Publications

Abstract

This article explores the relation between language and cognition by examining the case of "absolute" (cardinal direction) spatial description in the Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr. This kind of spatial description is incongruent with the "relative" (e.g., left/right/front/back) spatial description familiar in European languages. Building on Haviland's 1993 analysis of Guugu Yimithirr directionals in speech and gesture, a series of informal experiments were developed. It is shown that Guugu Yimithirr speakers predominantly code for nonverbal memory in "absolute" concepts congruent with their language, while a comparative sample of Dutch speakers do so in "relative" concepts. Much anecdotal evidence also supports this. The conclusion is that Whorfian effects may in fact be demonstrable in the spatial domain.

Abstract

Philosophers, psychologists, and linguists have argued that spatial conception is pivotal to cognition in general, providing a general, egocentric, and universal framework for cognition as well as metaphors for conceptualizing many other domains. But in an aboriginal community in Northern Queensland, a system of cardinal directions informs not only language, but also memory for arbitrary spatial arrays and directions. This work suggests that fundamental cognitive parameters, like the system of coding spatial locations, can vary cross-culturally, in line with the language spoken by a community. This opens up the prospect of a fruitful dialogue between anthropology and the cognitive sciences on the complex interaction between cultural and universal factors in the constitution of mind.

Abstract

In an earlier article (Levinson, 1987b), I raised the possibility that a Gricean theory of implicature might provide a systematic partial reduction of the Binding Conditions; the briefest of outlines is given in Section 2.1 below but the argumentation will be found in the earlier article. In this article I want, first, to show how that account might be further justified and extended, but then to introduce a radical alternative. This alternative uses the same pragmatic framework, but gives an account better adjusted to some languages. Finally, I shall attempt to show that both accounts can be combined by taking a diachronic perspective. The attraction of the combined account is that, suddenly, many facts about long-range reflexives and their associated logophoricity fall into place.

Abstract

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

Abstract

We propose that the choice between the auxiliaries hebben 'have' and zijn 'be' in Dutch is determined by a particular semantic feature of verbs. In particular we propose a feature of meaning [IEPS] for 'inferable eventual position or state' that characterizes whether the action denoted by the verb allows us to determine the eventual position or state of the verb's highest argument. It is argued that only verbs which exhibit the feature [+IEPS] or which obtain the feature compositionally in the syntax select zijn as their auxiliary. Our analysis is then compared to a number of other analyses of auxiliary selection in Dutch.

Abstract

Mutations of the renal-specific chloride channel (CLCN5) gene, which is located on chromosome Xp11.22, are associated with hypercalciuric nephrolithiasis (kidney stones) in the Northern European and Japanese populations. CLCN5 encodes a 746 amino acid channel (CLC-5) that has approximately 12 transmembrane domains, and heterologous expression of wild-type CLC-5 in Xenopus oocytes has yielded outwardly rectifying chloride currents that were markedly reduced or abolished by these mutations. In order to assess further the structural and functional relationships of this recently cloned chloride channel, additional CLCN5 mutations have been identified in five unrelated families with this disorder. Three of these mutations were missense (G57V, G512R and E527D), one was a nonsense (R648Stop) and one was an insertion (30:H insertion). In addition, two of the mutations (30:H insertion and E527D) were demonstrated to be de novo, and the G57V and E527D mutations were identified in families of Afro-American and Indian origin, respectively. The G57V and 30:H insertion mutations represent the first CLCN5 mutations to be identified in the N-terminus region, and the R648Stop mutation, which has been observed previously in an unrelated family, suggests that this codon may be particularly prone to mutations. Heterologous expression of the mutations resulted in a marked reduction or abolition of the chloride currents, thereby establishing their functional importance. These results help to elucidate further the structure-function relationships of this renal chloride channel.

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

The lack of diversity in the language sciences has increasingly been criticized as it holds the potential for producing flawed theories. Research on (i) geographically diverse language communities and (ii) on sign languages is necessary to corroborate, sharpen, and extend existing theories. This study contributes a case study of adapting a well-established paradigm to study the acquisition of sign phonology in Kata Kolok, a sign language of rural Bali, Indonesia. We conducted an experiment modeled after the familiarization paradigm with child signers of Kata Kolok. Traditional analyses of looking time did not yield significant differences between signing and non-signing children. Yet, additional behavioral analyses (attention, eye contact, hand behavior) suggest that children who are signers and those who are non-signers, as well as those who are hearing and those who are deaf, interact differently with the task. This study suggests limitations of the paradigm due to the ecology of sign languages and the sociocultural characteristics of the sample, calling for a mixed-methods approach. Ultimately, this paper aims to elucidate the diversity of adaptations necessary for experimental design, procedure, and analysis, and to offer a critical reflection on the contribution of similar efforts and the diversification of the field.

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

Several models of spoken word recognition postulate that recognition is achieved via a process of competition between lexical hypotheses. Competition not only provides a mechanism for isolated word recognition, it also assists in continuous speech recognition, since it offers a means of segmenting continuous input into individual words. We present statistics on the pattern of occurrence of words embedded in the polysyllabic words of the English vocabulary, showing that an overwhelming majority (84%) of polysyllables have shorter words embedded within them. Positional analyses show that these embeddings are most common at the onsets of the longer word. Although both phonological and syntactic constraints could rule out some embedded words, they do not remove the problem. Lexical competition provides a means of dealing with lexical embedding. It is also supported by a growing body of experimental evidence. We present results which indicate that competition operates both between word candidates that begin at the same point in the input and candidates that begin at different points (McQueen, Norris, & Cutler, 1994, Noms, McQueen, & Cutler, in press). We conclude that lexical competition is an essential component in models of continuous speech recognition.

