Publications

Displaying 201 - 300 of 387
  • Martin, A. E., & Doumas, L. A. A. (2019). Tensors and compositionality in neural systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 375(1791): 20190306. doi:10.1098/rstb.2019.0306.

    Abstract

    Neither neurobiological nor process models of meaning composition specify the operator through which constituent parts are bound together into compositional structures. In this paper, we argue that a neurophysiological computation system cannot achieve the compositionality exhibited in human thought and language if it were to rely on a multiplicative operator to perform binding, as the tensor product (TP)-based systems that have been widely adopted in cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence do. We show via simulation and two behavioural experiments that TPs violate variable-value independence, but human behaviour does not. Specifically, TPs fail to capture that in the statements fuzzy cactus and fuzzy penguin, both cactus and penguin are predicated by fuzzy(x) and belong to the set of fuzzy things, rendering these arguments similar to each other. Consistent with that thesis, people judged arguments that shared the same role to be similar, even when those arguments themselves (e.g., cacti and penguins) were judged to be dissimilar when in isolation. By contrast, the similarity of the TPs representing fuzzy(cactus) and fuzzy(penguin) was determined by the similarity of the arguments, which in this case approaches zero. Based on these results, we argue that neural systems that use TPs for binding cannot approximate how the human mind and brain represent compositional information during processing. We describe a contrasting binding mechanism that any physiological or artificial neural system could use to maintain independence between a role and its argument, a prerequisite for compositionality and, thus, for instantiating the expressive power of human thought and language in a neural system.

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  • Martin, A. E., & Doumas, L. A. A. (2019). Predicate learning in neural systems: Using oscillations to discover latent structure. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 29, 77-83. doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2019.04.008.

    Abstract

    Humans learn to represent complex structures (e.g. natural language, music, mathematics) from experience with their environments. Often such structures are latent, hidden, or not encoded in statistics about sensory representations alone. Accounts of human cognition have long emphasized the importance of structured representations, yet the majority of contemporary neural networks do not learn structure from experience. Here, we describe one way that structured, functionally symbolic representations can be instantiated in an artificial neural network. Then, we describe how such latent structures (viz. predicates) can be learned from experience with unstructured data. Our approach exploits two principles from psychology and neuroscience: comparison of representations, and the naturally occurring dynamic properties of distributed computing across neuronal assemblies (viz. neural oscillations). We discuss how the ability to learn predicates from experience, to represent information compositionally, and to extrapolate knowledge to unseen data is core to understanding and modeling the most complex human behaviors (e.g. relational reasoning, analogy, language processing, game play).
  • Martinez-Conde, S., Alexander, R. G., Blum, D., Britton, N., Lipska, B. K., Quirk, G. J., Swiss, J. I., Willems, R. M., & Macknik, S. L. (2019). The storytelling brain: How neuroscience stories help bridge the gap between research and society. The Journal of Neuroscience, 39(42), 8285-8290. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1180-19.2019.

    Abstract

    Active communication between researchers and society is necessary for the scientific community’s involvement in developing sciencebased
    policies. This need is recognized by governmental and funding agencies that compel scientists to increase their public engagement
    and disseminate research findings in an accessible fashion. Storytelling techniques can help convey science by engaging people’s imagination
    and emotions. Yet, many researchers are uncertain about how to approach scientific storytelling, or feel they lack the tools to
    undertake it. Here we explore some of the techniques intrinsic to crafting scientific narratives, as well as the reasons why scientific
    storytellingmaybe an optimal way of communicating research to nonspecialists.Wealso point out current communication gaps between
    science and society, particularly in the context of neurodiverse audiences and those that include neurological and psychiatric patients.
    Present shortcomings may turn into areas of synergy with the potential to link neuroscience education, research, and advocacy
  • Maslowski, M., Meyer, A. S., & Bosker, H. R. (2019). How the tracking of habitual rate influences speech perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(1), 128-138. doi:10.1037/xlm0000579.

    Abstract

    Listeners are known to track statistical regularities in speech. Yet, which temporal cues
    are encoded is unclear. This study tested effects of talker-specific habitual speech rate
    and talker-independent average speech rate (heard over a longer period of time) on
    the perception of the temporal Dutch vowel contrast /A/-/a:/. First, Experiment 1
    replicated that slow local (surrounding) speech contexts induce fewer long /a:/
    responses than faster contexts. Experiment 2 tested effects of long-term habitual
    speech rate. One high-rate group listened to ambiguous vowels embedded in `neutral'
    speech from talker A, intermixed with speech from fast talker B. Another low-rate group
    listened to the same `neutral' speech from talker A, but to talker B being slow.
    Between-group comparison of the `neutral' trials showed that the high-rate group
    demonstrated a lower proportion of /a:/ responses, indicating that talker A's habitual
    speech rate sounded slower when B was faster. In Experiment 3, both talkers
    produced speech at both rates, removing the different habitual speech rates of talker A
    and B, while maintaining the average rate differing between groups. This time no
    global rate effect was observed. Taken together, the present experiments show that a
    talker's habitual rate is encoded relative to the habitual rate of another talker, carrying
    implications for episodic and constraint-based models of speech perception.
  • Maslowski, M., Meyer, A. S., & Bosker, H. R. (2019). Listeners normalize speech for contextual speech rate even without an explicit recognition task. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 146(1), 179-188. doi:10.1121/1.5116004.

    Abstract

    Speech can be produced at different rates. Listeners take this rate variation into account by normalizing vowel duration for contextual speech rate: An ambiguous Dutch word /m?t/ is perceived as short /mAt/ when embedded in a slow context, but long /ma:t/ in a fast context. Whilst some have argued that this rate normalization involves low-level automatic perceptual processing, there is also evidence that it arises at higher-level cognitive processing stages, such as decision making. Prior research on rate-dependent speech perception has only used explicit recognition tasks to investigate the phenomenon, involving both perceptual processing and decision making. This study tested whether speech rate normalization can be observed without explicit decision making, using a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm. Results show that a fast precursor sentence makes an embedded ambiguous prime (/m?t/) sound (implicitly) more /a:/-like, facilitating lexical access to the long target word "maat" in a (explicit) lexical decision task. This result suggests that rate normalization is automatic, taking place even in the absence of an explicit recognition task. Thus, rate normalization is placed within the realm of everyday spoken conversation, where explicit categorization of ambiguous sounds is rare.
  • Matsuo, A. (2005). [Review of the book Children's discourse: Person, space and time across languages by Maya Hickmann]. Linguistics, 43(3), 653-657. doi:10.1515/ling.2005.43.3.653.
  • McKone, E., Wan, L., Pidcock, M., Crookes, K., Reynolds, K., Dawel, A., Kidd, E., & Fiorentini, C. (2019). A critical period for faces: Other-race face recognition is improved by childhood but not adult social contact. Scientific Reports, 9: 12820. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-49202-0.

    Abstract

    Poor recognition of other-race faces is ubiquitous around the world. We resolve a longstanding contradiction in the literature concerning whether interracial social contact improves the other-race effect. For the first time, we measure the age at which contact was experienced. taking advantage of
    unusual demographics allowing dissociation of childhood from adult contact, results show sufficient childhood contact eliminated poor other-race recognition altogether (confirming inter-country adoption
    studies). Critically, however, the developmental window for easy acquisition of other-race faces closed by approximately 12 years of age and social contact as an adult — even over several years and involving many other-race friends — produced no improvement. Theoretically, this pattern of developmental change in plasticity mirrors that found in language, suggesting a shared origin grounded in the
    functional importance of both skills to social communication. Practically, results imply that, where parents wish to ensure their offspring develop the perceptual skills needed to recognise other-race people easily, childhood experience should be encouraged: just as an English-speaking person who moves to France as a child (but not an adult) can easily become a native speaker of French, we can easily
    become “native recognisers” of other-race faces via natural social exposure obtained in childhood, but not later
  • McQueen, J. M., & Sereno, J. (2005). Cleaving automatic processes from strategic biases in phonological priming. Memory & Cognition, 33(7), 1185-1209.

    Abstract

    In a phonological priming experiment using spoken Dutch words, Dutch listeners were taught varying expectancies and relatedness relations about the phonological form of target words, given particular primes. They learned to expect that, after a particular prime, if the target was a word, it would be from a specific phonological category. The expectancy either involved phonological overlap (e.g., honk-vonk, “base-spark”; expected related) or did not (e.g., nest-galm, “nest-boom”; expected unrelated, where the learned expectation after hearing nest was a word rhyming in -alm). Targets were occasionally inconsistent with expectations. In these inconsistent expectancy trials, targets were either unrelated (e.g., honk-mest, “base-manure”; unexpected unrelated), where the listener was expecting a related target, or related (e.g., nest-pest, “nest-plague”; unexpected related), where the listener was expecting an unrelated target. Participant expectations and phonological relatedness were thus manipulated factorially for three types of phonological overlap (rhyme, one onset phoneme, and three onset phonemes) at three interstimulus intervals (ISIs; 50, 500, and 2,000 msec). Lexical decisions to targets revealed evidence of expectancy-based strategies for all three types of overlap (e.g., faster responses to expected than to unexpected targets, irrespective of phonological relatedness) and evidence of automatic phonological processes, but only for the rhyme and three-phoneme onset overlap conditions and, most strongly, at the shortest ISI (e.g., faster responses to related than to unrelated targets, irrespective of expectations). Although phonological priming thus has both automatic and strategic components, it is possible to cleave them apart.
  • Meira, S., & Terrill, A. (2005). Contrasting contrastive demonstratives in Tiriyó and Lavukaleve. Linguistics, 43(6), 1131-1152. doi:10.1515/ling.2005.43.6.1131.

    Abstract

    This article explores the contrastive function of demonstratives in two languages, Tiriyó (Cariban, northern Brazil) and Lavukaleve (Papuan isolate, Solomon Islands). The contrastive function has to a large extent been neglected in the theoretical literature on demonstrative functions, although preliminary investigations suggest that there are significant differences in demonstrative use in contrastive versus noncontrastive contexts. Tiriyó and Lavukaleve have what seem at first glance to be rather similar three-term demonstrative systems for exophoric deixis, with a proximal term, a distal term, and a middle term. However, under contrastive usage, significant differences between the two systems become apparent. In presenting an analysis of the contrastive use of demonstratives in these two languages, this article aims to show that the contrastive function is an important parameter of variation in demonstrative systems.
  • Merkx, D., & Frank, S. L. (2019). Learning semantic sentence representations from visually grounded language without lexical knowledge. Natural Language Engineering, 25, 451-466. doi:10.1017/S1351324919000196.

    Abstract

    Current approaches to learning semantic representations of sentences often use prior word-level knowledge. The current study aims to leverage visual information in order to capture sentence level semantics without the need for word embeddings. We use a multimodal sentence encoder trained on a corpus of images with matching text captions to produce visually grounded sentence embeddings. Deep Neural Networks are trained to map the two modalities to a common embedding space such that for an image the corresponding caption can be retrieved and vice versa. We show that our model achieves results comparable to the current state of the art on two popular image-caption retrieval benchmark datasets: Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MSCOCO) and Flickr8k. We evaluate the semantic content of the resulting sentence embeddings using the data from the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmark task and show that the multimodal embeddings correlate well with human semantic similarity judgements. The system achieves state-of-the-art results on several of these benchmarks, which shows that a system trained solely on multimodal data, without assuming any word representations, is able to capture sentence level semantics. Importantly, this result shows that we do not need prior knowledge of lexical level semantics in order to model sentence level semantics. These findings demonstrate the importance of visual information in semantics.
  • Meyer, A. S., Roelofs, A., & Brehm, L. (2019). Thirty years of Speaking: An introduction to the special issue. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(9), 1073-1084. doi:10.1080/23273798.2019.1652763.

    Abstract

    Thirty years ago, Pim Levelt published Speaking. During the 10th International Workshop on Language Production held at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in July 2018, researchers reflected on the impact of the book in the field, developments since its publication, and current research trends. The contributions in this Special Issue are closely related to the presentations given at the workshop. In this editorial, we sketch the research agenda set by Speaking, review how different aspects of this agenda are taken up in the papers in this volume and outline directions for further research.
  • Mickan, A., McQueen, J. M., & Lemhöfer, K. (2019). Bridging the gap between second language acquisition research and memory science: The case of foreign language attrition. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13: 397. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2019.00397.

    Abstract

    The field of second language acquisition (SLA) is by nature of its subject a highly interdisciplinary area of research. Learning a (foreign) language, for example, involves encoding new words, consolidating and committing them to long-term memory, and later retrieving them. All of these processes have direct parallels in the domain of human memory and have been thoroughly studied by researchers in that field. Yet, despite these clear links, the two fields have largely developed in parallel and in isolation from one another. The present paper aims to promote more cross-talk between SLA and memory science. We focus on foreign language (FL) attrition as an example of a research topic in SLA where the parallels with memory science are especially apparent. We discuss evidence that suggests that competition between languages is one of the mechanisms of FL attrition, paralleling the interference process thought to underlie forgetting in other domains of human memory. Backed up by concrete suggestions, we advocate the use of paradigms from the memory literature to study these interference effects in the language domain. In doing so, we hope to facilitate future cross-talk between the two fields, and to further our understanding of FL attrition as a memory phenomenon.
  • Middeldorp, C. M., Felix, J. F., Mahajan, A., EArly Genetics and Lifecourse Epidemiology (EAGLE) Consortium, Early Growth Genetics (EGG) consortium, & McCarthy, M. I. (2019). The Early Growth Genetics (EGG) and EArly Genetics and Lifecourse Epidemiology (EAGLE) consortia: Design, results and future prospects. European Journal of Epidemiology, 34(3), 279-300. doi:10.1007/s10654-019-00502-9.

