. doi:10.1515/ling-2021-0098.

    Abstract

    This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language acquisition, processing, typology, language contact, language evolution and change, and formal approaches. Gradient approaches have been very fruitful in some domains, such as language processing, but their potential is not fully realized yet. This may be due to practical reasons. We discuss the most pressing methodological challenges in corpus-based and experimental research of word order and propose some practical solutions.
  • Levshina, N. (2023). Testing communicative and learning biases in a causal model of language evolution:A study of cues to Subject and Object. In M. Degano, T. Roberts, G. Sbardolini, & M. Schouwstra (Eds.), The Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium (pp. 383-387). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
  • Lewis, A. G., Schoffelen, J.-M., Bastiaansen, M., & Schriefers, H. (2023). Is beta in agreement with the relatives? Using relative clause sentences to investigate MEG beta power dynamics during sentence comprehension. Psychophysiology, 60(10): e14332. doi:10.1111/psyp.14332.

    Abstract

    There remains some debate about whether beta power effects observed during sentence comprehension reflect ongoing syntactic unification operations (beta-syntax hypothesis), or instead reflect maintenance or updating of the sentence-level representation (beta-maintenance hypothesis). In this study, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate beta power neural dynamics while participants read relative clause sentences that were initially ambiguous between a subject- or an object-relative reading. An additional condition included a grammatical violation at the disambiguation point in the relative clause sentences. The beta-maintenance hypothesis predicts a decrease in beta power at the disambiguation point for unexpected (and less preferred) object-relative clause sentences and grammatical violations, as both signal a need to update the sentence-level representation. While the beta-syntax hypothesis also predicts a beta power decrease for grammatical violations due to a disruption of syntactic unification operations, it instead predicts an increase in beta power for the object-relative clause condition because syntactic unification at the point of disambiguation becomes more demanding. We observed decreased beta power for both the agreement violation and object-relative clause conditions in typical left hemisphere language regions, which provides compelling support for the beta-maintenance hypothesis. Mid-frontal theta power effects were also present for grammatical violations and object-relative clause sentences, suggesting that violations and unexpected sentence interpretations are registered as conflicts by the brain's domain-general error detection system.

    Additional information

    data
  • Mak, M., Faber, M., & Willems, R. M. (2023). Different kinds of simulation during literary reading: Insights from a combined fMRI and eye-tracking study. Cortex, 162, 115-135. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2023.01.014.

    Abstract

    Mental simulation is an important aspect of narrative reading. In a previous study, we found that gaze durations are differentially impacted by different kinds of mental simulation. Motor simulation, perceptual simulation, and mentalizing as elicited by literary short stories influenced eye movements in distinguishable ways (Mak & Willems, 2019). In the current study, we investigated the existence of a common neural locus for these different kinds of simulation. We additionally investigated whether individual differences during reading, as indexed by the eye movements, are reflected in domain-specific activations in the brain. We found a variety of brain areas activated by simulation-eliciting content, both modality-specific brain areas and a general simulation area. Individual variation in percent signal change in activated areas was related to measures of story appreciation as well as personal characteristics (i.e., transportability, perspective taking). Taken together, these findings suggest that mental simulation is supported by both domain-specific processes grounded in previous experiences, and by the neural mechanisms that underlie higher-order language processing (e.g., situation model building, event indexing, integration).

    Additional information

    figures localizer tasks appendix C1
  • Mazzini, S., Holler, J., & Drijvers, L. (2023). Studying naturalistic human communication using dual-EEG and audio-visual recordings. STAR Protocols, 4(3): 102370. doi:10.1016/j.xpro.2023.102370.

    Abstract

    We present a protocol to study naturalistic human communication using dual-EEG and audio-visual recordings. We describe preparatory steps for data collection including setup preparation, experiment design, and piloting. We then describe the data collection process in detail which consists of participant recruitment, experiment room preparation, and data collection. We also outline the kinds of research questions that can be addressed with the current protocol, including several analysis possibilities, from conversational to advanced time-frequency analyses.
    For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Drijvers and Holler (2022).
  • Mishra, C., Verdonschot, R. G., Hagoort, P., & Skantze, G. (2023). Real-time emotion generation in human-robot dialogue using large language models. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 10: 1271610. doi:10.3389/frobt.2023.1271610.

    Abstract

    Affective behaviors enable social robots to not only establish better connections with humans but also serve as a tool for the robots to express their internal states. It has been well established that emotions are important to signal understanding in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This work aims to harness the power of Large Language Models (LLM) and proposes an approach to control the affective behavior of robots. By interpreting emotion appraisal as an Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) tasks, we used GPT-3.5 to predict the emotion of a robot’s turn in real-time, using the dialogue history of the ongoing conversation. The robot signaled the predicted emotion using facial expressions. The model was evaluated in a within-subjects user study (N = 47) where the model-driven emotion generation was compared against conditions where the robot did not display any emotions and where it displayed incongruent emotions. The participants interacted with the robot by playing a card sorting game that was specifically designed to evoke emotions. The results indicated that the emotions were reliably generated by the LLM and the participants were able to perceive the robot’s emotions. It was found that the robot expressing congruent model-driven facial emotion expressions were perceived to be significantly more human-like, emotionally appropriate, and elicit a more positive impression. Participants also scored significantly better in the card sorting game when the robot displayed congruent facial expressions. From a technical perspective, the study shows that LLMs can be used to control the affective behavior of robots reliably in real-time. Additionally, our results could be used in devising novel human-robot interactions, making robots more effective in roles where emotional interaction is important, such as therapy, companionship, or customer service.
  • Quaresima, A., Fitz, H., Duarte, R., Van den Broek, D., Hagoort, P., & Petersson, K. M. (2023). The Tripod neuron: A minimal structural reduction of the dendritic tree. The Journal of Physiology, 601(15), 3007-3437. doi:10.1113/JP283399.

    Abstract

    Neuron models with explicit dendritic dynamics have shed light on mechanisms for coincidence detection, pathway selection and temporal filtering. However, it is still unclear which morphological and physiological features are required to capture these phenomena. In this work, we introduce the Tripod neuron model and propose a minimal structural reduction of the dendritic tree that is able to reproduce these computations. The Tripod is a three-compartment model consisting of two segregated passive dendrites and a somatic compartment modelled as an adaptive, exponential integrate-and-fire neuron. It incorporates dendritic geometry, membrane physiology and receptor dynamics as measured in human pyramidal cells. We characterize the response of the Tripod to glutamatergic and GABAergic inputs and identify parameters that support supra-linear integration, coincidence-detection and pathway-specific gating through shunting inhibition. Following NMDA spikes, the Tripod neuron generates plateau potentials whose duration depends on the dendritic length and the strength of synaptic input. When fitted with distal compartments, the Tripod encodes previous activity into a dendritic depolarized state. This dendritic memory allows the neuron to perform temporal binding, and we show that it solves transition and sequence detection tasks on which a single-compartment model fails. Thus, the Tripod can account for dendritic computations previously explained only with more detailed neuron models or neural networks. Due to its simplicity, the Tripod neuron can be used efficiently in simulations of larger cortical circuits.
  • Ryskin, R., & Nieuwland, M. S. (2023). Prediction during language comprehension: What is next? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(11), 1032-1052. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2023.08.003.

