Publications

Abstract

A commentary on
FOXP2 drives neuronal differentiation by interacting with retinoic acid signaling pathways

by Devanna, P., Middelbeek, J., and Vernes, S. C. (2014). Front. Cell. Neurosci. 8:305. doi: 10.3389/fncel.2014.00305

Abstract

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a common developmental disorder haracterized by difficulties in language acquisition despite otherwise normal development and in the absence of any obvious explanatory factors. We performed a high-density screen of SLI1, a region of chromosome 16q that shows highly significant and consistent linkage to nonword repetition, a measure of phonological short-term memory that is commonly impaired in SLI. Using two independent language-impaired samples, one family-based (211 families) and another selected from a population cohort on the basis of extreme language measures (490 cases), we detected association to two genes in the SLI1 region: that encoding c-maf-inducing protein (CMIP, minP = 5.5 × 10−7 at rs6564903) and that encoding calcium-transporting ATPase, type2C, member2 (ATP2C2, minP = 2.0 × 10−5 at rs11860694). Regression modeling indicated that each of these loci exerts an independent effect upon nonword repetition ability. Despite the consistent findings in language-impaired samples, investigation in a large unselected cohort (n = 3612) did not detect association. We therefore propose that variants in CMIP and ATP2C2 act to modulate phonological short-term memory primarily in the context of language impairment. As such, this investigation supports the hypothesis that some causes of language impairment are distinct from factors that influence normal language variation. This work therefore implicates CMIP and ATP2C2 in the etiology of SLI and provides molecular evidence for the importance of phonological short-term memory in language acquisition.

Abstract

The ability to design tailored messages for specific listeners is an important aspect of
human communication. The present study investigates whether a mere belief about an
addressee’s identity influences the generation and production of a communicative message in
a novel, non-verbal communication task. Participants were made to believe they were playing a game with a child or an adult partner, while a confederate acted as both child
and adult partners with matched performance and response times. The participants’ belief
influenced their behavior, spending longer when interacting with the presumed child
addressee, but only during communicative portions of the game, i.e. using time as a tool
to place emphasis on target information. This communicative adaptation attenuated with
experience, and it was related to personality traits, namely Empathy and Need for Cognition
measures. Overall, these findings indicate that novel nonverbal communicative interactions
are selected according to a socio-centric perspective, and they are strongly
influenced by participants’ traits.

Abstract

Motor cortex activation observed during body-related verb processing hints at simulation accompanying linguistic understanding. By exploiting the up- and down-regulation that anodal and cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) exert on motor cortical excitability, we aimed at further characterizing the functional contribution of the motor system to linguistic processing. In a double-blind sham-controlled within-subjects design, online stimulation was applied to the left hemispheric hand-related motor cortex of 20 healthy subjects. A dual, double-dissociation task required participants to semantically discriminate concrete (hand/foot) from abstract verb primes as well as to respond with the hand or with the foot to verb-unrelated geometric targets. Analyses were conducted with linear mixed models. Semantic priming was confirmed by faster and more accurate reactions when the response effector was congruent with the verb’s body part. Cathodal stimulation induced faster responses for hand verb primes thus indicating a somatotopical distribution of cortical activation as induced by body-related verbs. Importantly, this effect depended on performance in semantic discrimination. The current results point to verb processing being selectively modifiable by neuromodulation and at the same time to a dependence of tDCS effects on enhanced simulation. We discuss putative mechanisms operating in this reciprocal dependence of neuromodulation and motor resonance.

Abstract

The present study discusses psycholinguistic evidence for a difference between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology by investigating the processing of Finnish inflected and cliticized words. The data are derived from three sources of Finnish: from single-word reading performance in an agrammatic deep dyslectic speaker, as well as from visual lexical decision and wordness/learnability ratings of cliticized vs. inflected items by normal Finnish speakers. The agrammatic speaker showed awareness of the suffixes in multimorphemic words, including clitics, since he attempted to fill in this slot with morphological material. However, he never produced a clitic — either as the correct response or as an error — in any morphological configuration (simplex, derived, inflected, compound). Moreover, he produced more nominative singular errors for case-inflected nouns than he did for the cliticized words, a pattern that is expected if case-inflected forms were closely associated with their lexical heads, i.e., if they were paradigmatic and cliticized words were not. Furthermore, a visual lexical decision task with normal speakers of Finnish, showed an additional processing cost (longer latencies and more errors on cliticized than on case-inflected noun forms). Finally, a rating task indicated no difference in relative wordness between these two types of words. However, the same cliticized words were judged harder to learn as L2 items than the inflected words, most probably due to their conceptual/semantic properties, in other words due to their lack of word-level translation equivalents in SAVE languages. Taken together, the present results suggest that the distinction between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology is psychologically real.

Abstract

The ability to use words to refer to the world is vital to the communicative power of human language. In particular, the anaphoric use of words to refer to previously mentioned concepts (antecedents) allows dialogue to be coherent and meaningful. Psycholinguistic theory posits that anaphor comprehension involves reactivating a memory representation of the antecedent. Whereas this implies the involvement of recognition memory, or the mnemonic sub-routines by which people distinguish old from new, the neural processes for reference resolution are largely unknown. Here, we report time-frequency analysis of four EEG experiments to reveal the increased coupling of functional neural systems associated with referentially coherent expressions compared to referentially problematic expressions. Despite varying in modality, language, and type of referential expression, all experiments showed larger gamma-band power for referentially coherent expressions compared to referentially problematic expressions. Beamformer analysis in high-density Experiment 4 localised the gamma-band increase to posterior parietal cortex around 400-600 ms after anaphor-onset and to frontaltemporal cortex around 500-1000 ms. We argue that the observed gamma-band power increases reflect successful referential binding and resolution, which links incoming information to antecedents through an interaction between the brain’s recognition memory networks and frontal-temporal language network. We integrate these findings with previous results from patient and neuroimaging studies, and we outline a nascent cortico-hippocampal theory of reference.

Abstract

Background: Several nonpsychotic psychiatric disorders in childhood and adolescence can precede the onset of schizophrenia, but the etiology of this relationship remains unclear. We investigated to what extent the association between schizophrenia and psychiatric disorders in childhood is explained by correlated genetic risk factors. Methods: Polygenic risk scores (PRS), reflecting an individual’s genetic risk for schizophrenia, were constructed for 2588 children from the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR) and 6127 from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents And Children (ALSPAC). The associations between schizophrenia PRS and measures of anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and oppositional defiant disorder/conduct disorder (ODD/CD) were estimated at age 7, 10, 12/13, and 15 years in the 2 cohorts. Results were then meta-analyzed, and a meta-regression analysis was performed to test differences in effects sizes over, age and disorders. Results: Schizophrenia PRS were associated with childhood and adolescent psychopathology. Meta-regression analysis showed differences in the associations over disorders, with the strongest association with childhood and adolescent depression and a weaker association for ODD/CD at age 7. The associations increased with age and this increase was steepest for ADHD and ODD/CD. Genetic correlations varied between 0.10 and 0.25. Conclusion: By optimally using longitudinal data across diagnoses in a multivariate meta-analysis this study sheds light on the development of childhood disorders into severe adult psychiatric disorders. The results are consistent with a common genetic etiology of schizophrenia and developmental psychopathology as well as with a stronger shared genetic etiology between schizophrenia and adolescent onset psychopathology.

Abstract

This study sought to identify trajectories of DSM-IV based internalizing (INT) and externalizing (EXT) problem scores across childhood and adolescence and to provide insight into the comorbidity by modeling the co-occurrence of INT and EXT trajectories. INT and EXT were measured repeatedly between age 7 and age 15 years in over 7,000 children and analyzed using growth mixture models. Five trajectories were identified for both INT and EXT, including very low, low, decreasing, and increasing trajectories. In addition, an adolescent onset trajectory was identified for INT and a stable high trajectory was identified for EXT. Multinomial regression showed that similar EXT and INT trajectories were associated. However, the adolescent onset INT trajectory was independent of high EXT trajectories, and persisting EXT was mainly associated with decreasing INT. Sex and early life environmental risk factors predicted EXT and, to a lesser extent, INT trajectories. The association between trajectories indicates the need to consider comorbidity when a child presents with INT or EXT disorders, particularly when symptoms start early. This is less necessary when INT symptoms start at adolescence. Future studies should investigate the etiology of co-occurring INT and EXT and the specific treatment needs of these severely affected children.

Abstract

Human communication has been described as involving the coding-decoding of a conventional symbol system, which could be supported by parts of the human motor system (i.e. the “mirror neurons system”). However, this view does not explain how these conventions could develop in the first place. Here we target the neglected but crucial issue of how people organize their non-verbal behavior to communicate a given intention without pre-established conventions. We have measured behavioral and brain responses in pairs of subjects during communicative exchanges occurring in a real, interactive, on-line social context. In two fMRI studies, we found robust evidence that planning new communicative actions (by a sender) and recognizing the communicative intention of the same actions (by a receiver) relied on spatially overlapping portions of their brains (the right posterior superior temporal sulcus). The response of this region was lateralized to the right hemisphere, modulated by the ambiguity in meaning of the communicative acts, but not by their sensorimotor complexity. These results indicate that the sender of a communicative signal uses his own intention recognition system to make a prediction of the intention recognition performed by the receiver. This finding supports the notion that our communicative abilities are distinct from both sensorimotor processes and language abilities.

Abstract

Speech perception requires the decoding of complex acoustic patterns. According to most cognitive models of spoken word recognition, this complexity is dealt with before lexical access via a process of abstraction from the acoustic signal to pre-lexical categories. It is currently unclear how these categories are implemented in the auditory cortex. Recent advances in animal neurophysiology and human functional imaging have made it possible to investigate the processing of speech in terms of probabilistic cortical maps rather than simple cognitive subtraction, which will enable us to relate neurometric data more directly to behavioural studies. We suggest that integration of insights from cognitive science, neurophysiology and functional imaging is necessary for furthering our understanding of pre-lexical abstraction in the cortex.