    Abstract

    The impact of many unfavorable childhood traits or diseases, such as low birth weight and mental disorders, is not limited to childhood and adolescence, as they are also associated with poor outcomes in adulthood, such as cardiovascular disease. Insight into the genetic etiology of childhood and adolescent traits and disorders may therefore provide new perspectives, not only on how to improve wellbeing during childhood, but also how to prevent later adverse outcomes. To achieve the sample sizes required for genetic research, the Early Growth Genetics (EGG) and EArly Genetics and Lifecourse Epidemiology (EAGLE) consortia were established. The majority of the participating cohorts are longitudinal population-based samples, but other cohorts with data on early childhood phenotypes are also involved. Cohorts often have a broad focus and collect(ed) data on various somatic and psychiatric traits as well as environmental factors. Genetic variants have been successfully identified for multiple traits, for example, birth weight, atopic dermatitis, childhood BMI, allergic sensitization, and pubertal growth. Furthermore, the results have shown that genetic factors also partly underlie the association with adult traits. As sample sizes are still increasing, it is expected that future analyses will identify additional variants. This, in combination with the development of innovative statistical methods, will provide detailed insight on the mechanisms underlying the transition from childhood to adult disorders. Both consortia welcome new collaborations. Policies and contact details are available from the corresponding authors of this manuscript and/or the consortium websites.
  • Minutjukur, M., Tjitayi, K., Tjitayi, U., & Defina, R. (2019). Pitjantjatjara language change: Some observations and recommendations. Australian Aboriginal Studies, (1), 82-91.
  • Misersky, J., Majid, A., & Snijders, T. M. (2019). Grammatical gender in German influences how role-nouns are interpreted: Evidence from ERPs. Discourse Processes, 56(8), 643-654. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2018.1541382.

    Abstract

    Grammatically masculine role-nouns (e.g., Studenten-masc.‘students’) can refer to men and women, but may favor an interpretation where only men are considered the referent. If true, this has implications for a society aiming to achieve equal representation in the workplace since, for example, job adverts use such role descriptions. To investigate the interpretation of role-nouns, the present ERP study assessed grammatical gender processing in German. Twenty participants read sentences where a role-noun (masculine or feminine) introduced a group of people, followed by a congruent (masculine–men, feminine–women) or incongruent (masculine–women, feminine–men) continuation. Both for feminine-men and masculine-women continuations a P600 (500 to 800 ms) was observed; another positivity was already present from 300 to 500 ms for feminine-men continuations, but critically not for masculine-women continuations. The results imply a male-biased rather than gender-neutral interpretation of the masculine—despite widespread usage of the masculine as a gender-neutral form—suggesting masculine forms are inadequate for representing genders equally.
  • Monaghan, P., & Fletcher, M. (2019). Do sound symbolism effects for written words relate to individual phonemes or to phoneme features? Language and Cognition, 11(2), 235-255. doi:10.1017/langcog.2019.20.

    Abstract

    The sound of words has been shown to relate to the meaning that the words denote, an effect that extends beyond morphological properties of the word. Studies of these sound-symbolic relations have described this iconicity in terms of individual phonemes, or alternatively due to acoustic properties (expressed in phonological features) relating to meaning. In this study, we investigated whether individual phonemes or phoneme features best accounted for iconicity effects. We tested 92 participants’ judgements about the appropriateness of 320 nonwords presented in written form, relating to 8 different semantic attributes. For all 8 attributes, individual phonemes fitted participants’ responses better than general phoneme features. These results challenge claims that sound-symbolic effects for visually presented words can access broad, cross-modal associations between sound and meaning, instead the results indicate the operation of individual phoneme to meaning relations. Whether similar effects are found for nonwords presented auditorially remains an open question.
  • Monaghan, P., & Roberts, S. G. (2019). Cognitive influences in language evolution: Psycholinguistic predictors of loan word borrowing. Cognition, 186, 147-158. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.02.007.

    Abstract

    Languages change due to social, cultural, and cognitive influences. In this paper, we provide an assessment of these cognitive influences on diachronic change in the vocabulary. Previously, tests of stability and change of vocabulary items have been conducted on small sets of words where diachronic change is imputed from cladistics studies. Here, we show for a substantially larger set of words that stability and change in terms of documented borrowings of words into English and into Dutch can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties of words that reflect their representational fidelity. We found that grammatical category, word length, age of acquisition, and frequency predict borrowing rates, but frequency has a non-linear relationship. Frequency correlates negatively with probability of borrowing for high-frequency words, but positively for low-frequency words. This borrowing evidence documents recent, observable diachronic change in the vocabulary enabling us to distinguish between change associated with transmission during language acquisition and change due to innovations by proficient speakers.
  • Mongelli, V., Meijs, E. L., Van Gaal, S., & Hagoort, P. (2019). No language unification without neural feedback: How awareness affects sentence processing. Neuroimage, 202: 116063. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116063.

    Abstract

    How does the human brain combine a finite number of words to form an infinite variety of sentences? According to the Memory, Unification and Control (MUC) model, sentence processing requires long-range feedback from the left inferior frontal cortex (LIFC) to left posterior temporal cortex (LPTC). Single word processing however may only require feedforward propagation of semantic information from sensory regions to LPTC. Here we tested the claim that long-range feedback is required for sentence processing by reducing visual awareness of words using a masking technique. Masking disrupts feedback processing while leaving feedforward processing relatively intact. Previous studies have shown that masked single words still elicit an N400 ERP effect, a neural signature of semantic incongruency. However, whether multiple words can be combined to form a sentence under reduced levels of awareness is controversial. To investigate this issue, we performed two experiments in which we measured electroencephalography (EEG) while 40 subjects performed a masked priming task. Words were presented either successively or simultaneously, thereby forming a short sentence that could be congruent or incongruent with a target picture. This sentence condition was compared with a typical single word condition. In the masked condition we only found an N400 effect for single words, whereas in the unmasked condition we observed an N400 effect for both unmasked sentences and single words. Our findings suggest that long-range feedback processing is required for sentence processing, but not for single word processing.
  • Morgan, T. J. H., Acerbi, A., & Van Leeuwen, E. J. C. (2019). Copy-the-majority of instances or individuals? Two approaches to the majority and their consequences for conformist decision-making. PLoS One, 14(1): e021074. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0210748.

    Abstract

    Cultural evolution is the product of the psychological mechanisms that underlie individual decision making. One commonly studied learning mechanism is a disproportionate preference for majority opinions, known as conformist transmission. While most theoretical and experimental work approaches the majority in terms of the number of individuals that perform a behaviour or hold a belief, some recent experimental studies approach the majority in terms of the number of instances a behaviour is performed. Here, we use a mathematical model to show that disagreement between these two notions of the majority can arise when behavioural variants are performed at different rates, with different salience or in different contexts (variant overrepresentation) and when a subset of the population act as demonstrators to the whole population (model biases). We also show that because conformist transmission changes the distribution of behaviours in a population, how observers approach the majority can cause populations to diverge, and that this can happen even when the two approaches to the majority agree with regards to which behaviour is in the majority. We discuss these results in light of existing findings, ranging from political extremism on twitter to studies of animal foraging behaviour. We conclude that the factors we considered (variant overrepresentation and model biases) are plausibly widespread. As such, it is important to understand how individuals approach the majority in order to understand the effects of majority influence in cultural evolution.
  • Morgan, J., & Meyer, A. S. (2005). Processing of extrafoveal objects during multiple-object naming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 428-442. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.31.3.428.

    Abstract

    In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the extent to which objects that are about to be named are processed prior to fixation. Participants named pairs or triplets of objects. One of the objects, initially seen extrafoveally (the interloper), was replaced by a different object (the target) during the saccade toward it. The interloper-target pairs were identical or unrelated objects or visually and conceptually unrelated objects with homophonous names (e.g., animal-baseball bat). The mean latencies and gaze durations for the targets were shorter in the identity and homophone conditions than in the unrelated condition. This was true when participants viewed a fixation mark until the interloper appeared and when they fixated on another object and prepared to name it while viewing the interloper. These results imply that objects that are about to be named may undergo far-reaching processing, including access to their names, prior to fixation.
  • Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., Deutsch, A., Frost, R., Schreuder, R., De Jong, N. H., & Baayen, R. H. (2005). Changing places: A cross-language perspective on frequency and family size in Dutch and Hebrew. Journal of Memory and Language, 53(4), 496-512. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2005.07.003.

    Abstract

    This study uses the morphological family size effect as a tool for exploring the degree of isomorphism in the networks of morphologically related words in the Hebrew and Dutch mental lexicon. Hebrew and Dutch are genetically unrelated, and they structure their morphologically complex words in very different ways. Two visual lexical decision experiments document substantial cross-language predictivity for the family size measure after partialing out the effect of word frequency and word length. Our data show that the morphological family size effect is not restricted to Indo-European languages but extends to languages with non-concatenative morphology. In Hebrew, a new inhibitory component of the family size effect emerged that arises when a Hebrew root participates in different semantic fields.
  • Nakamoto, T., Suei, Y., Konishi, M., Kanda, T., Verdonschot, R. G., & Kakimoto, N. (2019). Abnormal positioning of the common carotid artery clinically diagnosed as a submandibular mass. Oral Radiology, 35(3), 331-334. doi:10.1007/s11282-018-0355-7.

    Abstract

    The common carotid artery (CCA) usually runs along the long axis of the neck, although it is occasionally found in an abnormal position or is displaced. We report a case of an 86-year-old woman in whom the CCA was identified in the submandibular area. The patient visited our clinic and reported soft tissue swelling in the right submandibular area. It resembled a tumor mass or a swollen lymph node. Computed tomography showed that it was the right CCA that had been bent forward and was running along the submandibular subcutaneous area. Ultrasonography verified the diagnosis. No other lesions were found on the diagnostic images. Consequently, the patient was diagnosed as having abnormal CCA positioning. Although this condition generally requires no treatment, it is important to follow-up the abnormality with diagnostic imaging because of the risk of cerebrovascular disorders.
  • Nakamoto, T., Taguchi, A., Verdonschot, R. G., & Kakimoto, N. (2019). Improvement of region of interest extraction and scanning method of computer-aided diagnosis system for osteoporosis using panoramic radiographs. Oral Radiology, 35(2), 143-151. doi:10.1007/s11282-018-0330-3.

    Abstract

    ObjectivesPatients undergoing osteoporosis treatment benefit greatly from early detection. We previously developed a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to identify osteoporosis using panoramic radiographs. However, the region of interest (ROI) was relatively small, and the method to select suitable ROIs was labor-intensive. This study aimed to expand the ROI and perform semi-automatized extraction of ROIs. The diagnostic performance and operating time were also assessed.MethodsWe used panoramic radiographs and skeletal bone mineral density data of 200 postmenopausal women. Using the reference point that we defined by averaging 100 panoramic images as the lower mandibular border under the mental foramen, a 400x100-pixel ROI was automatically extracted and divided into four 100x100-pixel blocks. Valid blocks were analyzed using program 1, which examined each block separately, and program 2, which divided the blocks into smaller segments and performed scans/analyses across blocks. Diagnostic performance was evaluated using another set of 100 panoramic images.ResultsMost ROIs (97.0%) were correctly extracted. The operation time decreased to 51.4% for program 1 and to 69.3% for program 2. The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy for identifying osteoporosis were 84.0, 68.0, and 72.0% for program 1 and 92.0, 62.7, and 70.0% for program 2, respectively. Compared with the previous conventional system, program 2 recorded a slightly higher sensitivity, although it occasionally also elicited false positives.ConclusionsPatients at risk for osteoporosis can be identified more rapidly using this new CAD system, which may contribute to earlier detection and intervention and improved medical care.
  • Narasimhan, B. (2005). Splitting the notion of 'agent': Case-marking in early child Hindi. Journal of Child Language, 32(4), 787-803. doi:10.1017/S0305000905007117.

    Abstract

    Two construals of agency are evaluated as possible innate biases guiding case-marking in children. A BROAD construal treats agentive arguments of multi-participant and single-participant events as being similar. A NARROWER construal is restricted to agents of multi-participant events. In Hindi, ergative case-marking is associated with agentive participants of multi-participant, perfective actions. Children relying on a broad or narrow construal of agent are predicted to overextend ergative case-marking to agentive participants of transitive imperfective actions and/or intransitive actions. Longitudinal data from three children acquiring Hindi (1;7 to 3;9) reveal no overextension errors, suggesting early sensitivity to distributional patterns in the input.
  • Narasimhan, B., Budwig, N., & Murty, L. (2005). Argument realization in Hindi caregiver-child discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 37(4), 461-495. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2004.01.005.

    Abstract

    An influential claim in the child language literature posits that children use structural cues in the input language to acquire verb meaning (Gleitman, 1990). One such cue is the number of arguments co-occurring with the verb, which provides an indication as to the event type associated with the verb (Fisher, 1995). In some languages however (e.g. Hindi), verb arguments are ellipted relatively freely, subject to certain discourse-pragmatic constraints. In this paper, we address three questions: Is the pervasive argument ellipsis characteristic of adult Hindi also found in Hindi-speaking caregivers’ input ? If so, do children consequently make errors in verb transitivity? How early do children learning a split-ergative language, such as Hindi, exhibit sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic influences on argument realization? We show that there is massive argument ellipsis in caregivers’ input to 3–4 year-olds. However, children acquiring Hindi do not make transitivity errors in their own speech. Nor do they elide arguments randomly. Rather, even at this early age, children appear to be sensitive to discourse-pragmatics in their own spontaneous speech production. These findings in a split-ergative language parallel patterns of argument realization found in children acquiring both nominative-accusative languages (e.g. Korean) and ergative-absolutive languages (e.g. Tzeltal, Inuktitut).
  • Nayernia, L., Van den Vijver, R., & Indefrey, P. (2019). The influence of orthography on phonemic knowledge: An experimental investigation on German and Persian. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 48(6), 1391-1406. doi:10.1007/s10936-019-09664-9.

    Abstract

    This study investigated whether the phonological representation of a word is modulated by its orthographic representation in case of a mismatch between the two representations. Such a mismatch is found in Persian, where short vowels are represented phonemically but not orthographically. Persian adult literates, Persian adult illiterates, and German adult literates were presented with two auditory tasks, an AX-discrimination task and a reversal task. We assumed that if orthographic representations influence phonological representations, Persian literates should perform worse than Persian illiterates or German literates on items with short vowels in these tasks. The results of the discrimination tasks showed that Persian literates and illiterates as well as German literates were approximately equally competent in discriminating short vowels in Persian words and pseudowords. Persian literates did not well discriminate German words containing phonemes that differed only in vowel length. German literates performed relatively poorly in discriminating German homographic words that differed only in vowel length. Persian illiterates were unable to perform the reversal task in Persian. The results of the other two participant groups in the reversal task showed the predicted poorer performance of Persian literates on Persian items containing short vowels compared to items containing long vowels only. German literates did not show this effect in German. Our results suggest two distinct effects of orthography on phonemic representations: whereas the lack of orthographic representations seems to affect phonemic awareness, homography seems to affect the discriminability of phonemic representations.
  • Nazzi, T., & Cutler, A. (2019). How consonants and vowels shape spoken-language recognition. Annual Review of Linguistics, 5, 25-47. doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-011919.