    Abstract

    Prediction is often regarded as an integral aspect of incremental language comprehension, but little is known about the cognitive architectures and mechanisms that support it. We review studies showing that listeners and readers use all manner of contextual information to generate multifaceted predictions about upcoming input. The nature of these predictions may vary between individuals owing to differences in language experience, among other factors. We then turn to unresolved questions which may guide the search for the underlying mechanisms. (i) Is prediction essential to language processing or an optional strategy? (ii) Are predictions generated from within the language system or by domain-general processes? (iii) What is the relationship between prediction and memory? (iv) Does prediction in comprehension require simulation via the production system? We discuss promising directions for making progress in answering these questions and for developing a mechanistic understanding of prediction in language.
  • Seijdel, N., Marshall, T. R., & Drijvers, L. (2023). Rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT): A promising technique to study neural and cognitive processing using naturalistic paradigms. Cerebral Cortex, 33(5), 1626-1629. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhac160.

    Abstract

    Frequency tagging has been successfully used to investigate selective stimulus processing in electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies. Recently, new projectors have been developed that allow for frequency tagging at higher frequencies (>60 Hz). This technique, rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT), provides two crucial advantages over low-frequency tagging as (i) it leaves low-frequency oscillations unperturbed, and thus open for investigation, and ii) it can render the tagging invisible, resulting in more naturalistic paradigms and a lack of participant awareness. The development of this technique has far-reaching implications as oscillations involved in cognitive processes can be investigated, and potentially manipulated, in a more naturalistic manner.
  • Seyfried, F., & Udden, J. (2023). Phonotactics and syntax: Investigating functional specialisation during structured sequence processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 38(3), 346-358. doi:10.1080/23273798.2022.2116462.

    Abstract

    Frontal lobe organisation displays a functional gradient, with overarching processing goals located in parts anterior to more subordinate goals, processed more posteriorly. Functional specialisation for syntax and phonology within language relevant areas has been supported by meta-analyses and reviews, but never directly tested experimentally. We tested for organised functional specialisation by manipulating syntactic case and phonotactics, creating violations at the end of otherwise matched and predictable sentences. Both violations led to increased activation in expected language regions. We observe the clearest signs of a functional gradient for language processing in the medial frontal cortex, where syntactic violations activated a more anterior portion compared to the phonotactic violations. A large overlap of syntactic and phonotactic processing in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) supports the view that general structured sequence processes are located in this area. These findings are relevant for understanding how sentence processing is implemented in hierarchically organised processing steps in the frontal lobe.

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    supplementary methods
  • Silva, S., Inácio, F., Rocha e Sousa, D., Gaspar, N., Folia, V., & Petersson, K. M. (2023). Formal language hierarchy reflects different levels of cognitive complexity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 49(4), 642-660. doi:10.1037/xlm0001182.

    Abstract

    Formal language hierarchy describes levels of increasing syntactic complexity (adjacent dependencies, nonadjacent nested, nonadjacent crossed) of which the transcription into a hierarchy of cognitive complexity remains under debate. The cognitive foundations of formal language hierarchy have been contradicted by two types of evidence: First, adjacent dependencies are not easier to learn compared to nonadjacent; second, crossed nonadjacent dependencies may be easier than nested. However, studies providing these findings may have engaged confounds: Repetition monitoring strategies may have accounted for participants’ high performance in nonadjacent dependencies, and linguistic experience may have accounted for the advantage of crossed dependencies. We conducted two artificial grammar learning experiments where we addressed these confounds by manipulating reliance on repetition monitoring and by testing participants inexperienced with crossed dependencies. Results showed relevant differences in learning adjacent versus nonadjacent dependencies and advantages of nested over crossed, suggesting that formal language hierarchy may indeed translate into a hierarchy of cognitive complexity
  • Tamaoka, K., Sakai, H., Miyaoka, Y., Ono, H., Fukuda, M., Wu, Y., & Verdonschot, R. G. (2023). Sentential inference bridging between lexical/grammatical knowledge and text comprehension among native Chinese speakers learning Japanese. PLoS One, 18(4): e0284331. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0284331.

    Abstract

    The current study explored the role of sentential inference in connecting lexical/grammatical knowledge and overall text comprehension in foreign language learning. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), causal relationships were examined between four latent variables: lexical knowledge, grammatical knowledge, sentential inference, and text comprehension. The study analyzed 281 Chinese university students learning Japanese as a second language and compared two causal models: (1) the partially-mediated model, which suggests that lexical knowledge, grammatical knowledge, and sentential inference concurrently influence text comprehension, and (2) the wholly-mediated model, which posits that both lexical and grammatical knowledge impact sentential inference, which then further affects text comprehension. The SEM comparison analysis supported the wholly-mediated model, showing sequential causal relationships from lexical knowledge to sentential inference and then to text comprehension, without significant contribution from grammatical knowledge. The results indicate that sentential inference serves as a crucial bridge between lexical knowledge and text comprehension.
  • Tamaoka, K., Zhang, J., Koizumi, M., & Verdonschot, R. G. (2023). Phonological encoding in Tongan: An experimental investigation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(10), 2197-2430. doi:10.1177/17470218221138770.

    Abstract

    This study is the first to report chronometric evidence on Tongan language production. It has been speculated that the mora plays an important role during Tongan phonological encoding. A mora follows the (C)V form, so /a/ and /ka/ (but not /k/) denote a mora in Tongan. Using a picture-word naming paradigm, Tongan native speakers named pictures containing superimposed non-word distractors. This task has been used before in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese to investigate the initially selected unit during phonological encoding (IPU). Compared to control distractors, both onset and mora overlapping distractors resulted in faster naming latencies. Several alternative explanations for the pattern of results - proficiency in English, knowledge of Latin script, and downstream effects - are discussed. However, we conclude that Tongan phonological encoding likely natively uses the phoneme, and not the mora, as the IPU..

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    supplemental material
  • Van Wonderen, E., & Nieuwland, M. S. (2023). Lexical prediction does not rationally adapt to prediction error: ERP evidence from pre-nominal articles. Journal of Memory and Language, 132: 104435. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2023.104435.