Abstract

Lateralization is a fundamental principle of nervous system organization but its molecular determinants are mostly unknown. In humans, asymmetric gene expression in the fetal cortex has been suggested as the molecular basis of handedness. However, human fetuses already show considerable asymmetries in arm movements before the motor cortex is functionally linked to the spinal cord, making it more likely that spinal gene expression asymmetries form the molecular basis of handedness. We analyzed genome-wide mRNA expression and DNA methylation in cervical and anterior thoracal spinal cord segments of five human fetuses and show development-dependent gene expression asymmetries. These gene expression asymmetries were epigenetically regulated by miRNA expression asymmetries in the TGF-β signaling pathway and lateralized methylation of CpG islands. Our findings suggest that molecular mechanisms for epigenetic regulation within the spinal cord constitute the starting point for handedness, implying a fundamental shift in our understanding of the ontogenesis of hemispheric asymmetries in humans

Abstract

The acoustic realisation of a speech sound varies, often showing allophonic variation triggered by surrounding sounds. Listeners recognise words and sounds well despite such variation, and even make use of allophonic variability in processing. This study reports five experiments on processing of the reduced/unreduced allophonic alternation of Japanese high vowels. The results show that listeners use phonological knowledge of their native language during phoneme processing and word recognition. However, interactions of the phonological and acoustic effects differ in these two processes. A facilitatory phonological effect and an inhibitory acoustic effect cancel one another out in phoneme processing; while in word recognition, the facilitatory phonological effect overrides the inhibitory acoustic effect. Four potential models of the processing of allophonic variation are discussed. The results can be accommodated in two of them, but require additional assumptions or modifications to the models, and primarily support lexical specification of allophonic variability.

Abstract

Do all components of a sign contribute equally to its recognition? In the present study, misperceptions in the sign-spotting task (based on the word-spotting task; Cutler & Norris, 1988) were analyzed to address this question. Three groups of deaf signers of British Sign Language (BSL) with different ages of acquisition (AoA) saw BSL signs combined with nonsense signs, along with combinations of two nonsense signs. They were asked to spot real signs and report what they had spotted. We will present an analysis of false alarms to the nonsense-sign combinations—that is, misperceptions of nonsense signs as real signs (cf. van Ooijen, 1996). Participants modified the movement and handshape parameters more than the location parameter. Within this pattern, however, there were differences as a function of AoA. These results show that the theoretical distinctions between form-based parameters in sign-language models have consequences for online processing. Vowels and consonants have different roles in speech recognition; similarly, it appears that movement, handshape, and location parameters contribute differentially to sign recognition.

Abstract

The study of iconicity, defined as the direct relationship between a linguistic form and its referent, has gained momentum in recent years across a wide range of disciplines. In the spoken modality, there is abundant evidence showing that iconicity is a key factor that facilitates language acquisition. However, when we look at sign languages, which excel in the prevalence of iconic structures, there is a more mixed picture, with some studies showing a positive effect and others showing a null or negative effect. In an attempt to reconcile the existing evidence the present review presents a critical overview of the literature on the acquisition of a sign language as first (L1) and second (L2) language and points at some factor that may be the source of disagreement. Regarding sign L1 acquisition, the contradicting findings may relate to iconicity being defined in a very broad sense when a more fine-grained operationalisation might reveal an effect in sign learning. Regarding sign L2 acquisition, evidence shows that there is a clear dissociation in the effect of iconicity in that it facilitates conceptual-semantic aspects of sign learning but hinders the acquisition of the exact phonological form of signs. It will be argued that when we consider the gradient nature of iconicity and that signs consist of a phonological form attached to a meaning we can discern how iconicity impacts sign learning in positive and negative ways

Abstract

Recent research on signed as well as spoken language shows that the iconic features of the target language might play a role in language development. Here, we ask further whether different types of iconic depictions modulate children’s preferences for certain types of sign-referent links during vocabulary development in sign language. Results from a picture description task indicate that lexical signs with 2 possible variants are used in different proportions by deaf signers from different age groups. While preschool and school-age children favored variants representing actions associated with their referent (e.g., a writing hand for the sign PEN), adults preferred variants representing the perceptual features of those objects (e.g., upward index finger representing a thin, elongated object for the sign PEN). Deaf parents interacting with their children, however, used action- and perceptual-based variants in equal proportion and favored action variants more than adults signing to other adults. We propose that when children are confronted with 2 variants for the same concept, they initially prefer action-based variants because they give them the opportunity to link a linguistic label to familiar schemas linked to their action/motor experiences. Our results echo findings showing a bias for action-based depictions in the development of iconic co-speech gestures suggesting a modality bias for such representations during development.

Abstract

The notion that processing spoken (object) words involves activation of category-specific representations in visual cortex is a key prediction of modality-specific theories of representation that contrasts with theories assuming dedicated conceptual representational systems abstracted away from sensorimotor systems. In the present study, we investigated whether participants can detect otherwise invisible pictures of objects when they are presented with the corresponding spoken word shortly before the picture appears. Our results showed facilitated detection for congruent ("bottle" -> picture of a bottle) vs. incongruent ("bottle" -> picture of a banana) trials. A second experiment investigated the time-course of the effect by manipulating the timing of picture presentation relative to word onset and revealed that it arises as soon as 200-400ms after word onset and decays at 600ms after word onset. Together, these data strongly suggest that spoken words can rapidly activate low-level category-specific visual representations that affect the mere detection of a stimulus, i.e. what we see. More generally our findings fit best with the notion that spoken words activate modality-specific visual representations that are low-level enough to provide information related to a given token and at the same time abstract enough to be relevant not only for previously seen tokens but also for generalizing to novel exemplars one has never seen before.

Abstract

It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual representations contribute functionally to concrete word comprehension using an interference paradigm. We interfered with basic visual processing while participants performed a concreteness task (Experiment 1), a lexical decision task (Experiment 2), and a word class judgment task (Experiment 3). We found that visual noise interfered more with concrete vs. abstract word processing, but only when the task required visual information to be accessed. This suggests that basic visual processes can be causally involved in language comprehension, but that their recruitment is not automatic and rather depends on the type of information that is required in a given task situation.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that processing words with an up/down association (e.g., bird, foot) can influence the subsequent identification of visual targets in congruent location (at the top/bottom of the screen). However, as facilitation and interference were found under similar conditions, the nature of the underlying mechanisms remained unclear. We propose that word comprehension relies on the perceptual simulation of a prototypical event involving the entity denoted by a word in order to provide a general account of the different findings. In three experiments, participants had to discriminate between two target pictures appearing at the top or the bottom of the screen by pressing the left vs. right button. Immediately before the targets appeared, they saw an up/down word belonging to the target’s event, an up/down word unrelated to the target, or a spatially neutral control word. Prime words belonging to target event facilitated identification of targets at 250ms SOA (experiment 1), but only when presented in the vertical location where they are typically seen, indicating that targets were integrated in the simulations activated by the prime words. Moreover, at the same SOA, there was a robust facilitation effect for targets appearing in their typical location regardless of the prime type. However, when words were presented for 100ms (experiment 2) or 800ms (experiment 3), only a location non-specific priming effect was found, suggesting that the visual system was not activated. Implications for theories of semantic processing are discussed.

Abstract

Prior research has indicated that readers and listeners can use information in the prior discourse to rapidly predict specific upcoming words, as the text is unfolding. Here we used event-related potentials to explore whether the ability to make rapid online predictions depends on a reader's working memory capacity (WMC). Readers with low WMC were hypothesized to differ from high WMC readers either in their overall capability to make predictions (because of their lack of cognitive resources). High and low WMC participants read highly constraining stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun, mixed with coherent but essentially unpredictive ‘prime control’ control stories that contained the same content words as the predictive stories. To test whether readers were anticipating upcoming words, critical nouns were preceded by a determiner whose gender agreed or disagreed with the gender of the expected noun. In predictive stories, both high and low WMC readers displayed an early negative deflection (300–600 ms) to unexpected determiners, which was not present in prime control stories. Only the low WMC participants displayed an additional later negativity (900–1500 ms) to unexpected determiners. This pattern of results suggests that WMC does not influence the ability to anticipate upcoming words per se, but does change the way in which readers deal with information that disconfirms the generated prediction.

Abstract

Human speech can be comprehended using only auditory information from the talker's voice. However, comprehension is improved if the talker's face is visible, especially if the auditory information is degraded as occurs in noisy environments or with hearing loss. We explored the neural substrates of audiovisual speech perception using electrocorticography, direct recording of neural activity using electrodes implanted on the cortical surface. We observed a double dissociation in the responses to audiovisual speech with clear and noisy auditory component within the superior temporal gyrus (STG), a region long known to be important for speech perception. Anterior STG showed greater neural activity to audiovisual speech with clear auditory component, whereas posterior STG showed similar or greater neural activity to audiovisual speech in which the speech was replaced with speech-like noise. A distinct border between the two response patterns was observed, demarcated by a landmark corresponding to the posterior margin of Heschl's gyrus. To further investigate the computational roles of both regions, we considered Bayesian models of multisensory integration, which predict that combining the independent sources of information available from different modalities should reduce variability in the neural responses. We tested this prediction by measuring the variability of the neural responses to single audiovisual words. Posterior STG showed smaller variability than anterior STG during presentation of audiovisual speech with noisy auditory component. Taken together, these results suggest that posterior STG but not anterior STG is important for multisensory integration of noisy auditory and visual speech.

