Publications

Abstract

Timing is an essential part of human cognition and of everyday life activities, such as walking or holding a conversation. Previous studies showed that traumatic brain injury (TBI) often affects cognitive functions such as processing speed and time-sensitive abilities, causing long-term sequelae as well as daily impairments. However, the existing evidence on timing capacities in TBI is mostly limited to perception and the processing of isolated intervals. It is therefore open whether the observed deficits extend to motor timing and to continuous dynamic tasks that more closely match daily life activities. The current study set out to answer these questions by assessing audio motor timing abilities and their relationship with cognitive functioning in a group of TBI patients (n=15) and healthy matched controls. We employed a comprehensive set of tasks aiming at testing timing abilities across perception and production and from single intervals to continuous auditory sequences. In line with previous research, we report functional impairments in TBI patients concerning cognitive processing speed and perceptual timing. Critically, these deficits extended to motor timing: The ability to adjust to tempo changes in an auditory pacing sequence was impaired in TBI patients, and this motor timing deficit covaried with measures of processing speed. These findings confirm previous evidence on perceptual and cognitive timing deficits resulting from TBI and provide first evidence for comparable deficits in motor behavior. This suggests basic co-occurring perceptual and motor timing impairments that may factor into a wide range of daily activities. Our results thus place TBI into the wider range of pathologies with well-documented timing deficits (such as Parkinson’s disease) and encourage the search for novel timing-based therapeutic interventions (e.g., employing dynamic and/or musical stimuli) with high transfer potential to everyday life activities.

Abstract

TANK-binding kinase 1 (TBK1) loss-of-function (LoF) mutations are known to cause frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often combined with memory deficits early in the disease course. We performed targeted resequencing of TBK1 in 1253 early onset Alzheimer's disease (EOAD) patients from 8 European countries to investigate whether pathogenic TBK1 mutations are enriched among patients with clinical diagnosis of EOAD. Variant frequencies were compared against 2117 origin-matched controls. We identified only 1 LoF mutation (p.Thr79del) in a patient clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and a positive family history of ALS. We did not observe enrichment of rare variants in EOAD patients compared to controls, nor of rare variants affecting NFκB induction. Of 3 common coding variants, rs7486100 showed evidence of association (OR 1.46 [95% CI 1.13–1.9]; p-value 0.01). Homozygous carriers of the risk allele showed reduced expression of TBK1 (p-value 0.03). Our findings are not indicative of a significant role for TBK1 mutations in EOAD. The association between common variants in TBK1, disease risk and reduced TBK1 expression warrants follow-up in FTD/ALS cohorts. © 2017 The Author(s)

Abstract

Congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG) are a group of clinically and genetically heterogeneous metabolic disorders. Over 150 CDG types have been described. Most CDG types are ultrarare disorders. CDG types affecting N-glycosylation are the most common type of CDG with emerging therapeutic possibilities. This review is an update on the available therapies for disorders affecting the N-linked glycosylation pathway. In the first part of the review, we highlight the clinical presentation, general principles of management, and disease-specific therapies for N-linked glycosylation CDG types, organized by organ system. The second part of the review focuses on the therapeutic strategies currently available and under development. We summarize the successful (pre-) clinical application of nutritional therapies, transplantation, activated sugars, gene therapy, and pharmacological chaperones and outline the anticipated expansion of the therapeutic possibilities in CDG. We aim to provide a comprehensive update on the treatable aspects of CDG types involving N-linked glycosylation, with particular emphasis on disease-specific treatment options for the involved organ systems; call for natural history studies; and present current and future therapeutic strategies for CDG.

Abstract

Over 25 genes are known to affect the risk of developing Alzheimer disease (AD), the most common neurodegenerative dementia. However, mechanistic insights and improved disease management remains limited, due to difficulties in determining the functional consequences of genetic associations. Transcriptomics is increasingly being used to corroborate or enhance interpretation of genetic discoveries. These approaches, which include second and third generation sequencing, single-cell sequencing, and bioinformatics, reveal allele-specific events connecting AD risk genes to expression profiles, and provide converging evidence of pathophysiological pathways underlying AD. Simultaneously, they highlight brain region- and cell-type-specific expression patterns, and alternative splicing events that affect the straightforward relation between a genetic variant and AD, re-emphasizing the need for an integrated approach of genetics and transcriptomics in understanding AD. © 2018 The Authors

Abstract

To understand why music is structured the way it is, we need an explanation that accounts for both the universality and variability found in musical traditions. Here we test whether statistical universals that have been identified for melodic structures in music can emerge as a result of cultural adaptation to human biases through iterated learning. We use data from an experiment in which artificial whistled systems, where sounds were produced with a slide whistle, were learned by human participants and transmitted multiple times from person to person. These sets of whistled signals needed to be memorized and recalled and the reproductions of one participant were used as the input set for the next. We tested for the emergence of seven different melodic features, such as discrete pitches, motivic patterns, or phrase repetition, and found some evidence for the presence of most of these statistical universals. We interpret this as promising evidence that, similarly to rhythmic universals, iterated learning experiments can also unearth melodic statistical universals. More, ideally cross-cultural, experiments are nonetheless needed. Simulating the cultural transmission of artificial proto-musical systems can help unravel the origins of universal tendencies in musical structures.

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are complex co-occurring neurodevelopmental conditions. Their genetic architectures reveal striking similarities but also differences, including strong, discordant polygenic associations with educational attainment (EA). To study genetic mechanisms that present as ASD-related positive and ADHD-related negative genetic correlations with EA, we carry out multivariable regression analyses using genome-wide summary statistics (N = 10,610–766,345). Our results show that EA-related genetic variation is shared across ASD and ADHD architectures, involving identical marker alleles. However, the polygenic association profile with EA, across shared marker alleles, is discordant for ASD versus ADHD risk, indicating independent effects. At the single-variant level, our results suggest either biological pleiotropy or co-localisation of different risk variants, implicating MIR19A/19B microRNA mechanisms. At the polygenic level, they point to a polygenic form of pleiotropy that contributes to the detectable genome-wide correlation between ASD and ADHD and is consistent with effect cancellation across EA-related regions.

Abstract

Background

The heritability of language and literacy skills increases from early‐childhood to adolescence. The underlying mechanisms are little understood and may involve (a) the amplification of genetic influences contributing to early language abilities, and/or (b) the emergence of novel genetic factors (innovation). Here, we investigate the developmental origins of genetic factors influencing mid‐childhood/early‐adolescent language and literacy. We evaluate evidence for the amplification of early‐childhood genetic factors for vocabulary, in addition to genetic innovation processes.
Methods

Expressive and receptive vocabulary scores at 38 months, thirteen language‐ and literacy‐related abilities and nonverbal cognition (7–13 years) were assessed in unrelated children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC, Nindividuals ≤ 6,092). We investigated the multivariate genetic architecture underlying early‐childhood expressive and receptive vocabulary, and each of 14 mid‐childhood/early‐adolescent language, literacy or cognitive skills with trivariate structural equation (Cholesky) models as captured by genome‐wide genetic relationship matrices. The individual path coefficients of the resulting structural models were finally meta‐analysed to evaluate evidence for overarching patterns.
Results

We observed little support for the emergence of novel genetic sources for language, literacy or cognitive abilities during mid‐childhood or early adolescence. Instead, genetic factors of early‐childhood vocabulary, especially those unique to receptive skills, were amplified and represented the majority of genetic variance underlying many of these later complex skills (≤99%). The most predictive early genetic factor accounted for 29.4%(SE = 12.9%) to 45.1%(SE = 7.6%) of the phenotypic variation in verbal intelligence and literacy skills, but also for 25.7%(SE = 6.4%) in performance intelligence, while explaining only a fraction of the phenotypic variation in receptive vocabulary (3.9%(SE = 1.8%)).
Conclusions

Genetic factors contributing to many complex skills during mid‐childhood and early adolescence, including literacy, verbal cognition and nonverbal cognition, originate developmentally in early‐childhood and are captured by receptive vocabulary. This suggests developmental genetic stability and overarching aetiological mechanisms.

Abstract

Individual differences in early-life vocabulary measures are heritable and associated with subsequent reading and cognitive abilities, although the underlying mechanisms are little understood. Here, we (i) investigate the developmental genetic architecture of expressive and receptive vocabulary in early-life and (ii) assess timing of emerging genetic associations with mid-childhood verbal and non-verbal skills. We studied longitudinally assessed early-life vocabulary measures (15–38 months) and later-life verbal and non-verbal skills (7–8 years) in up to 6,524 unrelated children from the population-based Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort. We dissected the phenotypic variance of rank-transformed scores into genetic and residual components by fitting multivariate structural equation models to genome-wide genetic-relationship matrices. Our findings show that the genetic architecture of early-life vocabulary involves multiple distinct genetic factors. Two of these genetic factors are developmentally stable and also contribute to genetic variation in mid-childhood skills: One genetic factor emerging with expressive vocabulary at 24 months (path coefficient: 0.32(SE = 0.06)) was also related to later-life reading (path coefficient: 0.25(SE = 0.12)) and verbal intelligence (path coefficient: 0.42(SE = 0.13)), explaining up to 17.9% of the phenotypic variation. A second, independent genetic factor emerging with receptive vocabulary at 38 months (path coefficient: 0.15(SE = 0.07)), was more generally linked to verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities in mid-childhood (reading path coefficient: 0.57(SE = 0.07); verbal intelligence path coefficient: 0.60(0.10); performance intelligence path coefficient: 0.50(SE = 0.08)), accounting for up to 36.1% of the phenotypic variation and the majority of genetic variance in these later-life traits (≥66.4%). Thus, the genetic foundations of mid-childhood reading and cognitive abilities are diverse. They involve at least two independent genetic factors that emerge at different developmental stages during early language development and may implicate differences in cognitive processes that are already detectable during toddlerhood.