Abstract

Recent work has claimed that (non-tonal) phonological patterns are subregular (Heinz 2011a,b, 2018; Heinz and Idsardi 2013), occupying a delimited proper subregion of the regular functions—the weakly deterministic (WD) functions (Heinz and Lai 2013; Jardine 2016). Whether or not it is correct (McCollum et al. 2020a), this claim can only be properly assessed given a complete and accurate definition of WD functions. We propose such a definition in this article, patching unintended holes in Heinz and Lai’s (2013) original definition that we argue have led to the incorrect classification of some phonological patterns as WD. We start from the observation that WD patterns share a property that we call unbounded semiambience, modeled after the analogous observation by Jardine (2016) about non-deterministic (ND) patterns and their unbounded circumambience. Both ND and WD functions can be broken down into compositions of deterministic (subsequential) functions (Elgot and Mezei 1965; Heinz and Lai 2013) that read an input string from opposite directions; we show that WD functions are those for which these deterministic composands do not interact in a way that is familiar from the theoretical phonology literature. To underscore how this concept of interaction neatly separates the WD class of functions from the strictly more expressive ND class, we provide analyses of the vowel harmony patterns of two Eastern Nilotic languages, Maasai and Turkana, using bimachines, an automaton type that represents unbounded bidirectional dependencies explicitly. These analyses make clear that there is interaction between deterministic composands when (and only when) the output of a given input element of a string is simultaneously dependent on information from both the left and the right: ND functions are those that involve interaction, while WD functions are those that do not.

Abstract

Scientific convergence is a phenomenon where the distance between hitherto distinct scientific fields narrows and the fields gradually overlap over time. It is creating important potential for research, development, and innovation. Although scientific convergence is crucial for the development of radically new technology, the identification of emerging scientific convergence is particularly difficult since the underlying knowledge flows are rather fuzzy and unstable in the early convergence stage. Nevertheless, novel scientific publications emerging at the intersection of different knowledge fields may reflect convergence processes. Thus, in this article, we exploit the growing number of research and digital libraries providing bibliographic metadata to propose an automated analysis of science dynamics. We utilize and adapt machine-learning methods (DeepWalk) to automatically learn a similarity measure between scientific fields from graphs constructed on bibliographic metadata. With a time-based perspective, we apply our approach to analyze the trajectories of evolving similarities between scientific fields. We validate the learned similarity measure by evaluating it within the well-explored case of cholesterol-lowering ingredients in which scientific convergence between the distinct scientific fields of nutrition and pharmaceuticals has partially taken place. Our results confirm that the similarity trajectories learned by our approach resemble the expected behavior, indicating that our approach may allow researchers and practitioners to detect and predict scientific convergence early.

Abstract

While it is well established that grammar learning success varies with age, the cause of this developmental change is largely unknown. This study examined functional MRI activation across a broad developmental sample of 165 Dutch-speaking individuals (8-25 years) as they were implicitly learning a new grammatical system. This approach allowed us to assess the direct effects of age on grammar learning ability while exploring its neural correlates. In contrast to the alleged advantage of children language learners over adults, we found that adults outperformed children. Moreover, our behavioral data showed a sharp discontinuity in the relationship between age and grammar learning performance: there was a strong positive linear correlation between 8 and 15.4 years of age, after which age had no further effect. Neurally, our data indicate two important findings: (i) during grammar learning, adults and children activate similar brain regions, suggesting continuity in the neural networks that support initial grammar learning; and (ii) activation level is age-dependent, with children showing less activation than older participants. We suggest that these age-dependent processes may constrain developmental effects in grammar learning. The present study provides new insights into the neural basis of age-related differences in grammar learning in second language acquisition.

Abstract

Subjects named pictures while hearing distractor words that shared word-initial or word-final segments with the picture names or were unrelated to the picture names. The relative timing of distractor and picture presentation was varied. Compared with unrelated distractors, both types of related distractors facilitated picture naming under certain timing conditions. Begin-related distractors facilitated the naming responses if the shared segments began 150 ms before, at, or 150 ms after picture onset. By contrast, end-related distractors only facilitated the responses if the shared segments began at or 150 ms after picture onset. The results suggest that the phonological encoding of the beginning of a word is initiated before the encoding of its end.

Abstract

Eight experiments were carried out investigating whether different parts of a syllable must be phonologically encoded in a specific order or whether they can be encoded in any order. A speech production task was used in which the subjects in each test trial had to utter one out of three or five response words as quickly as possible. In the so-called homogeneous condition these words were related in form, while in the heterogeneous condition they were unrelated in form. For monosyllabic response words shorter reaction times were obtained in the homogeneous than in the heterogeneous condition when the words had the same onset, but not when they had the same rhyme. Similarly, for disyllabic response words, the reaction times were shorter in the homogeneous than in the heterogeneous condition when the words shared only the onset of the first syllable, but not when they shared only its rhyme. Furthermore, a stronger facilitatory effect was observed when the words had the entire first syllable in common than when they only shared the onset, or the onset and the nucleus, but not the coda of the first syllable. These results suggest that syllables are phonologically encoded in two ordered steps, the first of which is dedicated to the onset and the second to the rhyme.

Abstract

Eye movements have been shown to reflect word recognition and language comprehension processes occurring during reading and auditory language comprehension. The present study examines whether the eye movements speakers make during object naming similarly reflect speech planning processes. In Experiment 1, speakers named object pairs saying, for instance, 'scooter and hat'. The objects were presented as ordinary line drawings or with partly dele:ed contours and had high or low frequency names. Contour type and frequency both significantly affected the mean naming latencies and the mean time spent looking at the objects. The frequency effects disappeared in Experiment 2, in which the participants categorized the objects instead of naming them. This suggests that the frequency effects of Experiment 1 arose during lexical retrieval. We conclude that eye movements during object naming indeed reflect linguistic planning processes and that the speakers' decision to move their eyes from one object to the next is contingent upon the retrieval of the phonological form of the object names.