    Abstract

    All languages instantiate a consonant/vowel contrast. This contrast has processing consequences at different levels of spoken-language recognition throughout the lifespan. In adulthood, lexical processing is more strongly associated with consonant than with vowel processing; this has been demonstrated across 13 languages from seven language families and in a variety of auditory lexical-level tasks (deciding whether a spoken input is a word, spotting a real word embedded in a minimal context, reconstructing a word minimally altered into a pseudoword, learning new words or the “words” of a made-up language), as well as in written-word tasks involving phonological processing. In infancy, a consonant advantage in word learning and recognition is found to emerge during development in some languages, though possibly not in others, revealing that the stronger lexicon–consonant association found in adulthood is learned. Current research is evaluating the relative contribution of the early acquisition of the acoustic/phonetic and lexical properties of the native language in the emergence of this association
  • Niermann, H. C. M., Tyborowska, A., Cillessen, A. H. N., Van Donkelaar, M. M. J., Lammertink, F., Gunnar, M. R., Franke, B., Figner, B., & Roelofs, K. (2019). The relation between infant freezing and the development of internalizing symptoms in adolescence: A prospective longitudinal study. Developmental Science, 22(3): e12763. doi:10.1111/desc.12763.

    Abstract

    Given the long-lasting detrimental effects of internalizing symptoms, there is great need for detecting early risk markers. One promising marker is freezing behavior. Whereas initial freezing reactions are essential for coping with threat, prolonged freezing has been associated with internalizing psychopathology. However, it remains unknown whether early life alterations in freezing reactions predict changes in internalizing symptoms during adolescent development. In a longitudinal study (N = 116), we tested prospectively whether observed freezing in infancy predicted the development of internalizing symptoms from childhood through late adolescence (until age 17). Both longer and absent infant freezing behavior during a standard challenge (robot-confrontation task) were associated with internalizing symptoms in adolescence. Specifically, absent infant freezing predicted a relative increase in internalizing symptoms consistently across development from relatively low symptom levels in childhood to relatively high levels in late adolescence. Longer infant freezing also predicted a relative increase in internalizing symptoms, but only up until early adolescence. This latter effect was moderated by peer stress and was followed by a later decrease in internalizing symptoms. The findings suggest that early deviations in defensive freezing responses signal risk for internalizing symptoms and may constitute important markers in future stress vulnerability and resilience studies.
  • Nieuwland, M. S., Coopmans, C. W., & Sommers, R. P. (2019). Distinguishing old from new referents during discourse comprehension: Evidence from ERPs and oscillations. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13: 398. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2019.00398.

    Abstract

    In this EEG study, we used pre-registered and exploratory ERP and time-frequency analyses to investigate the resolution of anaphoric and non-anaphoric noun phrases during discourse comprehension. Participants listened to story contexts that described two antecedents, and subsequently read a target sentence with a critical noun phrase that lexically matched one antecedent (‘old’), matched two antecedents (‘ambiguous’), partially matched one antecedent in terms of semantic features (‘partial-match’), or introduced another referent (non-anaphoric, ‘new’). After each target sentence, participants judged whether the noun referred back to an antecedent (i.e., an ‘old/new’ judgment), which was easiest for ambiguous nouns and hardest for partially matching nouns. The noun-elicited N400 ERP component demonstrated initial sensitivity to repetition and semantic overlap, corresponding to repetition and semantic priming effects, respectively. New and partially matching nouns both elicited a subsequent frontal positivity, which suggested that partially matching anaphors may have been processed as new nouns temporarily. ERPs in an even later time window and ERPs time-locked to sentence-final words suggested that new and partially matching nouns had different effects on comprehension, with partially matching nouns incurring additional processing costs up to the end of the sentence. In contrast to the ERP results, the time-frequency results primarily demonstrated sensitivity to noun repetition, and did not differentiate partially matching anaphors from new nouns. In sum, our results show the ERP and time-frequency effects of referent repetition during discourse comprehension, and demonstrate the potentially demanding nature of establishing the anaphoric meaning of a novel noun.
  • Nieuwland, M. S. (2019). Do ‘early’ brain responses reveal word form prediction during language comprehension? A critical review. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 96, 367-400. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.11.019.

    Abstract

    Current theories of language comprehension posit that readers and listeners routinely try to predict the meaning but also the visual or sound form of upcoming words. Whereas
    most neuroimaging studies on word rediction focus on the N400 ERP or its magnetic equivalent, various studies claim that word form prediction manifests itself in ‘early’, pre
    N400 brain responses (e.g., ELAN, M100, P130, N1, P2, N200/PMN, N250). Modulations of these components are often taken as evidence that word form prediction impacts early sensory processes (the sensory hypothesis) or, alternatively, the initial stages of word recognition before word meaning is integrated with sentence context (the recognition hypothesis). Here, I
    comprehensively review studies on sentence- or discourse-level language comprehension that report such effects of prediction on early brain responses. I conclude that the reported evidence for the sensory hypothesis or word recognition hypothesis is weak and inconsistent,
    and highlight the urgent need for replication of previous findings. I discuss the implications and challenges to current theories of linguistic prediction and suggest avenues for future research.
  • Nieuwland, M. S., & Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2005). Testing the limits of the semantic illusion phenomenon: ERPs reveal temporary semantic change deafness in discourse comprehension. Cognitive Brain Research, 24(3), 691-701. doi:10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2005.04.003.

    Abstract

    In general, language comprehension is surprisingly reliable. Listeners very rapidly extract meaning from the unfolding speech signal, on a word-by-word basis, and usually successfully. Research on ‘semantic illusions’ however suggests that under certain conditions, people fail to notice that the linguistic input simply doesn't make sense. In the current event-related brain potentials (ERP) study, we examined whether listeners would, under such conditions, spontaneously detect an anomaly in which a human character central to the story at hand (e.g., “a tourist”) was suddenly replaced by an inanimate object (e.g., “a suitcase”). Because this replacement introduced a very powerful coherence break, we expected listeners to immediately notice the anomaly and generate the standard ERP effect associated with incoherent language, the N400 effect. However, instead of the standard N400 effect, anomalous words elicited a positive ERP effect from about 500–600 ms onwards. The absence of an N400 effect suggests that subjects did not immediately notice the anomaly, and that for a few hundred milliseconds the comprehension system has converged on an apparently coherent but factually incorrect interpretation. The presence of the later ERP effect indicates that subjects were processing for comprehension and did ultimately detect the anomaly. Therefore, we take the absence of a regular N400 effect as the online manifestation of a temporary semantic illusion. Our results also show that even attentive listeners sometimes fail to notice a radical change in the nature of a story character, and therefore suggest a case of short-lived ‘semantic change deafness’ in language comprehension.
  • Nievergelt, C. M., Maihofer, A. X., Klengel, T., Atkinson, E. G., Chen, C.-Y., Choi, K. W., Coleman, J. R. I., Dalvie, S., Duncan, L. E., Gelernter, J., Levey, D. F., Logue, M. W., Polimanti, R., Provost, A. C., Ratanatharathorn, A., Stein, M. B., Torres, K., Aiello, A. E., Almli, L. M., Amstadter, A. B. and 159 moreNievergelt, C. M., Maihofer, A. X., Klengel, T., Atkinson, E. G., Chen, C.-Y., Choi, K. W., Coleman, J. R. I., Dalvie, S., Duncan, L. E., Gelernter, J., Levey, D. F., Logue, M. W., Polimanti, R., Provost, A. C., Ratanatharathorn, A., Stein, M. B., Torres, K., Aiello, A. E., Almli, L. M., Amstadter, A. B., Andersen, S. B., Andreassen, O. A., Arbisi, P. A., Ashley-Koch, A. E., Austin, S. B., Avdibegovic, E., Babić, D., Bækvad-Hansen, M., Baker, D. G., Beckham, J. C., Bierut, L. J., Bisson, J. I., Boks, M. P., Bolger, E. A., Børglum, A. D., Bradley, B., Brashear, M., Breen, G., Bryant, R. A., Bustamante, A. C., Bybjerg-Grauholm, J., Calabrese, J. R., Caldas- de- Almeida, J. M., Dale, A. M., Daly, M. J., Daskalakis, N. P., Deckert, J., Delahanty, D. L., Dennis, M. F., Disner, S. G., Domschke, K., Dzubur-Kulenovic, A., Erbes, C. R., Evans, A., Farrer, L. A., Feeny, N. C., Flory, J. D., Forbes, D., Franz, C. E., Galea, S., Garrett, M. E., Gelaye, B., Geuze, E., Gillespie, C., Uka, A. G., Gordon, S. D., Guffanti, G., Hammamieh, R., Harnal, S., Hauser, M. A., Heath, A. C., Hemmings, S. M. J., Hougaard, D. M., Jakovljevic, M., Jett, M., Johnson, E. O., Jones, I., Jovanovic, T., Qin, X.-J., Junglen, A. G., Karstoft, K.-I., Kaufman, M. L., Kessler, R. C., Khan, A., Kimbrel, N. A., King, A. P., Koen, N., Kranzler, H. R., Kremen, W. S., Lawford, B. R., Lebois, L. A. M., Lewis, C. E., Linnstaedt, S. D., Lori, A., Lugonja, B., Luykx, J. J., Lyons, M. J., Maples-Keller, J., Marmar, C., Martin, A. R., Martin, N. G., Maurer, D., Mavissakalian, M. R., McFarlane, A., McGlinchey, R. E., McLaughlin, K. A., McLean, S. A., McLeay, S., Mehta, D., Milberg, W. P., Miller, M. W., Morey, R. A., Morris, C. P., Mors, O., Mortensen, P. B., Neale, B. M., Nelson, E. C., Nordentoft, M., Norman, S. B., O’Donnell, M., Orcutt, H. K., Panizzon, M. S., Peters, E. S., Peterson, A. L., Peverill, M., Pietrzak, R. H., Polusny, M. A., Rice, J. P., Ripke, S., Risbrough, V. B., Roberts, A. L., Rothbaum, A. O., Rothbaum, B. O., Roy-Byrne, P., Ruggiero, K., Rung, A., Rutten, B. P. F., Saccone, N. L., Sanchez, S. E., Schijven, D., Seedat, S., Seligowski, A. V., Seng, J. S., Sheerin, C. M., Silove, D., Smith, A. K., Smoller, J. W., Sponheim, S. R., Stein, D. J., Stevens, J. S., Sumner, J. A., Teicher, M. H., Thompson, W. K., Trapido, E., Uddin, M., Ursano, R. J., van den Heuvel, L. L., Van Hooff, M., Vermetten, E., Vinkers, C. H., Voisey, J., Wang, Y., Wang, Z., Werge, T., Williams, M. A., Williamson, D. E., Winternitz, S., Wolf, C., Wolf, E. J., Wolff, J. D., Yehuda, R., Young, R. M., Young, K. A., Zhao, H., Zoellner, L. A., Liberzon, I., Ressler, K. J., Haas, M., & Koenen, K. C. (2019). International meta-analysis of PTSD genome-wide association studies identifies sex- and ancestry-specific genetic risk loci. Nature Communications, 10(1): 4558. doi:10.1038/s41467-019-12576-w.

    Abstract

    The risk of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following trauma is heritable, but robust common variants have yet to be identified. In a multi-ethnic cohort including over 30,000 PTSD cases and 170,000 controls we conduct a genome-wide association study of PTSD. We demonstrate SNP-based heritability estimates of 5–20%, varying by sex. Three genome-wide significant loci are identified, 2 in European and 1 in African-ancestry analyses. Analyses stratified by sex implicate 3 additional loci in men. Along with other novel genes and non-coding RNAs, a Parkinson’s disease gene involved in dopamine regulation, PARK2, is associated with PTSD. Finally, we demonstrate that polygenic risk for PTSD is significantly predictive of re-experiencing symptoms in the Million Veteran Program dataset, although specific loci did not replicate. These results demonstrate the role of genetic variation in the biology of risk for PTSD and highlight the necessity of conducting sex-stratified analyses and expanding GWAS beyond European ancestry populations.

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    Supplementary information
  • Noble, C., Sala, G., Peter, M., Lingwood, J., Rowland, C. F., Gobet, F., & Pine, J. (2019). The impact of shared book reading on children's language skills: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 28: 100290. doi:10.1016/j.edurev.2019.100290.

    Abstract

    Shared book reading is thought to have a positive impact on young children's language development, with shared reading interventions often run in an attempt to boost children's language skills. However, despite the volume of research in this area, a number of issues remain outstanding. The current meta-analysis explored whether shared reading interventions are equally effective (a) across a range of study designs; (b) across a range of different outcome variables; and (c) for children from different SES groups. It also explored the potentially moderating effects of intervention duration, child age, use of dialogic reading techniques, person delivering the intervention and mode of intervention delivery.

    Our results show that, while there is an effect of shared reading on language development, this effect is smaller than reported in previous meta-analyses (
     = 0.194, p = .002). They also show that this effect is moderated by the type of control group used and is negligible in studies with active control groups (  = 0.028, p = .703). Finally, they show no significant effects of differences in outcome variable (ps ≥ .286), socio-economic status (p = .658), or any of our other potential moderators (ps ≥ .077), and non-significant effects for studies with follow-ups (  = 0.139, p = .200). On the basis of these results, we make a number of recommendations for researchers and educators about the design and implementation of future shared reading interventions.

    Additional information

    Supplementary data
  • Nuthmann, A., De Groot, F., Huettig, F., & Olivers, C. L. N. (2019). Extrafoveal attentional capture by object semantics. PLoS One, 14(5): e0217051. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0217051.

    Abstract

    There is ongoing debate on whether object meaning can be processed outside foveal vision, making semantics available for attentional guidance. Much of the debate has centred on whether objects that do not fit within an overall scene draw attention, in complex displays that are often difficult to control. Here, we revisited the question by reanalysing data from three experiments that used displays consisting of standalone objects from a carefully controlled stimulus set. Observers searched for a target object, as per auditory instruction. On the critical trials, the displays contained no target but objects that were semantically related to the target, visually related, or unrelated. Analyses using (generalized) linear mixed-effects models showed that, although visually related objects attracted most attention, semantically related objects were also fixated earlier in time than unrelated objects. Moreover, semantic matches affected the very first saccade in the display. The amplitudes of saccades that first entered semantically related objects were larger than 5° on average, confirming that object semantics is available outside foveal vision. Finally, there was no semantic capture of attention for the same objects when observers did not actively look for the target, confirming that it was not stimulus-driven. We discuss the implications for existing models of visual cognition.
  • O’Meara, C., Kung, S. S., & Majid, A. (2019). The challenge of olfactory ideophones: Reconsidering ineffability from the Totonac-Tepehua perspective. International Journal of American Linguistics, 85(2), 173-212. doi:10.1086/701801.

