Publications

Abstract

Obesity is a genetically heterogeneous disorder. Using targeted and whole-exome sequencing, we studied 32 human and 87 rodent obesity genes in 2,548 severely obese children and 1,117 controls. We identified 52 variants contributing to obesity in 2% of cases including multiple novel variants in GNAS, which were sometimes found with accelerated growth rather than short stature as described previously. Nominally significant associations were found for rare functional variants in BBS1, BBS9, GNAS, MKKS, CLOCK and ANGPTL6. The p.S284X variant in ANGPTL6 drives the association signal (rs201622589, MAF~0.1%, odds ratio = 10.13, p-value = 0.042) and results in complete loss of secretion in cells. Further analysis including additional case-control studies and population controls (N = 260,642) did not support association of this variant with obesity (odds ratio = 2.34, p-value = 2.59 × 10−3), highlighting the challenges of testing rare variant associations and the need for very large sample sizes. Further validation in cohorts with severe obesity and engineering the variants in model organisms will be needed to explore whether human variants in ANGPTL6 and other genes that lead to obesity when deleted in mice, do contribute to obesity. Such studies may yield druggable targets for weight loss therapies.

Abstract

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

Abstract

Rhythmicity in the millisecond to second range is a fundamental building block of communication and coordinated movement. But how widespread are rhythmic capacities across species, and how did they evolve under different environmental pressures? Comparative research is necessary to answer these questions but has been hindered by limited crosstalk and comparability among results from different study species.
Most acoustics studies do not explicitly focus on characterising or quantifying rhythm, but many are just a few scrapes away from contributing to and advancing the field of comparative rhythm research. Here, we present an eight-level rhythm reporting framework which details actionable steps researchers can take to report rhythm-relevant metrics. Levels fall into two categories: metric reporting and data sharing. Metric reporting levels include defining rhythm-relevant metrics, providing point estimates of temporal interval variability, reporting interval distributions, and conducting rhythm analyses. Data sharing levels are: sharing audio recordings, sharing interval durations, sharing sound element start and end times, and sharing audio recordings with sound element start/end times.
Using sounds recorded from a sperm whale as a case study, we demonstrate how each reporting framework level can be implemented on real data. We also highlight existing best practice examples from recent research spanning multiple species. We clearly detail how engagement with our framework can be tailored case-by-case based on how much time and effort researchers are willing to contribute. Finally, we illustrate how reporting at any of the suggested levels will help advance comparative rhythm research.
This framework will actively facilitate a comparative approach to acoustic rhythms while also promoting cooperation and data sustainability. By quantifying and reporting rhythm metrics more consistently and broadly, new avenues of inquiry and several long-standing, big picture research questions become more tractable. These lines of research can inform not only about the behavioural ecology of animals but also about the evolution of rhythm-relevant phenomena and the behavioural neuroscience of rhythm production and perception. Rhythm is clearly an emergent feature of life; adopting our framework, researchers from different fields and with different study species can help understand why.

Abstract

Simultaneous interpretation is a complex cognitive task that not only demands multilingual language processing, but also requires application of extreme levels of domain-general cognitive control. We used MRI to longitudinally measure cortical thickness in simultaneous interpretation trainees before and after a Master's program in conference interpreting. We compared them to multilingual control participants scanned at the same interval of time. Increases in cortical thickness were specific to trainee interpreters. Increases were observed in regions involved in lower-level, phonetic processing (left posterior superior temporal gyrus, anterior supramarginal gyrus and planum temporale), in the higher-level formulation of propositional speech (right angular gyrus) and in the conversion of items from working memory into a sequence (right dorsal premotor cortex), and finally, in domain-general executive control and attention (right parietal lobule). Findings are consistent with the linguistic requirements of simultaneous interpretation and also with the more general cognitive demands on attentional control for expert performance in simultaneous interpreting. Our findings may also reflect beneficial, potentially protective effects of simultaneous interpretation training, which has previously been shown to confer enhanced skills in certain executive and attentional domains over and above those conferred by bilingualism.

Abstract

The use of virtual reality (VR) as a methodological tool is becoming increasingly popular in behavioral research as its flexibility allows for a wide range of applications. This new method has not been as widely accepted in the field of psycholinguistics, however, possibly due to the assumption that language processing during human-computer interactions does not accurately reflect human-human interactions. Yet at the same time there is a growing need to study human-human language interactions in a tightly controlled context, which has not been possible using existing methods. VR, however, offers experimental control over parameters that cannot be (as finely) controlled in the real world. As such, in this study we aim to show that human-computer language interaction is comparable to human-human language interaction in virtual reality. In the current study we compare participants’ language behavior in a syntactic priming task with human versus computer partners: we used a human partner, a human-like avatar with human-like facial expressions and verbal behavior, and a computer-like avatar which had this humanness removed. As predicted, our study shows comparable priming effects between the human and human-like avatar suggesting that participants attributed human-like agency to the human-like avatar. Indeed, when interacting with the computer-like avatar, the priming effect was significantly decreased. This suggests that when interacting with a human-like avatar, sentence processing is comparable to interacting with a human partner. Our study therefore shows that VR is a valid platform for conducting language research and studying dialogue interactions in an ecologically valid manner.

Abstract

Syntactic priming, the phenomenon in which participants adopt the linguistic behaviour of their partner, is widely used in psycholinguistics to investigate syntactic operations. Although the phenomenon of syntactic priming is well documented, the memory system that supports the retention of this syntactic information long enough to influence future utterances, is not as widely investigated. We aim to shed light on this issue by assessing patients with Korsakoff's amnesia on an active-passive syntactic priming task and compare their performance to controls matched in age, education, and premorbid intelligence. Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome display deficits in all subdomains of declarative memory, yet their nondeclarative memory remains intact, making them an ideal patient group to determine which memory system supports syntactic priming. In line with the hypothesis that syntactic priming relies on nondeclarative memory, the patient group shows strong priming tendencies (12.6% passive structure repetition). Our healthy control group did not show a priming tendency, presumably due to cognitive interference between declarative and nondeclarative memory. We discuss the results in relation to amnesia, aging, and compensatory mechanisms.

Abstract

The hippocampal formation is a brain structure integrally involved in episodic memory, spatial navigation, cognition and stress responsiveness. Structural abnormalities in hippocampal volume and shape are found in several common neuropsychiatric disorders. To identify the genetic underpinnings of hippocampal structure here we perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 33,536 individuals and discover six independent loci significantly associated with hippocampal volume, four of them novel. Of the novel loci, three lie within genes (ASTN2, DPP4 and MAST4) and one is found 200 kb upstream of SHH. A hippocampal subfield analysis shows that a locus within the MSRB3 gene shows evidence of a localized effect along the dentate gyrus, subiculum, CA1 and fissure. Further, we show that genetic variants associated with decreased hippocampal volume are also associated with increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease (rg=−0.155). Our findings suggest novel biological pathways through which human genetic variation influences hippocampal volume and risk for neuropsychiatric illness.

Abstract

Many studies have demonstrated that listeners use information extracted from verbs to guide anticipatory eye movements to objects in the visual context that satisfy the selection restrictions of the verb. An important question is what underlies such verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze. Based on empirical and theoretical suggestions, we investigated the influence of five potential predictors of this behavior: functional associations and general associations between verb and target object, as well as the listeners’ production fluency, receptive vocabulary knowledge, and non-verbal intelligence. In three eye-tracking experiments, participants looked at sets of four objects and listened to sentences where the final word was predictable or not predictable (e.g., “The man peels/draws an apple”). On predictable trials only the target object, but not the distractors, were functionally and associatively related to the verb. In Experiments 1 and 2, objects were presented before the verb was heard. In Experiment 3, participants were given a short preview of the display after the verb was heard. Functional associations and receptive vocabulary were found to be important predictors of verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze independent of the amount of contextual visual input. General word associations did not and non-verbal intelligence was only a very weak predictor of anticipatory eye movements. Participants’ production fluency correlated positively with the likelihood of anticipatory eye movements when participants were given the long but not the short visual display preview. These findings fit best with a pluralistic approach to predictive language processing in which multiple mechanisms, mediating factors, and situational context dynamically interact. 