Abstract

In everyday communication speakers often refer in speech and/or gesture to objects in their immediate environment, thereby shifting their addressee's attention to an intended referent. The neurobiological infrastructure involved in the comprehension of such basic multimodal communicative acts remains unclear. In an event-related fMRI study, we presented participants with pictures of a speaker and two objects while they concurrently listened to her speech. In each picture, one of the objects was singled out, either through the speaker's index-finger pointing gesture or through a visual cue that made the object perceptually more salient in the absence of gesture. A mismatch (compared to a match) between speech and the object singled out by the speaker's pointing gesture led to enhanced activation in left IFG and bilateral pMTG, showing the importance of these areas in conceptual matching between speech and referent. Moreover, a match (compared to a mismatch) between speech and the object made salient through a visual cue led to enhanced activation in the mentalizing system, arguably reflecting an attempt to converge on a jointly attended referent in the absence of pointing. These findings shed new light on the neurobiological underpinnings of the core communicative process of comprehending a speaker's multimodal referential act and stress the power of pointing as an important natural device to link speech to objects.

Abstract

Gesture-first theories of language origins often raise two unsubstantiated arguments against vocal origins. First, they argue that great ape vocal behavior is highly constrained, limited to a fixed, species-typical repertoire of reflexive calls. Second, they argue that vocalizations lack any significant potential to ground meaning through iconicity, or resemblance between form and meaning. This paper reviews the considerable evidence that debunks these two “myths”. Accumulating evidence shows that the great apes exercise voluntary control over their vocal behavior, including their breathing, larynx, and supralaryngeal articulators. They are also able to learn new vocal behaviors, and even show some rudimentary ability for vocal imitation. In addition, an abundance of research demonstrates that the vocal modality affords rich potential for iconicity. People can understand iconicity in sound symbolism, and they can produce iconic vocalizations to communicate a diverse range of meanings. Thus, two of the primary arguments against vocal origins theories are not tenable. As an alternative, the paper concludes that the origins of language – going as far back as our last common ancestor with great apes – are rooted in iconicity in both gesture and vocalization.

Abstract

Great apes and siamangs—but not humans—possess laryngeal air sacs, suggesting that they were lost over hominin evolution. The absence of air sacs in humans may hold clues to speech evolution, but little is known about their functions in extant apes. We investigated whether gorillas use their air sacs to produce the staccato ‘growling’ of the silverback chest beat display. This hypothesis was formulated after viewing a nature documentary showing a display by a silverback western gorilla (Kingo). As Kingo growls, the video shows distinctive vibrations in his chest and throat under which the air sacs extend. We also investigated whether other similarly staccato vocalizations—the whinny, sex whinny, and copulation grunt—might also involve the air sacs. To examine these hypotheses, we collected an opportunistic sample of video and audio evidence from research records and another documentary of Kingo’s group, and from videos of other gorillas found on YouTube. Analysis shows that the four vocalizations are each emitted in rapid pulses of a similar frequency (8–16 pulses per second), and limited visual evidence indicates that they may all occur with upper torso vibrations. Future research should determine how consistently the vibrations co-occur with the vocalizations, whether they are synchronized, and their precise location and timing. Our findings fit with the hypothesis that apes—especially, but not exclusively males—use their air sacs for vocalizations and displays related to size exaggeration for sex and territory. Thus changes in social structure, mating, and sexual dimorphism might have led to the obsolescence of the air sacs and their loss in hominin evolution.

Abstract

While autism is one of the most intensively researched psychiatric disorders, little is known about reasoning skills of people with autism. The focus of this study was on defeasible inferences, that is inferences that can be revised in the light of new information. We used a behavioral task to investigate (a) conditional reasoning and (b) the suppression of conditional inferences in high-functioning adults with autism. In the suppression task a possible exception was made salient which could prevent a conclusion from being drawn. We predicted that the autism group would have difficulties dealing with such exceptions because they require mental flexibility to adjust to the context, which is often impaired in autism. The findings confirm our hypothesis that high-functioning adults with autism have a specific difficulty with exception-handling during reasoning. It is suggested that defeasible reasoning is also involved in other cognitive domains. Implications for neural underpinnings of reasoning and autism are discussed.

Abstract

Although people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have severe problems with pragmatic aspects of language, little is known about their pragmatic reasoning. We carried out a behavioral study on highfunctioning adults with autistic disorder (n = 11) and Asperger syndrome (n = 17) and matched controls (n = 28) to investigate whether they are capable of deriving scalar implicatures, which are generally considered to be pragmatic inferences. Participants were presented with underinformative sentences like ‘‘Some sparrows are birds’’. This sentence is logically true, but pragmatically inappropriate if the scalar implicature ‘‘Not all sparrows are birds’’ is derived. The present findings indicate that the combined ASD group was just as likely as controls to derive scalar implicatures, yet there was a difference between participants with autistic disorder and Asperger syndrome, suggesting a potential differentiation between these disorders in pragmatic reasoning. Moreover, our results suggest that verbal intelligence is a constraint for task performance in autistic disorder but not in Asperger syndrome.

Abstract

Adults and children acquire knowledge of the structure of their environment on the basis of repeated exposure to samples of structured stimuli. In the study of inductive learning, a straightforward issue is how much sample information is needed to learn the structure. The present study distinguishes between two measures for the amount of information in the sample: set size and the extent to which the set of exemplars statistically covers the underlying structure. In an artificial grammar learning experiment, learning was affected by the sample’s statistical coverage of the grammar, but not by its mere size. Our result suggests an alternative explanation of the set size effects on learning found in previous studies (McAndrews & Moscovitch, 1985; Meulemans & Van der Linden, 1997), because, as we argue, set size was confounded with statistical coverage in these studies. nt]mis|This research was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We thank Jarry Porsius for his help with the data analyses.

Abstract

Learning local regularities in sequentially structured materials is typically assumed to be based on encoding of the frequencies of these regularities. We explore the view that transitional probabilities between elements of chunks, rather than frequencies of chunks, may be the primary factor in artificial grammar learning (AGL). The transitional probability model (TPM) that we propose is argued to provide an adaptive and parsimonious strategy for encoding local regularities in order to induce sequential structure from an input set of exemplars of the grammar. In a variant of the AGL procedure, in which participants estimated the frequencies of bigrams occurring in a set of exemplars they had been exposed to previously, participants were shown to be more sensitive to local transitional probability information than to mere pattern frequencies.

Abstract

Cognates share their form and meaning across languages: “winter” in English means the same as “winter” in Dutch. Research has shown that bilinguals process cognates more quickly than words that exist in one language only (e.g. “ant” in English). This finding is taken as strong evidence for the claim that bilinguals have one integrated lexicon and that lexical access is language non-selective. Two English lexical decision experiments with Dutch–English bilinguals investigated whether the cognate facilitation effect is influenced by stimulus list composition. In Experiment 1, the ‘standard’ version, which included only cognates, English control words and regular non-words, showed significant cognate facilitation (31 ms). In contrast, the ‘mixed’ version, which also included interlingual homographs, pseudohomophones (instead of regular non-words) and Dutch-only words, showed a significantly different profile: a non-significant disadvantage for the cognates (8 ms). Experiment 2 examined the specific impact of these three additional stimuli types and found that only the inclusion of Dutch words significantly reduced the cognate facilitation effect. Additional exploratory analyses revealed that, when the preceding trial was a Dutch word, cognates were recognised up to 50 ms more slowly than English controls. We suggest that when participants must respond ‘no’ to non-target language words, competition arises between the ‘yes’- and ‘no’-responses associated with the two interpretations of a cognate, which (partially) cancels out the facilitation that is a result of the cognate's shared form and meaning. We conclude that the cognate facilitation effect is a real effect that originates in the lexicon, but that cognates can be subject to competition effects outside the lexicon.

Abstract

We observe a tension in the target article as it stresses an integrated gesture-speech system that can nevertheless consist of contradictory representational states, which are reflected by mismatches in gesture and speech or sign. Beyond problems of coherence, this prevents furthering our understanding of gesture-related learning. As a possible antidote, we invite a more dynamically embodied perspective to the stage.

Abstract

GalMBP is a fragment of serum mannose-binding protein that has been modified to create a probe for galactose-containing ligands. Glycan array screening demonstrated that the carbohydrate-recognition domain of GalMBP selectively binds common groups of tumor-associated glycans, including Lewis-type structures and T antigen, suggesting that engineered glycan-binding proteins such as GalMBP represent novel tools for the characterization of glycoproteins bearing tumor-associated glycans. Blotting of cell extracts and membranes from MCF7 breast cancer cells with radiolabeled GalMBP was used to demonstrate that it binds to a selected set of high molecular weight glycoproteins that could be purified from MCF7 cells on an affinity column constructed with GalMBP. Proteomic and glycomic analysis of these glycoproteins by mass spectrometry showed that they are forms of CD98hc that bear glycans displaying heavily fucosylated termini, including Lewis(x) and Lewis(y) structures. The pool of ligands was found to include the target ligands for anti-CD15 antibodies, which are commonly used to detect Lewis(x) antigen on tumors, and for the endothelial scavenger receptor C-type lectin, which may be involved in tumor metastasis through interactions with this antigen. A survey of additional breast cancer cell lines reveals that there is wide variation in the types of glycosylation that lead to binding of GalMBP. Higher levels of binding are associated either with the presence of outer-arm fucosylated structures carried on a variety of different cell surface glycoproteins or with the presence of high levels of the mucin MUC1 bearing T antigen.

Abstract

In Greek orthography, stress position is marked with a diacritic. We investigated the developmental course of processing the stress diacritic in Grades 2 to 4. Ninety children read 108 pseudowords presented without or with a diacritic either in the same or in a different position relative to the source word. Half of the pseudowords resembled the words they were derived from. Results showed that lexical sources of stress assignment were active in Grade 2 and remained stronger than the diacritic through Grade 4. The effect of the diacritic increased more rapidly and approached the lexical effect with increasing grade. In a second experiment, 90 children read 54 words and 54 pseudowords. The pattern of results for words was similar to that for nonwords suggesting that findings regarding stress assignment using nonwords may generalize to word reading. Decoding of the diacritic does not appear to be the preferred option for developing readers.