    Abstract

    Olfactory impressions are said to be ineffable, but little systematic exploration has been done to substantiate this. We explored olfactory language in Huehuetla Tepehua—a Totonac-Tepehua language spoken in Hidalgo, Mexico—which has a large inventory of ideophones, words with sound-symbolic properties used to describe perceptuomotor experiences. A multi-method study found Huehuetla Tepehua has 45 olfactory ideophones, illustrating intriguing sound-symbolic alternation patterns. Elaboration in the olfactory domain is not unique to this language; related Totonac-Tepehua languages also have impressive smell lexicons. Comparison across these languages shows olfactory and gustatory terms overlap in interesting ways, mirroring the physiology of smelling and tasting. However, although cognate taste terms are formally similar, olfactory terms are less so. We suggest the relative instability of smell vocabulary in comparison with those of taste likely results from the more varied olfactory experiences caused by the mutability of smells in different environments.
  • Ortega, G., Schiefner, A., & Ozyurek, A. (2019). Hearing non-signers use their gestures to predict iconic form-meaning mappings at first exposure to sign. Cognition, 191: 103996. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.06.008.

    Abstract

    The sign languages of deaf communities and the gestures produced by hearing people are communicative systems that exploit the manual-visual modality as means of expression. Despite their striking differences they share the property of iconicity, understood as the direct relationship between a symbol and its referent. Here we investigate whether non-signing hearing adults exploit their implicit knowledge of gestures to bootstrap accurate understanding of the meaning of iconic signs they have never seen before. In Study 1 we show that for some concepts gestures exhibit systematic forms across participants, and share different degrees of form overlap with the signs for the same concepts (full, partial, and no overlap). In Study 2 we found that signs with stronger resemblance with signs are more accurately guessed and are assigned higher iconicity ratings by non-signers than signs with low overlap. In addition, when more people produced a systematic gesture resembling a sign, they assigned higher iconicity ratings to that sign. Furthermore, participants had a bias to assume that signs represent actions and not objects. The similarities between some signs and gestures could be explained by deaf signers and hearing gesturers sharing a conceptual substrate that is rooted in our embodied experiences with the world. The finding that gestural knowledge can ease the interpretation of the meaning of novel signs and predicts iconicity ratings is in line with embodied accounts of cognition and the influence of prior knowledge to acquire new schemas. Through these mechanisms we propose that iconic gestures that overlap in form with signs may serve as some type of ‘manual cognates’ that help non-signing adults to break into a new language at first exposure.

    Additional information

    Supplementary Materials
  • O'Shannessy, C. (2005). Light Warlpiri: A new language. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 25(1), 31-57. doi:10.1080/07268600500110472.
  • Ostarek, M., Joosen, D., Ishag, A., De Nijs, M., & Huettig, F. (2019). Are visual processes causally involved in “perceptual simulation” effects in the sentence-picture verification task? Cognition, 182, 84-94. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.08.017.

    Abstract

    Many studies have shown that sentences implying an object to have a certain shape produce a robust reaction time advantage for shape-matching pictures in the sentence-picture verification task. Typically, this finding has been interpreted as evidence for perceptual simulation, i.e., that access to implicit shape information involves the activation of modality-specific visual processes. It follows from this proposal that disrupting visual processing during sentence comprehension should interfere with perceptual simulation and obliterate the match effect. Here we directly test this hypothesis. Participants listened to sentences while seeing either visual noise that was previously shown to strongly interfere with basic visual processing or a blank screen. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the match effect but crucially visual noise did not modulate it. When an interference technique was used that targeted high-level semantic processing (Experiment 3) however the match effect vanished. Visual noise specifically targeting high-level visual processes (Experiment 4) only had a minimal effect on the match effect. We conclude that the shape match effect in the sentence-picture verification paradigm is unlikely to rely on perceptual simulation.
  • Ostarek, M., Van Paridon, J., & Montero-Melis, G. (2019). Sighted people’s language is not helpful for blind individuals’ acquisition of typical animal colors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(44), 21972-21973. doi:10.1073/pnas.1912302116.
  • Ostarek, M., & Huettig, F. (2019). Six challenges for embodiment research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28(6), 593-599. doi:10.1177/0963721419866441.

    Abstract

    20 years after Barsalou's seminal perceptual symbols paper (Barsalou, 1999), embodied cognition, the notion that cognition involves simulations of sensory, motor, or affective states, has moved in status from an outlandish proposal advanced by a fringe movement in psychology to a mainstream position adopted by large numbers of researchers in the psychological and cognitive (neuro)sciences. While it has generated highly productive work in the cognitive sciences as a whole, it had a particularly strong impact on research into language comprehension. The view of a mental lexicon based on symbolic word representations, which are arbitrarily linked to sensory aspects of their referents, for example, was generally accepted since the cognitive revolution in the 1950s. This has radically changed. Given the current status of embodiment as a main theory of cognition, it is somewhat surprising that a close look at the state of the affairs in the literature reveals that the debate about the nature of the processes involved in language comprehension is far from settled and key questions remain unanswered. We present several suggestions for a productive way forward.
  • Ozyurek, A., Kita, S., Allen, S., Furman, R., & Brown, A. (2005). How does linguistic framing of events influence co-speech gestures? Insights from crosslinguistic variations and similarities. Gesture, 5(1/2), 219-240.

    Abstract

    What are the relations between linguistic encoding and gestural representations of events during online speaking? The few studies that have been conducted on this topic have yielded somewhat incompatible results with regard to whether and how gestural representations of events change with differences in the preferred semantic and syntactic encoding possibilities of languages. Here we provide large scale semantic, syntactic and temporal analyses of speech- gesture pairs that depict 10 different motion events from 20 Turkish and 20 English speakers. We find that the gestural representations of the same events differ across languages when they are encoded by different syntactic frames (i.e., verb-framed or satellite-framed). However, where there are similarities across languages, such as omission of a certain element of the event in the linguistic encoding, gestural representations also look similar and omit the same content. The results are discussed in terms of what gestures reveal about the influence of language specific encoding on on-line thinking patterns and the underlying interactions between speech and gesture during the speaking process.
  • Peeters, D., Vanlangendonck, F., Rüschemeyer, S.-A., & Dijkstra, T. (2019). Activation of the language control network in bilingual visual word recognition. Cortex, 111, 63-73. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2018.10.012.

    Abstract

    Research into bilingual language production has identified a language control network that subserves control operations when bilinguals produce speech. Here we explore which brain areas are recruited for control purposes in bilingual language comprehension. In two experimental fMRI sessions, Dutch-English unbalanced bilinguals read words that differed in cross-linguistic form and meaning overlap across their two languages. The need for control operations was further manipulated by varying stimulus list composition across the two experimental sessions. We observed activation of the language control network in bilingual language comprehension as a function of both cross-linguistic form and meaning overlap and stimulus list composition. These findings suggest that the language control network is shared across bilingual language production and comprehension. We argue that activation of the language control network in language comprehension allows bilinguals to quickly and efficiently grasp the context-relevant meaning of words.

    Additional information

    1-s2.0-S0010945218303459-mmc1.docx
  • Peeters, D. (2019). Virtual reality: A game-changing method for the language sciences. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(3), 894-900. doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01571-3.

    Abstract

    This paper introduces virtual reality as an experimental method for the language sciences and provides a review of recent studies using the method to answer fundamental, psycholinguistic research questions. It is argued that virtual reality demonstrates that ecological validity and
    experimental control should not be conceived of as two extremes on a continuum, but rather as two orthogonal factors. Benefits of using virtual reality as an experimental method include that in a virtual environment, as in the real world, there is no artificial spatial divide between participant and stimulus. Moreover, virtual reality experiments do not necessarily have to include a repetitive trial structure or an unnatural experimental task. Virtual agents outperform experimental confederates in terms of the consistency and replicability of their behaviour, allowing for reproducible science across participants and research labs. The main promise of virtual reality as a tool for the experimental language sciences, however, is that it shifts theoretical focus towards the interplay between different modalities (e.g., speech, gesture, eye gaze, facial expressions) in dynamic and communicative real-world environments, complementing studies that focus on one modality (e.g. speech) in isolation.
  • Penke, M., Janssen, U., Indefrey, P., & Seitz, R. (2005). No evidence for a rule/procedural deficit in German patients with Parkinson's disease. Brain and Language, 95(1), 139-140. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2005.07.078.
  • Peter, M. S., & Rowland, C. F. (2019). Aligning developmental and processing accounts of implicit and statistical learning. Topics in Cognitive Science, 11, 555-572. doi:10.1111/tops.12396.

    Abstract

    A long‐standing question in child language research concerns how children achieve mature syntactic knowledge in the face of a complex linguistic environment. A widely accepted view is that this process involves extracting distributional regularities from the environment in a manner that is incidental and happens, for the most part, without the learner's awareness. In this way, the debate speaks to two associated but separate literatures in language acquisition: statistical learning and implicit learning. Both fields have explored this issue in some depth but, at present, neither the results from the infant studies used by the statistical learning literature nor the artificial grammar learning tasks studies from the implicit learning literature can be used to fully explain how children's syntax becomes adult‐like. In this work, we consider an alternative explanation—that children use error‐based learning to become mature syntax users. We discuss this proposal in the light of the behavioral findings from structural priming studies and the computational findings from Chang, Dell, and Bock's (2006) dual‐path model, which incorporates properties from both statistical and implicit learning, and offers an explanation for syntax learning and structural priming using a common error‐based learning mechanism. We then turn our attention to future directions for the field, here suggesting how structural priming might inform the statistical learning and implicit learning literature on the nature of the learning mechanism.
  • Peter, M. S., Durrant, S., Jessop, A., Bidgood, A., Pine, J. M., & Rowland, C. F. (2019). Does speed of processing or vocabulary size predict later language growth in toddlers? Cognitive Psychology, 115: 101238. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2019.101238.

    Abstract

    It is becoming increasingly clear that the way that children acquire cognitive representations
    depends critically on how their processing system is developing. In particular, recent studies
    suggest that individual differences in language processing speed play an important role in explaining
    the speed with which children acquire language. Inconsistencies across studies, however,
    mean that it is not clear whether this relationship is causal or correlational, whether it is
    present right across development, or whether it extends beyond word learning to affect other
    aspects of language learning, like syntax acquisition. To address these issues, the current study
    used the looking-while-listening paradigm devised by Fernald, Swingley, and Pinto (2001) to test
    the speed with which a large longitudinal cohort of children (the Language 0–5 Project) processed
    language at 19, 25, and 31 months of age, and took multiple measures of vocabulary (UKCDI,
    Lincoln CDI, CDI-III) and syntax (Lincoln CDI) between 8 and 37 months of age. Processing
    speed correlated with vocabulary size - though this relationship changed over time, and was
    observed only when there was variation in how well the items used in the looking-while-listening
    task were known. Fast processing speed was a positive predictor of subsequent vocabulary
    growth, but only for children with smaller vocabularies. Faster processing speed did, however,
    predict faster syntactic growth across the whole sample, even when controlling for concurrent
    vocabulary. The results indicate a relatively direct relationship between processing speed and
    syntactic development, but point to a more complex interaction between processing speed, vocabulary
    size and subsequent vocabulary growth.
  • Petersson, K. M. (2005). On the relevance of the neurobiological analogue of the finite-state architecture. Neurocomputing, 65(66), 825-832. doi:10.1016/j.neucom.2004.10.108.

    Abstract

    We present two simple arguments for the potential relevance of a neurobiological analogue of the finite-state architecture. The first assumes the classical cognitive framework, is wellknown, and is based on the assumption that the brain is finite with respect to its memory organization. The second is formulated within a general dynamical systems framework and is based on the assumption that the brain sustains some level of noise and/or does not utilize infinite precision processing. We briefly review the classical cognitive framework based on Church–Turing computability and non-classical approaches based on analog processing in dynamical systems. We conclude that the dynamical neurobiological analogue of the finitestate architecture appears to be relevant, at least at an implementational level, for cognitive brain systems
  • Petras, K., Ten Oever, S., Jacobs, C., & Goffaux, V. (2019). Coarse-to-fine information integration in human vision. NeuroImage, 186, 103-112. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.10.086.

    Abstract

    Coarse-to-fine theories of vision propose that the coarse information carried by the low spatial frequencies (LSF) of visual input guides the integration of finer, high spatial frequency (HSF) detail. Whether and how LSF modulates HSF processing in naturalistic broad-band stimuli is still unclear. Here we used multivariate decoding of EEG signals to separate the respective contribution of LSF and HSF to the neural response evoked by broad-band images. Participants viewed images of human faces, monkey faces and phase-scrambled versions that were either broad-band or filtered to contain LSF or HSF. We trained classifiers on EEG scalp-patterns evoked by filtered scrambled stimuli and evaluated the derived models on broad-band scrambled and intact trials. We found reduced HSF contribution when LSF was informative towards image content, indicating that coarse information does guide the processing of fine detail, in line with coarse-to-fine theories. We discuss the potential cortical mechanisms underlying such coarse-to-fine feedback.

    Additional information

    Supplementary figures
  • Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F., Lieven, E. V., & Theakston, A. L. (2005). Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model: Why the data on children's use of non-nominative 3psg subjects count against the ATOM. Journal of Child Language, 32(2), 269-289. doi:10.1017/S0305000905006860.