Abstract

In face-to-face discourse, listeners exploit cues in the input to generate predictions about upcoming words. Moreover, in addition to speech, speakers produce a multitude of visual signals, such as iconic gestures, which listeners readily integrate with incoming words. Previous studies have shown that processing of target words is facilitated when these are embedded in predictable compared to non-predictable discourses and when accompanied by iconic compared to meaningless gestures. In the present study, we investigated the interaction of both factors. We recorded electroencephalogram from 60 Dutch adults while they were watching videos of an actress producing short discourses. The stimuli consisted of an introductory and a target sentence; the latter contained a target noun. Depending on the preceding discourse, the target noun was either predictable or not. Each target noun was paired with an iconic gesture and a gesture that did not convey meaning. In both conditions, gesture presentation in the video was timed such that the gesture stroke slightly preceded the onset of the spoken target by 130 ms. Our ERP analyses revealed independent facilitatory effects for predictable discourses and iconic gestures. However, the interactive effect of both factors demonstrated that target processing (i.e., gesture-speech integration) was facilitated most when targets were part of predictable discourses and accompanied by an iconic gesture. Our results thus suggest a strong intertwinement of linguistic predictability and non-verbal gesture processing where listeners exploit predictive discourse cues to pre-activate verbal and non-verbal representations of upcoming target words.

Abstract

Listeners frequently recognize spoken words in the presence of background noise. Previous research has shown that noise reduces phoneme intelligibility and hampers spoken-word recognition—especially for non-native listeners. In the present study, we investigated how noise influences lexical competition in both the non-native and the native language, reflecting the degree to which both languages are co-activated. We recorded the eye movements of native Dutch participants as they listened to English sentences containing a target word while looking at displays containing four objects. On target-present trials, the visual referent depicting the target word was present, along with three unrelated distractors. On target-absent trials, the target object (e.g., wizard) was absent. Instead, the display contained an English competitor, overlapping with the English target in phonological onset (e.g., window), a Dutch competitor, overlapping with the English target in phonological onset (e.g., wimpel, pennant), and two unrelated distractors. Half of the sentences was masked by speech-shaped noise; the other half was presented in quiet. Compared to speech in quiet, noise delayed fixations to the target objects on target-present trials. For target-absent trials, we observed that the likelihood for fixation biases towards the English and Dutch onset competitors (over the unrelated distractors) was larger in noise than in quiet. Our data thus show that the presence of background noise increases lexical competition in the task-relevant non-native (English) and in the task-irrelevant native (Dutch) language. The latter reflects stronger interference of one’s native language during non-native spoken-word recognition under adverse conditions.

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the possibility of tremor detection based on deep brain activity.
Methods: We re-analyzed recordings of local field potentials (LFPs) from the subthalamic nucleus in 10
PD patients (12 body sides) with spontaneously fluctuating rest tremor. Power in several frequency bands
was estimated and used as input to Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) which classified short data segments
as either tremor-free rest or rest tremor. HMMs were compared to direct threshold application to individual
power features.
Results: Applying a threshold directly to band-limited power was insufficient for tremor detection (mean
area under the curve [AUC] of receiver operating characteristic: 0.64, STD: 0.19). Multi-feature HMMs, in
contrast, allowed for accurate detection (mean AUC: 0.82, STD: 0.15), using four power features obtained
from a single contact pair. Within-patient training yielded better accuracy than across-patient training
(0.84 vs. 0.78, p = 0.03), yet tremor could often be detected accurately with either approach. High frequency
oscillations (>200 Hz) were the best performing individual feature.
Conclusions: LFP-based markers of tremor are robust enough to allow for accurate tremor detection in
short data segments, provided that appropriate statistical models are used.
Significance: LFP-based markers of tremor could be useful control signals for closed-loop deep brain
stimulation.

Abstract

In 2 experiments, we assessed the effects of response latency and task-induced goals on the onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid processing of visual words as revealed by ocular response
tasks. In Experiment 1 (ocular lexical decision task), participants performed a lexical decision task using eye movement responses on a sequence of 4 words. In Experiment 2, the same words were encoded for an episodic recognition memory task that did not require a metalinguistic judgment. For both tasks, survival analyses showed that the earliest observable effect (divergence point [DP]) of semantic priming on target-word reading times occurred at approximately 260 ms, and ex-Gaussian distribution fits revealed that the magnitude of the priming effect increased as a function of response time. Together, these
distributional effects of semantic priming suggest that the influence of the prime increases when target processing is more effortful. This effect does not require that the task include a metalinguistic judgment;
manipulation of the task goals across experiments affected the overall response speed but not the location of the DP or the overall distributional pattern of the priming effect. These results are more readily explained as the result of a retrospective, rather than a prospective, priming mechanism and are consistent with compound-cue models of semantic priming.

Abstract

This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this paradigm, naming latencies have been found to increase for successive presentations of exemplars from the same category, a phenomenon known as Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI). As expected, the joint-naming task showed a within-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies increased as a function of the number of category exemplars named previously by the participant (self-produced items). Crucially, we also observed an across-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies slowed as a function of the number of category members named by the participant's task partner (other-produced items). The magnitude of the across-speaker CSI effect did not vary as a function of whether or not the listening participant could see the pictures their partner was naming. The observation of across-speaker CSI suggests that the effect originates at the conceptual level of the language system, as proposed by Belke's (2013) Conceptual Accumulation account. Whereas self-produced and other-produced words both resulted in a CSI effect on naming latencies, post-experiment free recall rates were higher for self-produced than other-produced items. Together, these results suggest that both speaking and listening result in implicit learning at the conceptual level of the language system but that these effects are independent of explicit learning as indicated by item recall.

Abstract

Conversational interaction occasionally lapses as topics become exhausted or as participants are left with no obvious thing to talk about next. In this article I look at episodes of ordinary conversation to examine how participants resolve issues of speakership and sequentiality in lapse environments. In particular, I examine one recurrent phenomenon—sequence recompletion—whereby participants bring to completion a sequence of talk that was already treated as complete. Using conversation analysis, I describe four methods for sequence recompletion: turn-exiting, action redoings, delayed replies, and post-sequence transitions. With this practice, participants use verbal and vocal resources to locally manage their participation framework when ending one course of action and potentially starting up a new one

Abstract

Until recently, the literature on common ground depicted its influence as a purely verbal phenomenon. We review current research on how common ground influences gesture. With informative exceptions, most experiments found that speakers used fewer gestures as well as fewer words in common ground contexts; i.e., the gesture/word ratio did not change. Common ground often led to more poorly articulated gestures, which parallels its effect on words. These findings support the principle of recipient design as well as more specific social functions such as grounding, the given-new contract, and Grice’s maxims. However, conceptual pacts or linking old with new information may maintain the original form. All together, these findings implicate gesture-speech ensembles rather than isolated effects on gestures alone.

Abstract

Does blinking function as a type of feedback in conversation? To address this question, we built a corpus of Dutch conversations, identified short and long addressee blinks during extended turns, and measured their occurrence relative to the end of turn constructional units (TCUs), the location
where feedback typically occurs. Addressee blinks were indeed timed to the
end of TCUs. Also, long blinks were more likely than short blinks to occur
during mutual gaze, with nods or continuers, and their occurrence was
restricted to sequential contexts in which signaling understanding was
particularly relevant, suggesting a special signaling capacity of long blinks.