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence suggests that learning a new foreign language (FL) makes you forget previously learned FLs. To seek empirical evidence for this claim, we tested whether learning words in a previously unknown L3 hampers subsequent retrieval of their L2 translation equivalents. In two experiments, Dutch native speakers with knowledge of English (L2), but not Spanish (L3), first completed an English vocabulary test, based on which 46 participant-specific, known English words were chosen. Half of those were then learned in Spanish. Finally, participants’ memory for all 46 English words was probed again in a picture naming task. In Experiment 1, all tests took place within one session. In Experiment 2, we separated the English pre-test from Spanish learning by a day and manipulated the timing of the English post-test (immediately after learning vs. 1 day later). By separating the post-test from Spanish learning, we asked whether consolidation of the new Spanish words would increase their interference strength. We found significant main effects of interference in naming latencies and accuracy: Participants speeded up less and were less accurate to recall words in English for which they had learned Spanish translations, compared with words for which they had not. Consolidation time did not significantly affect these interference effects. Thus, learning a new language indeed comes at the cost of subsequent retrieval ability in other FLs. Such interference effects set in immediately after learning and do not need time to emerge, even when the other FL has been known for a long time.

Abstract

On simple intelligibility measures, high-quality synthesiser output now scores almost as well as natural speech. Nevertheless, it is widely agreed that perception of synthetic speech is a harder task for listeners than perception of natural speech; in particular, it has been hypothesized that listeners have difficulty identifying phonemes in synthetic speech. If so, a simple measure of the speed with which a phoneme can be identified should prove a useful tool for comparing perception of synthetic and natural speech. The phoneme detection task was here used in three experiments comparing perception of natural and synthetic speech. In the first, response times to synthetic and natural targets were not significantly different, but in the second and third experiments response times to synthetic targets were significantly slower than to natural targets. A speed-accuracy tradeoff in the third experiment suggests that an important factor in this task is the response criterion adopted by subjects. It is concluded that the phoneme detection task is a useful tool for investigating phonetic processing of synthetic speech input, but subjects must be encouraged to adopt a response criterion which emphasizes rapid responding. When this is the case, significantly longer response times for synthetic targets can indicate a processing disadvantage for synthetic speech at an early level of phonetic analysis.

Abstract

The reading process depends both on the text and on the reader. When we read a text, propositions in the current input are matched to propositions in the memory representation of the previous discourse but also to knowledge structures in long‐term memory. Therefore, memory‐based text processing refers both to the bottom‐up processing of the text and to the top‐down activation of the reader's knowledge. In this article, we focus on the role of cognitive structures in the reader's knowledge. We argue that causality is an important category in structuring human knowledge and that this property has consequences for text processing. Some research is discussed that illustrates that the more the information in the text reflects causal categories, the more easily the information is processed.

Abstract

Spoken utterances contain few reliable cues to word boundaries, but listeners nonetheless experience little difficulty identifying words in continuous speech. The authors present data and simulations that suggest that this ability is best accounted for by a model of spoken-word recognition combining competition between alternative lexical candidates and sensitivity to prosodic structure. In a word-spotting experiment, stress pattern effects emerged most clearly when there were many competing lexical candidates for part of the input. Thus, competition between simultaneously active word candidates can modulate the size of prosodic effects, which suggests that spoken-word recognition must be sensitive both to prosodic structure and to the effects of competition. A version of the Shortlist model ( D. G. Norris, 1994b) incorporating the Metrical Segmentation Strategy ( A. Cutler & D. Norris, 1988) accurately simulates the results using a lexicon of more than 25,000 words.

Abstract

We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to constraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language. This Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input which could not be a word - for instance, a single consonant. In two word-spotting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detectapple,for example, infapple(where [f] alone would be an impossible word), than invuffapple(wherevuffcould be a word of English). We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based model of continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process of competition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced. This implementation accurately simulates both the present results and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation.

Abstract

The highly polygenic and pleiotropic nature of behavioural traits, psychiatric disorders and structural and functional brain phenotypes complicate mechanistic interpretation of related genome-wide association study (GWAS) signals, thereby obscuring underlying causal biological processes. We propose genomic principal and independent component analysis (PCA, ICA) to decompose a large set of univariate GWAS statistics of multimodal brain traits into more interpretable latent genomic components. Here we introduce and evaluate this novel methods various analytic parameters and reproducibility across independent samples. Two UK Biobank GWAS summary statistic releases of 2240 imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs) were retrieved. Genome-wide beta-values and their corresponding standard-error scaled z-values were decomposed using genomic PCA/ICA. We evaluated variance explained at multiple dimensions up to 200. We tested the inter-sample reproducibility of output of dimensions 5, 10, 25 and 50. Reproducibility statistics of the respective univariate GWAS served as benchmarks. Reproducibility of 10-dimensional PCs and ICs showed the best trade-off between model complexity and robustness and variance explained (PCs: |rz − max| = 0.33, |rraw − max| = 0.30; ICs: |rz − max| = 0.23, |rraw − max| = 0.19). Genomic PC and IC reproducibility improved substantially relative to mean univariate GWAS reproducibility up to dimension 10. Genomic components clustered along neuroimaging modalities. Our results indicate that genomic PCA and ICA decompose genetic effects on IDPs from GWAS statistics with high reproducibility by taking advantage of the inherent pleiotropic patterns. These findings encourage further applications of genomic PCA and ICA as fully data-driven methods to effectively reduce the dimensionality, enhance the signal to noise ratio and improve interpretability of high-dimensional multitrait genome-wide analyses.

Abstract

Memorializes Martin D. S. Braine, whose research on child language acquisition and on both child and adult thinking and reasoning had a major influence on modern cognitive psychology. Addressing meaning as well as position, Braine argued that children start acquiring language by learning narrow-scope positional formulas that map components of meaning to positions in the utterance. These proposals were critical in starting discussions of the possible universality of the pivot-grammar stage and of the role of syntax, semantics,and pragmatics in children's early grammar and were pivotal to the rise of approaches in which cognitive development in language acquisition is stressed.

