Publications

Abstract

While most research on scalar implicature has focused on the lexical scale “some” vs “all,” here we investigated an understudied scale formed by two syntactic constructions: categorizations (e.g., “Wilma is a nurse”) and comparisons (“Wilma is like a nurse”). An experimental study by Rubio-Fernandez et al. (2017) showed high rates of logical responses to superordinate comparisons, even though they are underinformative when interpreted pragmatically (e.g., “A robin is like a bird” implies that a robin is not a bird). Based on recent studies on enrichment priming, we predicted that including “some” and “all” statements (which typically elicit high rates of pragmatic responses) in sentence verification and sentence evaluation tasks would introduce an informativity bias, increasing pragmatic responses to superordinate comparisons. The results of three Web-based experiments supported our predictions, showing that different scalar expressions not only give rise to different rates of scalar implicatures, but can also affect the degree to which an experimental task elicits pragmatic reasoning.

Abstract

Listeners tune in to talkers’ vowels through extrinsic normalization. We asked here whether this process could be based on compensation for the Long Term Average Spectrum (LTAS) of preceding sounds and whether the mechanisms responsible for normalization are indifferent to the nature of those sounds. If so, normalization should apply to nonspeech stimuli. Previous findings were replicated with first formant (F1) manipulations of speech. Targets on a [pIt]-[pEt] (low-high F1) continuum were labeled as [pIt] more after high-F1 than after low-F1 precursors. Spectrally-rotated nonspeech versions of these materials produced similar normalization. None occurred, however, with nonspeech stimuli that were less speech-like, even though precursor-target LTAS relations were equivalent to those used earlier. Additional experiments investigated the roles of pitch movement, amplitude variation, formant location, and the stimuli's perceived similarity to speech. It appears that normalization is not restricted to speech, but that the nature of the preceding sounds does matter. Extrinsic normalization of vowels is due at least in part to an auditory process which may require familiarity with the spectro-temporal characteristics of speech.

Abstract

This study used an active multiple-deviant oddball design to investigate the time-course of normalization processes that help listeners deal with between-speaker variability. Electroencephalograms were recorded while Dutch listeners heard sequences of non-words (standards and occasional deviants). Deviants were [ɪ papu] or [ɛ papu], and the standard was [ɪɛpapu], where [ɪɛ] was a vowel that was ambiguous between [ɛ] and [ɪ]. These sequences were presented in two conditions, which differed with respect to the vocal-tract characteristics (i.e., the average 1st formant frequency) of the [papu] part, but not of the initial vowels [ɪ], [ɛ] or [ɪɛ] (these vowels were thus identical across conditions). Listeners more often detected a shift from [ɪɛpapu] to [ɛ papu] than from [ɪɛpapu] to [ɪ papu] in the high F1 context condition; the reverse was true in the low F1 context condition. This shows that listeners’ perception of vowels differs depending on the speaker‘s vocal-tract characteristics, as revealed in the speech surrounding those vowels. Cortical electrophysiological responses reflected this normalization process as early as about 120 ms after vowel onset, which suggests that shifts in perception precede influences due to conscious biases or decision strategies. Listeners’ abilities to normalize for speaker-vocal-tract properties are for an important part the result of a process that influences representations of speech sounds early in the speech processing stream.

Abstract

Adult speakers of different free stress languages (e.g., English, Spanish) differ both in their sensitivity to lexical stress and in their processing of suprasegmental and vowel quality cues to stress. In a head-turn preference experiment with a familiarization phase, both 8-month-old and 12-month-old English-learning infants discriminated between initial stress and final stress among lists of Spanish-spoken disyllabic nonwords that were segmentally varied (e.g. [ˈnila, ˈtuli] vs [luˈta, puˈki]). This is evidence that English-learning infants are sensitive to lexical stress patterns, instantiated primarily by suprasegmental cues, during the second half of the first year of life.