Abstract

How learning affects vocalizations is a key question in the study of animal
communication and human language. Parallel efforts in birds and humans
have taught us much about how vocal learning works on a behavioural
and neurobiological level. Subsequent efforts have revealed a variety of
cases among mammals in which experience also has a major influence on
vocal repertoires. Janik and Slater (Anim. Behav. 60, 1–11. (doi:10.1006/
anbe.2000.1410)) introduced the distinction between vocal usage and pro-
duction learning, providing a general framework to categorize how
different types of learning influence vocalizations. This idea was built on
by Petkov and Jarvis (Front. Evol. Neurosci. 4, 12. (doi:10.3389/fnevo.2012.
00012)) to emphasize a more continuous distribution between limited and
more complex vocal production learners. Yet, with more studies providing
empirical data, the limits of the initial frameworks become apparent.
We build on these frameworks to refine the categorization of vocal learning
in light of advances made since their publication and widespread agreement
that vocal learning is not a binary trait. We propose a novel classification
system, based on the definitions by Janik and Slater, that deconstructs
vocal learning into key dimensions to aid in understanding the mechanisms
involved in this complex behaviour. We consider how vocalizations can
change without learning, and a usage learning framework that considers
context specificity and timing. We identify dimensions of vocal production
learning, including the copying of auditory models (convergence/
divergence on model sounds, accuracy of copying), the degree of change
(type and breadth of learning) and timing (when learning takes place, the
length of time it takes and how long it is retained). We consider grey
areas of classification and current mechanistic understanding of these beha-
viours. Our framework identifies research needs and will help to inform
neurobiological and evolutionary studies endeavouring to uncover the
multi-dimensional nature of vocal learning.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Vocal learning in animals and
humans’.

Abstract

The comparative approach can provide insight into the evolution of human speech, language and social communication by studying relevant traits in animal systems. Bats are emerging as a model system with great potential to shed light on these processes given their learned vocalizations, close social interactions, and mammalian brains and physiology. A recent framework outlined the multiple levels of investigation needed to understand vocal learning across a broad range of non-human species, including cetaceans, pinnipeds, elephants, birds and bats. Here, we apply this framework to the current state-of-the-art in bat research. This encompasses our understanding of the abilities bats have displayed for vocal learning, what is known about the timing and social structure needed for such learning, and current knowledge about the prevalence of the trait across the order. It also addresses the biology (vocal tract morphology, neurobiology and genetics) and evolution of this trait. We conclude by highlighting some key questions that should be answered to advance our understanding of the biological encoding and evolution of speech and spoken communication. This article is part of the theme issue 'What can animal communication teach us about human language?'

Abstract

This study examines the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms. For this purpose, we compared the impact of phonological variation with the impact of spelling-sound consistency on the processing of words that may be produced with or without the vowel schwa. Participants learnt novel French words in which the vowel schwa was present or absent in the first syllable. In Experiment 1, the words were consistently produced without schwa or produced in a variable manner (i.e., sometimes produced with and sometimes produced without schwa). In Experiment 2, words were always produced in a consistent manner, but an orthographic exposure phase was included in which words that were produced without schwa were either spelled with or without the letter . Results from naming and eye-tracking tasks suggest that both phonological variation and spelling-sound consistency influence the processing of spoken novel words. However, the influence of phonological variation outweighs the effect of spelling-sound consistency. Our findings therefore suggest that the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms is relatively small.

Abstract

A controversial issue in psycholinguistics is the degree to which speakers employ audience design during language production. Hypothesising that a consideration of the listener’s needs is particularly relevant when the listener is under cognitive load, we had speakers describe objects for a listener performing an easy or a difficult simulated driving task. We predicted that speakers would introduce more redundancy in their descriptions in the difficult driving task, thereby accommodating the listener’s reduced cognitive capacity. The results showed that speakers did not adapt their descriptions to a change in the listener’s cognitive load. However, speakers who had experienced the driving task themselves before and who were presented with the difficult driving task first were more redundant than other speakers. These findings may suggest that speakers only consider the listener’s needs in the presence of strong enough cues, and do not update their beliefs about these needs during the task.

Abstract

Before infants become mature speakers of their native language, they must acquire a robust word-recognition system which allows them to strike the balance between allowing some variation (mood, voice, accent) and recognizing variability that potentially changes meaning (e.g. cat vs hat). The current meta-analysis quantifies how the latter, termed mispronunciation sensitivity, changes over infants’ first three years, testing competing predictions of mainstream language acquisition theories. Our results show that infants were sensitive to mispronunciations, but accepted them as labels for target objects. Interestingly, and in contrast to predictions of mainstream theories, mispronunciation sensitivity was not modulated by infant age, suggesting that a sufficiently flexible understanding of native language phonology is in place at a young age.

Abstract

As they develop into mature speakers of their native language, infants must not only learn words but also the sounds that make up those words. To do so, they must strike a balance between accepting speaker dependent variation (e.g. mood, voice, accent), but appropriately rejecting variation when it (potentially) changes a word's meaning (e.g. cat vs. hat). This meta-analysis focuses on studies investigating infants' ability to detect mispronunciations in familiar words, or mispronunciation sensitivity. Our goal was to evaluate the development of infants' phonological representations for familiar words as well as explore the role of experimental manipulations related to theoretical questions and analysis choices. The results show that although infants are sensitive to mispronunciations, they still accept these altered forms as labels for target objects. Interestingly, this ability is not modulated by age or vocabulary size, suggesting that a mature understanding of native language phonology may be present in infants from an early age, possibly before the vocabulary explosion. These results also support several theoretical assumptions made in the literature, such as sensitivity to mispronunciation size and position of the mispronunciation. We also shed light on the impact of data analysis choices that may lead to different conclusions regarding the development of infants' mispronunciation sensitivity. Our paper concludes with recommendations for improved practice in testing infants' word and sentence processing on-line.

Abstract

Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de Psycholinguïstiek aan de Faculteit der Letteren van de Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen op vrijdag 18 mei 2001

Abstract

We investigated whether the language of instruction (Dutch or English) influenced the study success of 614 Dutch and German first-year psychology students in the Netherlands. The Dutch students who were instructed in Dutch studied in their native language (L1), the other students in a second language (L2). In addition, only the Dutch students studied in their home country. Both these variables could potentially influence study success, operationalised as the number of European Credits (ECs) the students obtained, their grades, and drop-out rates. The L1 group outperformed the three L2 groups with respect to grades, but there were no significant differences in ECs and drop-out rates (although descriptively, the L1 group still performed best). In conclusion, this study shows an advantage of studying in the L1 when it comes to grades, and thereby contributes to the current debate in the Dutch media regarding the desirability of offering degrees taught in English.

Abstract

We meta‐analyzed the effectiveness of incidental second language word learning from spoken input. Our sample contained 105 effect sizes from 32 primary studies employing meaning‐focused word‐learning activities with 1,964 participants with typical cognitive functioning. The random‐effects meta‐analysis yielded a mean effect size of g = 1.05, reflecting generally large vocabulary gains from spoken input in meaning‐focused activities. A meta‐regression with three substantive and two methodological predictors also revealed that adult participants outperformed children in terms of word learning and that interactive learning tasks were more effective than noninteractive ones. Furthermore, learning scores were higher when measured with recognition than with recall tests. Methodologically, the use of a no‐input control group seemed to protect against an overestimation of learning effects, evidenced by smaller effect sizes. Finally, whether a pretest–posttest design was used did not influence effect sizes. All data and the analysis script are publicly available.

Abstract

Noticing the hole (NTH) occurs when speakers want to say something, but realise they do not know the right word(s). Such awareness of lacking knowledge supposedly facilitates the acquisition of the unknown word(s) from later input (Swain, 1993). We tested this claim by experimentally inducing NTH in a second language (L2) for some participants (experimental), but not others (control). Then, in a price comparison game, all participants were exposed to spoken L2 input containing the to-be-learned words. They were unaware of taking part in an L2 study. Post-tests showed that participants who had noticed holes in their vocabulary had indeed learned more words compared to participants who had not. This held both for the experimental group as well as those participants in the control group who later reported to have noticed holes. Thus, when we become aware of vocabulary holes, the first step to improve our vocabulary is already taken.