Abstract

Animal vocal communication often relies on call sequences. The temporal patterns of such sequences can be adjusted to other callers, follow complex rhythmic structures or exhibit a metronome-like pattern (i.e., isochronous). How regular are the temporal patterns in animal signals, and what influences their precision? If present, are rhythms already there early in ontogeny? Here, we describe an exploratory study of Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) barks—a vocalisation type produced across many pinniped species in rhythmic, percussive bouts. This study is the first quantitative description of barking in Cape fur seal pups. We analysed the rhythmic structures of spontaneous barking bouts of pups and adult females from the breeding colony in Cape Cross, Namibia. Barks of adult females exhibited isochrony, that is they were produced at fairly regular points in time. Instead, intervals between pup barks were more variable, that is skipping a bark in the isochronous series occasionally. In both age classes, beat precision, that is how well the barks followed a perfect template, was worse when barking at higher rates. Differences could be explained by physiological factors, such as respiration or arousal. Whether, and how, isochrony develops in this species remains an open question. This study provides evidence towards a rhythmic production of barks in Cape fur seal pups and lays the groundwork for future studies to investigate the development of rhythm using multidimensional metrics.

Abstract

Four experiments examined segmentation of spoken Japanese words by native and non-native listeners. Previous studies suggested that language rhythm determines the segmentation unit most natural to native listeners: French has syllabic rhythm, and French listeners use the syllable in segmentation, while English has stress rhythm, and segmentation by English listeners is based on stress. The rhythm of Japanese is based on a subsyllabic unit, the mora. In the present experiments Japanese listeners′ response patterns were consistent with moraic segmentation; acoustic artifacts could not have determined the results since nonnative (English and French) listeners showed different response patterns with the same materials. Predictions of a syllabic hypothesis were disconfirmed in the Japanese listeners′ results; in contrast, French listeners showed a pattern of responses consistent with the syllabic hypothesis. The results provide further evidence that listeners′ segmentation of spoken words relies on procedures determined by the characteristic phonology of their native language.

Abstract

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

Abstract

Across the animal kingdom, neural responses in the auditory cortex are suppressed during vocalization, and humans are no exception. A common hypothesis is that suppression increases sensitivity to auditory feedback, enabling the detection of vocalization errors. This hypothesis has been previously confirmed in non-human primates, however a direct link between auditory suppression and sensitivity in human speech monitoring remains elusive. To address this issue, we obtained intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings from 35 neurosurgical participants during speech production. We first characterized the detailed topography of auditory suppression, which varied across superior temporal gyrus (STG). Next, we performed a delayed auditory feedback (DAF) task to determine whether the suppressed sites were also sensitive to auditory feedback alterations. Indeed, overlapping sites showed enhanced responses to feedback, indicating sensitivity. Importantly, there was a strong correlation between the degree of auditory suppression and feedback sensitivity, suggesting suppression might be a key mechanism that underlies speech monitoring. Further, we found that when participants produced speech with simultaneous auditory feedback, posterior STG was selectively activated if participants were engaged in a DAF paradigm, suggesting that increased attentional load can modulate auditory feedback sensitivity.

Abstract

Evaluation plays a role in the telling and understanding of narratives, in communicative interaction, emotional understanding, and in psychological well-being. This article reports a study of evaluation by describing how readers monitor the concerns of characters over the course of a narrative. The main hypothesis is that readers tract the well-being via the expression of a character's internal states. Reader evaluations were revealed in think aloud protocols obtained during reading of narrative texts, one sentence at a time. Five kinds of evaluative inferences were found: appraisals (good versus bad), preferences (like versus don't like), emotions (happy versus frustrated), goals (want versus don't want), or purposes (to attain or maintain X versus to prevent or avoid X). Readers evaluated all sentences. The mean rate of evaluation per sentence was 0.55. Positive and negative evaluations over the course of the story indicated that things initially went badly for characters, improved with the formulation and execution of goal plans, declined with goal failure, and improved as characters formulated new goals and succeeded. The kind of evaluation made depended upon the episodic category of the event and the event's temporal location in the story. Evaluations also served to explain or predict events. In making evaluations, readers stayed within the frame of the story and perspectives of the character or narrator. They also moved out of the narrative frame and addressed evaluations towards the experimenter in a communicative context.

Abstract

* These two authors contributed equally to this study
Statistical learning – the ability to extract distributional regularities from input – is suggested to be key to language acquisition. Yet, evidence for the human capacity for statistical learning comes mainly from studies conducted in carefully controlled settings without auditory distraction. While such conditions permit careful examination of learning, they do not reflect the naturalistic language learning experience, which is replete with auditory distraction – including competing talkers. Here, we examine how statistical language learning proceeds in a virtual cocktail party environment, where the to-be-learned input is presented alongside a competing speech stream with its own distributional regularities. During exposure, participants in the Dual Talker group concurrently heard two novel languages, one produced by a female talker and one by a male talker, with each talker virtually positioned at opposite sides of the listener (left/right) using binaural acoustic manipulations. Selective attention was manipulated by instructing participants to attend to only one of the two talkers. At test, participants were asked to distinguish words from part-words for both the attended and the unattended languages. Results indicated that participants’ accuracy was significantly higher for trials from the attended vs. unattended
language. Further, the performance of this Dual Talker group was no different compared to a control group who heard only one language from a single talker (Single Talker group). We thus conclude that statistical learning is modulated by selective attention, being relatively robust against the additional cognitive load provided by competing speech, emphasizing its efficiency in naturalistic language learning situations.