Abstract

To study the neural bases of semantic composition in language processing without confounds from syntactic composition, recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies have investigated the processing of constructions that exhibit some type of syntax-semantics mismatch. The most studied case of such a mismatch is complement coercion; expressions such as the author began the book, where an entity-denoting noun phrase is coerced into an eventive meaning in order to match the semantic properties of the event-selecting verb (e.g., ‘the author began reading/writing the book’). These expressions have been found to elicit increased activity in the Anterior Midline Field (AMF), an MEG component elicited at frontomedial sensors at ∼400 ms after the onset of the coercing noun [Pylkkänen, L., & McElree, B. (2007). An MEG study of silent meaning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 11]. Thus, the AMF constitutes a potential neural correlate of coercion. However, the AMF was generated in ventromedial prefrontal regions, which are heavily associated with decision-making. This raises the possibility that, instead of semantic processing, the AMF effect may have been related to the experimental task, which was a sensicality judgment. We tested this hypothesis by assessing the effect of coercion when subjects were simply reading for comprehension, without a decision-task. Additionally, we investigated coercion in an adjectival rather than a verbal environment to further generalize the findings. Our results show that an AMF effect of coercion is elicited without a decision-task and that the effect also extends to this novel syntactic environment. We conclude that in addition to its role in non-linguistic higher cognition, ventromedial prefrontal regions contribute to the resolution of syntax-semantics mismatches in language processing.

Abstract

A fundamental and intensively discussed question is whether medial temporal lobe (MTL) processes that lead to non-associative item memories differ in their anatomical substrate from processes underlying associative memory formation. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we implemented a novel design to dissociate brain activity related to item and associative memory formation not only by subsequent memory performance and anatomy but also in time, because the two constituents of each pair to be memorized were presented sequentially with an intra-pair delay of several seconds. Furthermore, the design enabled us to reduce potential differences in memory strength between item and associative memory by increasing task difficulty in the item recognition memory test. Confidence ratings for correct item recognition for both constituents did not differ between trials in which only item memory was correct and trials in which item and associative memory were correct. Specific subsequent memory analyses for item and associative memory formation revealed brain activity that appears selectively related to item memory formation in the posterior inferior temporal, posterior parahippocampal, and perirhinal cortices. In contrast, hippocampal and inferior prefrontal activity predicted successful retrieval of newly formed inter-item associations. Our findings therefore suggest that different MTL subregions indeed play distinct roles in the formation of item memory and inter-item associative memory as expected by several dual process models of the MTL memory system.

Abstract

This editorial serves a number of purposes. First, it aims at summarizing and discussing 33 accepted contributions to the special issue “The evolution of rhythm cognition: Timing in music and speech.” The major focus of the issue is the cognitive neuroscience of rhythm, intended as a neurobehavioral trait undergoing an evolutionary process. Second, this editorial provides the interested reader with a guide to navigate the interdisciplinary contributions to this special issue. For this purpose, we have compiled Table 1, where methods, topics, and study species are summarized and related across contributions. Third, we also briefly highlight research relevant to the evolution of rhythm that has appeared in other journals while this special issue was compiled. Altogether, this editorial constitutes a summary of rhythm research in music and speech spanning two years, from mid-2015 until mid-2017

Abstract

Vocal communication is a crucial aspect of animal behavior. The mechanism which most mammals use to vocalize relies on three anatomical components. First, air overpressure is generated inside the lower vocal tract. Second, as the airstream goes through the glottis, sound is produced via vocal fold vibration. Third, this sound is further filtered by the geometry and length of the upper vocal tract. Evidence from mammalian anatomy and bioacoustics suggests that some of these three components may covary with an animal’s body size. The framework provided by acoustic allometry suggests that, because vocal tract length (VTL) is more strongly constrained by the growth of the body than vocal fold length (VFL), VTL generates more reliable acoustic cues to an animal’s size. This hypothesis is often tested acoustically but rarely anatomically, especially in pinnipeds. Here, we test the anatomical bases of the acoustic allometry hypothesis in harbor seal pups Phoca vitulina. We dissected and measured vocal tract, vocal folds, and other anatomical features of 15 harbor seals post-mortem. We found that, while VTL correlates with body size, VFL does not. This suggests that, while body growth puts anatomical constraints on how vocalizations are filtered by harbor seals’ vocal tract, no such constraints appear to exist on vocal folds, at least during puppyhood. It is particularly interesting to find anatomical constraints on harbor seals’ vocal tracts, the same anatomical region partially enabling pups to produce individually distinctive vocalizations.

Abstract

Research on the evolution of human speech and phonology benefits from the comparative approach: structural, spectral, and temporal features can be extracted and compared across species in an attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary history of human speech. Here we focus on analytical tools to measure and compare temporal structure in human speech and animal vocalizations. We introduce the reader to a range of statistical methods usable, on the one hand, to quantify rhythmic complexity in single vocalizations, and on the other hand, to compare rhythmic structure between multiple vocalizations. These methods include: time series analysis, distributional measures, variability metrics, Fourier transform, auto- and cross-correlation, phase portraits, and circular statistics. Using computer-generated data, we apply a range of techniques, walking the reader through the necessary software and its functions. We describe which techniques are most appropriate to test particular hypotheses on rhythmic structure, and provide possible interpretations of the tests. These techniques can be equally well applied to find rhythmic structure in gesture, movement, and any other behavior developing over time, when the research focus lies on its temporal structure. This introduction to quantitative techniques for rhythm and timing analysis will hopefully spur additional comparative research, and will produce comparable results across all disciplines working on the evolution of speech, ultimately advancing the field.

Abstract

Isochrony is crucial to the rhythm of human music. Some neural, behavioral and anatomical traits underlying rhythm perception and production are shared with a broad range of species. These may either have a common evolutionary origin, or have evolved into similar traits under different evolutionary pressures. Other traits underlying rhythm are rare across species, only found in humans and few other animals. Isochrony, or stable periodicity, is common to most human music, but isochronous behaviors are also found in many species. It appears paradoxical that humans are particularly good at producing and perceiving isochronous patterns, although this ability does not conceivably confer any evolutionary advantage to modern humans. This article will attempt to solve this conundrum. To this end, we define the concept of isochrony from the present functional perspective of physiology, cognitive neuroscience, signal processing, and interactive behavior, and review available evidence on isochrony in the signals of humans and other animals. We then attempt to resolve the paradox of isochrony by expanding an evolutionary hypothesis about the function that isochronous behavior may have had in early hominids. Finally, we propose avenues for empirical research to examine this hypothesis and to understand the evolutionary origin of isochrony in general.

Abstract

STRUCTURE IN MUSICAL RHYTHM CAN BE MEASURED using a number of analytical techniques. While some techniques—like circular statistics or grammar induction—rely on strong top-down assumptions, assumption-free techniques can only provide limited insights on higher-order rhythmic structure. I suggest that research in music perception and performance can benefit from systematically adopting phase space plots, a visualization technique originally developed in mathematical physics that overcomes the aforementioned limitations. By jointly plotting adjacent interonset intervals (IOI), the motivic rhythmic structure of musical phrases, if present, is visualized geometrically without making any a priori assumptions concerning isochrony, beat induction, or metrical hierarchies. I provide visual examples and describe how particular features of rhythmic patterns correspond to geometrical shapes in phase space plots. I argue that research on music perception and systematic musicology stands to benefit from this descriptive tool, particularly in comparative analyses of rhythm production. Phase space plots can be employed as an initial assumption-free diagnostic to find higher order structures (i.e., beyond distributional regularities) before proceeding to more specific, theory-driven analyses.

Abstract

The region of the ancient Sahul continent (present day Australia and New Guinea, and surrounding islands) is home to extreme linguistic diversity. Even apart from the huge Austronesian language family, which spread into the area after the breakup of the Sahul continent in the Holocene, there are hundreds of languages from many apparently unrelated families. On each of the subcontinents, the generally accepted classification recognizes one large, widespread family and a number of unrelatable smaller families. If these language families are related to each other, it is at a depth which is inaccessible to standard linguistic methods. We have inferred the history of structural characteristics of these languages under an admixture model, using a Bayesian algorithm originally developed to discover populations on the basis of recombining genetic markers. This analysis identifies 10 ancestral language populations, some of which can be identified with clearly defined phylogenetic groups. The results also show traces of early dispersals, including hints at ancient connections between Australian languages and some Papuan groups (long hypothesized, never before demonstrated). Systematic language contact effects between members of big phylogenetic groups are also detected, which can in some cases be identified with a diffusional or substrate signal. Most interestingly, however, there remains striking evidence of a phylogenetic signal, with many languages showing negligible amounts of admixture.