Abstract

Metaphors occur frequently in literary texts. Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT; e.g., Steen, 2017) proposes that metaphors that serve a communicative function as metaphor are radically different from metaphors that do not have this function. We investigated differences in processing between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphors, compared to non-metaphorical words in literary reading. Using the Deliberate Metaphor Identification Procedure (Reijnierse et al., 2018), we identified metaphors in two literary stories. Then, eye-tracking was used to investigate participants’ (N = 72) reading behavior. Deliberate metaphors were read slower than non-deliberate metaphors, and both metaphor types were read slower than non-metaphorical words. Differences were controlled for several psycholinguistic variables. Differences in reading behavior were related to individual differences in reading experience and absorption and appreciation of the story. These results are in line with predictions from DMT and underline the importance of distinguishing between metaphor types in the experimental study of literary reading.

Abstract

The present study investigated the interplay between selective inhibition (the ability to suppress specific competing responses) and nonselective inhibition (the ability to suppress any inappropriate response) during single word production. To this end, we combined two well-established research paradigms: the picture-word interference task and the stop-signal task. Selective inhibition was assessed by instructing participants to name target pictures (e.g., dog) in the presence of semantically related (e.g., cat) or unrelated (e.g., window) distractor words. Nonselective inhibition was tested by occasionally presenting a visual stop-signal, indicating that participants should withhold their verbal response. The stop-signal was presented early (250 ms) aimed at interrupting the lexical selection stage, and late (325 ms) to influence the word-encoding stage of the speech production process. We found longer naming latencies for pictures with semantically related distractors than with unrelated distractors (semantic interference effect). The results further showed that, at both delays, stopping latencies (i.e., stop-signal RTs) were prolonged for naming pictures with semantically related distractors compared to pictures with unrelated distractors. Taken together, our findings suggest that selective and nonselective inhibition, at least partly, share a common inhibitory mechanism during different stages of the speech production process.

Abstract

While the tendency of speakers to align their speech to that of others acoustic-phonetically has been widely studied among native speakers, very few studies have examined whether natives phonetically converge to non-native speakers. Here we measured native Dutch speakers’ convergence to a non-native speaker with an unfamiliar accent in a novel non-interactive task. Furthermore, we assessed the role of participants’ perceptions of the non-native accent in their tendency to converge. In addition to a perceptual measure (AXB ratings), we examined convergence on different acoustic dimensions (e.g., vowel spectra, fricative CoG, speech rate, overall f0) to determine what dimensions, if any, speakers converge to. We further combined these two types of measures to discover what dimensions weighed in raters’ judgments of convergence. The results reveal overall convergence to our non-native speaker, as indexed by both perceptual and acoustic measures. However, the ratings suggest the stronger participants rated the non-native accent to be, the less likely they were to converge. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence that natives can phonetically converge to non-native speech, even without any apparent socio-communicative motivation to do so. We argue that our results are hard to integrate with a purely social view of convergence.

Abstract

Readers and listeners actively predict upcoming words during language processing. These predictions might serve to support the unification of incoming words into sentence context and thus rely on interactions between areas in the language network. In the current magnetoencephalography study, participants read sentences that varied in contextual constraints so that the predictability of the sentence-final words was either high or low. Before the sentence-final words, we observed stronger alpha power suppression for the highly compared with low constraining sentences in the left inferior frontal cortex, left posterior temporal region, and visual word form area. Importantly, the temporal and visual word form area alpha power correlated negatively with left frontal gamma power for the highly constraining sentences. We suggest that the correlation between alpha power decrease in temporal language areas and left prefrontal gamma power reflects the initiation of an anticipatory unification process in the language network.

Abstract

Using magnetoencephalography, the current study examined gamma activity associated with language prediction. Participants read high- and low-constraining sentences in which the final word of the sentence was either expected or unexpected. Although no consistent gamma power difference induced by the sentence-final words was found between the expected and unexpected conditions, the correlation of gamma power during the prediction and activation intervals of the sentence-final words was larger when the presented words matched with the prediction compared with when the prediction was violated or when no prediction was available. This suggests that gamma magnitude relates to the match between predicted and perceived words. Moreover, the expected words induced activity with a slower gamma frequency compared with that induced by unexpected words. Overall, the current study establishes that prediction is related to gamma power correlations and a slowing of the gamma frequency.

Abstract

The blocked cyclic naming paradigm has been increasingly employed to investigate the mechanisms underlying spoken word production. Semantic homogeneity typically elicits longer naming latencies than heterogeneity; however, it is debated whether competitive lexical selection or incremental learning underlies this effect. The current study manipulated both semantic and phonological homogeneity and used behavioural and electrophysiological measurements to provide evidence that can distinguish between the two accounts. Results show that naming latencies are longer in semantically homogeneous blocks, but shorter in phonologically homogeneous blocks, relative to heterogeneity. The semantic factor significantly modulates electrophysiological waveforms from 200 ms and the phonological factor from 350 ms after picture presentation. A positive component was demonstrated in both manipulations, possibly reflecting a task-related top-down bias in performing blocked cyclic naming. These results provide novel insights into the neural correlates of blocked cyclic naming and further contribute to the understanding of spoken word production.

Abstract

Neurodevelopmental disorders have a strong genetic component, but despite widespread efforts, the specific genetic factors underlying these disorders remain undefined for a large proportion of affected individuals. Given the accessibility of exome-sequencing, this problem has thus far been addressed from a protein-centric standpoint; however, protein-coding regions only make up ∼1-2% of the human genome. With the advent of whole-genome sequencing we are in the midst of a paradigm shift as it is now possible to interrogate the entire sequence of the human genome (coding and non-coding) to fill in the missing heritability of complex disorders. These new technologies bring new challenges, as the number of non-coding variants identified per individual can be overwhelming, making it prudent to focus on non-coding regions of known function, for which the effects of variation can be predicted and directly tested to assess pathogenicity. The 3’UTRome is a region of the non-coding genome that perfectly fulfils these criteria and is of high interest when searching for pathogenic variation related to complex neurodevelopmental disorders. Herein, we review the regulatory roles of the 3’UTRome as binding sites for microRNAs, RNA binding proteins or during alternative polyadenylation. We detail existing evidence that these regions contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders and outline strategies for identification and validation of novel putatively pathogenic variation in these regions. This evidence suggests that studying the 3’UTRome will lead to the identification of new risk factors, new candidate disease genes and a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms contributing to NDDs.

Abstract

In processing connected speech, listeners must parse a highly variable signal. We investigate processing of a particular type of production variability, namely epenthetic stops between nasals and obstruents. Using a phoneme monitoring task and a dictation task, we test listeners' perception of epenthetic stops (which are not part of the string of segments intended by the speaker). We confirm that the epenthetic stop perceived is the one predicted by articulatory accounts of how such stops are produced, and that the likelihood of an epenthetic stop being perceived as a real stop is related to the strength of acoustic cues in the signal. We show that the probability of listeners mis-parsing epenthetic stops as real is influenced by language-specific syllable structure constraints, and depends on processing demands. We further show, through reaction time data, that even when epenthetic stops are perceived, they impose a greater processing load than stops which were intended by the speaker. These results show that processing of phonetic variability is affected by several factors, including language-specific phonology, even though the mis-timing of articulations that creates epenthetic stops is universally possible.

Abstract

In this paper, we use articulatory measures to determine whether Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process or a concrete phonetic process depending on articulatory timing. We examine tongue position during /l/ before underlying schwa and epenthetic schwa and in coda position. We find greater tip raising before both types of schwa, indicating light /l/ before schwa and dark /l/ in coda position. We argue that the ability of epenthetic schwa to condition the /l/ alternation shows that Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process involving insertion of some unit, and cannot be accounted for within Articulatory Phonology.

Abstract

Articulatory data are used to address the question of whether Dutch schwa insertion is a phonological or a phonetic process. By investigating tongue tip raising and dorsal lowering, we show that /l/ when it appears before inserted schwa is a light /l/, just as /l/ before an underlying schwa is, and unlike the dark /l/ before a consonant in non-insertion productions of the same words. The fact that inserted schwa can condition the light/dark /l/ alternation shows that schwa insertion involves the phonological insertion of a segment rather than phonetic adjustments to articulations.

Abstract

This study investigates whether the mora is used in controlling timing in Japanese speech, or is instead a structural unit in the language not involved in timing. Unlike most previous studies of mora-timing in Japanese, this article investigates timing in spontaneous speech. Predictability of word duration from number of moras is found to be much weaker than in careful speech. Furthermore, the number of moras predicts word duration only slightly better than number of segments. Syllable structure also has a significant effect on word duration. Finally, comparison of the predictability of whole words and arbitrarily truncated words shows better predictability for truncated words, which would not be possible if the truncated portion were compensating for remaining moras. The results support an accumulative model of variance with a final lengthening effect, and do not indicate the presence of any compensation related to mora-timing. It is suggested that the rhythm of Japanese derives from several factors about the structure of the language, not from durational compensation.