    Abstract

    People sometimes predict upcoming words during language comprehension, but debate remains on when and to what extent such predictions indeed occur. The rational adaptation hypothesis holds that predictions develop with expected utility: people predict more strongly when predictions are frequently confirmed (low prediction error) rather than disconfirmed. However, supporting evidence is mixed thus far and has only involved measuring responses to supposedly predicted nouns, not to preceding articles that may also be predicted. The current, large-sample (N = 200) ERP study on written discourse comprehension in Dutch therefore employs the well-known ‘pre-nominal prediction effect’: enhanced N400-like ERPs for articles that are unexpected given a likely upcoming noun’s gender (i.e., the neuter gender article ‘het’ when people expect the common gender noun phrase ‘de krant’, the newspaper) compared to expected articles. We investigated whether the pre-nominal prediction effect is larger when most of the presented stories contain predictable article-noun combinations (75% predictable, 25% unpredictable) compared to when most stories contain unpredictable combinations (25% predictable, 75% unpredictable). Our results show the pre-nominal prediction effect in both contexts, with little evidence to suggest that this effect depended on the percentage of predictable combinations. Moreover, the little evidence suggesting such a dependence was primarily observed for unexpected, neuter-gender articles (‘het’), which is inconsistent with the rational adaptation hypothesis. In line with recent demonstrations (Nieuwland, 2021a,b), our results suggest that linguistic prediction is less ‘rational’ or Bayes optimal than is often suggested.
  • Wang, M., Shao, Z., Verdonschot, R. G., Chen, Y., & Schiller, N. O. (2023). Orthography influences spoken word production in blocked cyclic naming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 30, 383-392. doi:10.3758/s13423-022-02123-y.

    Abstract

    Does the way a word is written influence its spoken production? Previous studies suggest that orthography is involved only when the orthographic representation is highly relevant during speaking (e.g., in reading-aloud tasks). To address this issue, we carried out two experiments using the blocked cyclic picture-naming paradigm. In both experiments, participants were asked to name pictures repeatedly in orthographically homogeneous or heterogeneous blocks. In the naming task, the written form was not shown; however, the radical of the first character overlapped between the four pictures in this block type. A facilitative orthographic effect was found when picture names shared part of their written forms, compared with the heterogeneous condition. This facilitative effect was independent of the position of orthographic overlap (i.e., the left, the lower, or the outer part of the character). These findings strongly suggest that orthography can influence speaking even when it is not highly relevant (i.e., during picture naming) and the orthographic effect is less likely to be attributed to strategic preparation.
  • Zioga, I., Weissbart, H., Lewis, A. G., Haegens, S., & Martin, A. E. (2023). Naturalistic spoken language comprehension is supported by alpha and beta oscillations. The Journal of Neuroscience, 43(20), 3718-3732. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1500-22.2023.

    Abstract

    Brain oscillations are prevalent in all species and are involved in numerous perceptual operations. α oscillations are thought to facilitate processing through the inhibition of task-irrelevant networks, while β oscillations are linked to the putative reactivation of content representations. Can the proposed functional role of α and β oscillations be generalized from low-level operations to higher-level cognitive processes? Here we address this question focusing on naturalistic spoken language comprehension. Twenty-two (18 female) Dutch native speakers listened to stories in Dutch and French while MEG was recorded. We used dependency parsing to identify three dependency states at each word: the number of (1) newly opened dependencies, (2) dependencies that remained open, and (3) resolved dependencies. We then constructed forward models to predict α and β power from the dependency features. Results showed that dependency features predict α and β power in language-related regions beyond low-level linguistic features. Left temporal, fundamental language regions are involved in language comprehension in α, while frontal and parietal, higher-order language regions, and motor regions are involved in β. Critically, α- and β-band dynamics seem to subserve language comprehension tapping into syntactic structure building and semantic composition by providing low-level mechanistic operations for inhibition and reactivation processes. Because of the temporal similarity of the α-β responses, their potential functional dissociation remains to be elucidated. Overall, this study sheds light on the role of α and β oscillations during naturalistic spoken language comprehension, providing evidence for the generalizability of these dynamics from perceptual to complex linguistic processes.
  • Zora, H., Tremblay, A. C., Gussenhoven, C., & Liu, F. (Eds.). (2023). Crosstalk between intonation and lexical tones: Linguistic, cognitive and neuroscience perspectives. Lausanne: Frontiers Media SA. doi:10.3389/978-2-8325-3301-7.
  • Zora, H., Wester, J. M., & Csépe, V. (2023). Predictions about prosody facilitate lexical access: Evidence from P50/N100 and MMN components. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 194: 112262. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2023.112262.

    Abstract

    Research into the neural foundation of perception asserts a model where top-down predictions modulate the bottom-up processing of sensory input. Despite becoming increasingly influential in cognitive neuroscience, the precise account of this predictive coding framework remains debated. In this study, we aim to contribute to this debate by investigating how predictions about prosody facilitate speech perception, and to shed light especially on lexical access influenced by simultaneous predictions in different domains, inter alia, prosodic and semantic. Using a passive auditory oddball paradigm, we examined neural responses to prosodic changes, leading to a semantic change as in Dutch nouns canon [ˈkaːnɔn] ‘cannon’ vs kanon [kaːˈnɔn] ‘canon’, and used acoustically identical pseudowords as controls. Results from twenty-eight native speakers of Dutch (age range 18–32 years) indicated an enhanced P50/N100 complex to prosodic change in pseudowords as well as an MMN response to both words and pseudowords. The enhanced P50/N100 response to pseudowords is claimed to indicate that all relevant auditory information is still processed by the brain, whereas the reduced response to words might reflect the suppression of information that has already been encoded. The MMN response to pseudowords and words, on the other hand, is best justified by the unification of previously established prosodic representations with sensory and semantic input respectively. This pattern of results is in line with the predictive coding framework acting on multiple levels and is of crucial importance to indicate that predictions about linguistic prosodic information are utilized by the brain as early as 50 ms.
  • Aldosimani, M., Verdonschot, R. G., Iwamoto, Y., Nakazawa, M., Mallya, S. M., Kakimoto, N., Toyosawa, S., Kreiborg, S., & Murakami, S. (2022). Prognostic factors for lymph node metastasis from upper gingival carcinomas. Oral Radiology, 38(3), 389-396. doi:10.1007/s11282-021-00568-w.