Abstract

Sign languages use multiple articulators and iconicity in the visual modality which allow linguistic units to be organized not only linearly but also simultaneously. Recent research has shown that users of an established sign language such as LIS (Italian Sign Language) use simultaneous and iconic constructions as a modality-specific resource to achieve communicative efficiency when they are required to encode informationally rich events. However, it remains to be explored whether the use of such simultaneous and iconic constructions recruited for communicative efficiency can be employed even without a linguistic system (i.e., in silent gesture) or whether they are specific to linguistic patterning (i.e., in LIS). In the present study, we conducted the same experiment as in Slonimska et al. with 23 Italian speakers using silent gesture and compared the results of the two studies. The findings showed that while simultaneity was afforded by the visual modality to some extent, its use in silent gesture was nevertheless less frequent and qualitatively different than when used within a linguistic system. Thus, the use of simultaneous and iconic constructions for communicative efficiency constitutes an emergent property of sign languages. The present study highlights the importance of studying modality-specific resources and their use for linguistic expression in order to promote a more thorough understanding of the language faculty and its modality-specific adaptive capabilities.

Abstract

The Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta‐Analysis copy number variant (ENIGMA‐CNV) and 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome Working Groups (22q‐ENIGMA WGs) were created to gain insight into the involvement of genetic factors in human brain development and related cognitive, psychiatric and behavioral manifestations. To that end, the ENIGMA‐CNV WG has collated CNV and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from ~49,000 individuals across 38 global research sites, yielding one of the largest studies to date on the effects of CNVs on brain structures in the general population. The 22q‐ENIGMA WG includes 12 international research centers that assessed over 533 individuals with a confirmed 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, 40 with 22q11.2 duplications, and 333 typically developing controls, creating the largest‐ever 22q11.2 CNV neuroimaging data set. In this review, we outline the ENIGMA infrastructure and procedures for multi‐site analysis of CNVs and MRI data. So far, ENIGMA has identified effects of the 22q11.2, 16p11.2 distal, 15q11.2, and 1q21.1 distal CNVs on subcortical and cortical brain structures. Each CNV is associated with differences in cognitive, neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric traits, with characteristic patterns of brain structural abnormalities. Evidence of gene‐dosage effects on distinct brain regions also emerged, providing further insight into genotype–phenotype relationships. Taken together, these results offer a more comprehensive picture of molecular mechanisms involved in typical and atypical brain development. This “genotype‐first” approach also contributes to our understanding of the etiopathogenesis of brain disorders. Finally, we outline future directions to better understand effects of CNVs on brain structure and behavior.

Abstract

The way a language encodes sensory experiences changes over time, and often this correlates with other changes in the society. There are noticeable differences in the language of perception between older and younger speakers of Cantonese in Hong Kong and Macau. Younger speakers make finer distinctions in the distal senses, but have less knowledge of the finer categories of the proximal senses than older speakers. The difference in the language of perception between older and younger speakers probably reflects the rapid changes that happened in Hong Kong and Macau in the last fifty years, from an underdeveloped and lessliterate society, to a developed and highly literate society. In addition to the increase in literacy, the education system has also undergone significant Westernization. Western-style education systems have most likely created finer categorizations in the distal senses. At the same time, the traditional finer distinctions of the proximal senses have become less salient: as the society became more urbanized and sanitized, people have had fewer opportunities to experience the variety of olfactory sensations experienced by their ancestors. This case study investigating interactions between social-economic 'development' and the elaboration of the senses hopefully contributes to the study of the ineffability of senses.

Abstract

To acquire language, infants must learn to segment words from running speech. A significant body of experimental research shows that infants use multiple cues to do so; however, little research has comprehensively examined the distribution of such cues in naturalistic speech. We conducted a comprehensive corpus analysis of German child-directed speech (CDS) using data from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database, investigating the availability of word stress, transitional probabilities (TPs), and lexical and sublexical frequencies as potential cues for word segmentation. Seven hours of data (~15,000 words) were coded, representing around an average day of speech to infants. The analysis revealed that for 97% of words, primary stress was carried by the initial syllable, implicating stress as a reliable cue to word onset in German CDS. Word identity was also marked by TPs between syllables, which were higher within than between words, and higher for backwards than forwards transitions. Words followed a Zipfian-like frequency distribution, and over two-thirds of words (78%) were monosyllabic. Of the 50 most frequent words, 82% were function words, which accounted for 47% of word tokens in the entire corpus. Finally, 15% of all utterances comprised single words. These results give rich novel insights into the availability of segmentation cues in German CDS, and support the possibility that infants draw on multiple converging cues to segment their input. The data, which we make openly available to the research community, will help guide future experimental investigations on this topic.