Abstract

The establishment of a reliable model for the study of Purkinje cells in vitro is of particular importance, given their central role in cerebellar function and pathology. Recent advances in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology offer the opportunity to generate multiple neuronal subtypes for study in vitro. However, to date, only a handful of studies have generated Purkinje cells from human pluripotent stem cells, with most of these protocols proving challenging to reproduce. Here, we describe a simplified method for the reproducible generation of Purkinje cells from human iPSCs. After 21 days of treatment with factors selected to mimic the self-inductive properties of the isthmic organiser—insulin, fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2), and the transforming growth factor β (TGFβ)-receptor blocker SB431542—hiPSCs could be induced to form En1-positive cerebellar progenitors at efficiencies of up to 90%. By day 35 of differentiation, subpopulations of cells representative of the two cerebellar germinal zones, the rhombic lip (Atoh1-positive) and ventricular zone (Ptf1a-positive), could be identified, with the latter giving rise to cells positive for Purkinje cell progenitor-specific markers, including Lhx5, Kirrel2, Olig2 and Skor2. Further maturation was observed following dissociation and co-culture of these cerebellar progenitors with mouse cerebellar cells, with 10% of human cells staining positive for the Purkinje cell marker calbindin by day 70 of differentiation. This protocol, which incorporates modifications designed to enhance cell survival and maturation and improve the ease of handling, should serve to make existing models more accessible, in order to enable future advances in the field.

Abstract

Margulies et al. (2016) demonstrated the existence of at least five independent functional connectivity gradients in the human brain. However, it is unclear how these functional gradients might link to anatomy. The dual origin theory proposes that differences in cortical cytoarchitecture originate from two trends of progressive differentiation between the different layers of the cortex, referred to as the hippocampocentric and olfactocentric systems. When conceptualising the functional connectivity gradients within the evolutionary framework of the Dual Origin theory, the first gradient likely represents the hippocampocentric system anatomically. Here we expand on this concept and demonstrate that the fifth gradient likely links to the olfactocentric system. We describe the anatomy of the latter as well as the evidence to support this hypothesis. Together, the first and fifth gradients might help to model the Dual Origin theory of the human brain and inform brain models and pathologies.

Abstract

Four phoneme-detection studies tested the conclusion from recent research that spoken-language processing is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation processes in the listeners’ native language. In Experiment 1, native listeners of German detected a target fricative in monosyllabic Dutch nonwords, half of which violated progressive German fricative place assimilation. In contrast to the earlier findings, listeners detected the fricative more quickly when assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. This difference was not due to purely acoustic factors, since in Experiment 2 native Dutch listeners, presented with the same materials, showed no such effect. In Experiment 3, German listeners again detected the fricative more quickly when violation occurred in both monosyllabic and bisyllabic native nonwords, further ruling out explanations based on non-native input or on syllable structure. Finally Experiment 4 tested whether the direction in which the rule operates (progressive or regressive) controls the direction of the effect on phoneme detection responses.When regressive German place assimilation for nasals was violated, German listeners detected stops more slowly, exactly as had been observed in previous studies of regressive assimilation. It is argued that a combination of low expectations in progressive assimilation and novel popout causes facilitation of processing,whereas not fulfilling high expectations in regressive assimilation causes inhibition.

Abstract

Reports of an advantage of bilingualism on brain structure in young adult participants
are inconsistent. Abutalebi et al. (2012) reported more efficient monitoring of conflict during the
Flanker task in young bilinguals compared to young monolingual speakers. The present study
compared young adult (mean age = 24) Cantonese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong and young
adult monolingual speakers. We expected (a) differences in metabolites in neural tissue to result
from bilingual experience, as measured by 1H-MRS at 3T, (b) correlations between metabolic
levels and Flanker conflict and interference effects (c) different associations in bilingual and
monolingual speakers. We found evidence of metabolic differences in the ACC due to bilingualism,
specifically in metabolites Cho, Cr, Glx and NAA. However, we found no significant correlations
between metabolic levels and conflict and interference effects and no significant evidence of
differential relationships between bilingual and monolingual speakers. Furthermore, we found no
evidence of significant differences in the mean size of conflict and interference effects between
groups i.e. no bilingual advantage. Lower levels of Cho, Cr, Glx and NAA in bilingual adults
compared to monolingual adults suggest that the brains of bilinguals develop greater adaptive
control during conflict monitoring because of their extensive bilingual experience.

Abstract

Speech comprehension requires rapid online processing of a continuous acoustic signal to extract structure and meaning. Previous studies on sentence comprehension have found neural correlates of the predictability of a word given its context, as well as of the precision of such a prediction. However, they have focused on single sentences and on particular words in those sentences. Moreover, they compared neural responses to words with low and high predictability, as well as with low and high precision. However, in speech comprehension, a listener hears many successive words whose predictability and precision vary over a large range. Here, we show that cortical activity in different frequency bands tracks word surprisal in continuous natural speech and that this tracking is modulated by precision. We obtain these results through quantifying surprisal and precision from naturalistic speech using a deep neural network and through relating these speech features to EEG responses of human volunteers acquired during auditory story comprehension. We find significant cortical tracking of surprisal at low frequencies, including the delta band as well as in the higher frequency beta and gamma bands, and observe that the tracking is modulated by the precision. Our results pave the way to further investigate the neurobiology of natural speech comprehension.

Abstract

When we want to describe a path through space, but do not share a common perceptual field with a conversation partner, language has to work doubly hard. This task investigates how people communicate the navigation of space in the absence of shared visual cues, as well as collecting data on motion verbs and the roles of symmetry and landmarks in route description. Two speakers (separated by a curtain or other barrier) are each given a model of a landscape, and one participant describes standard routes through this landscape for the other to match.

Abstract

The encoding of apparently ‘simple’ movement concepts such as ‘COME’ and ‘GO’ can differ widely across languages (e.g., in regard to specifying direction of motion relative to the speaker). This questionnaire is used to identify the range of use of basic motion verbs in a language, and investigate semantic parameters that are involved in high frequency ‘COME’ and ‘GO’-like terms.

Abstract

Exceptionally long-lived species, including many bats, rarely show overt signs of aging, making it difficult to determine why species differ in lifespan. Here, we use DNA methylation (DNAm) profiles from 712 known-age bats, representing 26 species, to identify epigenetic changes associated with age and longevity. We demonstrate that DNAm accurately predicts chronological age. Across species, longevity is negatively associated with the rate of DNAm change at age-associated sites. Furthermore, analysis of several bat genomes reveals that hypermethylated age- and longevity-associated sites are disproportionately located in promoter regions of key transcription factors (TF) and enriched for histone and chromatin features associated with transcriptional regulation. Predicted TF binding site motifs and enrichment analyses indicate that age-related methylation change is influenced by developmental processes, while longevity-related DNAm change is associated with innate immunity or tumorigenesis genes, suggesting that bat longevity results from augmented immune response and cancer suppression.

Abstract

Cognitive processes—from basic sensory analysis to language understanding—are typically contextualized. While the importance of considering context for understanding cognition has long been recognized in psychology and philosophy, it has not yet had much impact on cognitive neuroscience research, where cognition is often studied in decontextualized paradigms. Here, we present examples of recent studies showing that context changes the neural basis of diverse cognitive processes, including perception, attention, memory, and language. Within the domains of perception and language, we review neuroimaging results showing that context interacts with stimulus processing, changes activity in classical perception and language regions, and recruits additional brain regions that contribute crucially to naturalistic perception and language. We discuss how contextualized cognitive neuroscience will allow for discovering new principles of the mind and brain.

Abstract

People organize and convey their thoughts according to narratives. However, neuroscientists are often reluctant to incorporate narrative stimuli into their experiments. We argue that narratives deserve wider adoption in human neuroscience because they tap into the brain’s native machinery for representing the world and provide rich variability for testing hypotheses.

Abstract

Learning and processing natural language requires the ability to track syntactic relationships between words and phrases in a sentence, which are often separated by intervening material. These nonadjacent dependencies can be studied using artificial grammar learning paradigms and structured sequence processing tasks. These approaches have been used to demonstrate that human adults, infants and some nonhuman animals are able to detect and learn dependencies between nonadjacent elements within a sequence. However, learning nonadjacent dependencies appears to be more cognitively demanding than detecting dependencies between adjacent elements, and only occurs in certain circumstances. In this review, we discuss different types of nonadjacent dependencies in language and in artificial grammar learning experiments, and how these differences might impact learning. We summarize different types of perceptual cues that facilitate learning, by highlighting the relationship between dependent elements bringing them closer together either physically, attentionally, or perceptually. Finally, we review artificial grammar learning experiments in human adults, infants, and nonhuman animals, and discuss how similarities and differences observed across these groups can provide insights into how language is learned across development and how these language‐related abilities might have evolved.