    Abstract

    This study sought to identify tumor characteristics that associate with regional lymph node metastases in squamous cell carcinomas originating in the upper gingiva.
  • Arana, S. (2022). Abstract neural representations of language during sentence comprehension: Evidence from MEG and Behaviour. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2022). Counting systems. In A. Ledgeway, & M. Maiden (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics (pp. 459-488). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    The Romance counting system is numerical – with residues of earlier systems whereby each commodity had its own unit of quantification – and decimal. Numeral formations beyond ‘10’ are compounds, combining two or more numerals that are in an arithmetical relation, typically that of addition and multiplication. Formal variation across the (standard) Romance languages and dialects and across historical stages involves the relative sequence of the composing elements, absence or presence of connectors, their synthetic vs. analytic nature, and the degree of grammatical marking. A number of ‘deviant’ numeral formations raise the question of borrowing vs independent development, such as vigesimals (featuring a base ‘20’ instead ‘10’) in certain Romance varieties and the teen and decad formations in Romanian. The other types of numeral in Romance, which derive from the unmarked and consistent cardinals, feature a significantly higher degree of formal complexity and variation involving Latin formants and tend toward analyticity. While Latin features prominently in the Romance counting system as a source of numeral formations and suffixes, it is only in Romance that the inherited decimal system reached its full potential, illustrating its increasing prominence, reflected not only in numerals, but also in language acquisition, sign language, and post-Revolution measuring systems.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2022). Finite verb + infinite + object in later Latin: Early brace constructions? In G. V. M. Haverling (Ed.), Studies on Late and Vulgar Latin in the Early 21st Century: Acts of the 12th International Colloquium "Latin vulgaire – Latin tardif (pp. 166-181). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.
  • Bocanegra, B. R., Poletiek, F. H., & Zwaan, R. A. (2022). Language concatenates perceptual features into representations during comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 127: 104355. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2022.104355.

    Abstract

    Although many studies have investigated the activation of perceptual representations during language comprehension, to our knowledge only one previous study has directly tested how perceptual features are combined into representations during comprehension. In their classic study, Potter and Faulconer [(1979). Understanding noun phrases. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 509–521.] investigated the perceptual representation of adjective-noun combinations. However, their non-orthogonal design did not allow the differentiation between conjunctive vs. disjunctive representations. Using randomized orthogonal designs, we observe evidence for disjunctive perceptual representations when participants represent feature combinations simultaneously (in several experiments; N = 469), and we observe evidence for conjunctive perceptual representations when participants represent feature combinations sequentially (In several experiments; N = 628). Our findings show that the generation of conjunctive representations during comprehension depends on the concatenation of linguistic cues, and thus suggest the construction of elaborate perceptual representations may critically depend on language.
  • Carota, F., Schoffelen, J.-M., Oostenveld, R., & Indefrey, P. (2022). The time course of language production as revealed by pattern classification of MEG sensor data. The Journal of Neuroscience, 42(29), 5745-5754. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1923-21.2022.

    Abstract

    Language production involves a complex set of computations, from conceptualization to articulation, which are thought to engage cascading neural events in the language network. However, recent neuromagnetic evidence suggests simultaneous meaning-to-speech mapping in picture naming tasks, as indexed by early parallel activation of frontotemporal regions to lexical semantic, phonological, and articulatory information. Here we investigate the time course of word production, asking to what extent such “earliness” is a distinctive property of the associated spatiotemporal dynamics. Using MEG, we recorded the neural signals of 34 human subjects (26 males) overtly naming 134 images from four semantic object categories (animals, foods, tools, clothes). Within each category, we covaried word length, as quantified by the number of syllables contained in a word, and phonological neighborhood density to target lexical and post-lexical phonological/phonetic processes. Multivariate pattern analyses searchlights in sensor space distinguished the stimulus-locked spatiotemporal responses to object categories early on, from 150 to 250 ms after picture onset, whereas word length was decoded in left frontotemporal sensors at 250-350 ms, followed by the latency of phonological neighborhood density (350-450 ms). Our results suggest a progression of neural activity from posterior to anterior language regions for the semantic and phonological/phonetic computations preparing overt speech, thus supporting serial cascading models of word production
  • Carter, G., & Nieuwland, M. S. (2022). Predicting definite and indefinite referents during discourse comprehension: Evidence from event‐related potentials. Cognitive Science, 46(2): e13092. doi:10.1111/cogs.13092.

    Abstract

    Linguistic predictions may be generated from and evaluated against a representation of events and referents described in the discourse. Compatible with this idea, recent work shows that predictions about novel noun phrases include their definiteness. In the current follow-up study, we ask whether people engage similar prediction-related processes for definite and indefinite referents. This question is relevant for linguistic theories that imply a processing difference between definite and indefinite noun phrases, typically because definiteness is thought to require a uniquely identifiable referent in the discourse. We addressed this question in an event-related potential (ERP) study (N = 48) with preregistration of data acquisition, preprocessing, and Bayesian analysis. Participants read Dutch mini-stories with a definite or indefinite novel noun phrase (e.g., “het/een huis,” the/a house), wherein (in)definiteness of the article was either expected or unexpected and the noun was always strongly expected. Unexpected articles elicited enhanced N400s, but unexpectedly indefinite articles also elicited a positive ERP effect at frontal channels compared to expectedly indefinite articles. We tentatively link this effect to an antiuniqueness violation, which may force people to introduce a new referent over and above the already anticipated one. Interestingly, expectedly definite nouns elicited larger N400s than unexpectedly definite nouns (replicating a previous surprising finding) and indefinite nouns. Although the exact nature of these noun effects remains unknown, expectedly definite nouns may have triggered the strongest semantic activation because they alone refer to specific and concrete referents. In sum, results from both the articles and nouns clearly demonstrate that definiteness marking has a rapid effect on processing, counter to recent claims regarding definiteness processing.
  • Coopmans, C. W., De Hoop, H., Kaushik, K., Hagoort, P., & Martin, A. E. (2022). Hierarchy in language interpretation: Evidence from behavioural experiments and computational modelling. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 37(4), 420-439. doi:10.1080/23273798.2021.1980595.

    Abstract

    It has long been recognised that phrases and sentences are organised hierarchically, but many computational models of language treat them as sequences of words without computing constituent structure. Against this background, we conducted two experiments which showed that participants interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in terms of their abstract hierarchical structure rather than their linear surface order. When a neural network model was tested on this task, it could simulate such “hierarchical” behaviour. However, when we changed the training data such that they were not entirely unambiguous anymore, the model stopped generalising in a human-like way. It did not systematically generalise to novel items, and when it was trained on ambiguous trials, it strongly favoured the linear interpretation. We argue that these models should be endowed with a bias to make generalisations over hierarchical structure in order to be cognitively adequate models of human language.
  • Coopmans, C. W., De Hoop, H., Hagoort, P., & Martin, A. E. (2022). Effects of structure and meaning on cortical tracking of linguistic units in naturalistic speech. Neurobiology of Language, 3(3), 386-412. doi:10.1162/nol_a_00070.