Abstract

According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular inflected words can be retrieved as whole-word forms or decomposed into morphemes. Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder [(1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of AQ2 Memory and Language, 37, 94–117. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2509] proposed a ¶ dual-route model according to which plurals of singular-dominant words (e.g. “brides”) are decomposed, while plurals of plural-dominant words (e.g. “peas”) are accessed as whole-word units. We report two lexical-decision experiments investigating how plural processing is influenced by participants’ age (a proxy for experience with word forms) and morphological complexity of the language (German versus Dutch). For both Dutch participant groups and older German participants, we replicated the interaction between number and dominance reported by Baayen and colleagues. Younger German participants showed a main effect of number, indicating access of all plurals via decomposition. Access to stored forms seems to depend on morphological richness and experience with word forms. The data pattern fits neither full-decomposition nor full-storage models, but is compatible with dual-route models

Abstract

The adipocyte-derived protein adiponectin is highly heritable and inversely associated with risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) and coronary heart disease (CHD). We meta-analyzed 3 genome-wide association studies for circulating adiponectin levels (n = 8,531) and sought validation of the lead single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 5 additional cohorts (n = 6,202). Five SNPs were genome-wide significant in their relationship with adiponectin (P<} or =5x10(-8)). We then tested whether these 5 SNPs were associated with risk of T2D and CHD using a Bonferroni-corrected threshold of P{< or =0.011 to declare statistical significance for these disease associations. SNPs at the adiponectin-encoding ADIPOQ locus demonstrated the strongest associations with adiponectin levels (P-combined = 9.2x10(-19) for lead SNP, rs266717, n = 14,733). A novel variant in the ARL15 (ADP-ribosylation factor-like 15) gene was associated with lower circulating levels of adiponectin (rs4311394-G, P-combined = 2.9x10(-8), n = 14,733). This same risk allele at ARL15 was also associated with a higher risk of CHD (odds ratio [OR] = 1.12, P = 8.5x10(-6), n = 22,421) more nominally, an increased risk of T2D (OR = 1.11, P = 3.2x10(-3), n = 10,128), and several metabolic traits. Expression studies in humans indicated that ARL15 is well-expressed in skeletal muscle. These findings identify a novel protein, ARL15, which influences circulating adiponectin levels and may impact upon CHD risk.

Abstract

This paper outlines a first attempt to model the special constraints that arise in language processing in conversation, and to explore the implications such functional considerations may have on language typology and language change. In particular, we focus on processing pressures imposed by conversational turn-taking and their consequences for the cultural evolution of the structural properties of language. We present an agent-based model of cultural evolution where agents take turns at talk in conversation. When the start of planning for the next turn is constrained by the position of the verb, the stable distribution of dominant word orders across languages evolves to match the actual distribution reasonably well. We suggest that the interface of cognition and interaction should be a more central part of the story of language evolution.

Abstract

The annual conference of the European Second Language Association provides an opportunity for the presentation of second language research with a genuinely European flavour. The theoretical perspectives adopted are wide-ranging and may fall within traditions overlooked elsewhere. Moreover, the studies presented are largely multi-lingual and cross-cultural, as befits the make-up of modern-day Europe. At the same time, the work demonstrates sophisticated awareness of scholarly insights from around the world. The EUROSLA yearbook presents a selection each year of the very best research from the annual conference. Submissions are reviewed and professionally edited, and only those of the highest quality are selected. Contributions are in English.

Abstract

Premature termination codon (PTC) mutations in the ATP-Binding Cassette, Sub-Family A, Member 7 gene (ABCA7) have recently been identified as intermediate-to-high penetrant risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD). High variability, however, is observed in downstream ABCA7 mRNA and protein expression, disease penetrance, and onset age, indicative of unknown modifying factors. Here, we investigated the prevalence and disease penetrance of ABCA7 PTC mutations in a large early onset AD (EOAD)—control cohort, and examined the effect on transcript level with comprehensive third-generation long-read sequencing. We characterized the ABCA7 coding sequence with next-generation sequencing in 928 EOAD patients and 980 matched control individuals. With MetaSKAT rare variant association analysis, we observed a fivefold enrichment (p = 0.0004) of PTC mutations in EOAD patients (3%) versus controls (0.6%). Ten novel PTC mutations were only observed in patients, and PTC mutation carriers in general had an increased familial AD load. In addition, we observed nominal risk reducing trends for three common coding variants. Seven PTC mutations were further analyzed using targeted long-read cDNA sequencing on an Oxford Nanopore MinION platform. PTC-containing transcripts for each investigated PTC mutation were observed at varying proportion (5–41% of the total read count), implying incomplete nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). Furthermore, we distinguished and phased several previously unknown alternative splicing events (up to 30% of transcripts). In conjunction with PTC mutations, several of these novel ABCA7 isoforms have the potential to rescue deleterious PTC effects. In conclusion, ABCA7 PTC mutations play a substantial role in EOAD, warranting genetic screening of ABCA7 in genetically unexplained patients. Long-read cDNA sequencing revealed both varying degrees of NMD and transcript-modifying events, which may influence ABCA7 dosage, disease severity, and may create opportunities for therapeutic interventions in AD. © 2017, The Author(s).

Abstract

In this article we provide a preliminary description and analysis of the most common ergative
constructions in Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Northwestern Amazonia. We offer a
comparison with its sister language, Shiwilu, for which an optional ergativity-marking pattern has
been claimed (Valenzuela, 2008, 2011). There is not enough evidence, however, to claim the exact
same for Shawi. Ergativity in the language is driven by mere syntactic motivations. One of the
most common constituent orders in the language where the ergative marker is obligatory is OAV.
We close the article with a tentative proposal on the passive origins of OAV ergative constructions
in the language, via a by-phrase-like incorporation, and eventual grammaticalisation, resorting
to the formal syntactic theory known as Semantic Syntax (Seuren, 1996).

Abstract

Despite strong evidence for prediction during language comprehension, the underlying
mechanisms, and the extent to which they are specific to language, remain unclear. Re-analysing
an event-related potentials study, we examined responses in the time-frequency domain to
expected and unexpected (but plausible) words in strongly and weakly constraining sentences,
and found results similar to those reported in nonverbal domains. Relative to expected words,
unexpected words elicited an increase in the theta band (4–7 Hz) in strongly constraining
contexts, suggesting the involvement of control processes to deal with the consequences of
having a prediction disconfirmed. Prior to critical word onset, strongly constraining sentences
exhibited a decrease in the alpha band (8–12 Hz) relative to weakly constraining sentences,
suggesting that comprehenders can take advantage of predictive sentence contexts to prepare
for the input. The results suggest that the brain recruits domain-general preparation and control
mechanisms when making and assessing predictions during sentence comprehension

Abstract

Speakers usually begin to speak while only part of the utterance has been planned. Earlier work has shown that speech planning processes are reflected in speakers’ eye movements as they describe visually presented objects. However, to-be-named objects can be processed to some extent before they have been fixated upon, presumably because attention can be allocated to objects covertly, without moving the eyes. The present study investigated whether EEG could track speakers’ covert attention allocation as they produced short utterances to describe pairs of objects (e.g., “dog and chair”). The processing difficulty of each object was varied by presenting it in upright orientation (easy) or in upside down orientation (difficult). Background squares flickered at different frequencies in order to elicit steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs). The N2pc component, associated with the focusing of attention on an item, was detectable not only prior to speech onset, but also during speaking. The time course of the N2pc showed that attention shifted to each object in the order of mention prior to speech onset. Furthermore, greater processing difficulty increased the time speakers spent attending to each object. This demonstrates that the N2pc can track covert attention allocation in a naming task. In addition, an effect of processing difficulty at around 200–350 ms after stimulus onset revealed early attention allocation to the second to-be-named object. The flickering backgrounds elicited SSVEPs, but SSVEP amplitude was not influenced by processing difficulty. These results help complete the picture of the coordination of visual information uptake and motor output during speaking.

Abstract

Background: Human communication occurs through both verbal and visual/motoric modalities. Simultaneous
conversational speech and gesture occurs across all cultures and age groups. When verbal communication is
compromised, more of the communicative load can be transferred to the gesture modality. Although people with
aphasia produce meaning-laden gestures, the communicative value of these has not been adequately investigated.
Aims: To investigate the communicative effectiveness of pantomime gesture produced spontaneously by individuals
with aphasia during conversational discourse.
Methods & Procedures: Sixty-seven undergraduate students wrote down the messages conveyed by 11 people with
aphasia that produced pantomime while engaged in conversational discourse. Students were presented with a
speech-only, a gesture-only and a combined speech and gesture condition and guessed messages in both a free
description and a multiple-choice task.
Outcomes & Results: As hypothesized, listener comprehension was more accurate in the combined pantomime
gesture and speech condition as compared with the gesture- or speech-only conditions. Participants achieved
greater accuracy in the multiple-choice task as compared with the free-description task, but only in the gestureonly
condition. The communicative effectiveness of the pantomime gestures increased as the fluency of the
participants with aphasia decreased.
Conclusions&Implications: These results indicate that when pantomime gesture was presented with aphasic speech,
the combination had strong communicative effectiveness. Future studies could investigate how pantomimes can
be integrated into interventions for people with aphasia, particularly emphasizing elicitation of pantomimes in as
natural a context as possible and highlighting the opportunity for efficient message repair.

Abstract

Computer science offers a large set of tools for prototyping, writing, running, testing, validating, sharing and reproducing results; however, computational science lags behind. In the best case, authors may provide their source code as a compressed archive and they may feel confident their research is reproducible. But this is not exactly true. James Buckheit and David Donoho proposed more than two decades ago that an article about computational results is advertising, not scholarship. The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code, and data that produced the result. This implies new workflows, in particular in peer-reviews. Existing journals have been slow to adapt: source codes are rarely requested and are hardly ever actually executed to check that they produce the results advertised in the article. ReScience is a peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research can be replicated from its description. To achieve this goal, the whole publishing chain is radically different from other traditional scientific journals. ReScience resides on GitHub where each new implementation of a computational study is made available together with comments, explanations, and software tests.

Abstract

In developmental psycholinguistics, we have, for many years,
been generating and testing theories that propose both descriptions of
adult representations and explanations of how those representations
develop. We have learnt that restricting ourselves to any one
methodology yields only incomplete data about the nature of linguistic
representations. We argue that we need a multi-method approach to the
study of representation.