Abstract

Statistical learning (SL) is assumed to lead to long-term memory representations. However, the way that those representations influence future learning remains largely unknown. We studied how children’s existing distributional linguistic knowledge influences their subsequent SL on a serial recall task, in which 49 German-speaking seven- to nine-year-old children repeated a series of six-syllable sequences. These contained either (i) bisyllabic words based on frequently occurring German syllable transitions (naturalistic sequences), (ii) bisyllabic words created from unattested syllable transitions (non-naturalistic sequences), or (iii) random syllable combinations (unstructured foils). Children demonstrated learning from naturalistic sequences from the beginning of the experiment, indicating that their implicit memory traces derived from their input language informed learning from the very early stages onward. Exploratory analyses indicated that children with a higher language proficiency were more accurate in repeating the sequences and improved most throughout the study compared to children with lower proficiency.

Abstract

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the ‘voiced’ dorsal plosive /ɡ/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch–German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6–6;0 years generalized voicing to /ɡ/ in Dutch; and (2) whether there was evidence for featural cross-linguistic influence from Dutch to German in bilingual children, testing monolingual German-speaking children as controls. Bilingual and monolingual children’s production of /ɡ/ provided partial evidence for feature generalization: in Dutch, both bilingual and monolingual children either recombined Dutch voicing and place features to produce /ɡ/, suggesting feature generalization, or resorted to producing familiar /k/, suggesting segment-level adaptation within their Dutch phonological system. In German, bilingual children’s production of /ɡ/ was influenced by Dutch although the Dutch phoneme inventory lacks /ɡ/. This suggests that not only segments but also voicing features can exert cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, phonological features appear to play a crucial role in aspects of bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production.

Abstract

Successful spoken-word recognition relies on an interplay between lexical and sublexical processing. Previous research demonstrated that listeners readily shift between more lexically-biased and more sublexically-biased modes of processing in response to the situational context in which language comprehension takes place. Recognizing words in the presence of background noise reduces the perceptual evidence for the speech signal and – compared to the clear – results in greater uncertainty. It has been proposed that, when dealing with greater uncertainty, listeners rely more strongly on sublexical processing. The present study tested this proposal using behavioral and electroencephalography (EEG) measures. We reasoned that such an adjustment would be reflected in changes in the effects of variables predicting recognition performance with loci at lexical and sublexical levels, respectively. We presented native speakers of Dutch with words featuring substantial variability in (1) word frequency (locus at lexical level), (2) phonological neighborhood density (loci at lexical and sublexical levels) and (3) phonotactic probability (locus at sublexical level). Each participant heard each word in noise (presented at one of three signal-to-noise ratios) and in the clear and performed a two-stage lexical decision and transcription task while EEG was recorded. Using linear mixed-effects analyses, we observed behavioral evidence that listeners relied more strongly on sublexical processing when speech quality decreased. Mixed-effects modelling of the EEG signal in the clear condition showed that sublexical effects were reflected in early modulations of ERP components (e.g., within the first 300 ms post word onset). In noise, EEG effects occurred later and involved multiple regions activated in parallel. Taken together, we found evidence – especially in the behavioral data – supporting previous accounts that the presence of background noise induces a stronger reliance on sublexical processing.