Abstract

In an online experiment among native speakers of Dutch we measured addressees' responses to emails written in the informal pronoun T or the formal pronoun V in HR communication. 172 participants (61 male, mean age 37 years) read either the V-versions or the T-versions of two invitation emails and two rejection emails by four different fictitious recruiters. After each email, participants had to score their appreciation of the company and the recruiter on five different scales each, such as The recruiter who wrote this email seems … [scale from friendly to unfriendly]. We hypothesized that (i) the V-pronoun would be more appreciated in letters of rejection, and the T-pronoun in letters of invitation, and (ii) older people would appreciate the V-pronoun more than the T-pronoun, and the other way around for younger people. Although neither of these hypotheses was supported, we did find a small effect of pronoun: Emails written in V were more highly appreciated than emails in T, irrespective of type of email (invitation or rejection), and irrespective of the participant's age, gender, and level of education. At the same time, we observed differences in the strength of this effect across different scales.

Abstract

Purpose:
To our knowledge, there are no data examining the agreement between self-reported and clinician-rated stuttering severity. In the era of big data, self-reported ratings have great potential utility for large-scale data collection, where cost and time preclude in-depth assessment by a clinician. Equally, there is increasing emphasis on the need to recognize an individual's experience of their own condition. Here, we examined the agreement between self-reported stuttering severity compared to clinician ratings during a speech assessment. As a secondary objective, we determined whether self-reported stuttering severity correlated with an individual's subjective impact of stuttering.

Method:
Speech-language pathologists conducted face-to-face speech assessments with 195 participants (137 males) aged 5–84 years, recruited from a cohort of people with self-reported stuttering. Stuttering severity was rated on a 10-point scale by the participant and by two speech-language pathologists. Participants also completed the Overall Assessment of the Subjective Experience of Stuttering (OASES). Clinician and participant ratings were compared. The association between stuttering severity and the OASES scores was examined.

Results:
There was a strong positive correlation between speech-language pathologist and participant-reported ratings of stuttering severity. Participant-reported stuttering severity correlated weakly with the four OASES domains and with the OASES overall impact score.

Conclusions:
Participants were able to accurately rate their stuttering severity during a speech assessment using a simple one-item question. This finding indicates that self-report stuttering severity is a suitable method for large-scale data collection. Findings also support the collection of self-report subjective experience data using questionnaires, such as the OASES, which add vital information about the participants' experience of stuttering that is not captured by overt speech severity ratings alone.

Abstract

Prediction appears to be an important characteristic of the human mind. It has also been suggested that prediction is a core difference of autistic children. Past research exploring language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children, however, has been somewhat contradictory, with some studies finding normal anticipatory processing in autistic children with low levels of autistic traits but others observing weaker prediction effects in autistic children with less receptive language skills. Here we investigated language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in young children who differed in the severity of their level of autistic traits and were in professional institutional care in Hangzhou, China. We chose the same spoken sentences (translated into Mandarin Chinese) and visual stimuli as a previous study which observed robust prediction effects in young children (Mani & Huettig, 2012) and included a control group of typically-developing children. Typically developing but not autistic children showed robust prediction effects. Most interestingly, autistic children with lower communication, motor, and (adaptive) behavior scores exhibited both less predictive and non-predictive visual attention behavior. Our results raise the possibility that differences in language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children with higher levels of autistic traits may be differences in visual attention in disguise, a hypothesis that needs further investigation.

Abstract

We argue that the educational and psychological sciences must embrace the diversity of reading rather than chase the phantom of normal reading behavior. We critically discuss the research practice of asking participants in experiments to read “normally”. We then draw attention to the large cross-cultural and linguistic diversity around the world and consider the enormous diversity of reading situations and goals. Finally, we observe that people bring a huge diversity of brains and experiences to the reading task. This leads to certain implications. First, there are important lessons for how to conduct psycholinguistic experiments. Second, we need to move beyond Anglo-centric reading research and produce models of reading that reflect the large cross-cultural diversity of languages and types of writing systems. Third, we must acknowledge that there are multiple ways of reading and reasons for reading, and none of them is normal or better or a “gold standard”. Finally, we must stop stigmatizing individuals who read differently and for different reasons, and there should be increased focus on teaching the ability to extract information relevant to the person’s goals. What is important is not how well people decode written language and how fast people read but what people comprehend given their own stated goals.

Abstract

Semantic variation in the cutting and breaking domain has been shown to be constrained across languages in a previous typological study, but it was unclear whether Japanese was an outlier in this domain. Here we revisit cutting and breaking in the Japonic language area by collecting new naming data for 40 videoclips depicting cutting and breaking events in Standard Japanese, the highly divergent Tohoku dialects, as well as four related Ryukyuan languages (Amami, Okinawa, Miyako and Yaeyama). We find that the Japonic languages recapitulate the same semantic dimensions attested in the previous typological study, confirming that semantic variation in the domain of cutting and breaking is indeed cross-linguistically constrained. We then compare our new Japonic data to previously collected Germanic data and find that, in general, related languages resemble each other more than unrelated languages, and that the Japonic languages resemble each other more than the Germanic languages do. Nevertheless, English resembles all of the Japonic languages more than it resembles Swedish. Together, these findings show that the rate and extent of semantic change can differ between language families, indicating the existence of lineage-specific developments on top of universal cross-linguistic constraints.

Abstract

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

Abstract

n conversations, interlocutors concurrently perform two related processes: speech comprehension and speech planning. We investigated effects of speech planning on comprehension using EEG. Dutch speakers listened to sentences that ended with expected or unexpected target words. In addition, a picture was presented two seconds after target onset (Experiment 1) or 50 ms before target onset (Experiment 2). Participants’ task was to name the picture or to stay quiet depending on the picture category. In Experiment 1, we found a strong N400 effect in response to unexpected compared to expected target words. Importantly, this N400 effect was reduced in Experiment 2 compared to Experiment 1. Unexpectedly, the N400 effect was not smaller in the naming compared to categorization condition. This indicates that conceptual preparation or the decision whether to speak (taking place in both task conditions of Experiment 2) rather than processes specific to word planning interfere with comprehension.

Abstract

Foreign languages are often learned in emotionally neutral academic environments which differ greatly from the familiar context where native languages are acquired. This difference in learning contexts has been argued to lead to reduced emotional resonance when confronted with a foreign language. In the current study, we investigated whether the reactivity of the sympathetic nervous system in response to emotionally-charged stimuli is reduced in a foreign language. To this end, pupil sizes were recorded while reading aloud emotional sentences in the native or foreign language. Additionally, subjective ratings of emotional impact were provided after reading each sentence, allowing us to further investigate foreign language effects on explicit emotional understanding. Pupillary responses showed a larger effect of emotion in the native than in the foreign language. However, such a difference was not present for explicit ratings of emotionality. These results reveal that the sympathetic nervous system reacts differently depending on the language context, which in turns suggests a deeper emotional processing when reading in a native compared to a foreign language.

Abstract

Stimulus-related changes in cerebral blood oxygenation were measured using high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging sequentially covering visual occipital areas in contiguous sections. During dynamic imaging, healthy subjects silently viewed pseudowords, single false fonts, or length-matched strings of the same false fonts. The paradigm consisted of a sixfold alternation of an activation and a control task. With pseudowords as activation vs single false fonts as control, responses were seen mainly in medial occipital cortex. These responses disappeared when pseudowords were alternated with false font strings as the control and reappeared when false font strings instead of pseudowords served as activation and were alternated with single false fonts. The string-length contrast alone, therefore, is sufficient to account for the activation pattern observed in medial visual cortex when word-like stimuli are contrasted with single characters.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss an inherent difficulty of PET (and fMRI) research in language production. On the one hand, language production presupposes some degree of freedom for the subject, on the other hand, interpretability of results presupposes restrictions of this freedom. This difficulty is reflected in the existing PET literature in some neglect of the general principle to design experiments in such a way that the results do not allow for alternative interpretations. It is argued that by narrowing down the scope of experiments a gain in interpretability can be achieved.