    Abstract

    Recent research has established that cortical activity “tracks” the presentation rate of syntactic phrases in continuous speech, even though phrases are abstract units that do not have direct correlates in the acoustic signal. We investigated whether cortical tracking of phrase structures is modulated by the extent to which these structures compositionally determine meaning. To this end, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) of 38 native speakers who listened to naturally spoken Dutch stimuli in different conditions, which parametrically modulated the degree to which syntactic structure and lexical semantics determine sentence meaning. Tracking was quantified through mutual information between the EEG data and either the speech envelopes or abstract annotations of syntax, all of which were filtered in the frequency band corresponding to the presentation rate of phrases (1.1–2.1 Hz). Overall, these mutual information analyses showed stronger tracking of phrases in regular sentences than in stimuli whose lexical-syntactic content is reduced, but no consistent differences in tracking between sentences and stimuli that contain a combination of syntactic structure and lexical content. While there were no effects of compositional meaning on the degree of phrase-structure tracking, analyses of event-related potentials elicited by sentence-final words did reveal meaning-induced differences between conditions. Our findings suggest that cortical tracking of structure in sentences indexes the internal generation of this structure, a process that is modulated by the properties of its input, but not by the compositional interpretation of its output.

    Additional information

    supplementary information
  • Coopmans, C. W., & Cohn, N. (2022). An electrophysiological investigation of co-referential processes in visual narrative comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 172: 108253. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108253.

    Abstract

    Visual narratives make use of various means to convey referential and co-referential meaning, so comprehenders
    must recognize that different depictions across sequential images represent the same character(s). In this study,
    we investigated how the order in which different types of panels in visual sequences are presented affects how
    the unfolding narrative is comprehended. Participants viewed short comic strips while their electroencephalo-
    gram (EEG) was recorded. We analyzed evoked and induced EEG activity elicited by both full panels (showing a
    full character) and refiner panels (showing only a zoom of that full panel), and took into account whether they
    preceded or followed the panel to which they were co-referentially related (i.e., were cataphoric or anaphoric).
    We found that full panels elicited both larger N300 amplitude and increased gamma-band power compared to
    refiner panels. Anaphoric panels elicited a sustained negativity compared to cataphoric panels, which appeared
    to be sensitive to the referential status of the anaphoric panel. In the time-frequency domain, anaphoric panels
    elicited reduced 8–12 Hz alpha power and increased 45–65 Hz gamma-band power compared to cataphoric
    panels. These findings are consistent with models in which the processes involved in visual narrative compre-
    hension partially overlap with those in language comprehension.
  • Corps, R. E., Knudsen, B., & Meyer, A. S. (2022). Overrated gaps: Inter-speaker gaps provide limited information about the timing of turns in conversation. Cognition, 223: 105037. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105037.

    Abstract

    Corpus analyses have shown that turn-taking in conversation is much faster than laboratory studies of speech planning would predict. To explain fast turn-taking, Levinson and Torreira (2015) proposed that speakers are highly proactive: They begin to plan a response to their interlocutor's turn as soon as they have understood its gist, and launch this planned response when the turn-end is imminent. Thus, fast turn-taking is possible because speakers use the time while their partner is talking to plan their own utterance. In the present study, we asked how much time upcoming speakers actually have to plan their utterances. Following earlier psycholinguistic work, we used transcripts of spoken conversations in Dutch, German, and English. These transcripts consisted of segments, which are continuous stretches of speech by one speaker. In the psycholinguistic and phonetic literature, such segments have often been used as proxies for turns. We found that in all three corpora, large proportions of the segments comprised of only one or two words, which on our estimate does not give the next speaker enough time to fully plan a response. Further analyses showed that speakers indeed often did not respond to the immediately preceding segment of their partner, but continued an earlier segment of their own. More generally, our findings suggest that speech segments derived from transcribed corpora do not necessarily correspond to turns, and the gaps between speech segments therefore only provide limited information about the planning and timing of turns.
  • Dai, B., McQueen, J. M., Terporten, R., Hagoort, P., & Kösem, A. (2022). Distracting Linguistic Information Impairs Neural Tracking of Attended Speech. Current Research in Neurobiology, 3: 100043. doi:10.1016/j.crneur.2022.100043.

    Abstract

    Listening to speech is difficult in noisy environments, and is even harder when the interfering noise consists of intelligible speech as compared to unintelligible sounds. This suggests that the competing linguistic information interferes with the neural processing of target speech. Interference could either arise from a degradation of the neural representation of the target speech, or from increased representation of distracting speech that enters in competition with the target speech. We tested these alternative hypotheses using magnetoencephalography (MEG) while participants listened to a target clear speech in the presence of distracting noise-vocoded speech. Crucially, the distractors were initially unintelligible but became more intelligible after a short training session. Results showed that the comprehension of the target speech was poorer after training than before training. The neural tracking of target speech in the delta range (1–4 Hz) reduced in strength in the presence of a more intelligible distractor. In contrast, the neural tracking of distracting signals was not significantly modulated by intelligibility. These results suggest that the presence of distracting speech signals degrades the linguistic representation of target speech carried by delta oscillations.
  • Dijkstra, T., Peeters, D., Hieselaar, W., & van Geffen, A. (2022). Orthographic and semantic priming effects in neighbour cognates: Experiments and simulations. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 26(2), 371-383. doi:10.1017/S1366728922000591.

    Abstract

    To investigate how orthography and semantics interact during bilingual visual word recognition, Dutch–English bilinguals made lexical decisions in two masked priming experiments. Dutch primes and English targets were presented that were either neighbour cognates (boek – BOOK), noncognate translations (kooi – CAGE), orthographically related neighbours (neus – NEWS), or unrelated words (huid - COAT). Prime durations of 50 ms (Experiment 1) and 83 ms (Experiment 2) led to similar result patterns. Both experiments reported a large cognate facilitation effect, a smaller facilitatory noncognate translation effect, and the absence of inhibitory orthographic neighbour effects. These results indicate that cognate facilitation is in large part due to orthographic-semantic resonance. Priming results for each condition were simulated well (all r's >.50) by Multilink+, a recent computational model for word retrieval. Limitations to the role of lateral inhibition in bilingual word recognition are discussed.
  • Drijvers, L., & Holler, J. (2022). Face-to-face spatial orientation fine-tunes the brain for neurocognitive processing in conversation. iScience, 25(11): 105413. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.105413.

    Abstract

    We here demonstrate that face-to-face spatial orientation induces a special ‘social mode’ for neurocognitive processing during conversation, even in the absence of visibility. Participants conversed face-to-face, face-to-face but visually occluded, and back-to-back to tease apart effects caused by seeing visual communicative signals and by spatial orientation. Using dual-EEG, we found that 1) listeners’ brains engaged more strongly while conversing in face-to-face than back-to-back, irrespective of the visibility of communicative signals, 2) listeners attended to speech more strongly in a back-to-back compared to a face-to-face spatial orientation without visibility; visual signals further reduced the attention needed; 3) the brains of interlocutors were more in sync in a face-to-face compared to a back-to-back spatial orientation, even when they could not see each other; visual signals further enhanced this pattern. Communicating in face-to-face spatial orientation is thus sufficient to induce a special ‘social mode’ which fine-tunes the brain for neurocognitive processing in conversation.
  • Eekhof, L. S., Van Krieken, K., & Willems, R. M. (2022). Reading about minds: The social-cognitive potential of narratives. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 29, 1703-1718. doi:10.3758/s13423-022-02079-z.