Abstract

Background

The biological mechanisms of headache chronification are poorly understood. We aimed to identify changes in DNA methylation associated with the transformation from episodic to chronic headache.
Methods

Participants were recruited from the population-based Norwegian HUNT Study. Thirty-six female headache patients who transformed from episodic to chronic headache between baseline and follow-up 11 years later were matched against 35 controls with episodic headache. DNA methylation was quantified at 485,000 CpG sites, and changes in methylation level at these sites were compared between cases and controls by linear regression analysis. Data were analyzed in two stages (Stages 1 and 2) and in a combined meta-analysis.
Results

None of the top 20 CpG sites identified in Stage 1 replicated in Stage 2 after multiple testing correction. In the combined meta-analysis the strongest associated CpG sites were related to SH2D5 and NPTX2, two brain-expressed genes involved in the regulation of synaptic plasticity. Functional enrichment analysis pointed to processes including calcium ion binding and estrogen receptor pathways.
Conclusion

In this first genome-wide study of DNA methylation in headache chronification several potentially implicated loci and processes were identified. The study exemplifies the use of prospectively collected population cohorts to search for epigenetic mechanisms of disease

Abstract

Researchers have suggested that the vocabularies of languages are oriented towards the communicative needs of language users. Here, we provide evidence demonstrating that the higher frequency of visual words in a large variety of English corpora is reflected in greater lexical differentiation—a greater number of unique words—for the visual domain in the English lexicon. In comparison, sensory modalities that are less frequently talked about, particularly taste and smell, show less lexical differentiation. In addition, we show that even though sensory language can be expected to change across historical time and between contexts of use (e.g., spoken language versus fiction), the pattern of visual dominance is a stable property of the English language. Thus, we show that across the board, precisely those semantic domains that are more frequently talked about are also more lexically differentiated, for perceptual experiences. This correlation between type and token frequencies suggests that the sensory lexicon of English is geared towards communicative efficiency.

Abstract

Institutions driving fundamental research at the cutting edge such as for example from the Max Planck Society (MPS) took steps to optimize data management and stewardship to be able to address new scientific questions. In this paper we selected three institutes from the MPS from the areas of humanities, environmental sciences and natural sciences as examples to indicate the efforts to integrate large amounts of data from collaborators worldwide to create a data space that is ready to be exploited to get new insights based on data intensive science methods. For this integration the typical challenges of fragmentation, bad quality and also social differences had to be overcome. In all three cases, well-managed repositories that are driven by the scientific needs and harmonization principles that have been agreed upon in the community were the core pillars. It is not surprising that these principles are very much aligned with what have now become the FAIR principles. The FAIR principles confirm the correctness of earlier decisions and their clear formulation identified the gaps which the projects need to address.

Abstract

Several evolutionary accounts of human social cognition posit that language has co-evolved with the sophisticated mindreading abilities of modern humans. It has also been argued that these mindreading abilities are the product of cultural, rather than biological, evolution. Taken together, these claims suggest that the evolution of language has played an important role in the cultural evolution of human social cognition. Here we present a new computational model which formalises the assumptions that underlie this hypothesis, in order to explore how language and mindreading interact through cultural evolution. This model treats communicative behaviour as an interplay between the context in which communication occurs, an agent’s individual perspective on the world, and the agent’s lexicon. However, each agent’s perspective and lexicon are private mental representations, not directly observable to other agents. Learners are therefore confronted with the task of jointly inferring the lexicon and perspective of their cultural parent, based on their utterances in context. Simulation results show that given these assumptions, an informative lexicon evolves not just under a pressure to be successful at communicating, but also under a pressure for accurate perspective-inference. When such a lexicon evolves, agents become better at inferring others’ perspectives; not because their innate ability to learn about perspectives changes, but because sharing a language (of the right type) with others helps them to do so.

Abstract

Language users encounter words in at least two different modalities. Arguably, the most frequent encounters are in spoken or written form. Previous research has shown that – compared to the spoken modality – written language features more difficult words. Thus, frequent reading might have effects on word recognition. In the present study, we investigated 1) whether input modality (spoken, written, or bimodal) has an effect on word recognition accuracy, 2) whether this modality effect interacts with word difficulty, 3) whether the interaction of word difficulty and reading experience impacts word recognition accuracy, and 4) whether this interaction is influenced by input modality. To do so, we re-analysed a dataset that was collected in the context of a vocabulary test development to assess in which modality test words should be presented. Participants had carried out a word recognition task, where non-words and words of varying difficulty were presented in auditory, visual and audio-visual modalities. In addition to this main experiment, participants had completed a receptive vocabulary and an author recognition test to measure their reading experience. Our re-analyses did not reveal evidence for an effect of input modality on word recognition accuracy, nor for interactions with word difficulty or language experience. Word difficulty interacted with reading experience in that frequent readers were more accurate in recognizing difficult words than individuals who read less frequently. Practical implications are discussed.

Abstract

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 14 (SCA14) is a subtype of the autosomal dominant cerebellar ataxias that is characterized by slowly progressive cerebellar dysfunction and neurodegeneration. SCA14 is caused by mutations in the PRKCG gene, encoding protein kinase C gamma (PKCγ). Despite the identification of 40 distinct disease-causing mutations in PRKCG, the pathological mechanisms underlying SCA14 remain poorly understood. Here we report the molecular neuropathology of SCA14 in post-mortem cerebellum and in human patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) carrying two distinct SCA14 mutations in the C1 domain of PKCγ, H36R and H101Q. We show that endogenous expression of these mutations results in the cytoplasmic mislocalization and aggregation of PKCγ in both patient iPSCs and cerebellum. PKCγ aggregates were not efficiently targeted for degradation. Moreover, mutant PKCγ was found to be hyper-activated, resulting in increased substrate phosphorylation. Together, our findings demonstrate that a combination of both, loss-of-function and gain-of-function mechanisms are likely to underlie the pathogenesis of SCA14, caused by mutations in the C1 domain of PKCγ. Importantly, SCA14 patient iPSCs were found to accurately recapitulate pathological features observed in post-mortem SCA14 cerebellum, underscoring their potential as relevant disease models and their promise as future drug discovery tools.

Abstract

Objective: Patients with medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (MRONJ) often visit their dentists at advanced stages and subsequently require treatments that greatly affect quality of life. Currently, no clear diagnostic criteria exist to assess MRONJ, and the definitive diagnosis solely relies on clinical bone exposure. This ambiguity leads to a diagnostic delay, complications, and unnecessary burden. This article aims to identify imaging modalities' usage and findings of MRONJ to provide possible approaches for early detection.

Methods: Literature searches were conducted using PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cochrane Library to review all diagnostic imaging modalities for MRONJ.

Results: Panoramic radiography offers a fundamental understanding of the lesions. Imaging findings were comparable between non-exposed and exposed MRONJ, showing osteolysis, osteosclerosis, and thickened lamina dura. Mandibular cortex index Class II could be a potential early MRONJ indicator. While three-dimensional modalities, CT and CBCT, were able to show more features unique to MRONJ such as a solid type periosteal reaction, buccal predominance of cortical perforation, and bone-within-bone appearance. MRI signal intensities of vital bones are hypointense on T1WI and hyperintense on T2WI and STIR when necrotic bone shows hypointensity on all T1WI, T2WI, and STIR. Functional imaging is the most sensitive method but is usually performed in metastasis detection rather than being a diagnostic tool for early MRONJ.

Conclusion: Currently, MRONJ-specific imaging features cannot be firmly established. However, the current data are valuable as it may lead to a more efficient diagnostic procedure along with a more suitable selection of imaging modalities.

Abstract

Previous studies suggest that bilinguals' lexical access is language non-selective, especially for orthographically identical translation equivalents across languages (i.e., identical cognates). The present study investigated how such words (e.g., meaning "school" in both Chinese and Japanese) are processed in the (late) Chinese - Japanese bilingual brain. Using an L2-Japanese lexical decision task, both behavioral and electrophysiological data were collected. Reaction times (RTs), as well as the N400 component, showed that cognates are more easily recognized than non-cognates. Additionally, an early component (i.e., the N250), potentially reflecting activation at the word-form level, was also found. Cognates elicited a more positive N250 than non-cognates in the frontal region, indicating that the cognate facilitation effect occurred at an early stage of word formation for languages with logographic scripts.

Abstract

Language users process utterances by segmenting them into many cognitive units, which vary in their sizes and linguistic levels. Although we can do such unitization/segmentation easily, its cognitive mechanism is still not clear. This paper proposes an unsupervised model, Less-is-Better (LiB), to simulate the human cognitive process with respect to language unitization/segmentation. LiB follows the principle of least effort and aims to build a lexicon which minimizes the number of unit tokens (alleviating the effort of analysis) and number of unit types (alleviating the effort of storage) at the same time on any given corpus. LiB’s workflow is inspired by empirical cognitive phenomena. The design makes the mechanism of LiB cognitively plausible and the computational requirement light-weight. The lexicon generated by LiB performs the best among different types of lexicons (e.g. ground-truth words) both from an information-theoretical view and a cognitive view, which suggests that the LiB lexicon may be a plausible proxy of the mental lexicon.