    Abstract

    One of the most influential recent accounts of pronoun case-marking errors in young children's speech is Schütze & Wexler's (1996) Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The ATOM predicts that the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects will be so low that such errors can be reasonably disregarded as noise in the data. The present study tests this prediction on data from 12 children between the ages of 1;8.22 and 3;0.10. This is done, first, by identifying children who produced a reasonably large number of non-nominative 3psg subjects; second, by estimating the expected rate of agreeing verbs with masculine and feminine non-nominative subjects in these children's speech; and, third, by examining the actual rate at which agreeing verb forms occurred with non-nominative subjects in those areas of the data in which the expected error rate was significantly greater than 10%. The results show, first, that only three of the children produced enough non-nominative subjects to allow a reasonable test of the ATOM to be made; second, that for all three of these children, the only area of the data in which the expected frequency of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects was significantly greater than 10% was their use of feminine case-marked subjects; and third, that for all three of these children, the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative feminine subjects was over 30%. These results raise serious doubts about the claim that children's use of non-nominative subjects can be explained in terms of AGR optionality, and suggest the need for a model of pronoun case-marking error that can explain why some children produce agreeing verb forms with non-nominative subjects as often as they do.
  • Pluymaekers, M., Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2005). Articulatory planning is continuous and sensitive to informational redundancy. Phonetica, 62(2-4), 146-159. doi:10.1159/000090095.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictability from neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the seven most frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix -lijk, 40 occurrences were randomly selected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis of the selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measured by duration and number of realized segments) was affected by repetition, predictability from the previous word and predictability from the following word. Interestingly, not all of these effects were significant across morphemes and target words. Repetition effects were limited to suffixes, while effects of predictability from the previous word were restricted to the stems of two of the seven target words. Predictability from the following word affected the stems of all target words equally, but not all suffixes. The implications of these findings for models of speech production are discussed.
  • Pluymaekers, M., Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2005). Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction in spoken Dutch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118(4), 2561-2569. doi:10.1121/1.2011150.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the effects of lexical frequency on the durational reduction of morphologically complex words in spoken Dutch. The hypothesis that high-frequency words are more reduced than low-frequency words was tested by comparing the durations of affixes occurring in different carrier words. Four Dutch affixes were investigated, each occurring in a large number of words with different frequencies. The materials came from a large database of face-to-face conversations. For each word containing a target affix, one token was randomly selected for acoustic analysis. Measurements were made of the duration of the affix as a whole and the durations of the individual segments in the affix. For three of the four affixes, a higher frequency of the carrier word led to shorter realizations of the affix as a whole, individual segments in the affix, or both. Other relevant factors were the sex and age of the speaker, segmental context, and speech rate. To accommodate for these findings, models of speech production should allow word frequency to affect the acoustic realizations of lower-level units, such as individual speech sounds occurring in affixes.
  • Poletiek, F. H., & Rassin E. (Eds.). (2005). Het (on)bewuste [Special Issue]. De Psycholoog.
  • Poletiek, F. H., & Van den Bos, E. J. (2005). Het onbewuste is een dader met een motief. De Psycholoog, 40(1), 11-17.
  • Poort, E. D., & Rodd, J. M. (2019). A database of Dutch–English cognates, interlingual homographs and translation equivalents. Journal of Cognition, 2(1): 15. doi:10.5334/joc.67.

    Abstract

    To investigate the structure of the bilingual mental lexicon, researchers in the field of bilingualism often use words that exist in multiple languages: cognates (which have the same meaning) and interlingual homographs (which have a different meaning). A high proportion of these studies have investigated language processing in Dutch–English bilinguals. Despite the abundance of research using such materials, few studies exist that have validated such materials. We conducted two rating experiments in which Dutch–English bilinguals rated the meaning, spelling and pronunciation similarity of pairs of Dutch and English words. On the basis of these results, we present a new database of Dutch–English identical cognates (e.g. “wolf”–“wolf”; n = 58), non-identical cognates (e.g. “kat”–“cat”; n = 74), interlingual homographs (e.g. “angel”–“angel”; n = 72) and translation equivalents (e.g. “wortel”–“carrot”; n = 78). The database can be accessed at http://osf.io/tcdxb/.

    Additional information

    database
  • Poort, E. D., & Rodd, J. M. (2019). Towards a distributed connectionist account of cognates and interlingual homographs: Evidence from semantic relatedness tasks. PeerJ, 7: e6725. doi:10.7717/peerj.6725.

    Abstract

    Background

    Current models of how bilinguals process cognates (e.g., “wolf”, which has the same meaning in Dutch and English) and interlingual homographs (e.g., “angel”, meaning “insect’s sting” in Dutch) are based primarily on data from lexical decision tasks. A major drawback of such tasks is that it is difficult—if not impossible—to separate processes that occur during decision making (e.g., response competition) from processes that take place in the lexicon (e.g., lateral inhibition). Instead, we conducted two English semantic relatedness judgement experiments.
    Methods

    In Experiment 1, highly proficient Dutch–English bilinguals (N = 29) and English monolinguals (N = 30) judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs that included a cognate (e.g., “wolf”–“howl”; n = 50), an interlingual homograph (e.g., “angel”–“heaven”; n = 50) or an English control word (e.g., “carrot”–“vegetable”; n = 50). In Experiment 2, another group of highly proficient Dutch–English bilinguals (N = 101) read sentences in Dutch that contained one of those cognates, interlingual homographs or the Dutch translation of one of the English control words (e.g., “wortel” for “carrot”) approximately 15 minutes prior to completing the English semantic relatedness task.
    Results

    In Experiment 1, there was an interlingual homograph inhibition effect of 39 ms only for the bilinguals, but no evidence for a cognate facilitation effect. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and also revealed that cross-lingual long-term priming had an opposite effect on the cognates and interlingual homographs: recent experience with a cognate in Dutch speeded processing of those items 15 minutes later in English but slowed processing of interlingual homographs. However, these priming effects were smaller than previously observed using a lexical decision task.
    Conclusion

    After comparing our results to studies in both the bilingual and monolingual domain, we argue that bilinguals appear to process cognates and interlingual homographs as monolinguals process polysemes and homonyms, respectively. In the monolingual domain, processing of such words is best modelled using distributed connectionist frameworks. We conclude that it is necessary to explore the viability of such a model for the bilingual case.
  • Postema, M., De Marco, M., Colato, E., & Venneri, A. (2019). A study of within-subject reliability of the brain’s default-mode network. Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine, 32(3), 391-405. doi:10.1007/s10334-018-00732-0.

    Abstract

    Objective

    Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is promising for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This study aimed to examine short-term reliability of the default-mode network (DMN), one of the main haemodynamic patterns of the brain.
    Materials and methods

    Using a 1.5 T Philips Achieva scanner, two consecutive resting-state fMRI runs were acquired on 69 healthy adults, 62 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to AD, and 28 patients with AD dementia. The anterior and posterior DMN and, as control, the visual-processing network (VPN) were computed using two different methodologies: connectivity of predetermined seeds (theory-driven) and dual regression (data-driven). Divergence and convergence in network strength and topography were calculated with paired t tests, global correlation coefficients, voxel-based correlation maps, and indices of reliability.
    Results

    No topographical differences were found in any of the networks. High correlations and reliability were found in the posterior DMN of healthy adults and MCI patients. Lower reliability was found in the anterior DMN and in the VPN, and in the posterior DMN of dementia patients.
    Discussion

    Strength and topography of the posterior DMN appear relatively stable and reliable over a short-term period of acquisition but with some degree of variability across clinical samples.
  • Postema, M., Van Rooij, D., Anagnostou, E., Arango, C., Auzias, G., Behrmann, M., Busatto Filho, G., Calderoni, S., Calvo, R., Daly, E., Deruelle, C., Di Martino, A., Dinstein, I., Duran, F. L. S., Durston, S., Ecker, C., Ehrlich, S., Fair, D., Fedor, J., Feng, X. and 38 morePostema, M., Van Rooij, D., Anagnostou, E., Arango, C., Auzias, G., Behrmann, M., Busatto Filho, G., Calderoni, S., Calvo, R., Daly, E., Deruelle, C., Di Martino, A., Dinstein, I., Duran, F. L. S., Durston, S., Ecker, C., Ehrlich, S., Fair, D., Fedor, J., Feng, X., Fitzgerald, J., Floris, D. L., Freitag, C. M., Gallagher, L., Glahn, D. C., Gori, I., Haar, S., Hoekstra, L., Jahanshad, N., Jalbrzikowski, M., Janssen, J., King, J. A., Kong, X., Lazaro, L., Lerch, J. P., Luna, B., Martinho, M. M., McGrath, J., Medland, S. E., Muratori, F., Murphy, C. M., Murphy, D. G. M., O'Hearn, K., Oranje, B., Parellada, M., Puig, O., Retico, A., Rosa, P., Rubia, K., Shook, D., Taylor, M., Tosetti, M., Wallace, G. L., Zhou, F., Thompson, P., Fisher, S. E., Buitelaar, J. K., & Francks, C. (2019). Altered structural brain asymmetry in autism spectrum disorder in a study of 54 datasets. Nature Communications, 10: 4958. doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13005-8.
  • Pouw, W., & Dixon, J. A. (2019). Entrainment and modulation of gesture-speech synchrony under delayed auditory feedback. Cognitive Science, 43(3): e12721. doi:10.1111/cogs.12721.

    Abstract

    Gesture–speech synchrony re-stabilizes when hand movement or speech is disrupted by a delayed
    feedback manipulation, suggesting strong bidirectional coupling between gesture and speech. Yet it
    has also been argued from case studies in perceptual–motor pathology that hand gestures are a special
    kind of action that does not require closed-loop re-afferent feedback to maintain synchrony with
    speech. In the current pre-registered within-subject study, we used motion tracking to conceptually
    replicate McNeill’s (1992) classic study on gesture–speech synchrony under normal and 150 ms
    delayed auditory feedback of speech conditions (NO DAF vs. DAF). Consistent with, and extending
    McNeill’s original results, we obtain evidence that (a) gesture-speech synchrony is more stable
    under DAF versus NO DAF (i.e., increased coupling effect), (b) that gesture and speech variably
    entrain to the external auditory delay as indicated by a consistent shift in gesture-speech synchrony
    offsets (i.e., entrainment effect), and (c) that the coupling effect and the entrainment effect are codependent.
    We suggest, therefore, that gesture–speech synchrony provides a way for the cognitive
    system to stabilize rhythmic activity under interfering conditions.

    Additional information

    https://osf.io/pcde3/
  • Pouw, W., Rop, G., De Koning, B., & Paas, F. (2019). The cognitive basis for the split-attention effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(11), 2058-2075. doi:10.1037/xge0000578.

    Abstract

    The split-attention effect entails that learning from spatially separated, but mutually referring information
    sources (e.g., text and picture), is less effective than learning from the equivalent spatially integrated
    sources. According to cognitive load theory, impaired learning is caused by the working memory load
    imposed by the need to distribute attention between the information sources and mentally integrate them.
    In this study, we directly tested whether the split-attention effect is caused by spatial separation per se.
    Spatial distance was varied in basic cognitive tasks involving pictures (Experiment 1) and text–picture
    combinations (Experiment 2; preregistered study), and in more ecologically valid learning materials
    (Experiment 3). Experiment 1 showed that having to integrate two pictorial stimuli at greater distances
    diminished performance on a secondary visual working memory task, but did not lead to slower
    integration. When participants had to integrate a picture and written text in Experiment 2, a greater
    distance led to slower integration of the stimuli, but not to diminished performance on the secondary task.
    Experiment 3 showed that presenting spatially separated (compared with integrated) textual and pictorial
    information yielded fewer integrative eye movements, but this was not further exacerbated when
    increasing spatial distance even further. This effect on learning processes did not lead to differences in
    learning outcomes between conditions. In conclusion, we provide evidence that larger distances between
    spatially separated information sources influence learning processes, but that spatial separation on its
    own is not likely to be the only, nor a sufficient, condition for impacting learning outcomes.

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  • Preisig, B., Sjerps, M. J., Kösem, A., & Riecke, L. (2019). Dual-site high-density 4Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation applied over auditory and motor cortical speech areas does not influence auditory-motor mapping. Brain Stimulation, 12(3), 775-777. doi:10.1016/j.brs.2019.01.007.
  • Preisig, B., & Sjerps, M. J. (2019). Hemispheric specializations affect interhemispheric speech sound integration during duplex perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145, EL190-EL196. doi:10.1121/1.5092829.

    Abstract

    The present study investigated whether speech-related spectral information benefits from initially predominant right or left hemisphere processing. Normal hearing individuals categorized speech sounds composed of an ambiguous base (perceptually intermediate between /ga/ and /da/), presented to one ear, and a disambiguating low or high F3 chirp presented to the other ear. Shorter response times were found when the chirp was presented to the left ear than to the right ear (inducing initially right-hemisphere chirp processing), but no between-ear differences in strength of overall integration. The results are in line with the assumptions of a right hemispheric dominance for spectral processing.

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  • Prystauka, Y., & Lewis, A. G. (2019). The power of neural oscillations to inform sentence comprehension: A linguistic perspective. Language and Linguistics Compass, 13 (9): e12347. doi:10.1111/lnc3.12347.

    Abstract

    The field of psycholinguistics is currently experiencing an explosion of interest in the analysis of neural oscillations—rhythmic brain activity synchronized at different temporal and spatial levels. Given that language comprehension relies on a myriad of processes, which are carried out in parallel in distributed brain networks, there is hope that this methodology might bring the field closer to understanding some of the more basic (spatially and temporally distributed, yet at the same time often overlapping) neural computations that support language function. In this review, we discuss existing proposals linking oscillatory dynamics in different frequency bands to basic neural computations and review relevant theories suggesting associations between band-specific oscillations and higher-level cognitive processes. More or less consistent patterns of oscillatory activity related to certain types of linguistic processing can already be derived from the evidence that has accumulated over the past few decades. The centerpiece of the current review is a synthesis of such patterns grouped by linguistic phenomenon. We restrict our review to evidence linking measures of oscillatory
    power to the comprehension of sentences, as well as linguistically (and/or pragmatically) more complex structures. For each grouping, we provide a brief summary and a table of associated oscillatory signatures that a psycholinguist might expect to find when employing a particular linguistic task. Summarizing across different paradigms, we conclude that a handful of basic neural oscillatory mechanisms are likely recruited in different ways and at different times for carrying out a variety of linguistic computations.
  • Quinn, S., & Kidd, E. (2019). Symbolic play promotes non‐verbal communicative exchange in infant–caregiver dyads. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 37(1), 33-50. doi:10.1111/bjdp.12251.