    Abstract

    It is often argued that narratives improve social cognition, either by appealing to social-cognitive abilities as we engage with the story world and its characters, or by conveying social knowledge. Empirical studies have found support for both a correlational and a causal link between exposure to (literary, fictional) narratives and social cognition. However, a series of failed replications has cast doubt on the robustness of these claims. Here, we review the existing empirical literature and identify open questions and challenges. An important conclusion of the review is that previous research has given too little consideration to the diversity of narratives, readers, and social-cognitive processes involved in the social-cognitive potential of narratives. We therefore establish a research agenda, proposing that future research should focus on (1) the specific text characteristics that drive the social-cognitive potential of narratives, (2) the individual differences between readers with respect to their sensitivity to this potential, and (3) the various aspects of social cognition that are potentially affected by reading narratives. Our recommendations can guide the design of future studies that will help us understand how, for whom, and in what respect exposure to narratives can advantage social cognition.
  • Ferrari, A., Richter, D., & De Lange, F. (2022). Updating contextual sensory expectations for adaptive behaviour. The Journal of Neuroscience, 42(47), 8855-8869. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1107-22.2022.

    Abstract

    The brain has the extraordinary capacity to construct predictive models of the environment by internalizing statistical regularities in the sensory inputs. The resulting sensory expectations shape how we perceive and react to the world; at the neural level, this relates to decreased neural responses to expected than unexpected stimuli (‘expectation suppression’). Crucially, expectations may need revision as context changes. However, existing research has often neglected this issue. Further, it is unclear whether contextual revisions apply selectively to expectations relevant to the task at hand, hence serving adaptive behaviour. The present fMRI study examined how contextual visual expectations spread throughout the cortical hierarchy as participants update their beliefs. We created a volatile environment with two state spaces presented over separate contexts and controlled by an independent contextualizing signal. Participants attended a training session before scanning to learn contextual temporal associations among pairs of object images. The fMRI experiment then tested for the emergence of contextual expectation suppression in two separate tasks, respectively with task-relevant and task-irrelevant expectations. Behavioural and neural effects of contextual expectation emerged progressively across the cortical hierarchy as participants attuned themselves to the context: expectation suppression appeared first in the insula, inferior frontal gyrus and posterior parietal cortex, followed by the ventral visual stream, up to early visual cortex. This applied selectively to task-relevant expectations. Taken together, the present results suggest that an insular and frontoparietal executive control network may guide the flexible deployment of contextual sensory expectations for adaptive behaviour in our complex and dynamic world.
  • Gao, Y., Meng, X., Bai, Z., Liu, X., Zhang, M., Li, H., Ding, G., Liu, L., & Booth, J. R. (2022). Left and right arcuate fasciculi are uniquely related to word reading skills in Chinese-English bilingual children. Neurobiology of Language, 3(1), 109-131. doi:10.1162/nol_a_00051.

    Abstract

    Whether reading in different writing systems recruits language-unique or language-universal neural processes is a long-standing debate. Many studies have shown the left arcuate fasciculus (AF) to be involved in phonological and reading processes. In contrast, little is known about the role of the right AF in reading, but some have suggested that it may play a role in visual spatial aspects of reading or the prosodic components of language. The right AF may be more important for reading in Chinese due to its logographic and tonal properties, but this hypothesis has yet to be tested. We recruited a group of Chinese-English bilingual children (8.2 to 12.0 years old) to explore the common and unique relation of reading skill in English and Chinese to fractional anisotropy (FA) in the bilateral AF. We found that both English and Chinese reading skills were positively correlated with FA in the rostral part of the left AF-direct segment. Additionally, English reading skill was positively correlated with FA in the caudal part of the left AF-direct segment, which was also positively correlated with phonological awareness. In contrast, Chinese reading skill was positively correlated with FA in certain segments of the right AF, which was positively correlated with visual spatial ability, but not tone discrimination ability. Our results suggest that there are language universal substrates of reading across languages, but that certain left AF nodes support phonological mechanisms important for reading in English, whereas certain right AF nodes support visual spatial mechanisms important for reading in Chinese.

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    supplementary materials
  • Giglio, L., Ostarek, M., Weber, K., & Hagoort, P. (2022). Commonalities and asymmetries in the neurobiological infrastructure for language production and comprehension. Cerebral Cortex, 32(7), 1405-1418. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhab287.

    Abstract

    The neurobiology of sentence production has been largely understudied compared to the neurobiology of sentence comprehension, due to difficulties with experimental control and motion-related artifacts in neuroimaging. We studied the neural response to constituents of increasing size and specifically focused on the similarities and differences in the production and comprehension of the same stimuli. Participants had to either produce or listen to stimuli in a gradient of constituent size based on a visual prompt. Larger constituent sizes engaged the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and middle temporal gyrus (LMTG) extending to inferior parietal areas in both production and comprehension, confirming that the neural resources for syntactic encoding and decoding are largely overlapping. An ROI analysis in LIFG and LMTG also showed that production elicited larger responses to constituent size than comprehension and that the LMTG was more engaged in comprehension than production, while the LIFG was more engaged in production than comprehension. Finally, increasing constituent size was characterized by later BOLD peaks in comprehension but earlier peaks in production. These results show that syntactic encoding and parsing engage overlapping areas, but there are asymmetries in the engagement of the language network due to the specific requirements of production and comprehension.

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    supplementary material
  • Gussenhoven, C., Lu, Y.-A., Lee-Kim, S.-I., Liu, C., Rahmani, H., Riad, T., & Zora, H. (2022). The sequence recall task and lexicality of tone: Exploring tone “deafness”. Frontiers in Psychology, 13: 902569. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.902569.

    Abstract

    Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task (SRT), which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal contrasts to test the hypothesis that high performance in a tonal SRT indicates the lexical status of tone. An additional question concerned the extent to which accuracy scores depended on phonological and phonetic properties of a language’s tone system, like its complexity, the existence of an experimental contrast in a language’s phonology, and the phonetic salience of a contrast. The results suggest that a tonal SRT is not likely to discriminate between tonal and non-tonal languages within a typologically varied group, because of the effects of specific properties of their tone systems. Future research should therefore address the first hypothesis with participants from otherwise similar tonal and non-tonal varieties of the same language, where results from a tonal SRT may make a useful contribution to the typological debate on word prosody.