Abstract

Understanding the role of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in learning and memory is an important problem in cognitive neuroscience. Memory and learning processes that depend on the function of the MTL and related diencephalic structures (e.g., the anterior and mediodorsal thalamic nuclei) are defined as declarative. We have studied the MTL activity as indicated by regional cerebral blood flow with positron emission tomography and statistical parametric mapping during recall of abstract designs in a less practiced memory state as well as in a well-practiced (well-encoded) memory state. The results showed an increased activity of the MTL bilaterally (including parahippocampal gyrus extending into hippocampus proper, as well as anterior lingual and anterior fusiform gyri) during retrieval in the less practiced memory state compared to the well-practiced memory state, indicating a dynamic role of the MTL in retrieval during the learning processes. The results also showed that the activation of the MTL decreases as the subjects learn to draw abstract designs from memory, indicating a changing role of the MTL during recall in the earlier stages of acquisition compared to the well-encoded declarative memory state.

Abstract

In animals, the rhythmical properties of calls are known to be shaped by physical constraints and the necessity of conveying information. As a consequence, investigating rhythmical properties in relation to different environmental conditions can help to shed light on the relationship between environment and species behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Sciaena umbra (fam. Sciaenidae) male fish emit reproductive calls characterized by a simple isochronous, i.e., metronome-like rhythm (the so-called R-pattern). Here, S. umbra R-pattern rhythm properties were assessed and compared between four different sites located along the Mediterranean basin (Mallorca, Venice, Trieste, Crete); furthermore, for one location, two datasets collected 10 years apart were available. Recording sites differed in habitat types, vessel density and acoustic richness; despite this, S. umbra R-calls were isochronous across all locations. A degree of variability was found only when considering the beat frequency, which was temporally stable, but spatially variable, with the beat frequency being faster in one of the sites (Venice). Statistically, the beat frequency was found to be dependent on the season (i.e. month of recording) and potentially influenced by the presence of soniferous competitors and human-generated underwater noise. Overall, the general consistency in the measured rhythmical properties (isochrony and beat frequency) suggests their nature as a fitness-related trait in the context of the S. umbra reproductive behavior and calls for further evaluation as a communicative cue.

Abstract

In this study data from the first six months of 12 children s multiword speech were used to test the validity of Valian's (1991) syntactic perfor-mance-limitation account and Tomasello s (1992) verb-island account of early multiword speech with particular reference to the development of the English verb category. The results provide evidence for appropriate use of verb morphology, auxiliary verb structures, pronoun case marking, and SVO word order from quite early in development. However, they also demonstrate a great deal of lexical specificity in the children's use of these systems, evidenced by a lack of overlap in the verbs to which different morphological markers were applied, a lack of overlap in the verbs with which different auxiliary verbs were used, a disproportionate use of the first person singular nominative pronoun I, and a lack of overlap in the lexical items that served as the subjects and direct objects of transitive verbs. These findings raise problems for both a syntactic performance-limitation account and a strong verb-island account of the data and suggest the need to develop a more general lexiealist account of early multiword speech that explains why some words come to function as "islands" of organization in the child's grammar and others do not.

Abstract

In this study we test a number of different claims about the nature of stylistic variation at the “single-word” stage by examining the relation between variation in early vocabulary composition, variation in early language use, and variation in the structural and functional propreties of mothers' child-directed speech. Maternal-report and observational data were collected for 26 children at 10, 50, and 100 words, These were then correlated with a variety of different measures of maternal speech at 10 words, The results show substantial variation in the percentage of common nouns and unanalyzed phrases in children's vocabularies, and singficant relations between this variation and the way in which language is used by the child. They also reveal singficant relations between the way in whch mothers use language at 10 words and the way in chich their children use language at 50 words and between certain formal properties of mothers speech at 10 words and the percentage of common nouns and unanalyzed phrases in children's early vocabularies, However, most of these relations desappear when an attempt is made to control for ossible effects of the child on the mother at Time 1. The exception is a singficant negative correlation between mothers tendency to produce speech that illustrates word boundaries and the percentage of unanalyzed phrases at 50 and 100 words. This suggests that mothers whose sprech provides the child with information about where new words begin and end tend to have children with few unanalyzed. phrases in their early vocabularies.

Abstract

This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person marked subjects with third-person unmarked verbs and vice versa. Crucially, person violations with 1st person subjects (e.g., io *suona la chitarra “I plays-3rd-person the guitar”) yielded significantly shorter RTs in the SPRT and higher accuracy in the GJT than the opposite error type (e.g., il giornalista *esco spesso “the journalist go-1st-person out often”). This effect is consistent with the claim that when the first element in the dependency is marked (first person), the parser generates stronger predictions regarding upcoming agreeing elements. These results nicely align with work from the same populations investigating the impact of morphological markedness on grammatical gender agreement, suggesting that markedness impacts agreement similarly in two distinct grammatical domains and that sensitivity to markedness is more prevalent for HSs.

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been a slow but steady accumulation of psycholinguistic research focusing on typologically diverse languages. In this review, we provide an overview of the psycholinguistic research on Philippine languages at the sentence level. We first discuss the grammatical features of these languages that figure prominently in existing research. We identify four linguistic domains that have received attention from language researchers and summarize the empirical terrain. We advance two claims that emerge across these different domains: (a) The agent-first pressure plays a central role in many of the findings, and (b) the generalization that the patient argument is the syntactically privileged argument cannot be reduced to frequency, but instead is an emergent phenomenon caused by the alignment of competing pressures toward an optimal candidate. We connect these language-specific claims to language-general theories of sentence processing.

Abstract

A patient who already had Wernick's aphasia due to a left temporal lobe lesion suffered a severe deterioration specifically of auditory language comprehension, subsequent to right temporal lobe infarction. A detailed comparison of his new condition with his language status before the second stroke revealed that the newly acquired deficit was limited to tasks related to auditory input. Further investigations demonstrated a speech perceptual disorder, which we analysed as due to deficits both at the level of general auditory processes and at the level of phonetic analysis. We discuss some arguments related to hemisphere specialization of phonetic processing and to the disconnection explanation of word deafness that support the hypothesis of word deafness being generally caused by mixed deficits.