    Abstract

    Symbolic play has long been considered a fertile context for communicative development (Bruner, 1983, Child's talk: Learning to use language, Oxford University Press, Oxford; Vygotsky, 1962, Thought and language, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; Vygotsky, 1978, Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA). In the current study, we examined caregiver–infant interaction during symbolic play and compared it to interaction in a comparable but non‐symbolic context (i.e., ‘functional’ play). Fifty‐four (N = 54) caregivers and their 18‐month‐old infants were observed engaging in 20 min of play (symbolic, functional). Play interactions were coded and compared across play conditions for joint attention (JA) and gesture use. Compared with functional play, symbolic play was characterized by greater frequency and duration of JA and greater gesture use, particularly the use of iconic gestures with an object in hand. The results suggest that symbolic play provides a rich context for the exchange and negotiation of meaning, and thus may contribute to the development of important skills underlying communicative development.
  • Radenkovic, S., Bird, M. J., Emmerzaal, T. L., Wong, S. Y., Felgueira, C., Stiers, K. M., Sabbagh, L., Himmelreich, N., Poschet, G., Windmolders, P., Verheijen, J., Witters, P., Altassan, R., Honzik, T., Eminoglu, T. F., James, P. M., Edmondson, A. C., Hertecant, J., Kozicz, T., Thiel, C. and 5 moreRadenkovic, S., Bird, M. J., Emmerzaal, T. L., Wong, S. Y., Felgueira, C., Stiers, K. M., Sabbagh, L., Himmelreich, N., Poschet, G., Windmolders, P., Verheijen, J., Witters, P., Altassan, R., Honzik, T., Eminoglu, T. F., James, P. M., Edmondson, A. C., Hertecant, J., Kozicz, T., Thiel, C., Vermeersch, P., Cassiman, D., Beamer, L., Morava, E., & Ghesquiere, B. (2019). The metabolic map into the pathomechanism and treatment of PGM1-CDG. American Journal of Human Genetics, 104(5), 835-846. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2019.03.003.

    Abstract

    Phosphoglucomutase 1 (PGM1) encodes the metabolic enzyme that interconverts glucose-6-P and glucose-1-P. Mutations in PGM1 cause impairment in glycogen metabolism and glycosylation, the latter manifesting as a congenital disorder of glycosylation (CDG). This unique metabolic defect leads to abnormal N-glycan synthesis in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and the Golgi apparatus (GA). On the basis of the decreased galactosylation in glycan chains, galactose was administered to individuals with PGM1-CDG and was shown to markedly reverse most disease-related laboratory abnormalities. The disease and treatment mechanisms, however, have remained largely elusive. Here, we confirm the clinical benefit of galactose supplementation in PGM1-CDG-affected individuals and obtain significant insights into the functional and biochemical regulation of glycosylation. We report here that, by using tracer-based metabolomics, we found that galactose treatment of PGM1-CDG fibroblasts metabolically re-wires their sugar metabolism, and as such replenishes the depleted levels of galactose-1-P, as well as the levels of UDP-glucose and UDP-galactose, the nucleotide sugars that are required for ER- and GA-linked glycosylation, respectively. To this end, we further show that the galactose in UDP-galactose is incorporated into mature, de novo glycans. Our results also allude to the potential of monosaccharide therapy for several other CDG.
  • Räsänen, O., Seshadri, S., Karadayi, J., Riebling, E., Bunce, J., Cristia, A., Metze, F., Casillas, M., Rosemberg, C., Bergelson, E., & Soderstrom, M. (2019). Automatic word count estimation from daylong child-centered recordings in various language environments using language-independent syllabification of speech. Speech Communication, 113, 63-80. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2019.08.005.

    Abstract

    Automatic word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings can be used to quantify the amount of verbal communication in a recording environment. One key application of WCE is to measure language input heard by infants and toddlers in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings from microphones worn by the infants. Although WCE is nearly trivial for high-quality signals in high-resource languages, daylong recordings are substantially more challenging due to the unconstrained acoustic environments and the presence of near- and far-field speech. Moreover, many use cases of interest involve languages for which reliable ASR systems or even well-defined lexicons are not available. A good WCE system should also perform similarly for low- and high-resource languages in order to enable unbiased comparisons across different cultures and environments. Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art solution, the LENA system, is based on proprietary software and has only been optimized for American English, limiting its applicability. In this paper, we build on existing work on WCE and present the steps we have taken towards a freely available system for WCE that can be adapted to different languages or dialects with a limited amount of orthographically transcribed speech data. Our system is based on language-independent syllabification of speech, followed by a language-dependent mapping from syllable counts (and a number of other acoustic features) to the corresponding word count estimates. We evaluate our system on samples from daylong infant recordings from six different corpora consisting of several languages and socioeconomic environments, all manually annotated with the same protocol to allow direct comparison. We compare a number of alternative techniques for the two key components in our system: speech activity detection and automatic syllabification of speech. As a result, we show that our system can reach relatively consistent WCE accuracy across multiple corpora and languages (with some limitations). In addition, the system outperforms LENA on three of the four corpora consisting of different varieties of English. We also demonstrate how an automatic neural network-based syllabifier, when trained on multiple languages, generalizes well to novel languages beyond the training data, outperforming two previously proposed unsupervised syllabifiers as a feature extractor for WCE.
  • Ravignani, A. (2019). [Review of the book Animal beauty: On the evolution of bological aesthetics by C. Nüsslein-Volhard]. Animal Behaviour, 155, 171-172. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2019.07.005.
  • Ravignani, A. (2019). [Review of the book The origins of musicality ed. by H. Honing]. Perception, 48(1), 102-105. doi:10.1177/0301006618817430.
  • Ravignani, A. (2019). Humans and other musical animals [Review of the book The evolving animal orchestra: In search of what makes us musical by Henkjan Honing]. Current Biology, 29(8), R271-R273. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2019.03.013.
  • Ravignani, A., & de Reus, K. (2019). Modelling animal interactive rhythms in communication. Evolutionary Bioinformatics, 15, 1-14. doi:10.1177/1176934318823558.

    Abstract

    Time is one crucial dimension conveying information in animal communication. Evolution has shaped animals’ nervous systems to produce signals with temporal properties fitting their socio-ecological niches. Many quantitative models of mechanisms underlying rhythmic behaviour exist, spanning insects, crustaceans, birds, amphibians, and mammals. However, these computational and mathematical models are often presented in isolation. Here, we provide an overview of the main mathematical models employed in the study of animal rhythmic communication among conspecifics. After presenting basic definitions and mathematical formalisms, we discuss each individual model. These computational models are then compared using simulated data to uncover similarities and key differences in the underlying mechanisms found across species. Our review of the empirical literature is admittedly limited. We stress the need of using comparative computer simulations – both before and after animal experiments – to better understand animal timing in interaction. We hope this article will serve as a potential first step towards a common computational framework to describe temporal interactions in animals, including humans.

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  • Ravignani, A., Verga, L., & Greenfield, M. D. (2019). Interactive rhythms across species: The evolutionary biology of animal chorusing and turn-taking. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1453(1), 12-21. doi:10.1111/nyas.14230.

    Abstract

    The study of human language is progressively moving toward comparative and interactive frameworks, extending the concept of turn‐taking to animal communication. While such an endeavor will help us understand the interactive origins of language, any theoretical account for cross‐species turn‐taking should consider three key points. First, animal turn‐taking must incorporate biological studies on animal chorusing, namely how different species coordinate their signals over time. Second, while concepts employed in human communication and turn‐taking, such as intentionality, are still debated in animal behavior, lower level mechanisms with clear neurobiological bases can explain much of animal interactive behavior. Third, social behavior, interactivity, and cooperation can be orthogonal, and the alternation of animal signals need not be cooperative. Considering turn‐taking a subset of chorusing in the rhythmic dimension may avoid overinterpretation and enhance the comparability of future empirical work.
  • Ravignani, A. (2019). Everything you always wanted to know about sexual selection in 129 pages [Review of the book Sexual selection: A very short introduction by M. Zuk and L. W. Simmons]. Journal of Mammalogy, 100(6), 2004-2005. doi:10.1093/jmammal/gyz168.
  • Ravignani, A., & Gamba, M. (2019). Evolving musicality [Review of the book The evolving animal orchestra: In search of what makes us musical by Henkjan Honing]. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 34(7), 583-584. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2019.04.016.
  • Ravignani, A., Kello, C. T., de Reus, K., Kotz, S. A., Dalla Bella, S., Mendez-Arostegui, M., Rapado-Tamarit, B., Rubio-Garcia, A., & de Boer, B. (2019). Ontogeny of vocal rhythms in harbor seal pups: An exploratory study. Current Zoology, 65(1), 107-120. doi:10.1093/cz/zoy055.

    Abstract

    Puppyhood is a very active social and vocal period in a harbor seal's life Phoca vitulina. An important feature of vocalizations is their temporal and rhythmic structure, and understanding vocal timing and rhythms in harbor seals is critical to a cross-species hypothesis in evolutionary neuroscience that links vocal learning, rhythm perception, and synchronization. This study utilized analytical techniques that may best capture rhythmic structure in pup vocalizations with the goal of examining whether (1) harbor seal pups show rhythmic structure in their calls and (2) rhythms evolve over time. Calls of 3 wild-born seal pups were recorded daily over the course of 1-3 weeks; 3 temporal features were analyzed using 3 complementary techniques. We identified temporal and rhythmic structure in pup calls across different time windows. The calls of harbor seal pups exhibit some degree of temporal and rhythmic organization, which evolves over puppyhood and resembles that of other species' interactive communication. We suggest next steps for investigating call structure in harbor seal pups and propose comparative hypotheses to test in other pinniped species.
  • Ravignani, A., Filippi, P., & Fitch, W. T. (2019). Perceptual tuning influences rule generalization: Testing humans with monkey-tailored stimuli. i-Perception, 10(2), 1-5. doi:10.1177/2041669519846135.

    Abstract

    Comparative research investigating how nonhuman animals generalize patterns of auditory stimuli often uses sequences of human speech syllables and reports limited generalization abilities in animals. Here, we reverse this logic, testing humans with stimulus sequences tailored to squirrel monkeys. When test stimuli are familiar (human voices), humans succeed in two types of generalization. However, when the same structural rule is instantiated over unfamiliar but perceivable sounds within squirrel monkeys’ optimal hearing frequency range, human participants master only one type of generalization. These findings have methodological implications for the design of comparative experiments, which should be fair towards all tested species’ proclivities and limitations.

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  • Ravignani, A. (2019). Singing seals imitate human speech. Journal of Experimental Biology, 222: jeb208447. doi:10.1242/jeb.208447.
  • Ravignani, A. (2019). Rhythm and synchrony in animal movement and communication. Current Zoology, 65(1), 77-81. doi:10.1093/cz/zoy087.

    Abstract

    Animal communication and motoric behavior develop over time. Often, this temporal dimension has communicative relevance and is organized according to structural patterns. In other words, time is a crucial dimension for rhythm and synchrony in animal movement and communication. Rhythm is defined as temporal structure at a second-millisecond time scale (Kotz et al. 2018). Synchrony is defined as precise co-occurrence of 2 behaviors in time (Ravignani 2017).

    Rhythm, synchrony, and other forms of temporal interaction are taking center stage in animal behavior and communication. Several critical questions include, among others: what species show which rhythmic predispositions? How does a species’ sensitivity for, or proclivity towards, rhythm arise? What are the species-specific functions of rhythm and synchrony, and are there functional trends across species? How did similar or different rhythmic behaviors evolved in different species? This Special Column aims at collecting and contrasting research from different species, perceptual modalities, and empirical methods. The focus is on timing, rhythm and synchrony in the second-millisecond range.

    Three main approaches are commonly adopted to study animal rhythms, with a focus on: 1) spontaneous individual rhythm production, 2) group rhythms, or 3) synchronization experiments. I concisely introduce them below (see also Kotz et al. 2018; Ravignani et al. 2018).
  • Ravignani, A., Dalla Bella, S., Falk, S., Kello, C. T., Noriega, F., & Kotz, S. A. (2019). Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: A cross‐species perspective. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1453(1), 79-98. doi:10.1111/nyas.14166.

    Abstract

    Why does human speech have rhythm? As we cannot travel back in time to witness how speech developed its rhythmic properties and why humans have the cognitive skills to process them, we rely on alternative methods to find out. One powerful tool is the comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species to determine which traits are shared between species and which are recent human inventions. Vocalizations of many species exhibit temporal structure, but little is known about how these rhythmic structures evolved, are perceived and produced, their biological and developmental bases, and communicative functions. We review the literature on rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations as a first step toward understanding similarities and differences across species. We extend this review to quantitative techniques that are useful for computing rhythmic structure in acoustic sequences and hence facilitate cross‐species research. We report links between vocal perception and motor coordination and the differentiation of rhythm based on hierarchical temporal structure. While still far from a complete cross‐species perspective of speech rhythm, our review puts some pieces of the puzzle together.
  • Ravignani, A. (2019). Seeking shared ground in space. Science, 366(6466), 696. doi:10.1126/science.aay6955.
  • Ravignani, A. (2019). Timing of antisynchronous calling: A case study in a harbor seal pup (Phoca vitulina). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 133(2), 272-277. doi:10.1037/com0000160.

    Abstract

    Alternative mathematical models predict differences in how animals adjust the timing of their calls. Differences can be measured as the effect of the timing of a conspecific call on the rate and period of calling of a focal animal, and the lag between the two. Here, I test these alternative hypotheses by tapping into harbor seals’ (Phoca vitulina) mechanisms for spontaneous timing. Both socioecology and vocal behavior of harbor seals make them an interesting model species to study call rhythm and timing. Here, a wild-born seal pup was tested in controlled laboratory conditions. Based on previous recordings of her vocalizations and those of others, I designed playback experiments adapted to that specific animal. The call onsets of the animal were measured as a function of tempo, rhythmic regularity, and spectral properties of the playbacks. The pup adapted the timing of her calls in response to conspecifics’ calls. Rather than responding at a fixed time delay, the pup adjusted her calls’ onset to occur at a fraction of the playback tempo, showing a relative-phase antisynchrony. Experimental results were confirmed via computational modeling. This case study lends preliminary support to a classic mathematical model of animal behavior—Hamilton’s selfish herd—in the acoustic domain.
  • Ravignani, A. (2019). Understanding mammals, hands-on [Review of the book Mammalogy techniques lab manual by J. M. Ryan]. Journal of Mammalogy, 100(5), 1695-1696. doi:10.1093/jmammal/gyz132.
  • Raviv, L., Meyer, A. S., & Lev-Ari, S. (2019). Larger communities create more systematic languages. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 286(1907): 20191262. doi:10.1098/rspb.2019.1262.