Abstract

Language development research suggests a universal tendency for children to be under- informative in narrating motion events by omitting components such as Path, Manner or Ground. However, this assumption has not been tested for children acquiring sign language. Due to the affordances of the visual-spatial modality of sign languages for iconic expression, signing children might omit event components less frequently than speaking children. Here we analysed motion event descriptions elicited from deaf children (4–10 years) acquiring Turkish Sign Language (TİD) and their Turkish-speaking peers. While children omitted all types of event components more often than adults, signing children and adults encoded more Path and Manner in TİD than their peers in Turkish. These results provide more evidence for a general universal tendency for children to omit event components as well as a modality bias for sign languages to encode both Manner and Path more frequently than spoken languages.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that spatial language is sensitive to the effects of delayed language exposure. Locative encodings of late-signing deaf adults varied from those of early-signing deaf adults in the preferred types of linguistic forms. In the current study, we investigated whether such differences would be found in spatial language use of deaf children with deaf parents who are either early or late signers of Turkish Sign Language (TİD). We analyzed locative encodings elicited from these two groups of deaf children for the use of different linguistic forms and the types of classifier handshapes. Our findings revealed differences between these two groups of deaf children in their preferred types of linguistic forms, which showed parallels to differences between late versus early deaf adult signers as reported by earlier studies. Deaf children in the current study, however, were similar to each other in the type of classifier handshapes that they used in their classifier constructions. Our findings have implications for expanding current knowledge on to what extent variation in language input (i.e., from early vs. late deaf signers) is reflected in children’s productions as well as the role of linguistic input on language development in general.

Abstract

Objectives

The aim of this study was to identify sex-specific prevalence and strength of risk factors for the incidence of radiographic knee OA (incRKOA).
Methods

Our study population consisted of 10 958 Rotterdam Study participants free of knee OA in one or both knees at baseline. One thousand and sixty-four participants developed RKOA after a median follow-up time of 9.6 years. We estimated the association between each available risk factor and incRKOA using sex stratified multivariate regression models with generalized estimating equations. Subsequently, we statistically tested sex differences between risk estimates and calculated the population attributable fractions (PAFs) for modifiable risk factors.
Results

The prevalence of the investigated risk factors was, in general, higher in women compared with men, except that alcohol intake and smoking were higher in men and high BMI showed equal prevalence. We found significantly different risk estimates between men and women: high level of physical activity [relative risk (RR) 1.76 (95% CI: 1.29–2.40)] or a Kellgren and Lawrence score 1 at baseline [RR 5.48 (95% CI: 4.51–6.65)] was higher in men. Among borderline significantly different risk estimates was BMI ≥27, associated with higher risk for incRKOA in women [RR 2.00 (95% CI: 1.74–2.31)]. The PAF for higher BMI was 25.6% in women and 19.3% in men.
Conclusion

We found sex-specific differences in both presence and relative risk of several risk factors for incRKOA. Especially BMI, a modifiable risk factor, impacts women more strongly than men. These risk factors can be used in the development of personalized prevention strategies and in building sex-specific prediction tools to identify high risk profile patients.

Abstract

In Polish, it is obligatory to mark feminine or masculine grammatical gender on second-person singular past tense verbs (e.g., Dostałaś list ‘You received-F a letter’). When the addressee’s gender is unknown or unspecified, masculine but never feminine gender marking may be used. The present self-paced reading experiment aims to determine whether this practice creates a processing disadvantage for female addressees in such contexts. We further investigated how men process being addressed with feminine-marked verbs, which constitutes a pragmatic violation. To this end, we presented Polish native speakers with short narratives. Each narrative contained either a second-person singular past tense verb with masculine or feminine gender marking, or a gerund verb with no gender marking as a baseline. We hypothesised that both men and women would read the verbs with gender marking mismatching their own gender more slowly than the gender-unmarked gerund verbs. The results revealed that the gender-mismatching verbs were read equally fast as the gerund verbs, and that the verbs with gender marking matching participant gender were read faster. While the relatively high reading time of the gender-unmarked baseline was unexpected, the pattern of results nevertheless shows that verbs with masculine marking were more difficult to process for women compared to men, and vice versa. In conclusion, even though masculine gender marking in the second person is commonly used with a gender-unspecific intention, it created similar processing difficulties for women as the ones that men experienced when addressed through feminine gender marking. This study is the first one, as far as we are aware, to provide evidence for the male bias of second-person masculine generics during language processing.