Abstract

Purpose: The study of auxiliary acquisition is central to work on language development and has attracted theoretical work from both nativist and constructivist approaches. This study is part of a 2-part companion set that represents a unique attempt to trace the development of auxiliary syntax by using a longitudinal elicitation methodology. The aim of the research described in this part is to track the development of modal auxiliaries and auxiliary DO in questions and declaratives to provide a more complete picture of the development of the auxiliary system in English-speaking children. Method: Twelve English-speaking children participated in 2 tasks designed to elicit auxiliaries CAN, WILL, and DOES in declaratives and yes/no questions. They completed each task 6 times in total between the ages of 2;10 (years;months) and 3;6. Results: The children’s levels of correct use of the target auxiliaries differed in complex ways according to auxiliary, polarity, and sentence structure, and these relations changed over development. An analysis of the children’s errors also revealed complex interactions between these factors. Conclusions: These data cannot be explained in full by existing theories of auxiliary acquisition. Researchers working within both generativist and constructivist frameworks need to develop more detailed theories of acquisition that predict the pattern of acquisition observed.

Abstract

It has been generally assumed in the Theory of Mind literature of the past 30 years that young children fail standard false-belief tasks because they attribute their own knowledge to the protagonist (what Leslie and colleagues called a “true-belief default”). Contrary to the traditional view, we have recently proposed that the children's bias is task induced. This alternative view was supported by studies showing that 3 year olds are able to pass a false-belief task that allows them to focus on the protagonist, without drawing their attention to the target object in the test phase. For a more accurate comparison of these two accounts, the present study tested the true-belief default with adults. Four experiments measuring eye movements and response inhibition revealed that (a) adults do not have an automatic tendency to respond to the false-belief question according to their own knowledge and (b) the true-belief response need not be inhibited in order to correctly predict the protagonist's actions. The positive results observed in the control conditions confirm the accuracy of the various measures used. I conclude that the results of this study undermine the true-belief default view and those models that posit mechanisms of response inhibition in false-belief reasoning. Alternatively, the present study with adults and recent studies with children suggest that participants' focus of attention in false-belief tasks may be key to their performance.

Abstract

In standard Theory of Mind tasks, such as the Sally-Anne, children have to predict the behaviour of a mistaken character, which requires attributing the character a false belief. Hundreds of developmental studies in the last 30 years have shown that children under 4 fail standard false-belief tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that bilingual children and adults outperform their monolingual peers in this type of tasks. Bilinguals’ better performance in false-belief tasks has generally been interpreted as a result of their better inhibitory control; that is, bilinguals are allegedly better than monolinguals at inhibiting the erroneous response to the false-belief question. In this review, I challenge the received view and argue instead that bilinguals’ better false-belief performance results from more effective attention management. This challenge ties in with two independent lines of research: on the one hand, recent studies on the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks with monolingual children and adults; and on the other, current research on bilinguals’ performance in different Executive Function tasks. The review closes with an exploratory discussion of further benefits of bilingual cognition to Theory of Mind development and pragmatics, which may be independent from Executive Function.

Abstract

Categorisation models of metaphor interpretation are based on the premiss that categorisation statements (e.g., ‘Wilma is a nurse’) and comparison statements (e.g., ‘Betty is like a nurse’) are fundamentally different types of assertion. Against this assumption, we argue that the difference is merely a quantitative one: ‘x is a y’ unilaterally entails ‘x is like a y’, and therefore the latter is merely weaker than the former. Moreover, if ‘x is like a y’ licenses the inference that x is not a y, then that inference is a scalar implicature. We defend these claims partly on theoretical grounds and partly on the basis of experimental evidence. A suite of experiments indicates both that ‘x is a y’ unilaterally entails that x is like a y, and that in several respects the non-y inference behaves exactly as one should expect from a scalar implicature. We discuss the implications of our view of categorisation and comparison statements for categorisation models of metaphor interpretation.

Abstract

Over two decades, the director task has increasingly been employed as a test of the use of Theory of Mind in communication, first in psycholinguistics and more recently in social cognition research. A new version of this task was designed to test two independent hypotheses. First, optimal performance in the director task, as established by the standard metrics of interference, is possible by using selective attention alone, and not necessarily Theory of Mind. Second, pragmatic measures of Theory-of-Mind use can reveal that people actively represent the director’s mental states, contrary to recent claims that they only use domain-general cognitive processes to perform this task. The results of this study support both hypotheses and provide a new interactive paradigm to reliably test Theory-of-Mind use in referential communication.

Abstract

This article reports on the analysis of prosodic marking of topical referents in the German prefield by 5- and 7-year-old children and adults. Natural speech data was obtained from a picture-elicited narration task. The data was analyzed both phonologically and phonetically. In line with previous findings, adult speakers realized topical referents predominantly with the accents L+H* and L*+H, but H* accents and unaccented items were also observed. Children used the same accent types as adults, but the accent types were distributed differently. Also, children aligned pitch minima earlier than adults and produced accents with a decreased speed of pitch change. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed. Contrast – defined in terms of a change of subjecthood – did not affect the choice of pitch accent type and did not influence phonetic realization, underlining the fact that accentuation is often a matter of individual speaker choice.

Abstract

Understanding of evidentials is incomplete without consideration of their behaviour in interrogative contexts. We discuss key formal, semantic, and pragmatic features of cross-linguistic variation concerning the use of evidential markers in interrogative clauses. Cross-linguistic data suggest that an exclusively speaker-centric view of evidentiality is not sufficient to explain the semantics of information source marking, as in many languages it is typical for evidentials in questions to represent addressee perspective. Comparison of evidentiality and the related phenomenon of egophoricity emphasises how knowledge-based linguistic systems reflect attention to the way knowledge is distributed among participants in the speech situation

Abstract

The voice system of Tagalog has been proposed to be symmetrical in the sense that there are no morphologically unmarked voice forms. This stands in contrast to asymmetrical voice systems which exhibit unmarked and marked voices (e.g., active and passive in German). This paper investigates the psycholinguistic processing consequences of the symmetrical and asymmetrical nature of the Tagalog and German voice systems by analyzing changes in cognitive load during sentence production. Tagalog and German native speakers' pupil diameters were recorded while they produced sentences with different voice markings. Growth curve analyses of the shape of task-evoked pupillary responses revealed that processing load changes were similar for different voices in the symmetrical voice system of Tagalog. By contrast, actives and passives in the asymmetrical voice system of German exhibited different patterns of processing load changes during sentence production. This is interpreted as supporting the notion of symmetry in the Tagalog voice system. Mental effort during sentence planning changes in different ways in the two languages because the grammatical architecture of their voice systems is different. Additionally, an anti-Patient bias in sentence production was found in Tagalog: cognitive load increased at the same time and at the same rate but was maintained for a longer time when the patient argument was the subject, as compared to agent subjects. This indicates that while both voices in Tagalog afford similar planning operations, linking patients to the subject function is more effortful. This anti-Patient bias in production adds converging evidence to “subject preferences” reported in the sentence comprehension literature.

Abstract

Theories of incremental sentence production make different assumptions about when speakers encode information about described events and when verbs are selected, accordingly. An eye tracking experiment on German testing the predictions from linear and hierarchical incrementality about the timing of event encoding and verb planning is reported. In the experiment, participants described depictions of two-participant events with sentences that differed in voice and word order. Verb-medial active sentences and actives and passives with sentence-final verbs were compared. Linear incrementality predicts that sentences with verbs placed early differ from verb-final sentences because verbs are assumed to only be planned shortly before they are articulated. By contrast, hierarchical incrementality assumes that speakers start planning with relational encoding of the event. A weak version of hierarchical incrementality assumes that only the action is encoded at the outset of formulation and selection of lexical verbs only occurs shortly before they are articulated, leading to the prediction of different fixation patterns for verb-medial and verb-final sentences. A strong version of hierarchical incrementality predicts no differences between verb-medial and verb-final sentences because it assumes that verbs are always lexically selected early in the formulation process. Based on growth curve analyses of fixations to agent and patient characters in the described pictures, and the influence of character humanness and the lack of an influence of the visual salience of characters on speakers' choice of active or passive voice, the current results suggest that while verb planning does not necessarily occur early during formulation, speakers of German always create an event representation early

Abstract

PET and fMRI experiments have previously shown that several brain regions in the frontal and parietal lobe are involved in working memory maintenance. MEG and EEG experiments have shown parametric increases with load for oscillatory activity in posterior alpha and frontal theta power. In the current study we investigated whether the areas found with fMRI can be associated with these alpha and theta effects by measuring simultaneous EEG and fMRI during a modified Sternberg task This allowed us to correlate EEG at the single trial level with the fMRI BOLD signal by forming a regressor based on single trial alpha and theta
power estimates. We observed a right posterior, parametric alpha power increase, which was functionally related to decreases in BOLD in the primary visual cortex and in the posterior part of the right middle temporal gyrus. We relate this finding to the inhibition of neuronal activity that may interfere with WM maintenance. An observed parametric increase in frontal theta power was correlated to a decrease in BOLD in
regions that together form the default mode network. We did not observe correlations between oscillatory EEG phenomena and BOLD in the traditional WM areas. In conclusion, the study shows that simultaneous EEG fMRI recordings can be successfully used to identify the emergence of functional networks in the brain during the execution of a cognitive task.