Abstract

In a recent series of papers, Caramazza and Miozzo [Caramazza, A., 1997. How many levels of processing are there in lexical access? Cognitive Neuropsychology 14, 177-208; Caramazza, A., Miozzo, M., 1997. The relation between syntactic and phonological knowledge in lexical access: evidence from the 'tip-of-the-tongue' phenomenon. Cognition 64, 309-343; Miozzo, M., Caramazza, A., 1997. On knowing the auxiliary of a verb that cannot be named: evidence for the independence of grammatical and phonological aspects of lexical knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuropsychology 9, 160-166] argued against the lemma/lexeme distinction made in many models of lexical access in speaking, including our network model [Roelofs, A., 1992. A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking. Cognition 42, 107-142; Levelt, W.J.M., Roelofs, A., Meyer, A.S., 1998. A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (in press)]. Their case was based on the observations that grammatical class deficits of brain-damaged patients and semantic errors may be restricted to either spoken or written forms and that the grammatical gender of a word and information about its form can be independently available in tip-of-the-tongue stales (TOTs). In this paper, we argue that though our model is about speaking, not taking position on writing, extensions to writing are possible that are compatible with the evidence from aphasia and speech errors. Furthermore, our model does not predict a dependency between gender and form retrieval in TOTs. Finally, we argue that Caramazza and Miozzo have not accounted for important parts of the evidence motivating the lemma/lexeme distinction, such as word frequency effects in homophone production, the strict ordering of gender and pho neme access in LRP data, and the chronometric and speech error evidence for the production of complex morphology.

Abstract

According to most models of speech production, the planning of spoken words involves the independent retrieval of segments and metrical frames followed by segment-to-frame association. In some models, the metrical frame includes a specification of the number and ordering of consonants and vowels, but in the word-form encoding by activation and verification (WEAVER) model (A. Roelofs, 1997), the frame specifies only the stress pattern across syllables. In 6 implicit priming experiments, on each trial, participants produced 1 word out of a small set as quickly as possible. In homogeneous sets, the response words shared word-initial segments, whereas in heterogeneous sets, they did not. Priming effects from shared segments depended on all response words having the same number of syllables and stress pattern, but not on their having the same number of consonants and vowels. No priming occurred when the response words had only the same metrical frame but shared no segments. Computer simulations demonstrated that WEAVER accounts for the findings.

Abstract

This article reports 7 experiments investigating whether utterances are planned in a parallel or rightward incremental fashion during language production. The experiments examined the role of linear order, length, frequency, and repetition in producing Dutch verb–particle combinations. On each trial, participants produced 1 utterance out of a set of 3 as quickly as possible. The responses shared part of their form or not. For particle-initial infinitives, facilitation was obtained when the responses shared the particle but not when they shared the verb. For verb-initial imperatives, however, facilitation was obtained for the verbs but not for the particles. The facilitation increased with length, decreased with frequency, and was independent of repetition. A simple rightward incremental model accounts quantitatively for the results.

Abstract

Lexical access in speaking consists of two major steps: lemma retrieval and word-form encoding. In Roelofs (Roelofs, A. 1992a. Cognition 42. 107-142; Roelofs. A. 1993. Cognition 47, 59-87.), I described a model of lemma retrieval. The present paper extends this work by presenting a comprehensive model of the second access step, word-form encoding. The model is called WEAVER (Word-form Encoding by Activation and VERification). Unlike other models of word-form generation, WEAVER is able to provide accounts of response time data, particularly from the picture-word interference paradigm and the implicit priming paradigm. Its key features are (1) retrieval by spreading activation, (2) verification of activated information by a production rule, (3) a rightward incremental construction of phonological representations using a principle of active syllabification, syllables are constructed on the fly rather than stored with lexical items, (4) active competitive selection of syllabic motor programs using a mathematical formalism that generates response times and (5) the association of phonological speech errors with the selection of syllabic motor programs due to the failure of verification.

Abstract

Studies investigating language commonly isolate one modality or process, focusing on comprehension or production. Here, we present a framework for a paradigm that combines both: the Concise Language Paradigm (CLaP), tapping into comprehension and production within one trial. The trial structure is identical across conditions, presenting a sentence followed by a picture to be named. We tested 21 healthy speakers with EEG to examine three time periods during a trial (sentence, pre-picture interval, picture onset), yielding contrasts of sentence comprehension, contextually and visually guided word retrieval, object recognition, and naming. In the CLaP, sentences are presented auditorily (constrained, unconstrained, reversed), and pictures appear as normal (constrained, unconstrained, bare) or scrambled objects. Imaging results revealed different evoked responses after sentence onset for normal and time-reversed speech. Further, we replicated the context effect of alpha-beta power decreases before picture onset for constrained relative to unconstrained sentences, and could clarify that this effect arises from power decreases following constrained sentences. Brain responses locked to picture-onset differed as a function of sentence context and picture type (normal vs. scrambled), and naming times were fastest for pictures in constrained sentences, followed by scrambled picture naming, and equally fast for bare and unconstrained picture naming. Finally, we also discuss the potential of the CLaP to be adapted to different focuses, using different versions of the linguistic content and tasks, in combination with electrophysiology or other imaging methods. These first results of the CLaP indicate that this paradigm offers a promising framework to investigate the language system.