    Additional information

    also published as book chapter (2023)
  • Hagoort, P. (2022). Reasoning and the brain. In M. Stokhof, & K. Stenning (Eds.), Rules, regularities, randomness. Festschrift for Michiel van Lambalgen (pp. 83-85). Amsterdam: Institute for Logic, Language and Computation.
  • Heilbron, M., Armeni, K., Schoffelen, J.-M., Hagoort, P., & De Lange, F. P. (2022). A hierarchy of linguistic predictions during natural language comprehension. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(32): e2201968119. doi:10.1073/pnas.2201968119.

    Abstract

    Understanding spoken language requires transforming ambiguous acoustic streams into a hierarchy of representations, from phonemes to meaning. It has been suggested that the brain uses prediction to guide the interpretation of incoming input. However, the role of prediction in language processing remains disputed, with disagreement about both the ubiquity and representational nature of predictions. Here, we address both issues by analyzing brain recordings of participants listening to audiobooks, and using a deep neural network (GPT-2) to precisely quantify contextual predictions. First, we establish that brain responses to words are modulated by ubiquitous predictions. Next, we disentangle model-based predictions into distinct dimensions, revealing dissociable neural signatures of predictions about syntactic category (parts of speech), phonemes, and semantics. Finally, we show that high-level (word) predictions inform low-level (phoneme) predictions, supporting hierarchical predictive processing. Together, these results underscore the ubiquity of prediction in language processing, showing that the brain spontaneously predicts upcoming language at multiple levels of abstraction.

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    supporting information
  • Heilbron, M. (2022). Getting ahead: Prediction as a window into language, and language as a window into the predictive brain. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Hervais-Adelman, A., Kumar, U., Mishra, R., Tripathi, V., Guleria, A., Singh, J. P., & Huettig, F. (2022). How does literacy affect speech processing? Not by enhancing cortical responses to speech, but by promoting connectivity of acoustic-phonetic and graphomotor cortices. Journal of Neuroscience, 42(47), 8826-8841. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1125-21.2022.

    Abstract

    Previous research suggests that literacy, specifically learning alphabetic letter-to-phoneme mappings, modifies online speech processing, and enhances brain responses, as indexed by the blood-oxygenation level dependent signal (BOLD), to speech in auditory areas associated with phonological processing (Dehaene et al., 2010). However, alphabets are not the only orthographic systems in use in the world, and hundreds of millions of individuals speak languages that are not written using alphabets. In order to make claims that literacy per se has broad and general consequences for brain responses to speech, one must seek confirmatory evidence from non-alphabetic literacy. To this end, we conducted a longitudinal fMRI study in India probing the effect of literacy in Devanagari, an abugida, on functional connectivity and cerebral responses to speech in 91 variously literate Hindi-speaking male and female human participants. Twenty-two completely illiterate participants underwent six months of reading and writing training. Devanagari literacy increases functional connectivity between acoustic-phonetic and graphomotor brain areas, but we find no evidence that literacy changes brain responses to speech, either in cross-sectional or longitudinal analyses. These findings shows that a dramatic reconfiguration of the neurofunctional substrates of online speech processing may not be a universal result of learning to read, and suggest that the influence of writing on speech processing should also be investigated.
  • Hoeksema, N., Hagoort, P., & Vernes, S. C. (2022). Piecing together the building blocks of the vocal learning bat brain. In A. Ravignani, R. Asano, D. Valente, F. Ferretti, S. Hartmann, M. Hayashi, Y. Jadoul, M. Martins, Y. Oseki, E. D. Rodrigues, O. Vasileva, & S. Wacewicz (Eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE) (pp. 294-296). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).
  • Holler, J., Drijvers, L., Rafiee, A., & Majid, A. (2022). Embodied space-pitch associations are shaped by language. Cognitive Science, 46(2): e13083. doi:10.1111/cogs.13083.

    Abstract

    Height-pitch associations are claimed to be universal and independent of language, but this claim remains controversial. The present study sheds new light on this debate with a multimodal analysis of individual sound and melody descriptions obtained in an interactive communication paradigm with speakers of Dutch and Farsi. The findings reveal that, in contrast to Dutch speakers, Farsi speakers do not use a height-pitch metaphor consistently in speech. Both Dutch and Farsi speakers’ co-speech gestures did reveal a mapping of higher pitches to higher space and lower pitches to lower space, and this gesture space-pitch mapping tended to co-occur with corresponding spatial words (high-low). However, this mapping was much weaker in Farsi speakers than Dutch speakers. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences shape the conceptualization of pitch and further calls into question the universality of height-pitch associations.

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    supporting information
  • Huizeling, E., Arana, S., Hagoort, P., & Schoffelen, J.-M. (2022). Lexical frequency and sentence context influence the brain’s response to single words. Neurobiology of Language, 3(1), 149-179. doi:10.1162/nol_a_00054.

    Abstract

    Typical adults read remarkably quickly. Such fast reading is facilitated by brain processes that are sensitive to both word frequency and contextual constraints. It is debated as to whether these attributes have additive or interactive effects on language processing in the brain. We investigated this issue by analysing existing magnetoencephalography data from 99 participants reading intact and scrambled sentences. Using a cross-validated model comparison scheme, we found that lexical frequency predicted the word-by-word elicited MEG signal in a widespread cortical network, irrespective of sentential context. In contrast, index (ordinal word position) was more strongly encoded in sentence words, in left front-temporal areas. This confirms that frequency influences word processing independently of predictability, and that contextual constraints affect word-by-word brain responses. With a conservative multiple comparisons correction, only the interaction between lexical frequency and surprisal survived, in anterior temporal and frontal cortex, and not between lexical frequency and entropy, nor between lexical frequency and index. However, interestingly, the uncorrected index*frequency interaction revealed an effect in left frontal and temporal cortex that reversed in time and space for intact compared to scrambled sentences. Finally, we provide evidence to suggest that, in sentences, lexical frequency and predictability may independently influence early (<150ms) and late stages of word processing, but interact during later stages of word processing (>150-250ms), thus helping to converge previous contradictory eye-tracking and electrophysiological literature. Current neuro-cognitive models of reading would benefit from accounting for these differing effects of lexical frequency and predictability on different stages of word processing.
  • Huizeling, E., Peeters, D., & Hagoort, P. (2022). Prediction of upcoming speech under fluent and disfluent conditions: Eye tracking evidence from immersive virtual reality. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 37(4), 481-508. doi:10.1080/23273798.2021.1994621.