Abstract

When we perceive speech, our goal is to extract the meaning of the verbal message which includes semantic processing. However, how deeply do we process speech in different situations? In two experiments, native Dutch participants heard spoken sentences describing simultaneously presented pictures. Sentences either correctly described the pictures or contained an anomalous final word (i.e. a semantically or phonologically incongruent word). In the first experiment, spoken sentences were task-irrelevant and both anomalous conditions elicited similar centro-parietal N400s that were larger in amplitude than the N400 for the correct condition. In the second experiment, we ensured that participants processed the same stimuli semantically. In an early time window, we found similar phonological mismatch negativities for both anomalous conditions compared to the correct condition. These negativities were followed by an N400 that was larger for semantic than phonological errors. Together, these data suggest that we process speech semantically, even if the speech is task-irrelevant. Once listeners allocate more cognitive resources to the processing of speech, we suggest that they make predictions for upcoming words, presumably by means of the production system and an internal monitoring loop, to facilitate lexical processing of the perceived speech

Abstract

The brain’s remarkable capacity for language requires bidirectional interactions between functionally specialized brain regions. We used magnetoencephalography to investigate interregional interactions in the brain network for language while 102 participants were reading sentences. Using Granger causality analysis, we identified inferior frontal cortex and anterior temporal regions to receive widespread input and middle temporal regions to send widespread output. This fits well with the notion that these regions play a central role in language processing. Characterization of the functional topology of this network, using data-driven matrix factorization, which allowed for partitioning into a set of subnetworks, revealed directed connections at distinct frequencies of interaction. Connections originating from temporal regions peaked at alpha frequency, whereas connections originating from frontal and parietal regions peaked at beta frequency. These findings indicate that the information flow between language-relevant brain areas, which is required for linguistic processing, may depend on the contributions of distinct brain rhythms

Abstract

Interactions between functionally specialized brain regions are crucial for normal brain function. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) are techniques suited to capture these interactions, because they provide whole head measurements of brain activity in the millisecond range. More than one sensor picks up the activity of an underlying source. This field spread severely limits the utility of connectivity measures computed directly between sensor recordings. Consequentially, neuronal interactions should be studied on the level of the reconstructed sources. This article reviews several methods that have been applied to investigate interactions between brain regions in source space. We will mainly focus on the different measures used to quantify connectivity, and on the different strategies adopted to identify regions of interest. Despite various successful accounts of MEG and EEG source connectivity, caution with respect to the interpretation of the results is still warranted. This is due to the fact that effects of field spread can never be completely abolished in source space. However, in this very exciting and developing field of research this cautionary note should not discourage researchers from further investigation into the connectivity between neuronal sources.

Abstract

The acoustic realization of speech is constrained by the physical mechanisms by which it is produced. Yet for speech perception, the degree to which listeners utilize experience derived from speech production has long been debated. In the present study, we examined how sensorimotor adaptation during production may affect perception, and how this relationship may be reflected in early vs. late electrophysiological responses. Participants first performed a baseline speech production task, followed by a vowel categorization task during which EEG responses were recorded. In a subsequent speech production task, half the participants received shifted auditory feedback, leading most to alter their articulations. This was followed by a second, post-training vowel categorization task. We compared changes in vowel production to both behavioral and electrophysiological changes in vowel perception. No differences in phonetic categorization were observed between groups receiving altered or unaltered feedback. However, exploratory analyses revealed correlations between vocal motor behavior and phonetic categorization. EEG analyses revealed correlations between vocal motor behavior and cortical responses in both early and late time windows. These results suggest that participants' recent production behavior influenced subsequent vowel perception. We suggest that the change in perception can be best characterized as a mapping of acoustics onto articulation

Abstract

A given speech sound will be realized differently depending on the context in which it is produced. Listeners have been found to compensate perceptually for these coarticulatory effects, yet it is unclear to what extent this effect depends on actual production experience. In this study, whether changes in motor-to-sound mappings induced by adaptation to altered auditory feedback can affect perceptual compensation for coarticulation is investigated. Specifically, whether altering how the vowel [i] is produced can affect the categorization of a stimulus continuum between an alveolar and a palatal fricative whose interpretation is dependent on vocalic context is tested. It was found that participants could be sorted into three groups based on whether they tended to oppose the direction of the shifted auditory feedback, to follow it, or a mixture of the two, and that these articulatory responses, not the shifted feedback the participants heard, correlated with changes in perception. These results indicate that sensorimotor adaptation to altered feedback can affect the perception of unaltered yet coarticulatorily-dependent speech sounds, suggesting a modulatory role of sensorimotor experience on speech perception

Abstract

This paper combines acoustic features with a high temporal and a high frequency resolution to reliably classify articulatory events of short duration, such as bursts in plosives. SVM classification experiments on TIMIT and SVArticulatory showed that articulatory-acoustic features (AFs) based on a combination of MFCCs derived from a long window of 25ms and a short window of 5ms that are both shifted with 2.5ms steps (Both) outperform standard MFCCs derived with a window of 25 ms and a shift of 10 ms (Baseline). Finally, comparison of the TIMIT and SVArticulatory results showed that for classifiers trained on data that allows for asynchronously changing AFs (SVArticulatory) the improvement from Baseline to Both is larger than for classifiers trained on data where AFs change simultaneously with the phone boundaries (TIMIT).

Abstract

The motor theory of speech perception assumes that activation of the motor system is essential in the perception of speech. However, deficits in speech perception and comprehension do not arise from damage that is restricted to the motor cortex, few functional imaging studies reveal activity in motor cortex during speech perception, and the motor cortex is strongly activated by many different sound categories. Here, we evaluate alternative roles for the motor cortex in spoken communication and suggest a specific role in sensorimotor processing in conversation. We argue that motor-cortex activation it is essential in joint speech, particularly for the timing of turn-taking.

Abstract

Bipolar disorder (BP) is a disabling and often life-threatening disorder that affects approximately 1% of the population worldwide. To identify genetic variants that increase the risk of BP, we genotyped on the Illumina HumanHap550 Beadchip 2,076 bipolar cases and 1,676 controls of European ancestry from the National Institute of Mental Health Human Genetics Initiative Repository, and the Prechter Repository and samples collected in London, Toronto, and Dundee. We imputed SNP genotypes and tested for SNP-BP association in each sample and then performed meta-analysis across samples. The strongest association P value for this 2-study meta-analysis was 2.4 x 10(-6). We next imputed SNP genotypes and tested for SNP-BP association based on the publicly available Affymetrix 500K genotype data from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium for 1,868 BP cases and a reference set of 12,831 individuals. A 3-study meta-analysis of 3,683 nonoverlapping cases and 14,507 extended controls on >2.3 M genotyped and imputed SNPs resulted in 3 chromosomal regions with association P approximately 10(-7): 1p31.1 (no known genes), 3p21 (>25 known genes), and 5q15 (MCTP1). The most strongly associated nonsynonymous SNP rs1042779 (OR = 1.19, P = 1.8 x 10(-7)) is in the ITIH1 gene on chromosome 3, with other strongly associated nonsynonymous SNPs in GNL3, NEK4, and ITIH3. Thus, these chromosomal regions harbor genes implicated in cell cycle, neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, and neurosignaling. In addition, we replicated the reported ANK3 association results for SNP rs10994336 in the nonoverlapping GSK sample (OR = 1.37, P = 0.042). Although these results are promising, analysis of additional samples will be required to confirm that variant(s) in these regions influence BP risk.

Abstract

Using kinetic contours derived from everyday objects, we investigated how motion affects object identification. In order not to be distinguishable when static, kinetic contours were made from random dot displays consisting of two regions, inside and outside the object contour. In Experiment 1, the dots were moving in only one of two regions. The objects were identified nearly equally well as soon as the dots either in the figure or in the background started to move. RTs decreased with increasing motion coherence levels and were shorter for complex, less compact objects than for simple, more compact objects. In Experiment 2, objects could be identified when the dots were moving both in the figure and in the background with speed and direction differences between the two. A linear increase in either the speed difference or the direction difference caused a linear decrease in RT for correct identification. In addition, the combination of speed and motion differences appeared to be super-additive.

Abstract

French-learning 11-month-old and English-learning 11- and 4-month-old infants were familiarized with consonant–vowel–consonant syllables in which the final consonants were dependent on whether the preceding vowel was oral or nasal. Oral and nasal vowels are present in the ambient language of all participants, but vowel nasality is phonemic (contrastive) in French and allophonic (noncontrastive) in English. After familiarization, infants heard novel syllables that either followed or violated the familiarized patterns. French-learning 11-month-olds and English-learning 4-month-olds displayed a reliable pattern of preference demonstrating learning and generalization of the patterns, while English-learning 11-month-olds oriented equally to syllables following and violating the familiarized patterns. The results are consistent with an experience-driven reduction of attention to allophonic contrasts by as early as 11 months, which influences phonotactic learning.

Abstract

This study longitudinally investigated developmental changes in the frame of reference used by children in their gestures and speech. Fifteen children, between 4 and 6 years of age, were asked once a year to describe their route home from their nursery school. When the children were 4 years old, they tended to produce gestures that directly and continuously indicated their actual route in a large gesture space. In contrast, as 6-year-olds, their gestures were segmented and did not match the actual route. Instead, at age 6, the children seemed to create a virtual space in front of themselves to symbolically describe their route. These results indicate that the use of frames of reference develops across the preschool years, shifting from an actual environmental to an abstract environmental frame of reference. Factors underlying the development of frame of reference, including verbal encoding skills and experience, are discussed.

Abstract

This study examined spatial story representations created by speaker's cohesive gestures. Participants were presented with three-sentence discourse with two protagonists. In the first and second sentences, gestures consistently located the two protagonists in the gesture space: one to the right and the other to the left. The third sentence (without gestures) referred to one of the protagonists, and the participants responded with one of the two keys to indicate the relevant protagonist. The response keys were either spatially congruent or incongruent with the gesturally established locations for the two participants. Though the cohesive gestures did not provide any clue for the correct response, they influenced performance: the reaction time in the congruent condition was faster than that in the incongruent condition. Thus, cohesive gestures automatically establish spatial story representations and the spatial story representations remain activated in a subsequent sentence without any gesture.