    Abstract

    Understanding worldwide patterns of language diversity has long been a goal for evolutionary scientists, linguists and philosophers. Research over the past decade has suggested that linguistic diversity may result from differences in the social environments in which languages evolve. Specifically, recent work found that languages spoken in larger communities typically have more systematic grammatical structures. However, in the real world, community size is confounded with other social factors such as network structure and the number of second languages learners in the community, and it is often assumed that linguistic simplification is driven by these factors instead. Here, we show that in contrast to previous assumptions, community size has a unique and important influence on linguistic structure. We experimentally examine the live formation of new languages created in the laboratory by small and larger groups, and find that larger groups of interacting participants develop more systematic languages over time, and do so faster and more consistently than small groups. Small groups also vary more in their linguistic behaviours, suggesting that small communities are more vulnerable to drift. These results show that community size predicts patterns of language diversity, and suggest that an increase in community size might have contributed to language evolution.
  • Raviv, L., Meyer, A. S., & Lev-Ari, S. (2019). Compositional structure can emerge without generational transmission. Cognition, 182, 151-164. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.09.010.

    Abstract

    Experimental work in the field of language evolution has shown that novel signal systems become more structured over time. In a recent paper, Kirby, Tamariz, Cornish, and Smith (2015) argued that compositional languages can emerge only when languages are transmitted across multiple generations. In the current paper, we show that compositional languages can emerge in a closed community within a single generation. We conducted a communication experiment in which we tested the emergence of linguistic structure in different micro-societies of four participants, who interacted in alternating dyads using an artificial language to refer to novel meanings. Importantly, the communication included two real-world aspects of language acquisition and use, which introduce compressibility pressures: (a) multiple interaction partners and (b) an expanding meaning space. Our results show that languages become significantly more structured over time, with participants converging on shared, stable, and compositional lexicons. These findings indicate that new learners are not necessary for the formation of linguistic structure within a community, and have implications for related fields such as developing sign languages and creoles.
  • Reber, S. A., Šlipogor, V., Oh, J., Ravignani, A., Hoeschele, M., Bugnyar, T., & Fitch, W. T. (2019). Common marmosets are sensitive to simple dependencies at variable distances in an artificial grammar. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(2), 214-221. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.11.006.

    Abstract

    Recognizing that two elements within a sequence of variable length depend on each other is a key ability in understanding the structure of language and music. Perception of such interdependencies has previously been documented in chimpanzees in the visual domain and in human infants and common squirrel monkeys with auditory playback experiments, but it remains unclear whether it typifies primates in general. Here, we investigated the ability of common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) to recognize and respond to such dependencies. We tested subjects in a familiarization-discrimination playback experiment using stimuli composed of pure tones that either conformed or did not conform to a grammatical rule. After familiarization to sequences with dependencies, marmosets spontaneously discriminated between sequences containing and lacking dependencies (‘consistent’ and ‘inconsistent’, respectively), independent of stimulus length. Marmosets looked more often to the sound source when hearing sequences consistent with the familiarization stimuli, as previously found in human infants. Crucially, looks were coded automatically by computer software, avoiding human bias. Our results support the hypothesis that the ability to perceive dependencies at variable distances was already present in the common ancestor of all anthropoid primates (Simiiformes).
  • Redmann, A., FitzPatrick, I., & Indefrey, P. (2019). The time course of colour congruency effects in picture naming. Acta Psychologica, 196, 96-108. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.04.005.

    Abstract

    In our interactions with people and objects in the world around us, as well as in communicating our thoughts, we
    rely on the use of conceptual knowledge stored in long-term memory. From a frame-theoretic point of view, a
    concept is represented by a central node and recursive attribute-value structures further specifying the concept.
    The present study explores whether and how the activation of an attribute within a frame might influence access
    to the concept's name in language production, focussing on the colour attribute. Colour has been shown to
    contribute to object recognition, naming, and memory retrieval, and there is evidence that colour plays a different
    role in naming objects that have a typical colour (high colour-diagnostic objects such as tomatoes) than in
    naming objects without a typical colour (low colour-diagnostic objects such as bicycles). We report two behavioural
    experiments designed to reveal potential effects of the activation of an object's typical colour on naming
    the object in a picture-word interference paradigm. This paradigm was used to investigate whether naming is
    facilitated when typical colours are presented alongside the to-be-named picture (e.g., the word “red” superimposed
    on the picture of a tomato), compared to atypical colours (such as “brown”), unrelated adjectives (such
    as “fast”), or random letter strings. To further explore the time course of these potential effects, the words were
    presented at different time points relative to the to-be-named picture (Exp. 1: −400 ms, Exp. 2: −200 ms, 0 ms,
    and+200 ms). By including both high and low colour-diagnostic objects, it was possible to explore whether the
    activation of a colour differentially affects naming of objects that have a strong association with a typical colour.
    The results showed that (pre-)activation of the appropriate colour attribute facilitated naming compared to an
    inappropriate colour. This was only the case for objects closely connected with a typical colour. Consequences of
    these findings for frame-theoretic accounts of conceptual representation are discussed.
  • De Resende, N. C. A., Mota, M. B., & Seuren, P. A. M. (2019). The processing of grammatical gender agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: ERP evidence in favor of a single route. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 48(1), 181-198. doi:10.1007/s10936-018-9598-z.

    Abstract

    The present study used event-related potentials to investigate whether the processing of grammatical gender agreement involving gender regular and irregular forms recruit the same or distinct neurocognitive mechanisms and whether different grammatical gender agreement conditions elicit the same or diverse ERP signals. Native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese read sentences containing congruent and incongruent grammatical gender agreement between a determiner and a regular or an irregular form (condition 1) and between a regular or an irregular form and an adjective (condition 2). However, in condition 2, trials with incongruent regular forms elicited more positive ongoing waveforms than trial with incongruent irregular forms. We found a biphasic LAN/P600 effect for gender agreement violation involving regular and irregular forms in both conditions. Our findings suggest that gender agreement between determiner and nouns recruits the same neurocognitive mechanisms regardless of the nouns’ form and that, depending on the grammatical class of the words involved in gender agreement, differences in ERP signals can emerge
  • Rey, A., & Schiller, N. O. (2005). Graphemic complexity and multiple print-to-sound associations in visual word recognition. Memory & Cognition, 33(1), 76-85.

    Abstract

    It has recently been reported that words containing a multiletter grapheme are processed slower than are words composed of single-letter graphemes (Rastle & Coltheart, 1998; Rey, Jacobs, Schmidt-Weigand, & Ziegler, 1998). In the present study, using a perceptual identification task, we found in Experiment 1 that this graphemic complexity effect can be observed while controlling for multiple print-to-sound associations, indexed by regularity or consistency. In Experiment 2, we obtained cumulative effects of graphemic complexity and regularity. These effects were replicated in Experiment 3 in a naming task. Overall, these results indicate that graphemic complexity and multiple print-to-sound associations effects are independent and should be accounted for in different ways by models of written word processing.
  • Rissman, L., & Majid, A. (2019). Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(6), 1850-1869. doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01634-5.

    Abstract

    The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role. For Agents and Patients, there is strong evidence for abstract role categories and a universal bias to distinguish the two roles. For Goals and Recipients, we find clear evidence for abstraction but mixed evidence as to whether there is a bias to encode Goals and Recipients as part of one or two distinct categories. Finally, we discuss the Instrumental role and do not find clear evidence for either abstraction or universal biases to structure instrumental categories.
  • Rodd, J., Bosker, H. R., Ten Bosch, L., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Deriving the onset and offset times of planning units from acoustic and articulatory measurements. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145(2), EL161-EL167. doi:10.1121/1.5089456.

    Abstract

    Many psycholinguistic models of speech sequence planning make claims about the onset and offset times of planning units, such as words, syllables, and phonemes. These predictions typically go untested, however, since psycholinguists have assumed that the temporal dynamics of the speech signal is a poor index of the temporal dynamics of the underlying speech planning process. This article argues that this problem is tractable, and presents and validates two simple metrics that derive planning unit onset and offset times from the acoustic signal and articulatographic data.
  • Roelofs, A. (2005). The visual-auditory color-word Stroop asymmetry and its time course. Memory & Cognition, 33(8), 1325-1336.

    Abstract

    Four experiments examined crossmodal versions of the Stroop task in order (1) to look for Stroop asymmetries in color naming, spoken-word naming, and written-word naming and to evaluate the time course of these asymmetries, and (2) to compare these findings to current models of the Stroop effect. Participants named color patches while ignoring spoken color words presented with an onset varying from 300 msec before to 300 msec after the onset of the color (Experiment 1), or they named the spoken words and ignored the colors (Experiment 2). A secondary visual detection task assured that the participants looked at the colors in both tasks. Spoken color words yielded Stroop effects in color naming, but colors did not yield an effect in spoken-word naming at any stimulus onset asynchrony. This asymmetry in effects was obtained with equivalent color- and spoken-word-naming latencies. Written color words yielded a Stroop effect in naming spoken words (Experiment 3), and spoken color words yielded an effect in naming written words (Experiment 4). These results were interpreted as most consistent with an architectural account of the color-word Stroop asymmetry, in contrast with discriminability and pathway strength accounts.
  • Rowland, C. F., Pine, J. M., Lieven, E. V., & Theakston, A. L. (2005). The incidence of error in young children's wh-questions. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 384-404. doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2005/027).

    Abstract

    Many current generativist theorists suggest that young children possess the grammatical principles of inversion required for question formation but make errors because they find it difficult to learn language-specific rules about how inversion applies. The present study analyzed longitudinal spontaneous sampled data from twelve 2–3-year-old English speaking children and the intensive diary data of 1 child (age 2;7 [years;months] to 2;11) in order to test some of these theories. The results indicated significantly different rates of error use across different auxiliaries. In particular, error rates differed across 2 forms of the same auxiliary subtype (e.g., auxiliary is vs. are), and auxiliary DO and modal auxiliaries attracted significantly higher rates of errors of inversion than other auxiliaries. The authors concluded that current generativist theories might have problems explaining the patterning of errors seen in children's questions, which might be more consistent with a constructivist account of development. However, constructivists need to devise more precise predictions in order to fully explain the acquisition of questions.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P. (2019). Memory and inferential processes in false-belief tasks: An investigation of the unexpected-contents paradigm. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 177, 297-312. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2018.08.011.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the extent to which 3- and 4-year-old children may rely on associative memory representations to pass an unexpected-contents false-belief task. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds performed at chance in both a standard Smarties task and a modified version highlighting the secrecy of the contents of the tube. These results were interpreted as evidence that having to infer the answer to a false-belief question (without relying on memory representations) is generally difficult for preschool children. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, 3-year-olds were tested at 3-month intervals during their first year of preschool and showed better performance in a narrative version of the Smarties task (chance level) than in the standard version (below-chance level). These children performed even better in an associative version of the narrative task (above-chance level) where they could form a memory representation associating the protagonist with the expected contents of a box. The results of a true-belief control suggest that some of these children may have relied on their memory of the protagonist’s preference for the original contents of the box (rather than their understanding of what the protagonist was expecting to find inside). This suggests that when 3-year-olds passed the associative unexpected-contents task, some may have been keeping track of the protagonist’s initial preference and not only (or not necessarily) of the protagonist’s false belief. These results are interpreted in the light of current accounts of Theory of Mind development and failed replications of verbal false-belief tasks.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P. (2019). Publication standards in infancy research: Three ways to make Violation-of-Expectation studies more reliable. Infant Behavior and Development, 54, 177-188. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2018.09.009.

    Abstract

    The Violation-of-Expectation paradigm is a widespread paradigm in infancy research that relies on looking time as an index of surprise. This methodological review aims to increase the reliability of future VoE studies by proposing to standardize reporting practices in this literature. I review 15 VoE studies on false-belief reasoning, which used a variety of experimental parameters. An analysis of the distribution of p-values across experiments suggests an absence of p-hacking. However, there are potential concerns with the accuracy of their measures of infants’ attention, as well as with the lack of a consensus on the parameters that should be used to set up VoE studies. I propose that (i) future VoE studies ought to report not only looking times (as a measure of attention) but also looking-away times (as an equally important measure of distraction); (ii) VoE studies must offer theoretical justification for the parameters they use, and (iii) when parameters are selected through piloting, pilot data must be reported in order to understand how parameters were selected. Future VoE studies ought to maximize the accuracy of their measures of infants’ attention since the reliability of their results and the validity of their conclusions both depend on the accuracy of their measures.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P., Mollica, F., Oraa Ali, M., & Gibson, E. (2019). How do you know that? Automatic belief inferences in passing conversation. Cognition, 193: 104011. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104011.

    Abstract

    There is an ongoing debate, both in philosophy and psychology, as to whether people are able to automatically infer what others may know, or whether they can only derive belief inferences by deploying cognitive resources. Evidence from laboratory tasks, often involving false beliefs or visual-perspective taking, has suggested that belief inferences are cognitively costly, controlled processes. Here we suggest that in everyday conversation, belief reasoning is pervasive and therefore potentially automatic in some cases. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two pre-registered self-paced reading experiments (N1 = 91, N2 = 89). The results of these experiments showed that participants slowed down when a stranger commented ‘That greasy food is bad for your ulcer’ relative to conditions where a stranger commented on their own ulcer or a friend made either comment – none of which violated participants’ common-ground expectations. We conclude that Theory of Mind models need to account for belief reasoning in conversation as it is at the center of everyday social interaction
  • Rubio-Fernández, P. (2019). Overinformative Speakers Are Cooperative: Revisiting the Gricean Maxim of Quantity. Cognitive Science, 43: e12797. doi:10.1111/cogs.12797.

    Abstract

    A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language-production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener's search for the referent in the visual display (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when the listener knew which shape was the target, speakers did not produce redundant color adjectives (Experiment 1b). English speakers used redundant color adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, suggesting that speakers are sensitive to the differential efficiency of prenominal and postnominal modification (Experiment 2). Speakers were also cooperative when using redundant size adjectives (Experiment 3). Overall, these results show how discriminability affects a speaker's choice of referential expression above and beyond considerations of informativity, supporting the view that redundant speakers can be cooperative.
  • Sakarias, M., & Flecken, M. (2019). Keeping the result in sight and mind: General cognitive principles and language-specific influences in the perception and memory of resultative events. Cognitive Science, 43(1), 1-30. doi:10.1111/cogs.12708.