Abstract

Linguistic phrases are tracked in sentences even though there is no one-to-one acoustic phrase marker in the physical signal. This phenomenon suggests an automatic tracking of abstract linguistic structure that is endogenously generated by the brain. However, all studies investigating linguistic tracking compare conditions where either relevant information at linguistic timescales is available, or where this information is absent altogether (e.g., sentences versus word lists during passive listening). It is therefore unclear whether tracking at phrasal timescales is related to the content of language, or rather, results as a consequence of attending to the timescales that happen to match behaviourally relevant information. To investigate this question, we presented participants with sentences and word lists while recording their brain activity with magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants performed passive, syllable, word, and word-combination tasks corresponding to attending to four different rates: one they would naturally attend to, syllable-rates, word-rates, and phrasal-rates, respectively. We replicated overall findings of stronger phrasal-rate tracking measured with mutual information for sentences compared to word lists across the classical language network. However, in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) we found a task effect suggesting stronger phrasal-rate tracking during the word-combination task independent of the presence of linguistic structure, as well as stronger delta-band connectivity during this task. These results suggest that extracting linguistic information at phrasal rates occurs automatically with or without the presence of an additional task, but also that IFG might be important for temporal integration across various perceptual domains.

Abstract

Sentences contain structure that determines their meaning beyond that of individual words. An influential study by Ding and colleagues (2016) used frequency tagging of phrases and sentences to show that the human brain is sensitive to structure by finding peaks of neural power at the rate at which structures were presented. Since then, there has been a rich debate on how to best explain this pattern of results with profound impact on the language sciences. Models that use hierarchical structure building, as well as models based on associative sequence processing, can predict the neural response, creating an inferential impasse as to which class of models explains the nature of the linguistic computations reflected in the neural readout. In the current manuscript, we discuss pitfalls and common fallacies seen in the conclusions drawn in the literature illustrated by various simulations. We conclude that inferring the neural operations of sentence processing based on these neural data, and any like it, alone, is insufficient. We discuss how to best evaluate models and how to approach the modeling of neural readouts to sentence processing in a manner that remains faithful to cognitive, neural, and linguistic principles.

Abstract

Every day people see, describe, and remember motion events. However, the relation between multimodal encoding of motion events in speech and gesture, and memory is not yet fully understood. Moreover, whether language typology modulates this relation remains to be tested. This study investigates whether the type of motion event information (path or manner) mentioned in speech and gesture predicts which information is remembered and whether this varies across speakers of typologically different languages. Dutch- and Turkish-speakers watched and described motion events and completed a surprise recognition memory task. For both Dutch- and Turkish-speakers, manner memory was at chance level. Participants who mentioned path in speech during encoding were more accurate at detecting changes to the path in the memory task. The relation between mentioning path in speech and path memory did not vary cross-linguistically. Finally, the co-speech gesture did not predict memory above mentioning path in speech. These findings suggest that how speakers describe a motion event in speech is more important than the typology of the speakers’ native language in predicting motion event memory. The motion event videos are available for download for future research at https://osf.io/p8cas/.

Abstract

The Papuan-Oceanic world has long been considered a hotbed of contact-induced linguistic change, and there have been a number of studies of deep linguistic influence between Papuan and Oceanic languages (like those by Thurston and Ross). This paper assesses the degree and type of contact-induced language change in the Solomon Islands, between the four Papuan languages—Bilua (spoken on Vella Lavella, Western Province), Touo (spoken on southern Rendova, Western Province), Savosavo (spoken on Savo Island, Central Province), and Lavukaleve (spoken in the Russell Islands, Central Province)—and their Oceanic neighbors. First, a claim is made for a degree of cultural homogeneity for Papuan and Oceanic-speaking populations within the Solomons. Second, lexical and grammatical borrowing are considered in turn, in an attempt to identify which elements in each of the four Papuan languages may have an origin in Oceanic languages—and indeed which elements in Oceanic languages may have their origin in Papuan languages. Finally, an assessment is made of the degrees of stability versus change in the Papuan and Oceanic languages of the Solomon Islands.