Abstract

Although it is well established that self-related information can rapidly capture our attention and bias cognitive functioning, whether this self-bias can affect language processing remains largely unknown. In addition, there is an ongoing debate as to the functional independence of language processes, notably regarding the syntactic domain. Hence, this study investigated the influence of self-related content on syntactic speech processing. Participants listened to sentences that could contain morphosyntactic anomalies while the masked face identity (self, friend, or unknown faces) was presented for 16 msec preceding the critical word. The language-related ERP components (left anterior negativity [LAN] and P600) appeared for all identity conditions. However, the largest LAN effect followed by a reduced P600 effect was observed for self-faces, whereas a larger LAN with no reduction of the P600 was found for friend faces compared with unknown faces. These data suggest that both early and late syntactic processes can be modulated by self-related content. In addition, alpha power was more suppressed over the left inferior frontal gyrus only when self-faces appeared before the critical word. This may reflect higher semantic demands concomitant to early syntactic operations (around 150–550 msec). Our data also provide further evidence of self-specific response, as reflected by the N250 component. Collectively, our results suggest that identity-related information is rapidly decoded from facial stimuli and may impact core linguistic processes, supporting an interactive view of syntactic processing. This study provides evidence that the self-reference effect can be extended to syntactic processing.

Abstract

Language and social cognition come together in communication, but their relation has been intensely contested. Here, I argue that these two distinctively human abilities are connected in a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one cognitive skill boosts the development of the other. More specifically, I hypothesize that language and social cognition codevelop in ontogeny and coevolve in diachrony through the acquisition, mature use, and cultural evolution of reference systems (e.g., demonstratives: “this” vs. “that”; articles: “a” vs. “the”; pronouns: “I” vs. “you”). I propose to study the connection between reference systems and communicative social cognition across three parallel timescales—language acquisition, language use, and language change, as a new research program for cultural evolutionary pragmatics. Within that framework, I discuss the coevolution of language and communicative social cognition as cognitive gadgets, and introduce a new methodological approach to study how universals and cross-linguistic differences in reference systems may result in different developmental pathways to human social cognition.

Abstract

Handedness is a manifestation of brain hemispheric specialization. Left-handedness occurs at increased rates in neurodevelopmental disorders. Genome-wide association studies have identified common genetic effects on handedness or brain asymmetry, which mostly involve variants outside protein-coding regions and may affect gene expression. Implicated genes include several that encode tubulins (microtubule components) or microtubule-associated proteins. Here we examine whether left-handedness is also influenced by rare coding variants (frequencies ≤ 1%), using exome data from 38,043 left-handed and 313,271 right-handed individuals from the UK Biobank. The beta-tubulin gene TUBB4B shows exome-wide significant association, with a rate of rare coding variants 2.7 times higher in left-handers than right-handers. The TUBB4B variants are mostly heterozygous missense changes, but include two frameshifts found only in left-handers. Other TUBB4B variants have been linked to sensorineural and/or ciliopathic disorders, but not the variants found here. Among genes previously implicated in autism or schizophrenia by exome screening, DSCAM and FOXP1 show evidence for rare coding variant association with left-handedness. The exome-wide heritability of left-handedness due to rare coding variants was 0.91%. This study reveals a role for rare, protein-altering variants in left-handedness, providing further evidence for the involvement of microtubules and disorder-relevant genes.

Abstract

To investigate the role of the syllable in Dutch speech production, five experiments were carried out to examine the effect of visually masked syllable primes on the naming latencies for written words and pictures. Targets had clear syllable boundaries and began with a CV syllable (e.g., ka.no) or a CVC syllable (e.g., kak.tus), or had ambiguous syllable boundaries and began with a CV[C] syllable (e.g., ka[pp]er). In the syllable match condition, bisyllabic Dutch nouns or verbs were preceded by primes that were identical to the target’s first syllable. In the syllable mismatch condition, the prime was either shorter or longer than the target’s first syllable. A neutral condition was also included. None of the experiments showed a syllable priming effect. Instead, all related primes facilitated the naming of the targets. It is concluded that the syllable does not play a role in the process of phonological encoding in Dutch. Because the amount of facilitation increased with increasing overlap between prime and target, the priming effect is accounted for by a segmental overlap hypothesis.

Abstract

A series of experiments was carried out to investigate the syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants following short vowels, long vowels, and schwa in Dutch. Special interest was paid to words such as letter ['leter] ''id.,'' where a short vowel is followed by a single consonant. On phonological grounds one may predict that the first syllable should always be closed, but earlier psycholinguistic research had shown that speakers tend to leave these syllables open. In our experiments, bisyllabic word forms were presented aurally, and participants produced their syllables in reversed order (Experiments 1 through 5), or repeated the words inserting a pause between the syllables (Experiment 6). The results showed that participants generally closed syllables with a short vowel. However, in a significant number of the cases they produced open short vowel syllables. Syllables containing schwa, like syllables with a long vowel, were hardly ever closed. Word stress, the phonetic quality of the vowel in the first syllable, and the experimental context influenced syllabification. Taken together, the experiments show that native speakers syllabify bisyllabic Dutch nouns in accordance with a small set of prosodic output constraints. To account for the variability of the results, we propose that these constraints differ in their probabilities of being applied.

Abstract

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

Abstract

The present study investigated to what extent children, compared to adults, benefit from gestures to disambiguate degraded speech by manipulating speech signals and manual modality. Dutch-speaking adults (N = 20) and 6- and 7-year-old children (N = 15) were presented with a series of video clips in which an actor produced a Dutch action verb with or without an accompanying iconic gesture. Participants were then asked to repeat what they had heard. The speech signal was either clear or altered into 4- or 8-band noise-vocoded speech. Children had more difficulty than adults in disambiguating degraded speech in the speech-only condition. However, when presented with both speech and gestures, children reached a comparable level of accuracy to that of adults in the degraded-speech-only condition. Furthermore, for adults, the enhancement of gestures was greater in the 4-band condition than in the 8-band condition, whereas children showed the opposite pattern. Gestures help children to disambiguate degraded speech, but children need more phonological information than adults to benefit from use of gestures. Children’s multimodal language integration needs to further develop to adapt flexibly to challenging situations such as degraded speech, as tested in our study, or instances where speech is heard with environmental noise or through a face mask.