Abstract

We investigated how two groups of Turkish-Dutch bilinguals and two groups of monolingual speakers of the two languages described static topological relations. The bilingual groups differed with respect to their first (L1) and second (L2) language proficiencies and a number of sociolinguistic factors. Using an elicitation tool that covers a wide range of topological relations, we first assessed the extensions of different spatial expressions (topological relation markers, TRMs) in the Turkish and Dutch spoken by monolingual speakers. We then assessed differences in the use of TRMs between the two bilingual groups and monolingual speakers. In both bilingual groups, differences compared to monolingual speakers were mainly observed for Turkish. Dutch-dominant bilinguals showed enhanced congruence between translation-equivalent Turkish and Dutch TRMs. Turkish-dominant bilinguals extended the use of a topologically neutral locative marker. Our results can be interpreted as showing different bilingual optimization strategies (Muysken, 2013) in bilingual speakers who live in the same environment but differ with respect to L2 onset, L2 proficiency, and perceived importance of the L1.

Abstract

Attempts to connect individual differences in statistical learning with broader aspects of cognition have received considerable attention, but have yielded mixed results. A possible explanation is that statistical learning is typically tested using the two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task. As a meta-cognitive task relying on explicit familiarity judgments, 2AFC may not accurately capture implicitly formed statistical computations. In this paper, we adapt the classic serial-recall memory paradigm to implicitly test statistical learning in a statistically-induced chunking recall (SICR) task. We hypothesized that artificial language exposure would lead subjects to chunk recurring statistical patterns, facilitating recall of words from the input. Experiment 1 demonstrates that SICR offers more fine-grained insights into individual differences in statistical learning than 2AFC. Experiment 2 shows that SICR has higher test-retest reliability than that reported for 2AFC. Thus, SICR offers a more sensitive measure of individual differences, suggesting that basic chunking abilities may explain statistical learning.

Abstract

Current psycholinguistic theory proffers prediction as a central, explanatory mechanism in language
processing. However, widely-replicated prediction effects may not mean that prediction is
necessary in language processing. As a case in point, C. D. Martin et al. [2013. Bilinguals reading
in their second language do not predict upcoming words as native readers do.
Journal of
Memory and Language, 69
(4), 574
–
588. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2013.08.001] reported ERP evidence for
prediction in native- but not in non-native speakers. Articles mismatching an expected noun
elicited larger negativity in the N400 time window compared to articles matching the expected
noun in native speakers only. We attempted to replicate these findings, but found no evidence
for prediction irrespective of language nativeness. We argue that pre-activation of phonological
form of upcoming nouns, as evidenced in article-elicited effects, may not be a robust
phenomenon. A view of prediction as a necessary computation in language comprehension
must be re-evaluated.

Abstract

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish−English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., “The student is going to the library to borrow a . . .”), followed by the predictable word (book), a word that was form-related (hook) or semantically related (page) to the predictable word, or an unrelated word (sofa). Word stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) was 500 ms (Experiment 1) or 700 ms (Experiment 2). In both experiments, all nonpredictable words elicited classic N400 effects. Form-related and unrelated words elicited similar N400 effects. Semantically related words elicited smaller N400s than unrelated words, which however, did not depend on cloze value of the predictable word. Thus, we found no N400 evidence for preactivation of form or meaning at either SOA, unlike native-speaker results (Ito, Corley et al., 2016). However, non-native speakers did show the post-N400 posterior positivity (LPC effect) for form-related words like native speakers, but only at the slower SOA. This LPC effect increased gradually with cloze value of the predictable word. We do not interpret this effect as necessarily demonstrating prediction, but rather as evincing combined effects of top-down activation (contextual meaning) and bottom-up activation (form similarity) that result in activation of unseen words that fit the context well, thereby leading to an interpretation conflict reflected in the LPC. Although there was no evidence that non-native speakers preactivate form or meaning, non-native speakers nonetheless appear to use bottom-up and top-down information to constrain incremental interpretation much like native speakers do.

Abstract

To communicate, an animal's strategic timing of rhythmic signals is crucial. Evolutionary, game-theoretical, and dynamical systems models can shed light on the interaction between individuals and the associated costs and benefits of signalling at a specific time. Mathematical models that study rhythmic interactions from a strategic or evolutionary perspective are rare in animal communication research. But new inspiration may come from a recent game theory model of how group synchrony emerges from local interactions of oscillatory neurons. In the study, the authors analyse when the benefit of joint synchronization outweighs the cost of individual neurons sending electrical signals to each other. They postulate there is a benefit for pairs of neurons to fire together and a cost for a neuron to communicate. The resulting model delivers a variant of a classical dynamical system, the Kuramoto model. Here, we present an accessible overview of the Kuramoto model and evolutionary game theory, and of the 'oscillatory neurons' model. We interpret the model's results and discuss the advantages and limitations of using this particular model in the context of animal rhythmic communication. Finally, we sketch potential future directions and discuss the need to further combine evolutionary dynamics, game theory and rhythmic processes in animal communication studies.

Abstract

Objective

Researchers in animal cognition, psychophysics, and experimental psychology need to randomise the presentation order of trials in experimental sessions. In many paradigms, for each trial, one of two responses can be correct, and the trials need to be ordered such that the participant’s responses are a fair assessment of their performance. Specifically, in some cases, especially for low numbers of trials, randomised trial orders need to be excluded if they contain simple patterns which a participant could accidentally match and so succeed at the task without learning.
Results

We present and distribute a simple Python software package and tool to produce pseudorandom sequences following the Gellermann series. This series has been proposed to pre-empt simple heuristics and avoid inflated performance rates via false positive responses. Our tool allows users to choose the sequence length and outputs a .csv file with newly and randomly generated sequences. This allows behavioural researchers to produce, in a few seconds, a pseudorandom sequence for their specific experiment. PyGellermann is available at https://github.com/YannickJadoul/PyGellermann.

Abstract

Most bioacoustics software is used to analyse the already collected acoustics data in batch, i.e., after the data-collecting phase of a scientific study. However, experiments based on animal training require immediate and precise reactions from the experimenter, and thus do not easily dovetail with a typical bioacoustics workflow. Bridging this methodological gap, we have developed a custom application to live-monitor the vocal development of harbour seals in a behavioural experiment. In each trial, the application records and automatically detects an animal's call, and immediately measures duration and acoustic measures such as intensity, fundamental frequency, or formant frequencies. It then displays a spectrogram of the recording and the acoustic measurements, allowing the experimenter to instantly evaluate whether or not to reinforce the animal's vocalisation. From a technical perspective, the rapid and easy development of this custom software was made possible by combining multiple open-source software projects. Here, we integrated the acoustic analyses from Parselmouth, a Python library for Praat, together with PyAudio and Matplotlib's recording and plotting functionality, into a custom graphical user interface created with PyQt. This flexible recombination of different open-source Python libraries allows the whole program to be written in a mere couple of hundred lines of code

Abstract

At the group level, children exposed to certain health and demographic risk factors, and who have delayed language in early childhood are, more likely to have language problems later in childhood. However, it is unclear whether we can use these risk factors to predict whether an individual child is likely to develop problems with language (e.g., be diagnosed with a developmental language disorder). We tested this in a sample of 146 children who took part in the UK-CDI norming project. When the children were 15–18 months old, 1,210 British parents completed: (a) the UK-CDI (a detailed assessment of vocabulary and gesture use) and (b) the Family Questionnaire (questions about health and demographic risk factors). When the children were between 4 and 6  years, 146 of the same parents completed a short questionnaire that assessed (a) whether children had been diagnosed with a disability that was likely to affect language proficiency (e.g., developmental disability, language disorder, hearing impairment), but (b) also yielded a broader measure: whether the child’s language had raised any concern, either by a parent or professional. Discriminant function analyses were used to assess whether we could use different combinations of 10 risk factors, together with early vocabulary and gesture scores, to identify children (a) who had developed a language-related disability by the age of 4–6 years (20 children, 13.70% of the sample) or (b) for whom concern about language had been expressed (49 children; 33.56%). The overall accuracy of the models, and the specificity scores were high, indicating that the measures correctly identified those children without a language-related disability and whose language was not of concern. However, sensitivity scores were low, indicating that the models could not identify those children who were diagnosed with a language-related disability or whose language was of concern. Several exploratory analyses were carried out to analyse these results further. Overall, the results suggest that it is difficult to use parent reports of early risk factors and language in the first 2 years of life to predict which children are likely to be diagnosed with a language-related disability. Possible reasons for this are discussed.