Abstract

A core question in language acquisition is whether children’s syntactic processing is experience-dependent and language-specific, or whether it is governed by abstract, universal syntactic machinery. We address this question by presenting corpus and on-line processing dat a from children learning Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been important in debates about the universality of parsing processes. The corpus data revealed that two different relative clause constructions in Mandarin are differentially used to modify syntactic subjects and objects. In the experiment, 4-year-old children’s eye-movements were recorded as they listened to the two RC construction types (e.g., Can you pick up the pig that pushed the sheep?). A permutation analysis showed that children’s ease of comprehension was closely aligned with the distributional frequencies, suggesting syntactic processing preferences are shaped by the input experience of these constructions.

Abstract

Chunking in language comprehension is a process that segments continuous linguistic input into smaller chunks that are in the reader’s mental lexicon. Effective chunking during reading facilitates disambiguation and enhances efficiency for comprehension. However, the chunking mechanisms remain elusive, especially in reading given that information arrives simultaneously yet the written systems may not have explicit cues for labeling boundaries such as Chinese. What are the mechanisms of chunking that mediates the reading of the text that contains hierarchical information? We investigated this question by manipulating the lexical status of the chunks at distinct levels in four-character Chinese strings, including the two-character local chunk and four-character global chunk. Male and female human participants were asked to make lexical decisions on these strings in a behavioral experiment, followed by a passive reading task when their electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. The behavioral results showed that the lexical decision time of lexicalized two-character local chunks was influenced by the lexical status of the four-character global chunk, but not vice versa, which indicated the processing of global chunks possessed priority over the local chunks. The EEG results revealed that familiar lexical chunks were detected simultaneously at both levels and further processed in a different temporal order – the onset of lexical access for the global chunks was earlier than that of local chunks. These consistent results suggest a two-stage operation for chunking in reading–– the simultaneous detection of familiar lexical chunks at multiple levels around 100 ms followed by recognition of chunks with global precedence.

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) provides high temporal resolution cognitive information from non-invasive recordings. However, one of the common practices-using a subset of sensors in ERP analysis is hard to provide a holistic and precise dynamic results. Selecting or grouping subsets of sensors may also be subject to selection bias, multiple comparison, and further complicated by individual differences in the group-level analysis. More importantly, changes in neural generators and variations in response magnitude from the same neural sources are difficult to separate, which limit the capacity of testing different aspects of cognitive hypotheses. We introduce EasyEEG, a toolbox that includes several multivariate analysis methods to directly test cognitive hypotheses based on topographic responses that include data from all sensors. These multivariate methods can investigate effects in the dimensions of response magnitude and topographic patterns separately using data in the sensor space, therefore enable assessing neural response dynamics. The concise workflow and the modular design provide user-friendly and programmer-friendly features. Users of all levels can benefit from the open-sourced, free EasyEEG to obtain a straightforward solution for efficient processing of EEG data and a complete pipeline from raw data to final results for publication.

Abstract

In attempting to understand mental processes, it is important to use a task that appropriately reflects the underlying processes being investigated. Recently, Verdonschot and Kinoshita (Memory & Cognition, 46,410-425, 2018) proposed that a variant of the Stroop task-the "phonological Stroop task"-might be a suitable tool for investigating speech production. The major advantage of this task is that the task is apparently not affected by the orthographic properties of the stimuli, unlike other, commonly used, tasks (e.g., associative-cuing and word-reading tasks). The viability of this proposal was examined in the present experiments by manipulating the script types of Japanese distractors. For Romaji distractors (e.g., "kushi"), color-naming responses were faster when the initial phoneme was shared between the color name and the distractor than when the initial phonemes were different, thereby showing a phoneme-based phonological Stroop effect (Experiment1). In contrast, no such effect was observed when the same distractors were presented in Katakana (e.g., "< ") pound, replicating Verdonschot and Kinoshita's original results (Experiment2). A phoneme-based effect was again found when the Katakana distractors used in Verdonschot and Kinoshita's original study were transcribed and presented in Romaji (Experiment3). Because the observation of a phonemic effectdirectly depended on the orthographic properties of the distractor stimuli, we conclude that the phonological Stroop task is also susceptible to orthographic influences.

Abstract

In a masked priming word-naming task, a facilitation due to the initial-segmental sound overlap for 2-character kanji prime-target pairs was affected by certain orthographic properties (Yoshihara, Nakayama, Verdonschot, & Hino, 2017). That is, the facilitation that was due to the initial mora overlap occurred only when the mora was the whole pronunciation of their initial kanji characters (i.e., match pairs; e.g., /ka-se.ki/-/ka-rjo.ku/). When the shared initial mora was only a part of the kanji characters' readings, however, there was no facilitation (i.e., mismatch pairs; e.g., /ha.tu-a.N/-/ha.ku-bu.tu/). In the present study, we used a masked priming picture-naming task to investigate whether the previous results were relevant only when the orthography of targets is visually presented. In Experiment 1. the main findings of our word-naming task were fully replicated in a picture-naming task. In Experiments 2 and 3. the absence of facilitation for the mismatch pairs were confirmed with a new set of stimuli. On the other hand, a significant facilitation was observed for the match pairs that shared the 2 initial morae (in Experiment 4), which was again consistent with the results of our word-naming study. These results suggest that the orthographic properties constrain the phonological expression of masked priming for kanji words across 2 tasks that are likely to differ in how phonology is retrieved. Specifically, we propose that orthography of a word is activated online and constrains the phonological encoding processes in these tasks.

Abstract

In the absence of explicitly marked cues to word boundaries, listeners tend to segment spoken English at the onset of strong syllables. This may suggest that under difficult listening conditions, speech should be easier to recognize where strong syllables are word-initial. We report two experiments in which listeners were presented with sentences which had been time-compressed to make listening difficult. The first study contrasted sentences in which all content words began with strong syllables with sentences in which all content words began with weak syllables. The intelligibility of the two groups of sentences did not differ significantly. Apparent rhythmic effects in the results prompted a second experiment; however, no significant effects of systematic rhythmic manipulation were observed. In both experiments, the strongest predictor of intelligibility was the rated plausibility of the sentences. We conclude that listeners' recognition responses to time-compressed speech may be strongly subject to experiential bias; effects of rhythmic structure are most likely to show up also as bias effects.

Abstract

Online testing holds great promise for infant scientists. It could increase participant diversity, improve reproducibility and collaborative possibilities, and reduce costs for researchers and participants. However, despite the rise of platforms and participant databases, little work has been done to overcome the challenges of making this approach available to researchers across the world. In this paper, we elaborate on the benefits of online infant testing from a global perspective and identify challenges for the international community that have been outside of the scope of previous literature. Furthermore, we introduce ManyBabies-AtHome, an international, multi-lab collaboration that is actively working to facilitate practical and technical aspects of online testing as well as address ethical concerns regarding data storage and protection, and cross-cultural variation. The ultimate goal of this collaboration is to improve the method of testing infants online and make it globally available.

Abstract

The three Olutec stories from Oluta, Veracruz, werenarrated by Antonio Asistente Maldonado. Roberto Zavala presents amorpheme-by-morpheme analysis of the texts with a sketch of the majorgrammatical and typological features of this language. Olutec is spoken bythree dozen speakers. The grammatical structure of this language has not beendescribed before. The sketch contains information on verb and noun morphology,verb dasses, clause types, inverse/direct patterns, grammaticalizationprocesses, applicatives, incorporation, word order type, and discontinuousexpressions. The stories presented here are the first Olutec texts everpublished. The motifs of the stories are well known throughout Middle America.The story of "the Rabbit who wants to be big" explains why one of the mainprotagonists of Middle American folktales acquired long ears. The story of "theDevil who is inebriated by the people of a village" explains how theinhabitants of a village discover the true identity of a man who likes to dancehuapango and decide to get rid of him. Finally the story of "theshit-sellers" presents two compadres, one who is lazy and the otherone who works hard. The hard-worker asks the lazy compadre how he surviveswithout working. The latter lies to to him that he sells shit in theneighboring village. The hard-working compadre decides to become a shit-sellerand in the process realizes that the lazy compadre deceived him. However, he islucky and meets with the Devil who offers him money in compensation for havingbeen deceived. When the lazy compadre realizes that the hard-working compadrehas become rich, he tries to do the same business but gets beaten in theprocess.

Abstract

Language is multimodal: non-linguistic cues, such as prosody,
gestures and mouth movements, are always present in face-to-
face communication and interact to support processing. In this
paper, we ask whether and how multimodal cues affect L2
processing by recording EEG for highly proficient bilinguals
when watching naturalistic materials. For each word, we
quantified surprisal and the informativeness of prosody,
gestures, and mouth movements. We found that each cue
modulates the N400: prosodic accentuation, meaningful
gestures, and informative mouth movements all reduce N400.
Further, effects of meaningful gestures but not mouth
informativeness are enhanced by prosodic accentuation,
whereas effects of mouth are enhanced by meaningful gestures
but reduced by beat gestures. Compared with L1, L2
participants benefit less from cues and their interactions, except
for meaningful gestures and mouth movements. Thus, in real-
world language comprehension, L2 comprehenders use
multimodal cues just as L1 speakers albeit to a lesser extent.