    Abstract

    Traditional experiments indicate that prediction is important for efficient speech processing. In three virtual reality visual world paradigm experiments, we tested whether such findings hold in naturalistic settings (Experiment 1) and provided novel insights into whether disfluencies in speech (repairs/hesitations) inform one’s predictions in rich environments (Experiments 2–3). Experiment 1 supports that listeners predict upcoming speech in naturalistic environments, with higher proportions of anticipatory target fixations in predictable compared to unpredictable trials. In Experiments 2–3, disfluencies reduced anticipatory fixations towards predicted referents, compared to conjunction (Experiment 2) and fluent (Experiment 3) sentences. Unexpectedly, Experiment 2 provided no evidence that participants made new predictions from a repaired verb. Experiment 3 provided novel findings that fixations towards the speaker increase upon hearing a hesitation, supporting current theories of how hesitations influence sentence processing. Together, these findings unpack listeners’ use of visual (objects/speaker) and auditory (speech/disfluencies) information when predicting upcoming words.
  • Lai, V. T., Van Berkum, J. J. A., & Hagoort, P. (2022). Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge. Frontiers in Communication, 7: 910482. doi:10.3389/fcomm.2022.910482.

    Abstract

    Introduction: Mood is a constant in our daily life and can permeate all levels of cognition. We examined whether and how mood influences the processing of discourse content that is relatively neutral and not loaded with emotion. During discourse processing, readers have to constantly strike a balance between what they know in long term memory and what the current discourse is about. Our general hypothesis is that mood states would affect this balance. We hypothesized that readers in a positive mood would rely more on default world knowledge, whereas readers in a negative mood would be more inclined to analyze the details in the current discourse.

    Methods: Participants were put in a positive and a negative mood via film clips, one week apart. In each session, after mood manipulation, they were presented with sentences in discourse materials. We created sentences such as “With the lights on you can see...” that end with critical words (CWs) “more” or “less”, where general knowledge supports “more”, not “less”. We then embedded each of these sentences in a wider discourse that does/does not support the CWs (a story about driving in the night vs. stargazing). EEG was recorded throughout.

    Results: The results showed that first, mood manipulation was successful in that there was a significant mood difference between sessions. Second, mood did not modulate the N400 effects. Participants in both moods detected outright semantic violations and allowed world knowledge to be overridden by discourse context. Third, mood modulated the LPC (Late Positive Component) effects, distributed in the frontal region. In negative moods, the LPC was sensitive to one-level violation. That is, CWs that were supported by only world knowledge, only discourse, and neither, elicited larger frontal LPCs, in comparison to the condition where CWs were supported by both world knowledge and discourse.

    Discussion: These results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sensemaking (P600) during discourse processing. These results advance our understanding of the impact and time course of mood on discourse.

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    Table 1.XLSX
  • Levshina, N. (2022). Frequency, informativity and word length: Insights from typologically diverse corpora. Entropy, 24(2): 280. doi:10.3390/e24020280.

    Abstract

    Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which posits a negative correlation between word frequency and length, is one of the most famous and robust cross-linguistic generalizations. At the same time, it has been shown that contextual informativity (average surprisal given previous context) is more strongly correlated with word length, although this tendency is not observed consistently, depending on several methodological choices. The present study examines a more diverse sample of languages than the previous studies (Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). I use large web-based corpora from the Leipzig Corpora Collection to estimate word lengths in UTF-8 characters and in phonemes (for some of the languages), as well as word frequency, informativity given previous word and informativity given next word, applying different methods of bigrams processing. The results show different correlations between word length and the corpus-based measure for different languages. I argue that these differences can be explained by the properties of noun phrases in a language, most importantly, by the order of heads and modifiers and their relative morphological complexity, as well as by orthographic conventions

    Additional information

    datasets
  • Levshina, N., & Hawkins, J. A. (2022). Verb-argument lability and its correlations with other typological parameters. A quantitative corpus-based study. Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads, 2(1), 94-120. doi:10.6092/issn.2785-0943/13861.

    Abstract

    We investigate the correlations between A- and P-lability for verbal arguments with other typological parameters using large, syntactically annotated corpora of online news in 28 languages. To estimate how much lability is observed in a language, we measure associations between Verbs or Verb + Noun combinations and the alternating constructions in which they occur. Our correlational analyses show that high P-lability scores correlate strongly with the following parameters: little or no case marking; weaker associations between lexemes and the grammatical roles A and P; rigid order of Subject and Object; and a high proportion of verb-medial clauses (SVO). Low P-lability correlates with the presence of case marking, stronger associations between nouns and grammatical roles, relatively flexible ordering of Subject and Object, and verb-final order. As for A-lability, it is not correlated with any other parameters. A possible reason is that A-lability is a result of more universal discourse processes, such as deprofiling of the object, and also exhibits numerous lexical and semantic idiosyncrasies. The fact that P-lability is strongly correlated with other parameters can be interpreted as evidence for a more general typology of languages, in which some tend to have highly informative morphosyntactic and lexical cues, whereas others rely predominantly on contextual environment, which is possibly due to fixed word order. We also find that P-lability is more strongly correlated with the other parameters than any of these parameters are with each other, which means that it can be a very useful typological variable.
  • Levshina, N., & Lorenz, D. (2022). Communicative efficiency and the Principle of No Synonymy: Predictability effects and the variation of want to and wanna. Language and Cognition, 14(2), 249-274. doi:10.1017/langcog.2022.7.

    Abstract

    There is ample psycholinguistic evidence that speakers behave efficiently, using shorter and less effortful constructions when the meaning is more predictable, and longer and more effortful ones when it is less predictable. However, the Principle of No Synonymy requires that all formally distinct variants should also be functionally different. The question is how much two related constructions should overlap semantically and pragmatically in order to be used for the purposes of efficient communication. The case study focuses on want to + Infinitive and its reduced variant with wanna, which have different stylistic and sociolinguistic connotations. Bayesian mixed-effects regression modelling based on the spoken part of the British National Corpus reveals a very limited effect of efficiency: predictability increases the chances of the reduced variant only in fast speech. We conclude that efficient use of more and less effortful variants is restricted when two variants are associated with different registers or styles. This paper also pursues a methodological goal regarding missing values in speech corpora. We impute missing data based on the existing values. A comparison of regression models with and without imputed values reveals similar tendencies. This means that imputation is useful for dealing with missing values in corpora.

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    supplementary materials
  • Levshina, N. (2022). Semantic maps of causation: New hybrid approaches based on corpora and grammar descriptions. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 41(1), 179-205. doi:10.1515/zfs-2021-2043.

    Abstract

    The present paper discusses connectivity and proximity maps of causative constructions and combines them with different types of typological data. In the first case study, I show how one can create a connectivity map based on a parallel corpus. This allows us to solve many problems, such as incomplete descriptions, inconsistent terminology and the problem of determining the semantic nodes. The second part focuses on proximity maps based on Multidimensional Scaling and compares the most important semantic distinctions, which are inferred from a parallel corpus of film subtitles and from grammar descriptions. The results suggest that corpus-based maps of tokens are more sensitive to cultural and genre-related differences in the prominence of specific causation scenarios than maps based on constructional types, which are described in reference grammars. The grammar-based maps also reveal a less clear structure, which can be due to incomplete semantic descriptions in grammars. Therefore, each approach has its shortcomings, which researchers need to be aware of.

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