Abstract

Children's abilities to process the phonological structure of words are important predictors of their literacy development. In the current study, we examined the interrelatedness between implicit (i.e., speech decoding) and explicit (i.e., phonological awareness) phonological abilities, and especially the role therein of lexical specificity (i.e., the ability to learn to recognize spoken words based on only minimal acoustic-phonetic differences). We tested 75 Dutch monolingual and 64 Turkish–Dutch bilingual kindergartners. SEM analyses showed that speech decoding predicted lexical specificity, which in turn predicted rhyme awareness in the first language learners but phoneme awareness in the second language learners. Moreover, in the latter group there was an impact of the second language: Dutch speech decoding and lexical specificity predicted Turkish phonological awareness, which in turn predicted Dutch phonological awareness. We conclude that language-specific phonological characteristics underlie different patterns of transfer from implicit to explicit phonological abilities in first and second language learners.

Abstract

Open Science is becoming a mainstream scientific ideology in psychology and related fields. However, researchers, especially early-career researchers (ECRs) in developing countries, are facing significant hurdles in engaging in Open Science and moving it forward. In China, various societal and cultural factors discourage ECRs from participating in Open Science, such as the lack of dedicated communication channels and the norm of modesty. To make the voice of Open Science heard by Chinese-speaking ECRs and scholars at large, the Chinese Open Science Network (COSN) was initiated in 2016. With its core values being grassroots-oriented, diversity, and inclusivity, COSN has grown from a small Open Science interest group to a recognized network both in the Chinese-speaking research community and the international Open Science community. So far, COSN has organized three in-person workshops, 12 tutorials, 48 talks, and 55 journal club sessions and translated 15 Open Science-related articles and blogs from English to Chinese. Currently, the main social media account of COSN (i.e., the WeChat Official Account) has more than 23,000 subscribers, and more than 1,000 researchers/students actively participate in the discussions on Open Science. In this article, we share our experience in building such a network to encourage ECRs in developing countries to start their own Open Science initiatives and engage in the global Open Science movement. We foresee great collaborative efforts of COSN together with all other local and international networks to further accelerate the Open Science movement.

Abstract

In the present study, we used chronometric TMS to probe the time-course of 3 brain regions during a picture naming task. The left inferior frontal gyrus, left posterior middle temporal gyrus, and left posterior superior temporal gyrus were all separately stimulated in 1 of 5 time-windows (225, 300, 375, 450, and 525 ms) from picture onset. We found posterior temporal areas to be causally involved in picture naming in earlier time-windows, whereas all 3 regions appear to be involved in the later time-windows. However, chronometric TMS produces nonspecific effects that may impact behavior, and furthermore, the time-course of any given process is a product of both the involved processing stages along with individual variation in the duration of each stage. We therefore extend previous work in the field by accounting for both individual variations in naming latencies and directly testing for nonspecific effects of TMS. Our findings reveal that both factors influence behavioral outcomes at the group level, underlining the importance of accounting for individual variations in naming latencies, especially for late processing stages closer to articulation, and recognizing the presence of nonspecific effects of TMS. The paper advances key considerations and avenues for future work using chronometric TMS to study overt production.

Abstract

Children who hear large amounts of diverse speech learn language more quickly than children who do not. However, high correlations between the amount and the diversity of the input in speech samples makes it difficult to isolate the influence of each. We overcame this problem by controlling the input to a computational model so that amount of exposure to linguistic input (quantity) and the quality of that input (lexical diversity) were independently manipulated. Sublexical, lexical, and multi-word knowledge were charted across development (Study 1), showing that while input quantity may be important early in learning, lexical diversity is ultimately more crucial, a prediction confirmed against children’s data (Study 2). The model trained on a lexically diverse input also performed better on nonword repetition and sentence recall tests (Study 3) and was quicker to learn new words over time (Study 4). A language input that is rich in lexical diversity outperforms equivalent richness in quantity for learned sublexical and lexical knowledge, for well-established language tests, and for acquiring words that have never been encountered before.

Abstract

Sustained attention has previously been shown as a requirement for language production. However, this is mostly evident for difficult conditions, such as a dual-task situation. The current study provides corroborating evidence that this relationship holds even for simple picture naming. Sustained attention ability, indexed both by participants’ reaction times and individuals’ hit rate (the proportion of correctly detected targets) on a digit discrimination task, correlated with picture naming latencies. Individuals with poor sustained attention were consistently slower and their RT distributions were more positively skewed when naming pictures compared to individuals with better sustained attention. Additionally, the need to sustain attention was manipulated by changing the speed of stimulus presentation. Research has suggested that fast event rates tax sustained attention resources to a larger degree than slow event rates. However, in this study the fast event rate did not result in increased difficulty, neither for the picture naming task nor for the sustained attention task. Instead, the results point to a speed-accuracy trade-off in the sustained attention task (lower accuracy but faster responses in the fast than in the slow event rate), and to a benefit for faster rates in the picture naming task (shorter naming latencies with no difference in accuracy). Performance on both tasks was largely comparable, supporting previous findings that sustained attention is called upon during language production

Abstract

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have problems not only with language performance but also with sustained attention, which is the ability to maintain alertness over an extended period of time. Although there is consensus that this ability is impaired with respect to processing stimuli in the auditory perceptual modality, conflicting evidence exists concerning the visual modality.
Aims

To address the outstanding issue whether the impairment in sustained attention is limited to the auditory domain, or if it is domain-general. Furthermore, to test whether children's sustained attention ability relates to their word-production skills.
Methods & Procedures

Groups of 7–9 year olds with SLI (N = 28) and typically developing (TD) children (N = 22) performed a picture-naming task and two sustained attention tasks, namely auditory and visual continuous performance tasks (CPTs).
Outcomes & Results

Children with SLI performed worse than TD children on picture naming and on both the auditory and visual CPTs. Moreover, performance on both the CPTs correlated with picture-naming latencies across developmental groups.
Conclusions & Implications

These results provide evidence for a deficit in both auditory and visual sustained attention in children with SLI. Moreover, the study indicates there is a relationship between domain-general sustained attention and picture-naming performance in both TD and language-impaired children. Future studies should establish whether this relationship is causal. If attention influences language, training of sustained attention may improve language production in children from both developmental groups.