Abstract

This paper provides a brief survey on various absolute frames of spatial reference that can be observed in a number of Austronesian languages – with an emphasis on languages of the Oceanic subgroup. It is based on research of conceptions of space and systems of spatial reference that was initiated by the “space project” of the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group (now the Department of Language and Cognition) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and by my anthology “Referring to Space” (Senft 1997a; see Keller 2002: 250). The examples illustrating these different absolute frames of spatial reference reveal once more that earlier generalizations within the domain of “SPACE” were strongly biased by research on Indo-European languages; they also reveal how complex some of these absolute frames of spatial reference found in these languages are. The paper ends with a summary of Wegener’s (2002) preliminary typology of these absolute frames of spatial reference.

Abstract

Trobriand children are breastfed until they can walk; then they are abruptly weaned and the parents dramatically reduce the pervasive loving care that their children experienced before. The children have to find a place within the children’s groups in their villages. They learn to behave according to their community’s rules and regulations which find their expression in forms of verbal and non-verbal behavior. They acquire their culture specific pragmatics under the control of older members of their groups. The children's “small republic” is the primary institution of verbal and cultural socialization. Attempts of parental education are confined to a minimum.

Abstract

This volume presents five variants of the Imdeduya myth: two versions of the actual myth, a short story, a song and John Kasaipwalova’s English poem “Sail the Midnight Sun”. This poem draws heavily on the Trobriand myth which introduces the protagonists Imdeduya and Yolina and reports on Yolina’s intention to marry the girl so famous for her beauty, on his long journey to Imdeduya’s village and on their tragic love story. The texts are compared with each other with a final focus on the clash between orality and scripturality. Contrary to Kasaipwalova’s fixed poetic text, the oral Imdeduya versions reveal the variability characteristic for oral tradition. This variability opens up questions about traditional stability and destabilization of oral literature, especially questions about the changing role of myth – and magic – in the Trobriand Islanders' society which gets more and more integrated into the by now “literal” nation of Papua New Guinea. This e-book is available under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Abstract

Language in Cognition argues that language is based on the human construal of reality. Humans refer to and quantify over virtual entities with the same ease as they do over actual entities: the natural ontology of language, the author argues, must therefore comprise both actual and virtual entities and situations. He reformulates speech act theory, suggesting that the primary function of language is less the transfer of information than the establishing of socially binding commitments or appeals based on the proposition expressed. This leads him first to a new analysis of the systems and structures of cognitive language machinery and their ecological embedding, and finally to a reformulation of the notion of meaning, in which sentence meaning is distinguished from lexical meaning and the vagaries and multifarious applications of lexical meanings may be explained and understood. This is the first of a two-volume foundational study of language, published under the title, Language from Within. Pieter Seuren discusses and analyses such apparently diverse issues as the ontology underlying the semantics of language, speech act theory, intensionality phenomena, the machinery and ecology of language, sentential and lexical meaning, the natural logic of language and cognition, and the intrinsically context-sensitive nature of language - and shows them to be intimately linked. Throughout his ambitious enterprise, he maintains a constant dialogue with established views, reflecting on their development from Ancient Greece to the present. The resulting synthesis concerns central aspects of research and theory in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Abstract

The article concentrates on the question of the composition, the internal ordering and the placement of clitic-clusters (C-clusters) in French and Italian, though clitic data from other languages are drawn in occasionally. The system proposed is top-down transformational, in the terms of Semantic Syntax (Seuren, Blackwell, 1996). Clitics are taken to originate in underlying structure as canonical argument terms or adverbial constituents of clauses. During the process of transformation from semantic to surface form, nonfocus, nonsubject, pronominal argument terms are assigned values for the features of animacy ([±an]), dative status ([±dat]) and reflexivity ([±refl]). On the basis of these, the rule feature cm, inducing clitic movement, is assigned or withheld. Plus-values increase, and minus-values reduce, the “semantic weight” of the clitics in question. Pronouns without the feature cm are not cliticised and stay in their canonical term position in their full phonological form. Pronouns with the feature cm are attached to the nearest verb form giving rise to clitic clusters, which accounts for the composition of well-formed C-clusters. The attachment of clitics to a cluster occurs in a fixed order, which accounts for the ordering of clitics in well-formed clusters. Branching directionality, together with a theory of complementation, accounts for the placement of C-clusters. Clitics often take on a reduced phonological form. It is argued that, in French and Italian, which are languages with a right-branching syntax and a left-branching flectional morphology, postverbal clitics, or enclitics, are part of left-branching structures and hence fit naturally into the morphology. They are best categorised as affixes. Occasionally, as in Italian glielo, dative clitics (e.g., gli) turn preceding lighter clitics (e.g., lo) into affixes, resulting in the left-branching structure glielo, where -lo is an affix. In a brief Intermezzo, instances are shown of the irregular but revealing lui-le-lui phenomenon in French, and its much less frequent analog in Italian. On these assumptions, supported by the official orthographies, the clitic systems of French and Italian largely coincide. This new analysis of the facts in question invites further reflection on the interface between syntax and morphology. The final section deals with reflexive clitics. There, the system begins to be unable to account for the observed facts. At this end, therefore, the system is allowed to remain fraying, till further research brings greater clarity.

Abstract

Ever since the category of evidentiality has been identified in the verbal grammar of certain languages, it has been assumed that evidentiality plays no role in the grammars of those languages that have not incorporated it into their verb morphology or at least their verb clusters. The present paper attempts to show that even if evidentiality is not visible in the verbal grammar of English and Dutch, it appears to be a motivating factor, both historically and synchronically, in the process whereby evidential predicates are made to play a subordinate syntactic role with regard to their embedded subject clause. This process, known as AUXILIATION (Kuteva 2001), appears to manifest itself in a variety of, often successive, grammatical processes or rules, such as Subject-to-Subject Raising (the subject of the embedded clause becomes the subject of the main verb, as in John is likely to be late), V-ING (as in The man stopped breathing), Incorporation-by-Lowering (the evidential main verb is lowered on to the V-constituent of the embedded subject clause, as in John may have left), or Incorporation-by-Raising (also known as Predicate Raising), not or hardly attested in English but dominant in Dutch. A list is provided of those English (and Dutch) predicates that induce one of the above-mentioned auxiliation rules and it is checked how many of those have an evidential meaning. This is set off against evidential predicates that do not induce an auxiliation rule. It results that, for English and Dutch, lexical evidentiality is a powerful determinant for the induction of syntactic auxiliation.

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that spoken word production requires different amounts of top-down control depending on the prevailing circumstances. For example, during Stroop-like tasks, the interference in response time (RT) is typically larger following congruent trials than following incongruent trials. This effect is called the Gratton effect, and has been taken to reflect top-down control adjustments based on the previous trial type. Such control adjustments have been studied extensively in Stroop and Eriksen flanker tasks (mostly using manual responses), but not in the picture-word interference (PWI) task, which is a workhorse of language production research. In one of the few studies of the Gratton effect in PWI, Van Maanen and Van Rijn (2010) examined the effect in picture naming RTs during dual-task performance. Based on PWI effect differences between dual-task conditions, they argued that the functional locus of the PWI effect differs between post-congruent trials (i.e., locus in perceptual and conceptual encoding) and post-incongruent trials (i.e., locus in word planning). However, the dual-task procedure may have contaminated the results. We therefore performed an EEG study on the Gratton effect in a regular PWI task. We observed a PWI effect in the RTs, in the N400 component of the event-related brain potentials, and in the midfrontal theta power, regardless of the previous trial type. Moreover, the RTs, N400, and theta power reflected the Gratton effect. These results provide evidence that the PWI effect arises at the word planning stage following both congruent and incongruent trials, while the amount of top-down control changes depending on the previous trial type.

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that spoken word production requires different amounts of top-down control depending on the prevailing circumstances. For example, during Stroop-like tasks, the interference in response time (RT) is typically larger following congruent trials than following incongruent trials. This effect is called the Gratton effect, and has been taken to reflect top-down control adjustments based on the previous trial type. Such control adjustments have been studied extensively in Stroop and Eriksen flanker tasks (mostly using manual responses), but not in the picture–word interference (PWI) task, which is a workhorse of language production research. In one of the few studies of the Gratton effect in PWI, Van Maanen and Van Rijn (2010) examined the effect in picture naming RTs during dual-task performance. Based on PWI effect differences between dual-task conditions, they argued that the functional locus of the PWI effect differs between post-congruent trials (i.e., locus in perceptual and conceptual encoding) and post-incongruent trials (i.e., locus in word planning). However, the dual-task procedure may have contaminated the results. We therefore performed an electroencephalography (EEG) study on the Gratton effect in a regular PWI task. We observed a PWI effect in the RTs, in the N400 component of the event-related brain potentials, and in the midfrontal theta power, regardless of the previous trial type. Moreover, the RTs, N400, and theta power reflected the Gratton effect. These results provide evidence that the PWI effect arises at the word planning stage following both congruent and incongruent trials, while the amount of top-down control changes depending on the previous trial type.

Abstract

Allocation and use of central processing capacity have been associated with the P3 event-related brain potential amplitude in a large variety of non-linguistic tasks. However, little is known about the P3 in spoken language production. Moreover, the few studies that are available report opposing P3 effects when task complexity is manipulated. We investigated allocation and use of central processing capacity in a spoken phrase production task: Participants switched every second trial between describing pictures using noun phrases with one adjective (size only; simple condition, e.g., “the big desk”) or two adjectives (size and color; complex condition, e.g., “the big red desk”). Capacity allocation was manipulated by complexity, and capacity use by switching. Response time (RT) was longer for complex than for simple trials. Moreover, complexity and switching interacted: RTs were longer on switch than on repeat trials for simple phrases but shorter on switch than on repeat trials for complex phrases. P3 amplitude increased with complexity. Moreover, complexity and switching interacted: The complexity effect was larger on the switch trials than on the repeat trials. These results provide evidence that the allocation and use of central processing capacity in language production are differentially reflected in the P3 amplitude.