Abstract

This article discusses how the Trobriand Islanders speak about body and mind. It addresses the following questions: do the linguistic datafit into theories about lexical universals of body-part terminology? Can we make inferences about the Trobrianders' conceptualization of psychological and physical states on the basis of these data? If a Trobriand Islander sees these idioms as external manifestations of inner states, then can we interpret them as a kind of ethnopsychological theory about the body and its role for emotions, knowledge, thought, memory, and so on? Can these idioms be understood as representation of Trobriand ethnopsychological theory?

Abstract

Different talkers speak differently, even within the same homogeneous group. These differences lead to acoustic variability in speech, causing challenges for correct perception of the intended message. Because previous descriptions of this acoustic variability have focused mostly on segments, talker variability in prosodic structures is not yet well documented. The present study therefore examined acoustic between-talker variability in word stress in Dutch. We recorded 40 native Dutch talkers from a participant sample with minimal dialectal variation and balanced gender, producing segmentally overlapping words (e.g., VOORnaam vs. voorNAAM; ‘first name’ vs. ‘respectable’, capitalization indicates lexical stress), and measured different acoustic cues to stress. Each individual participant’s acoustic measurements were analyzed using Linear Discriminant Analyses, which provide coefficients for each cue, reflecting the strength of each cue in a talker’s productions. On average, talkers primarily used mean F0, intensity, and duration. Moreover, each participant also employed a unique combination of cues, illustrating large prosodic variability between talkers. In fact, classes of cue-weighting tendencies emerged, differing in which cue was used as the main cue. These results offer the most comprehensive acoustic description, to date, of word stress in Dutch, and illustrate that large prosodic variability is present between individual talkers.

Abstract

Background: Positive parental interactions may buffer maltreated children from poor psychosocial outcomes. The study aims to evaluate the associations between various types of maltreatment and psychosocial outcomes in early childhood, and examine the moderating effect of positive parent-child interactions on them.

Methods: Data were from a representative Chinese 6-year-old children sample (n = 17,088). Caregivers reported the history of child maltreatment perpetrated by any individuals, completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire as a proxy for psychosocial well-being, and reported the frequency of their interactions with children by the Chinese Parent-Child Interaction Scale.

Results: Physical abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse were all associated with higher odds of psychosocial problems (aOR = 1.90 [95% CI: 1.57-2.29], aOR = 1.92 [95% CI: 1.75-2.10], aOR = 1.64 [95% CI: 1.17-2.30], aOR = 2.03 [95% CI: 1.30-3.17]). Positive parent-child interactions were associated with lower odds of psychosocial problems after accounting for different types of maltreatment. The moderating effect of frequent parent-child interactions was found only in the association between occasional only physical abuse and psychosocial outcomes (interaction term: aOR = 0.34, 95% CI: 0.15-0.77).

Conclusions: Maltreatment and positive parent-child interactions have impacts on psychosocial well-being in early childhood. Positive parent-child interactions could only buffer the adverse effect of occasional physical abuse on psychosocial outcomes. More frequent parent-child interactions may be an important intervention opportunity among some children.

Impact: It provides the first data on the prevalence of different single types and combinations of maltreatment in early childhood in Shanghai, China by drawing on a city-level population-representative sample. It adds to evidence that different forms and degrees of maltreatment were all associated with a higher risk of psychosocial problems in early childhood. Among them, sexual abuse posed the highest risk, followed by emotional abuse. It innovatively found that higher frequencies of parent-child interactions may provide buffering effects only to children who are exposed to occasional physical abuse. It provides a potential intervention opportunity, especially for physically abused children.

Abstract

A t(X;1)(p11.2;q21.2) has been reported in cases of papillary renal cell tumors arising in males. In this study two cell lines derived from this tumor type have been used to indicate the breakpoint region on the X chromosome. Both cell lines have the translocation in addition to other rearrangements and one is derived from the first female case to be reported with the t(X;1)(p11.2;q21.2). Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) has been used to position YACs belonging to contigs in the Xp11.2 region relative to the breakpoint. When considered together with detailed mapping information from the Xp11.2 region the position of the breakpoint in both cell lines was suggested as follows: Xpter-->Xp11.23-OATL1-GATA1-WAS-TFE3-SY P-t(X;1)-DXS255-CLCN5-DXS146-OATL2- Xp11.22-->Xcen. The breakpoint was determined to lie in an uncloned region between SYP and a YAC called FTDM/1 which extends 1 Mb distal to DXS255. These results are contrary to the conclusion from previous FISH studies that the breakpoint was near the OATL2 locus, but are consistent with, and considerably refine, the position that had been established by molecular analysis.

Abstract

Aboriginal languages threatened by speakers poor economic and social conditions; some may survive through support for community development, language maintenance, bilingual education and training of Aboriginal teachers and linguists, and nonAboriginal teachers of Aboriginal and Islander students.

Abstract

A quantitative model of human categorization behavior is proposed, which can be applied to 4-alternative forced-choice categorization data involving two binary classifications. A number of processing dependencies between the two classifications are explicitly formulated, such as the dependence of the location, orientation, and steepness of the class boundary for one classification on the outcome of the other classification. The significance of various types of dependencies can be tested statistically. Analyses of a data set from the literature shows that interesting dependencies in human speech recognition can be uncovered using the model.

Abstract

Recent studies of aging organisms have identified a systematic phenomenon, characterized by a negative correlation between gene length and their expression in various cell types, species, and diseases. We term this phenomenon gene-length-dependent transcription decline (GLTD) and suggest that it may represent a bottleneck in the transcription machinery and thereby significantly contribute to aging as an etiological factor. We review potential links between GLTD and key aging processes such as DNA damage and explore their potential in identifying disease modification targets. Notably, in Alzheimer’s disease, GLTD spotlights extremely long synaptic genes at chromosomal fragile sites (CFSs) and their vulnerability to postmitotic DNA damage. We suggest that GLTD is an integral element of biological aging.