Abstract

Theories of conversation propose that in order to have smooth transitions from one turn to the next, speakers already plan their response while listening to their interlocutor. Moreover, it has been argued that speakers align their linguistic representations (i.e. prime each other), thereby reducing the processing costs associated with concurrent listening and speaking. In two experiments, we assessed how identity and associative priming from spoken words onto picture naming were affected by a concurrent speech planning task. In a baseline (no name) condition, participants heard prime words that were identical, associatively related, or unrelated to target pictures presented two seconds after prime onset. Each prime was accompanied by a non-target picture and followed by its recorded name. The participant did not name the non-target picture. In the plan condition, the participants first named the non-target picture, instead of listening to the recording, and then the target. In Experiment 1, where the plan- and no-plan conditions were tested between participants, priming effects of equal strength were found in the plan and no-plan condition. In Experiment 2, where the two conditions were tested within participants, the identity priming effect was maintained, but the associative priming effect was only seen in the no-plan but not in the plan condition. In this experiment, participant had to decide at the onset of each trial whether or not to name the non-target picture, rendering the task more complex than in Experiment 1. These decision processes may have interfered with the processing of the primes. Thus, associative priming can take place during speech planning, but only if the cognitive load is not too high.

Abstract

This paper compares the focus marking systems and the focus size that can be expressed by the different focus markings in four Mande and three Atlantic languages and varieties, namely: Bambara, Dyula, Kakabe, Soninke (Mande), Wolof, Jóola Foñy and Jóola Karon (Atlantic). All of these languages are known to mark focus morphosyntactically, rather than prosodically, as the more well-studied Germanic languages do. However, the Mande languages under discussion use only morphology, in the form of a particle that follows the focus, while the Atlantic ones use a more complex morphosyntactic system in which focus is marked by morphology in the verbal complex and movement of the focused term. It is shown that while there are some syntactic restrictions to how many different focus sizes can be marked in a distinct way, there is also a certain degree of arbitrariness as to which focus sizes are marked in the same way as each other.

Abstract

This special issue focuses on the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of truth-marking. The names that have been used to refer to this phenomenon include, among others, counter-assertive focus, polar(ity) focus, verum focus, emphatic polarity or simply verum. This terminological variety is suggestive of the wide range of ideas and conceptions that characterizes this research field. This collection aims to get closer to the core of what truly constitutes verum. We want to expand the empirical base and determine the common and diverging properties of truth-marking in the languages of the world. The objective is to set a theoretical and empirical baseline for future research on verum and related phenomena.

Abstract

Spontaneous language learning both in children learning their mother tongue and in adults learning a second language shows that language development proceeds in a stage-wise manner. Given that a developmental stage is defined as a coherent linguistic system, utterances of language learners can be accounted for in terms of what (Selinker, Larry. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics 10. 209-231) referred to with the term Interlanguage. This paper is a study on the early interlanguage systems of children learning Dutch and German as their mother tongue. The present child learner systems, so it is claimed, are coherent lexical systems based on types of verb-argument structure that are either agentive (as in Dutch: kannie bal pakke 'cannot ball get', or German: mag nich nase putzen 'like not nose clean') or non-agentive (as in Dutch: popje valt bijna 'doll falls nearly', or in German: ente fällt 'duck falls'). At this lexical stage, functional morphology (e. g. morphological finiteness, tense), function words (e. g. auxiliary verbs, determiners) and word order variation are absent. For these typically developing children, both in Dutch and in German, it is claimed that developmental progress is driven by the acquisition of the formal properties of topicalization. It is, furthermore, argued that this feature seems to serve as the driving force in the instantiation of the functional, i. e. informational linguistic properties of the target-language system

Abstract

The growing importance of research on bilingualism in psychology and neuroscience motivates the need for a psychometric model that can be used to understand and quantify this phenomenon. This research is the first to meet this need. We reanalyzed two data sets (N = 171 and N = 112) from relatively young adult language-unbalanced bilinguals and asked whether bilingualism is best described by the factor structure or by the network structure. The factor and network models were established on one data set and then validated on the other data set in a fully confirmatory manner. The network model provided the best fit to the data. This implies that bilingualism should be conceptualized as an emergent phenomenon arising from direct and idiosyncratic dependencies among the history of language acquisition, diverse language skills, and language-use practices. These dependencies can be reduced to neither a single universal quotient nor to some more general factors. Additional in-depth network analyses showed that the subjective perception of proficiency along with language entropy and language mixing were the most central indices of bilingualism, thus indicating that these measures can be especially sensitive to variation in the overall bilingual experience. Overall, this work highlights the great potential of psychometric network modeling to gain a more accurate description and understanding of complex (psycho)linguistic and cognitive phenomena.

Abstract

Sign language is a rich form of communication, uniquely conveying meaning through a combination of gestures, facial expressions, and body movements. Existing research in sign language generation has predominantly focused on text-to-sign pose generation, while speech-to-sign pose generation remains relatively underexplored. Speech-to-sign language generation models can facilitate effective communication between the deaf and hearing communities. In this paper, we propose an architecture that utilises prosodic information from speech audio and semantic context from text to generate sign pose sequences. In our approach, we adopt a multi-tasking strategy that involves an additional task of predicting Facial Action Units (FAUs). FAUs capture the intricate facial muscle movements that play a crucial role in conveying specific facial expressions during sign language generation. We train our models on an existing Indian Sign language dataset that contains sign language videos with audio and text translations. To evaluate our models, we report Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Probability of Correct Keypoints (PCK) scores. We find that combining prosody and text as input, along with incorporating facial action unit prediction as an additional task, outperforms previous models in both DTW and PCK scores. We also discuss the challenges and limitations of speech-to-sign pose generation models to encourage future research in this domain. We release our models, results and code to foster reproducibility and encourage future research1.

Abstract

In production, frequently used words are preferentially extended to new, though related meanings. In comprehension, frequent exposure to a word instead makes the learner confident that all of the word’s legitimate uses have been experienced, resulting in an entrenched form-meaning mapping between the word and its experienced meaning(s). This results in a perception-production dissociation, where the forms speakers are most likely to map onto a novel meaning are precisely the forms that they believe can never be used that way. At first glance, this result challenges the idea of bidirectional form-meaning mappings, assumed by all current approaches to linguistic theory. In this paper, we show that bidirectional form-meaning mappings are not in fact challenged by this production-perception dissociation. We show that the production-perception dissociation is expected even if learners of the lexicon acquire simple symmetrical form-meaning associations through simple Hebbian learning.

Abstract

Deaf children born to hearing parents are exposed to language input quite late, which has long-lasting effects on language production. Previous studies with deaf individuals mostly focused on linguistic expressions of motion events, which have several event components. We do not know if similar effects emerge in simple events such as descriptions of spatial configurations of objects. Moreover, previous data mainly come from late adult signers. There is not much known about language development of late signing children soon after learning sign language. We compared simple event descriptions of late signers of Turkish Sign Language (adults, children) to age-matched native signers. Our results indicate that while late signers in both age groups are native-like in frequency of expressing a relational encoding, they lag behind native signers in using morphologically complex linguistic forms compared to other simple forms. Late signing children perform similar to adults and thus showed no development over time.

Abstract

Prior work with hearing children acquiring a spoken language as their first language shows that spatial language and cognition are related systems and spatial language use predicts spatial memory. Here, we further investigate the extent of this relationship in signing deaf children and adults and ask if late sign language exposure, as well as the frequency and the type of spatial language use that might be affected by late exposure, modulate subsequent memory for spatial relations. To do so, we compared spatial language and memory of 8-year-old late-signing children (after 2 years of exposure to a sign language at the school for the deaf) and late-signing adults to their native-signing counterparts. We elicited picture descriptions of Left-Right relations in Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili) and measured the subsequent recognition memory accuracy of the described pictures. Results showed that late-signing adults and children were similar to their native-signing counterparts in how often they encoded the spatial relation. However, late-signing adults but not children differed from their native-signing counterparts in the type of spatial language they used. However, neither late sign language exposure nor the frequency and type of spatial language use modulated spatial memory accuracy. Therefore, even though late language exposure seems to influence the type of spatial language use, this does not predict subsequent memory for spatial relations. We discuss the implications of these findings based on the theories concerning the correspondence between spatial language and cognition as related or rather independent systems.