    Abstract

    We study how people attend to and memorize endings of events that differ in the degree to which objects in them are affected by an action: Resultative events show objects that undergo a visually salient change in state during the course of the event (peeling a potato), and non‐resultative events involve objects that undergo no, or only partial state change (stirring in a pan). We investigate general cognitive principles, and potential language‐specific influences, in verbal and nonverbal event encoding and memory, across two experiments with Dutch and Estonian participants. Estonian marks a viewer's perspective on an event's result obligatorily via grammatical case on direct object nouns: Objects undergoing a partial/full change in state in an event are marked with partitive/accusative case, respectively. Therefore, we hypothesized increased saliency of object states and event results in Estonian speakers, as compared to speakers of Dutch. Findings show (a) a general cognitive principle of attending carefully to endings of resultative events, implying cognitive saliency of object states in event processing; (b) a language‐specific boost on attention and memory of event results under verbal task demands in Estonian speakers. Results are discussed in relation to theories of event cognition, linguistic relativity, and thinking for speaking.
  • Satizabal, C. L., Adams, H. H. H., Hibar, D. P., White, C. C., Knol, M. J., Stein, J. L., Scholz, M., Sargurupremraj, M., Jahanshad, N., Roshchupkin, G. V., Smith, A. V., Bis, J. C., Jian, X., Luciano, M., Hofer, E., Teumer, A., Van der Lee, S. J., Yang, J., Yanek, L. R., Lee, T. V. and 271 moreSatizabal, C. L., Adams, H. H. H., Hibar, D. P., White, C. C., Knol, M. J., Stein, J. L., Scholz, M., Sargurupremraj, M., Jahanshad, N., Roshchupkin, G. V., Smith, A. V., Bis, J. C., Jian, X., Luciano, M., Hofer, E., Teumer, A., Van der Lee, S. J., Yang, J., Yanek, L. R., Lee, T. V., Li, S., Hu, Y., Koh, J. Y., Eicher, J. D., Desrivières, S., Arias-Vasquez, A., Chauhan, G., Athanasiu, L., Renteria, M. E., Kim, S., Höhn, D., Armstrong, N. J., Chen, Q., Holmes, A. J., Den Braber, A., Kloszewska, I., Andersson, M., Espeseth, T., Grimm, O., Abramovic, L., Alhusaini, S., Milaneschi, Y., Papmeyer, M., Axelsson, T., Ehrlich, S., Roiz-Santiañez, R., Kraemer, B., Håberg, A. K., Jones, H. J., Pike, G. B., Stein, D. J., Stevens, A., Bralten, J., Vernooij, M. W., Harris, T. B., Filippi, I., Witte, A. V., Guadalupe, T., Wittfeld, K., Mosley, T. H., Becker, J. T., Doan, N. T., Hagenaars, S. P., Saba, Y., Cuellar-Partida, G., Amin, N., Hilal, S., Nho, K., Karbalai, N., Arfanakis, K., Becker, D. M., Ames, D., Goldman, A. L., Lee, P. H., Boomsma, D. I., Lovestone, S., Giddaluru, S., Le Hellard, S., Mattheisen, M., Bohlken, M. M., Kasperaviciute, D., Schmaal, L., Lawrie, S. M., Agartz, I., Walton, E., Tordesillas-Gutierrez, D., Davies, G. E., Shin, J., Ipser, J. C., Vinke, L. N., Hoogman, M., Jia, T., Burkhardt, R., Klein, M., Crivello, F., Janowitz, D., Carmichael, O., Haukvik, U. K., Aribisala, B. S., Schmidt, H., Strike, L. T., Cheng, C.-Y., Risacher, S. L., Pütz, B., Fleischman, D. A., Assareh, A. A., Mattay, V. S., Buckner, R. L., Mecocci, P., Dale, A. M., Cichon, S., Boks, M. P., Matarin, M., Penninx, B. W. J. H., Calhoun, V. D., Chakravarty, M. M., Marquand, A., Macare, C., Masouleh, S. K., Oosterlaan, J., Amouyel, P., Hegenscheid, K., Rotter, J. I., Schork, A. J., Liewald, D. C. M., De Zubicaray, G. I., Wong, T. Y., Shen, L., Sämann, P. G., Brodaty, H., Roffman, J. L., De Geus, E. J. C., Tsolaki, M., Erk, S., Van Eijk, K. R., Cavalleri, G. L., Van der Wee, N. J. A., McIntosh, A. M., Gollub, R. L., Bulayeva, K. B., Bernard, M., Richards, J. S., Himali, J. J., Loeffler, M., Rommelse, N., Hoffmann, W., Westlye, L. T., Valdés Hernández, M. C., Hansell, N. K., Van Erp, T. G. M., Wolf, C., Kwok, J. B. J., Vellas, B., Heinz, A., Olde Loohuis, L. M., Delanty, N., Ho, B.-C., Ching, C. R. K., Shumskaya, E., Singh, B., Hofman, A., Van der Meer, D., Homuth, G., Psaty, B. M., Bastin, M., Montgomery, G. W., Foroud, T. M., Reppermund, S., Hottenga, J.-J., Simmons, A., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Cahn, W., Whelan, C. D., Van Donkelaar, M. M. J., Yang, Q., Hosten, N., Green, R. C., Thalamuthu, A., Mohnke, S., Hulshoff Pol, H. E., Lin, H., Jack Jr., C. R., Schofield, P. R., Mühleisen, T. W., Maillard, P., Potkin, S. G., Wen, W., Fletcher, E., Toga, A. W., Gruber, O., Huentelman, M., Smith, G. D., Launer, L. J., Nyberg, L., Jönsson, E. G., Crespo-Facorro, B., Koen, N., Greve, D., Uitterlinden, A. G., Weinberger, D. R., Steen, V. M., Fedko, I. O., Groenewold, N. A., Niessen, W. J., Toro, R., Tzourio, C., Longstreth Jr., W. T., Ikram, M. K., Smoller, J. W., Van Tol, M.-J., Sussmann, J. E., Paus, T., Lemaître, H., Schroeter, M. L., Mazoyer, B., Andreassen, O. A., Holsboer, F., Depondt, C., Veltman, D. J., Turner, J. A., Pausova, Z., Schumann, G., Van Rooij, D., Djurovic, S., Deary, I. J., McMahon, K. L., Müller-Myhsok, B., Brouwer, R. M., Soininen, H., Pandolfo, M., Wassink, T. H., Cheung, J. W., Wolfers, T., Martinot, J.-L., Zwiers, M. P., Nauck, M., Melle, I., Martin, N. G., Kanai, R., Westman, E., Kahn, R. S., Sisodiya, S. M., White, T., Saremi, A., Van Bokhoven, H., Brunner, H. G., Völzke, H., Wright, M. J., Van 't Ent, D., Nöthen, M. M., Ophoff, R. A., Buitelaar, J. K., Fernández, G., Sachdev, P. S., Rietschel, M., Van Haren, N. E. M., Fisher, S. E., Beiser, A. S., Francks, C., Saykin, A. J., Mather, K. A., Romanczuk-Seiferth, N., Hartman, C. A., DeStefano, A. L., Heslenfeld, D. J., Weiner, M. W., Walter, H., Hoekstra, P. J., Nyquist, P. A., Franke, B., Bennett, D. A., Grabe, H. J., Johnson, A. D., Chen, C., Van Duijn, C. M., Lopez, O. L., Fornage, M., Wardlaw, J. A., Schmidt, R., DeCarli, C., De Jager, P. L., Villringer, A., Debette, S., Gudnason, V., Medland, S. E., Shulman, J. M., Thompson, P. M., Seshadri, S., & Ikram, M. A. (2019). Genetic architecture of subcortical brain structures in 38,854 individuals worldwide. Nature Genetics, 51, 1624-1636. doi:10.1038/s41588-019-0511-y.

    Abstract

    Subcortical brain structures are integral to motion, consciousness, emotions and learning. We identified common genetic variation related to the volumes of the nucleus accumbens, amygdala, brainstem, caudate nucleus, globus pallidus, putamen and thalamus, using genome-wide association analyses in almost 40,000 individuals from CHARGE, ENIGMA and UK Biobank. We show that variability in subcortical volumes is heritable, and identify 48 significantly associated loci (40 novel at the time of analysis). Annotation of these loci by utilizing gene expression, methylation and neuropathological data identified 199 genes putatively implicated in neurodevelopment, synaptic signaling, axonal transport, apoptosis, inflammation/infection and susceptibility to neurological disorders. This set of genes is significantly enriched for Drosophila orthologs associated with neurodevelopmental phenotypes, suggesting evolutionarily conserved mechanisms. Our findings uncover novel biology and potential drug targets underlying brain development and disease.
  • Savoia, M., Cencioni, C., Mori, M., Atlante, S., Zaccagnini, G., Devanna, P., Di Marcotullio, L., Botta, B., Martelli, F., Zeiher, A. M., Pontecorvi, A., Farsetti, A., Spallotta, F., & Gaetano, C. (2019). P300/CBP-associated factor regulates transcription and function of isocitrate dehydrogenase 2 during muscle differentiation. The FASEB Journal, 33(3), 4107-4123. doi:10.1096/fj.201800788R.

    Abstract

    The epigenetic enzyme p300/CBP-associated factor (PCAF) belongs to the GCN5-related N-acetyltransferase (GNAT) family together with GCN5. Although its transcriptional and post-translational function is well characterized, little is known about its properties as regulator of cell metabolism. Here, we report the mitochondrial localization of PCAF conferred by an 85 aa mitochondrial targeting sequence (MTS) at the N-terminal region of the protein. In mitochondria, one of the PCAF targets is the isocitrate dehydrogenase 2 (IDH2) acetylated at lysine 180. This PCAF-regulated post-translational modification might reduce IDH2 affinity for isocitrate as a result of a conformational shift involving predictively the tyrosine at position 179. Site-directed mutagenesis and functional studies indicate that PCAF regulates IDH2, acting at dual level during myoblast differentiation: at a transcriptional level together with MyoD, and at a post-translational level by direct modification of lysine acetylation in mitochondria. The latter event determines a decrease in IDH2 function with negative consequences on muscle fiber formation in C2C12 cells. Indeed, a MTS-deprived PCAF does not localize into mitochondria, remains enriched into the nucleus, and contributes to a significant increase of muscle-specific gene expression enhancing muscle differentiation. The role of PCAF in mitochondria is a novel finding shedding light on metabolic processes relevant to early muscle precursor differentiation.—Savoia, M., Cencioni, C., Mori, M., Atlante, S., Zaccagnini, G., Devanna, P., Di Marcotullio, L., Botta, B., Martelli, F., Zeiher, A. M., Pontecorvi, A., Farsetti, A., Spallotta, F., Gaetano, C. P300/CBP-associated factor regulates transcription and function of isocitrate dehydrogenase 2 during muscle differentiation.

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  • Scharenborg, O., Norris, D., Ten Bosch, L., & McQueen, J. M. (2005). How should a speech recognizer work? Cognitive Science, 29(6), 867-918. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_37.

    Abstract

    Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that research in these related fields has focused on the mechanics of how speech can be recognized. In Marr's (1982) terms, emphasis has been on the algorithmic and implementational levels rather than on the computational level. In this article, we provide a computational-level analysis of the task of speech recognition, which reveals the close parallels between research concerned with HSR and ASR. We illustrate this relation by presenting a new computational model of human spoken-word recognition, built using techniques from the field of ASR that, in contrast to current existing models of HSR, recognizes words from real speech input.
  • Schijven, D., Geuze, E., Vinkers, C. H., Pulit, S. L., Schür, R. R., Malgaz, M., Bekema, E., Medic, J., van der Kust, K. E., Veldink, J. H., Boks, M. P., Vermetten, E., & Luykx, J. J. (2019). Multivariate genome-wide analysis of stress-related quantitative phenotypes. European Neuropsychopharmacology, 29(12), 1354-1364. doi:10.1016/j.euroneuro.2019.09.012.

    Abstract

    Exposure to traumatic stress increases the odds of developing a broad range of psychiatric conditions. Genetic studies targeting multiple stress-related quantitative phenotypes may shed light on mechanisms underlying vulnerability to psychopathology in the aftermath of stressful events. We applied a multivariate genome-wide association study (GWAS) to a unique military cohort (N = 583) in which we measured biochemical and behavioral phenotypes. The availability of pre- and post-deployment measurements allowed to capture changes in these phenotypes in response to stress. For genome-wide significant loci, we performed functional annotation, phenome-wide analysis and quasi-replication in PTSD case-control GWASs. We discovered one genetic variant reaching genome-wide significant association, surviving permutation and sensitivity analyses (rs10100651, p = 9.9 × 10−9). Functional annotation prioritized the genes INTS8 and TP53INP1. A phenome-wide scan revealed a significant association of these same genes with sleeping problems, hypertension and subjective well-being. Finally, a targeted lookup revealed nominally significant association of rs10100651 in a PTSD case-control GWAS in the UK Biobank (p = 0.02). We provide comprehensive evidence from multiple resources hinting at a role of the highlighted genetic variant in the human stress response, marking the power of multivariate genome-wide analysis of quantitative measures in stress research. Future genetic and functional studies can target this locus to further assess its effects on stress mediation and its possible role in psychopathology or resilience.

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  • Schoffelen, J.-M., Oostenveld, R., Lam, N. H. L., Udden, J., Hulten, A., & Hagoort, P. (2019). A 204-subject multimodal neuroimaging dataset to study language processing. Scientific Data, 6(1): 17. doi:10.1038/s41597-019-0020-y.

    Abstract

    This dataset, colloquially known as the Mother Of Unification Studies (MOUS) dataset, contains multimodal neuroimaging data that has been acquired from 204 healthy human subjects. The neuroimaging protocol consisted of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to derive information at high spatial resolution about brain anatomy and structural connections, and functional data during task, and at rest. In addition, magnetoencephalography (MEG) was used to obtain high temporal resolution electrophysiological measurements during task, and at rest. All subjects performed a language task, during which they processed linguistic utterances that either consisted of normal or scrambled sentences. Half of the subjects were reading the stimuli, the other half listened to the stimuli. The resting state measurements consisted of 5 minutes eyes-open for the MEG and 7 minutes eyes-closed for fMRI. The neuroimaging data, as well as the information about the experimental events are shared according to the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) format. This unprecedented neuroimaging language data collection allows for the investigation of various aspects of the neurobiological correlates of language.

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