Abstract

The learning of first object names is deemed a hard problem due to the uncertainty inherent in mapping a heard name to the intended referent in a cluttered and variable world. However, human infants readily solve this problem. Despite considerable theoretical discussion, relatively little is known about the uncertainty infants face in the real world. We used head-mounted eye tracking during parent–infant toy play and quantified the uncertainty by measuring the distribution of infant attention to the potential referents when a parent named both familiar and unfamiliar toy objects. The results show that infant gaze upon hearing an object name is often directed to a single referent which is equally likely to be a wrong competitor or the intended target. This bimodal gaze distribution clarifies and redefines the uncertainty problem and constrains possible solutions.

Abstract

Recent laboratory experiments have shown that both infant and adult learners can acquire word-referent mappings using cross-situational statistics. The vast majority of the work on this topic has used unfamiliar objects presented on neutral backgrounds as the visual contexts for word learning. However, these laboratory contexts are much different than the real-world contexts in which learning occurs. Thus, the feasibility of generalizing cross-situational learning beyond the laboratory is in question. Adapting the Human Simulation Paradigm, we conducted a series of experiments examining cross-situational learning from children's egocentric videos captured during naturalistic play. Focusing on individually ambiguous naming moments that naturally occur during toy play, we asked how statistical learning unfolds in real time through accumulating cross-situational statistics in naturalistic contexts. We found that even when learning situations were individually ambiguous, learners' performance gradually improved over time. This improvement was driven in part by learners' use of partial knowledge acquired from previous learning situations, even when they had not yet discovered correct word-object mappings. These results suggest that word learning is a continuous process by means of real-time information integration.

Abstract

Learning verbs is challenging because it is difficult to infer the precise meaning of a verb when there are a multitude of relations that one can derive from a single event. To study this verb learning challenge, we used children's egocentric view collected from naturalistic toy-play interaction as learning materials and investigated how visual and linguistic information provided in individual naming moments as well as cross-situational information provided from multiple learning moments can help learners resolve this mapping problem using the Human Simulation Paradigm. Our results show that learners benefit from seeing children's egocentric views compared to third-person observations. In addition, linguistic information can help learners identify the correct verb meaning by eliminating possible meanings that do not belong to the linguistic category. Learners are also able to integrate visual and linguistic information both within and across learning situations to reduce the ambiguity in the space of possible verb meanings.

Abstract

To acquire the meaning of a verb, language learners not only need to find the correct mapping between a specific verb and an action or event in the world, but also infer the underlying relational meaning that the verb encodes. Most verb naming instances in naturalistic contexts are highly ambiguous as many possible actions can be embedded in the same scenario and many possible verbs can be used to describe those actions. To understand whether learners can find the correct verb meaning from referentially ambiguous learning situations, we conducted three experiments using the Human Simulation Paradigm with adult learners. Our results suggest that although finding the right verb meaning from one learning instance is hard, there is a statistical solution to this problem. When provided with multiple verb learning instances all referring to the same verb, learners are able to aggregate information across situations and gradually converge to the correct semantic space. Even in cases where they may not guess the exact target verb, they can still discover the right meaning by guessing a similar verb that is semantically close to the ground truth.

Abstract

Bilinguals usually select the right language to speak for the particular context they are in, but sometimes the nontarget language intrudes. Despite a large body of research into language selection and language control, it remains unclear where intrusion errors originate from. These errors may be due to incorrect selection of the nontarget language at the conceptual level, or be a consequence of erroneous word selection (despite correct language selection) at the lexical level. We examined the former possibility in two language switching experiments using a manipulation that supposedly affects language selection on the conceptual level, namely whether the conversational language context was associated with the target language (congruent) or with the alternative language (incongruent) on a trial. Both experiments showed that language intrusion errors occurred more often in incongruent than in congruent contexts, providing converging evidence that language selection during concept preparation is one driving force behind language intrusion.

Abstract

Bilingual speakers have to control their languages to avoid interference, which may be achieved by enhancing the target language and/or inhibiting the nontarget language. Previous research suggests that bilinguals use inhibition (e.g., Jackson et al., 2001), which should be reflected in the N2 component of the event-related potential (ERP) in the EEG. In the current study, we investigated the dynamics of inhibitory control by measuring the N2 during language switching and repetition in bilingual picture naming. Participants had to name pictures in Dutch or English depending on the cue. A run of same-language trials could be short (two or three trials) or long (five or six trials). We assessed whether RTs and N2 changed over the course of same-language runs, and at a switch between languages. Results showed that speakers named pictures more quickly late as compared to early in a run of same-language trials. Moreover, they made a language switch more quickly after a long run than after a short run. This run-length effect was only present in the first language (L1), not in the second language (L2). In ERPs, we observed a widely distributed switch effect in the N2, which was larger after a short run than after a long run. This effect was only present in the L2, not in the L1, although the difference was not significant between languages. In contrast, the N2 was not modulated during a same-language run. Our results suggest that the nontarget language is inhibited at a switch, but not during the repeated use of the target language.

Abstract

Although bilingual speakers are very good at selectively using one language rather than another, sometimes language selection errors occur. To investigate how bilinguals monitor their speech errors and control their languages in use, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in unbalanced Dutch-English bilingual speakers in a cued language-switching task. We tested the conflict-based monitoring model of Nozari and colleagues by investigating the error-related negativity (ERN) and comparing the effects of the two switching directions (i.e., to the first language, L1 vs. to the second language, L2). Results show that the speakers made more language selection errors when switching from their L2 to the L1 than vice versa. In the EEG, we observed a robust ERN effect following language selection errors compared to correct responses, reflecting monitoring of speech errors. Most interestingly, the ERN effect was enlarged when the speakers were switching to their L2 (less conflict) compared to switching to the L1 (more conflict). Our findings do not support the conflict-based monitoring model. We discuss an alternative account in terms of error prediction and reinforcement learning.

Abstract

Although bilingual speakers are very good at selectively using one language rather than another, sometimes language selection errors occur. We examined the relative contribution of top-down cognitive control and bottom-up language priming to these errors. Unbalanced Dutch-English bilinguals named pictures and were cued to switch between languages under time pressure. We also manipulated the number of same-language trials before a switch (long vs. short runs). Results show that speakers made more language selection errors when switching from their second language (L2) to the first language (L1) than vice versa. Furthermore, they made more errors when switching to the L1 after a short compared to a long run of L2 trials. In the reverse switching direction (L1 to L2), run length had no effect. These findings are most compatible with an account of language selection errors that assigns a strong role to top-down processes of cognitive control.

Abstract

To understand the origins of interhemispheric differences and commonalities/coupling in human brain wiring, it is crucial to determine how homologous interregional connectivities of the left and right hemispheres are genetically determined and related. To address this, in the present study, we analyzed human twin and pedigree samples with high-quality diffusion magnetic resonance imaging tractography and estimated the heritability and genetic correlation of homologous left and right white matter (WM) connections. The results showed that the heritability of WM connectivity was similar and coupled between the 2 hemispheres and that the degree of overlap in genetic factors underlying homologous WM connectivity (i.e., interhemispheric genetic correlation) varied substantially across the human brain: from complete overlap to complete nonoverlap. Particularly, the heritability was significantly stronger and the chance of interhemispheric complete overlap in genetic factors was higher in subcortical WM connections than in cortical WM connections. In addition, the heritability and interhemispheric genetic correlations were stronger for long-range connections than for short-range connections. These findings highlight the determinants of the genetics underlying WM connectivity and its interhemispheric relationships, and provide insight into genetic basis of WM connectivity asymmetries in both healthy and disease states.

Abstract

Adults who as children were adopted into a different linguistic community retain knowledge of their birth language. The possession (without awareness) of such knowledge is known to facilitate the (re)learning of birth-language speech patterns; this perceptual learning predicts such adults' production success as well, indicating that the retained linguistic knowledge is abstract in nature. Adoptees' acquisition of their adopted language is fast and complete; birth-language mastery disappears rapidly, although this latter process has been little studied. Here, 46 international adoptees from China aged four to 10 years, with Dutch as their new language, plus 47 matched non-adopted Dutch-native controls and 40 matched non-adopted Chinese controls, undertook across a two-week period 10 blocks of training in perceptually identifying Chinese speech contrasts (one segmental, one tonal) which were unlike any Dutch contrasts. Chinese controls easily accomplished all these tasks. The same participants also provided speech production data in an imitation task. In perception, adoptees and Dutch controls scored equivalently poorly at the outset of training; with training, the adoptees significantly improved while the Dutch controls did not. In production, adoptees' imitations both before and after training could be better identified, and received higher goodness ratings, than those of Dutch controls. The perception results confirm that birth-language knowledge is stored and can facilitate re-learning in post-adoption childhood; the production results suggest that although processing of phonological category detail appears to depend on access to the stored knowledge, general articulatory dimensions can at this age also still be remembered, and may facilitate spoken imitation.