Abstract

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), the prototypic severe childhood speech disorder, is characterized by motor programming and planning deficits. Genetic factors make substantive contributions to CAS aetiology, with a monogenic pathogenic variant identified in a third of cases, implicating around 20 single genes to date. Here we aimed to identify molecular causation in 70 unrelated probands ascertained with CAS. We performed trio genome sequencing. Our bioinformatic analysis examined single nucleotide, indel, copy number, structural and short tandem repeat variants. We prioritised appropriate variants arising de novo or inherited that were expected to be damaging based on in silico predictions. We identified high confidence variants in 18/70 (26%) probands, almost doubling the current number of candidate genes for CAS. Three of the 18 variants affected SETBP1, SETD1A and DDX3X, thus confirming their roles in CAS, while the remaining 15 occurred in genes not previously associated with this disorder. Fifteen variants arose de novo and three were inherited. We provide further novel insights into the biology of child speech disorder, highlighting the roles of chromatin organization and gene regulation in CAS, and confirm that genes involved in CAS are co-expressed during brain development. Our findings confirm a diagnostic yield comparable to, or even higher, than other neurodevelopmental disorders with substantial de novo variant burden. Data also support the increasingly recognised overlaps between genes conferring risk for a range of neurodevelopmental disorders. Understanding the aetiological basis of CAS is critical to end the diagnostic odyssey and ensure affected individuals are poised for precision medicine trials.

Abstract

There is evidence that the human cerebellum is involved not only in motor control but also in other cognitive functions. Several studies have shown that language-related activation is lateralized toward the right cerebellar hemisphere in most people, in accordance with leftward cerebral cortical lateralization for language and a general contralaterality of cerebral–cerebellar activations. In terms of behavior, hand use elicits asymmetrical activation in the cerebellum, while hand preference is weakly associated with language lateralization. However, it is not known how, or whether, these functional relations are reflected in anatomy. We investigated volumetric gray matter asymmetries of cerebellar lobules in an MRI data set comprising 2226 subjects. We tested these cerebellar asymmetries for associations with handedness, and for correlations with cerebral cortical anatomical asymmetries of regions important for language or hand motor control, as defined by two different automated image analysis methods and brain atlases, and supplemented with extensive visual quality control. No significant associations of cerebellar asymmetries to handedness were found. Some significant associations of cerebellar lobular asymmetries to cerebral cortical asymmetries were found, but none of these correlations were greater than 0.14, and they were mostly method-/atlas-dependent. On the basis of this large and highly powered study, we conclude that there is no overt structural manifestation of cerebellar functional lateralization and connectivity, in respect of hand motor control or language laterality

Abstract

English and German have similar prosody, but their speakers realize some pitch falls (not rises) in subtly different ways. We here test for asymmetry in perception. An ABX discrimination task requiring F0 slope or duration judgements on isolated vowels revealed no cross-language difference in duration or F0 fall discrimination, but discrimination of rises (realized similarly in each language) was less accurate for English than for German listeners. This unexpected finding may reflect greater sensitivity to rising patterns by German listeners, or reduced sensitivity by English listeners as a result of extensive exposure to phrase-final rises (“uptalk”) in their language

Abstract

Modern word processors begin to offer a range of facilities for spelling, grammar and style checking in English. For the Dutch language hardly anything is available as yet. Many commercial word processing packages do include a hyphenation routine and a lexicon-based spelling checker but the practical usefulness of these tools is limited due to certain properties of Dutch orthography, as we will explain below. In this chapter we describe a text editor which incorporates a great deal of lexical, morphological and syntactic knowledge of Dutch and monitors the orthographical quality of Dutch texts. Section 1 deals with those aspects of Dutch orthography which pose problems to human authors as well as to computational language sensitive text editing tools. In section 2 we describe the design and the implementation of the text editor we have built. Section 3 is mainly devoted to a provisional evaluation of the system.

Abstract

In a paper entitled “Against markedness (and what to replace it with)”, Haspelmath argues “that the term ‘markedness’ is superfluous”, and that frequency asymmetries often explain structural (un)markedness asymmetries (Haspelmath 2006). We investigate whether this argument applies to Object and Verb orders in main (VO, marked) and subordinate (OV, unmarked) clauses of spoken and written German and Dutch, using English (without VO/OV alternation) as control. Frequency counts from six treebanks (three languages, two output modalities) do not support Haspelmath’s proposal. However, they reveal an unexpected phenomenon, most prominently in spoken Dutch and German: a small set of extremely high-frequent finite verbs with unspecific meanings populates main clauses much more densely than subordinate clauses. We suggest these verbs accelerate the start-up of grammatical encoding, thus facilitating sentence-initial output fluency

Abstract

Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computational sentence generators from the perspective of incremental production.

Abstract

A new cognitive architecture is proposed for the syntactic aspects of human sentence processing. The architecture, called Unification Space, is biologically inspired but not based on neural nets. Instead it relies on biosynthesis as a basic metaphor. We use simulated annealing as an optimization technique which searches for the best configuration of isolated syntactic segments or subtrees in the final parse tree. The gradually decaying activation of individual syntactic nodes determines the ‘global excitation level’ of the system. This parameter serves the function of ‘computational temperature’ in simulated annealing. We have built a computer implementation of the architecture which simulates well-known sentence understanding phenomena. We report successful simulations of the psycholinguistic effects of clause embedding, minimal attachment, right association and lexical ambiguity. In addition, we simulated impaired sentence understanding as observable in agrammatic patients. Since the Unification Space allows for contextual (semantic and pragmatic) influences on the syntactic tree formation process, it belongs to the class of interactive sentence processing models.

Abstract

[Seven one-page psycholinguistic sketches]

Abstract

In this article, we examine gaze direction in responses to polar questions using both quantitative and conversation analytic (CA) methods. The data come from a novel corpus of conversations in which participants wore eye-tracking glasses to obtain direct measures of their eye movements. The results show that while most preferred responses are produced with gaze toward the questioner, most dispreferred responses are produced with gaze aversion. We further demonstrate that gaze aversion by respondents can occasion self-repair by questioners in the transition space between turns, indicating that the relationship between gaze direction and preference is more than a mere statistical association. We conclude that gaze direction in responses to polar questions functions as a signal of response preference. Data are in American, British, and Canadian English.

Abstract

Human communicative interaction is characterized by rapid and precise turn-taking. This is achieved by an intricate system that has been elucidated in the field of conversation analysis, based largely on the study of the auditory signal. This model suggests that transitions occur at points of possible completion identified in terms of linguistic units. Despite this, considerable evidence exists that visible bodily actions including gaze and gestures also play a role. To reconcile disparate models and observations in the literature, we combine qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse turn-taking in a corpus of multimodal interaction using eye-trackers and multiple cameras. We show that transitions seem to be inhibited when a speaker averts their gaze at a point of possible turn completion, or when a speaker produces gestures which are beginning or unfinished at such points. We further show that while the direction of a speaker's gaze does not affect the speed of transitions, the production of manual gestures does: turns with gestures have faster transitions. Our findings suggest that the coordination of transitions involves not only linguistic resources but also visual gestural ones and that the transition-relevance places in turns are multimodal in nature.