Abstract

In individuals with ASD, difficulties with language comprehension are most evident when higher-level semantic-pragmatic language processing is required, for instance when context has to be used to interpret the meaning of an utterance. Until now, it is unclear at what level of processing and for what type of context these difficulties in language comprehension occur. Therefore, in the current fMRI study, we investigated the neural correlates of the integration of contextual information during auditory language comprehension in 24 adults with ASD and 24 matched control participants. Different levels of context processing were manipulated by using spoken sentences that were correct or contained either a semantic or world knowledge anomaly. Our findings demonstrated significant differences between the groups in inferior frontal cortex that were only present for sentences with a world knowledge anomaly. Relative to the ASD group, the control group showed significantly increased activation in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) for sentences with a world knowledge anomaly compared to correct sentences. This effect possibly indicates reduced integrative capacities of the ASD group. Furthermore, world knowledge anomalies elicited significantly stronger activation in right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG) in the control group compared to the ASD group. This additional RIFG activation probably reflects revision of the situation model after new, conflicting information. The lack of recruitment of RIFG is possibly related to difficulties with exception handling in the ASD group.

Abstract

There is more to brain connections than the mere transfer of signals between brain regions. Behavior and cognition emerge through cortical area interaction. This requires integration between local and distant areas orchestrated by densely connected networks. Brain connections determine the brain’s functional organization. The imaging of connections in the living brain has provided an opportunity to identify the driving factors behind the neurobiology of cognition. Connectivity differences between species and among humans have furthered the understanding of brain evolution and of diverging cognitive profiles. Brain pathologies amplify this variability through disconnections and, consequently, the disintegration of cognitive functions. The prediction of long-term symptoms is now preferentially based on brain disconnections. This paradigm shift will reshape our brain maps and challenge current brain models.

Abstract

Right hemisphere dominance for visuospatial attention is characteristic of most humans, but its anatomical basis remains unknown. We report the first evidence in humans for a larger parieto-frontal network in the right than left hemisphere, and a significant correlation between the degree of anatomical lateralization and asymmetry of performance on visuospatial tasks. Our results suggest that hemispheric specialization is associated with an unbalanced speed of visuospatial processing.

Abstract

Despite the substantial heritability of antisocial behavior (ASB), specific genetic variants robustly associated with the trait have not been identified. The present study by the Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium (BroadABC) meta-analyzed data from 28 discovery samples (N = 85,359) and five independent replication samples (N = 8058) with genotypic data and broad measures of ASB. We identified the first significant genetic associations with broad ASB, involving common intronic variants in the forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) gene (lead SNP rs12536335, p = 6.32 × 10−10). Furthermore, we observed intronic variation in Foxp2 and one of its targets (Cntnap2) distinguishing a mouse model of pathological aggression (BALB/cJ strain) from controls (BALB/cByJ strain). Polygenic risk score (PRS) analyses in independent samples revealed that the genetic risk for ASB was associated with several antisocial outcomes across the lifespan, including diagnosis of conduct disorder, official criminal convictions, and trajectories of antisocial development. We found substantial genetic correlations of ASB with mental health (depression rg = 0.63, insomnia rg = 0.47), physical health (overweight rg = 0.19, waist-to-hip ratio rg = 0.32), smoking (rg = 0.54), cognitive ability (intelligence rg = −0.40), educational attainment (years of schooling rg = −0.46) and reproductive traits (age at first birth rg = −0.58, father’s age at death rg = −0.54). Our findings provide a starting point toward identifying critical biosocial risk mechanisms for the development of ASB.

Abstract

The present study compares the realization of intervocalic voiceless stops and vowels surrounded by voiceless stops in conversational Spanish and French. Our data reveal significant differences in how these segments are realized in each language. Spanish voiceless stops tend to have shorter stop closures, display incomplete closures more often, and exhibit more voicing than French voiceless stops. As for vowels, more cases of complete devoicing and greater degrees of partial devoicing were found in French than in Spanish. Moreover, all French vowel types exhibit significantly lower F1 values than their Spanish counterparts. These findings indicate that the extent of reduction that a segment type can undergo in conversational speech can vary significantly across languages. Language differences in coarticulatory strategies and “base-of-articulation” are discussed as possible causes of our observations.