Abstract

This paper examines adjectival placement in Griko, an Italian-Greek lan-
guage variety. Guardiano and Stavrou (2019, 2014) have argued that
there is a gap of evidence in the diachrony of adjectives in prenominal
position and in particular, of measuring adjectives. Evidence is presented
in this paper contradicting the aforementioned claims. After considering
the placement of adjectives in Greek and Italian, and their similarities
and differences, the adjectival pattern of Griko is analysed. The analysis
is based mostly on written data from the early 20th century proving the
prenominal position of adjectives and adding to the diachronic schema of
adjectival placement in Griko.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to shed light to the linguistic deficit in populations with dementia, and more specifically with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease; by examining the assignment of thematic roles (θ-roles) in sentences including psychological verbs.
The interest in types of dementia and its precursor is due to the relevance of the disease in present-day world society (Caloi, 2017). 47 millions of people worldwide were reported by the World Alzheimer Report in 2016 (Prince et al. 2016) as people with a type of dementia. This number surpasses the number of inhabitants in Spain, a whole country, and it is expected, according to the report, to triplicate until 2050 reaching the number of 131 million. The impact of this disease is observed not only at the social level but also in the economic one, because of their need for assistance in their everyday life. What is worrying, is the lack of total treatment once the disease has started. Despite the efforts of medicine, dementia is problematic in terms of its diagnosis, because a variety of cognitive abilities is assessed in combination with medical workup. Language is a crucial component in the procedure of diagnosis as linguistic deficits are among the first symptoms that accompany the onset of the disease. Therefore, further investigation of linguistic impairment is a necessity in order to enhance the diagnostic techniques used nowadays. Furthermore, the lack of efficient drugs for the treatment of the disease has necessitated the development of training programs for maintenance and increase of the cognitive abilities in people with either Mild Cognitive Impairment or a type of dementia …

Abstract

This study investigates the difficulty of people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in the production and comprehension of psychological verbs, as thematic realization may involve both the canonical and non-canonical realization of arguments. More specifically, we aim to examine whether there is a deficit in the mapping of syntactic and semantic representations in psych-predicates regarding Greek-speaking individuals with MCI and AD, and whether the linguistic abilities associated with θ-role assignment decrease as the disease progresses. Moreover, given the decline of cognitive abilities in people with MCI and AD, we explore the effects of components of memory (Semantic, Episodic, and Working Memory) on the assignment of thematic roles in constructions with psychological verbs.

Abstract

The present paper explores how rules are enforced and talked about in everyday life. Drawing on a corpus of board game recordings across European languages, we identify a sequential and praxeological context for rule talk. After a game rule is breached, a participant enforces proper play and then formulates a rule with an impersonal deontic statement (e.g. ‘It’s not allowed to do this’). Impersonal deontic statements express what may or may not be done without tying the obligation to a particular individual. Our analysis shows that such statements are used as part of multi-unit and multi-modal turns where rule talk is accomplished through both grammatical and embodied means. Impersonal deontic statements serve multiple interactional goals: they account for having changed another’s behavior in the moment and at the same time impart knowledge for the future. We refer to this complex action as an “instruction”. The results of this study advance our understanding of rules and rule-following in everyday life, and of how resources of language and the body are combined to enforce and formulate rules.

Abstract

In informal interaction, speakers rarely thank a person who has complied with a request. Examining data from British English, German, Italian, Polish, and Telugu, we ask when speakers do thank after compliance. The results show that thanking treats the other’s assistance as going beyond what could be taken for granted in the circumstances. Coupled with the rareness of thanking after requests, this suggests that cooperation is to a great extent governed by expectations of helpfulness, which can be long-standing, or built over the course of a particular interaction. The higher frequency of thanking in some languages (such as English or Italian) suggests that cultures differ in the importance they place on recognizing the other’s agency in doing as requested.

Abstract

It is undisputed that presenting a rhythmic stimulus leads to a measurable brain response that follows the rhythmic structure of this stimulus. What is still debated, however, is the question whether this brain response exclusively reflects a regular repetition of evoked responses, or whether it also includes entrained oscillatory activity. Here we systematically present evidence in favor of an involvement of entrained neural oscillations in the processing of rhythmic input while critically pointing out which questions still need to be addressed before this evidence could be considered conclusive. In this context, we also explicitly discuss the potential functional role of such entrained oscillations, suggesting that these stimulus-aligned oscillations reflect, and serve as, predictive processes, an idea often only implicitly assumed in the literature.

Abstract

Change in linguistic prosody generates a mismatch negativity response (MMN), indicating neural representation of linguistic prosody, while change in affective prosody generates a positive response (P3a), reflecting its motivational salience. However, the neural response to concurrent affective and linguistic prosody is unknown. The present paper investigates the integration of these two prosodic features in the brain by examining the neural response to separate and concurrent processing by electroencephalography (EEG). A spoken pair of Swedish words—[ˈfɑ́ːsɛn] phase and [ˈfɑ̀ːsɛn] damn—that differed in emotional semantics due to linguistic prosody was presented to 16 subjects in an angry and neutral affective prosody using a passive auditory oddball paradigm. Acoustically matched pseudowords—[ˈvɑ́ːsɛm] and [ˈvɑ̀ːsɛm]—were used as controls. Following the constructionist concept of emotions, accentuating the conceptualization of emotions based on language, it was hypothesized that concurrent affective and linguistic prosody with the same valence—angry [ˈfɑ̀ːsɛn] damn—would elicit a unique late EEG signature, reflecting the temporal integration of affective voice with emotional semantics of prosodic origin. In accordance, linguistic prosody elicited an MMN at 300–350 ms, and affective prosody evoked a P3a at 350–400 ms, irrespective of semantics. Beyond these responses, concurrent affective and linguistic prosody evoked a late positive component (LPC) at 820–870 ms in frontal areas, indicating the conceptualization of affective prosody based on linguistic prosody. This study provides evidence that the brain does not only distinguish between these two functions of prosody but also integrates them based on language and experience.

Abstract

Dealing with phonological variations is important for speech processing. This article addresses whether phonological variations introduced by assimilatory processes are compensated for at the pre-lexical or lexical level, and whether the nature of variation and the phonological context influence this process. To this end, Swedish nasal regressive place assimilation was investigated using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component. In nasal regressive assimilation, the coronal nasal assimilates to the place of articulation of a following segment, most clearly with a velar or labial place of articulation, as in utan mej “without me” > [ʉːtam mɛjː]. In a passive auditory oddball paradigm, 15 Swedish speakers were presented with Swedish phrases with attested and unattested phonological variations and contexts for nasal assimilation. Attested variations – a coronal-to-labial change as in utan “without” > [ʉːtam] – were contrasted with unattested variations – a labial-to-coronal change as in utom “except” > ∗[ʉːtɔn] – in appropriate and inappropriate contexts created by mej “me” [mɛjː] and dej “you” [dɛjː]. Given that the MMN amplitude depends on the degree of variation between two stimuli, the MMN responses were expected to indicate to what extent the distance between variants was tolerated by the perceptual system. Since the MMN response reflects not only low-level acoustic processing but also higher-level linguistic processes, the results were predicted to indicate whether listeners process assimilation at the pre-lexical and lexical levels. The results indicated no significant interactions across variations, suggesting that variations in phonological forms do not incur any cost in lexical retrieval; hence such variation is compensated for at the lexical level. However, since the MMN response reached significance only for a labial-to-coronal change in a labial context and for a coronal-to-labial change in a coronal context, the compensation might have been influenced by the nature of variation and the phonological context. It is therefore concluded that while assimilation is compensated for at the lexical level, there is also some influence from pre-lexical processing. The present results reveal not only signal-based perception of phonological units, but also higher-level lexical processing, and are thus able to reconcile the bottom-up and top-down models of speech processing.

Abstract

How listeners handle prosodic cues of linguistic and paralinguistic origin is a central question for spoken communication. In the present EEG study, we addressed this question by examining neural responses to variations in pitch accent (linguistic) and affective (paralinguistic) prosody in Swedish words, using a passive auditory oddball paradigm. The results indicated that changes in pitch accent and affective prosody elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) responses at around 200 ms, confirming the brain’s pre-attentive response to any prosodic modulation. The MMN amplitude was, however, statistically larger to the deviation in affective prosody in comparison to the deviation in pitch accent and affective prosody combined, which is in line with previous research indicating not only a larger MMN response to affective prosody in comparison to neutral prosody but also a smaller MMN response to multidimensional deviants than unidimensional ones. The results, further, showed a significant P3a response to the affective prosody change in comparison to the pitch accent change at around 300 ms, in accordance with previous findings showing an enhanced positive response to emotional stimuli. The present findings provide evidence for distinct neural processing of different prosodic cues, and statistically confirm the intrinsic perceptual and motivational salience of paralinguistic information in spoken communication.

Abstract

There is a rich tradition of building computational models in cognitive science, but modeling, theoretical, and experimental research are not as tightly integrated as they could be. In this paper, we show that computational techniques—even simple ones that are straightforward to use—can greatly facilitate designing, implementing, and analyzing experiments, and generally help lift research to a new level. We focus on the domain of artificial grammar learning, and we give five concrete examples in this domain for (a) formalizing and clarifying theories, (b) generating stimuli, (c) visualization, (d) model selection, and (e) exploring the hypothesis space.