Abstract

Language development is driven by multiple factors involving both the individual child and the environments that surround the child. The chapters in this volume highlight several such factors as potential contributors to developmental change, including factors that examine the role of immediate social environment (i.e., parent SES, parent and sibling input, peer interaction) and factors that focus on the child’s own cognitive and social development, such as the acquisition of theory of mind, event knowledge, and memory. The discussion of the different factors is presented largely from a crosslinguistic framework, using a multimodal perspective (speech, gesture, sign). The book celebrates the scholarly contributions of Prof. Ayhan Aksu-Koç – a pioneer in the study of crosslinguistic variation in language acquisition, particularly in the domain of evidentiality and theory of mind. This book will serve as an important resource for researchers in the field of developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics across the globe

Abstract

The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of abstract representations for syntactic structures in children. In a structural priming experiment on the dative alternation in German, we primed children from three different age groups (3–4 years, 5–6 years, 7–8 years) and adults with double object datives (Dora sent Boots the rabbit) or prepositional object datives (Dora sent the rabbit to Boots). Importantly, the prepositional object structure in German is dispreferred and only rarely encountered by young children. While immediate as well as cumulative structural priming effects occurred across all age groups, these effects were strongest in the 3- to 4-year-old group and gradually decreased with increasing age. These results suggest that representations in young children are less stable than in adults and, therefore, more susceptible to adaptation both immediately and across time, presumably due to stronger surprisal. Lexical boost effects, in contrast, were not present in 3- to 4-year-olds but gradually emerged with increasing age, possibly due to limited working-memory capacity in the younger child groups.

Abstract

Statistical learning (SL)—sensitivity to statistical regularities in the environment—has been postulated to support language development. While even young infants are capable of using distributional statistics to learn in linguistic and non-linguistic domains, efforts to measure SL at the level of the individual and link it to language proficiency in individual differences designs have been mixed, which has at least in part been attributed to problems with task reliability. In the current study we present the first prospective longitudinal study of the relationship between both non-linguistic SL (measured with visual stimuli) and linguistic SL (measured with auditory stimuli) and language in a group of English-speaking children. One-hundred and twenty-one (N = 121) children in their first two years of formal schooling (Mage = 6;1 years, Range: 5;2 – 7;2) completed tests of visual SL (VSL) and auditory SL (ASL) and several control variables at time 1. Both forms of SL were then measured every 6 months for the next 18 months, and at the final testing session (time 4) their language proficiency was measured using a standardised test. The results showed that the reliability of the SL tasks increased across the course of the study. A series of path analyses showed that both VSL and ASL independently predicted individual differences in language proficiency at time 4. The evidence is consistent with the suggestion that, when measured reliably, an observable relationship between SL and language proficiency exists. Theoretical and methodological issues are discussed.

Abstract

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested children's comprehension of subject, object, and two types of oblique relatives. No difference was found in the children's performance on different structures, including a lack of previously widely reported asymmetry between subject and object relatives. However, children's comprehension was modulated by animacy of the head referent. Study 3 tested children's production of the same RC structures using sentence repetition. Again we found no subject–object asymmetry. The pattern of results suggested that distributional frequency patterns and the relative complexity of the relativizer contribute to the difficulty associated with particular RC structures.

Abstract

Pretence and creativity are often regarded as ubiquitous characteristics of childhood, yet not all education systems value or promote these attributes to the same extent. Different pedagogies and practices are evident within the UK National Curriculum, Steiner and Montessori schools. In this study, 20 children participated from each of these school systems (N = 60, aged 6;10–8;11) completing the test of creative thinking—drawing production (TCT-DP; K. K. Urban, & H. G. Jellen, 1996) and a pretend actions task (W. F. Overton & J. P. Jackson, 1973). Overall, Steiner pupils performed significantly higher on the TCT-DP than both the Montessori and National Curriculum pupils who performed similarly. Steiner pupils also performed significantly better on the pretend actions task than the Montessori pupils, but no other significant differences were found. Overall, there was also a significant positive correlation between pretence and creativity in the current sample, supporting previous research suggesting that these skills are related (e.g., A.S. Kaugars & S. W. Russ, 2009; P. Y. Mullineaux & L. F. Dilalla, 2009).

Abstract

People spontaneously produce gestures during speaking and thinking. The authors focus here on gestures that depict or indicate information related to the contents of concurrent speech or thought (i.e., representational gestures). Previous research indicates that such gestures have not only communicative functions, but also self-oriented cognitive functions. In this article, the authors propose a new theoretical framework, the gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis, which explains the self-oriented functions of representational gestures. According to this framework, representational gestures affect cognitive processes in 4 main ways: gestures activate, manipulate, package, and explore spatio-motoric information for speaking and thinking. These four functions are shaped by gesture's ability to schematize information, that is, to focus on a small subset of available information that is potentially relevant to the task at hand. The framework is based on the assumption that gestures are generated from the same system that generates practical actions, such as object manipulation; however, gestures are distinct from practical actions in that they represent information. The framework provides a novel, parsimonious, and comprehensive account of the self-oriented functions of gestures. The authors discuss how the framework accounts for gestures that depict abstract or metaphoric content, and they consider implications for the relations between self-oriented and communicative functions of gestures

Abstract

The geographical region of Insular South East Asia and New Guinea is well-known as an
area of mega-biodiversity. Less well-known is the extreme linguistic diversity in this area:
over a quarter of the world’s 6,000 languages are spoken here. As small minority languages,
most of them will cease to be spoken in the coming few generations. The project described
here ensures the preservation of unique records of languages and the cultures encapsulated
by them in the region. The language resources were gathered by twenty linguists at,
or in collaboration with, Dutch universities over the last 40 years, and were compiled and
archived in collaboration with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute in
Nijmegen. The resulting archive constitutes a collection ofmultimediamaterials and written
documents from 48 languages in Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea. At TLA,
the data was archived according to state-of-the-art standards (TLA holds the Data Seal of
Approval): the component metadata infrastructure CMDI was used; all metadata categories
as well as relevant units of annotation were linked to the ISO data category registry ISOcat.
This guaranteed proper integration of the language resources into the CLARIN framework.
Through the archive, future speaker communities and researchers will be able to extensively
search thematerials for answers to their own questions, even if they do not themselves know the language, and even if the language dies.

Abstract

In the first, critical part of this study, a small sample of simple German sentences with their empirically determined pitch contours is used to demonstrate the incorrectness of numerous currently hold views of German sentence intonation. In the second, more constructive part, several interrogative sentence types are analysed and an attempt is made to show that intonation, besides other functions, indicates the permantently changing 'thematic score' in on-going discourse as well as certain validity claims.

Abstract

Neurodevelopmental disorders are defined by highly heritable problems during development and brain growth. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), and intellectual disability (ID) are frequent neurodevelopmental disorders, with common comorbidity among them. Imaging genetics studies on the role of disease-linked genetic variants on brain structure and function have been performed to unravel the etiology of these disorders. Here, we reviewed imaging genetics literature on these disorders attempting to understand the mechanisms of individual disorders and their clinical overlap. For ADHD and ASD, we selected replicated candidate genes implicated through common genetic variants. For ID, which is mainly caused by rare variants, we included genes for relatively frequent forms of ID occurring comorbid with ADHD or ASD. We reviewed case-control studies and studies of risk variants in healthy individuals. Imaging genetics studies for ADHD were retrieved for SLC6A3/DAT1, DRD2, DRD4, NOS1, and SLC6A4/5HTT. For ASD, studies on CNTNAP2, MET, OXTR, and SLC6A4/5HTT were found. For ID, we reviewed the genes FMR1, TSC1 and TSC2, NF1, and MECP2. Alterations in brain volume, activity, and connectivity were observed. Several findings were consistent across studies, implicating, for example, SLC6A4/5HTT in brain activation and functional connectivity related to emotion regulation. However, many studies had small sample sizes, and hypothesis-based, brain region-specific studies were common. Results from available studies confirm that imaging genetics can provide insight into the link between genes, disease-related behavior, and the brain. However, the field is still in its early stages, and conclusions about shared mechanisms cannot yet be drawn.