Abstract

This study investigates the reduction of vowel /e/ in the French word c’était /setε/ ‘it was’. This reduction phenomenon appeared to be highly frequent, as more than half of the occurrences of this word in a corpus of casual French contained few or no acoustic traces of a vowel between [s] and [t]. All our durational analyses clearly supported a categorical absence of vowel /e/ in a subset of c’était tokens. This interpretation was also supported by our finding that the occurrence of complete elision and [e] duration in non-elision tokens were conditioned by different factors. However, spectral measures were consistent with the possibility that a highly reduced /e/ vowel is still present in elision tokens in spite of the durational evidence for categorical elision. We discuss how these findings can be reconciled, and conclude that acoustic analysis of uncontrolled materials can provide valuable information about the mechanisms underlying reduction phenomena in casual speech.

Abstract

In human communication, when the speech is disrupted, the visual channel (e.g. manual gestures) can compensate to ensure successful communication. Whether speech also compensates when the visual channel is disrupted is an open question, and one that significantly bears on the status of the gestural modality. We test whether gesture and speech are dynamically co-adapted to meet communicative needs. To this end, we parametrically reduce visibility during casual conversational interaction and measure the effects on speakers' communicative behaviour using motion tracking and manual annotation for kinematic and acoustic analyses. We found that visual signalling effort was flexibly adapted in response to a decrease in visual quality (especially motion energy, gesture rate, size, velocity and hold-time). Interestingly, speech was also affected: speech intensity increased in response to reduced visual quality (particularly in speech-gesture utterances, but independently of kinematics). Our findings highlight that multi-modal communicative behaviours are flexibly adapted at multiple scales of measurement and question the notion that gesture plays an inferior role to speech.

Abstract

Persons with and without autism process sensory information differently. Differences in sensory processing are directly relevant to social functioning and communicative abilities, which are known to be hampered in persons with autism. We collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 25 autistic individuals and 25 neurotypical individuals while they performed a silent gesture recognition task. We exploited brain network topology, a holistic quantification of how networks within the brain are organized to provide new insights into how visual communicative signals are processed in autistic and neurotypical individuals. Performing graph theoretical analysis, we calculated two network properties of the action observation network: local efficiency, as a measure of network segregation, and global efficiency, as a measure of network integration. We found that persons with autism and neurotypical persons differ in how the action observation network is organized. Persons with autism utilize a more clustered, local-processing-oriented network configuration (i.e., higher local efficiency), rather than the more integrative network organization seen in neurotypicals (i.e., higher global efficiency). These results shed new light on the complex interplay between social and sensory processing in autism.

Abstract

When experienced in-person, engagement with art has been associated—in a growing body of evidence—with positive outcomes in wellbeing and mental health. This represents an exciting new field for psychology, curation, and health interventions, suggesting a widely-accessible, cost-effective, and non-pharmaceutical means of regulating factors such as mood or anxiety. However, can similar impacts be found with online presentations? If so, this would open up positive outcomes to an even-wider population—a trend accelerating due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its promise, this question, and the underlying mechanisms of art interventions and impacts, has largely not been explored. Participants (N = 84) were asked to engage with one of two online exhibitions from Google Arts and Culture (a Monet painting or a similarly-formatted display of Japanese culinary traditions). With just 1–2 min exposure, both improved negative mood, state-anxiety, loneliness, and wellbeing. Stepdown analysis suggested the changes can be explained primarily via negative mood, while improvements in mood correlated with aesthetic appraisals and cognitive-emotional experience of the exhibition. However, no difference was found between exhibitions. We discuss the findings in terms of applications and targets for future research.

Abstract

In the interplay between language, culture, and perception, iconicity structures our representations of what we experience. By examining secondary iconicity in sensory vocabulary, this study draws attention to diagrammatic qualities in human interaction with, and representation of, the sensory world. In Semai (Mon-Khmer, Aslian), spoken on Peninsular Malaysia, sensory experiences are encoded by expressives. Expressives display a diagrammatic iconic structure whereby related sensory experiences receive related linguistic forms. Through this type of formmeaning mapping, gradient relationships in the perceptual world receive gradient linguistic representations. Form-meaning mapping such as this enables speakers to categorize sensory events into types and subtypes of perceptions, and provide illustrates how a diagrammatic iconic structure within sensory vocabulary creates networks of relational sensory knowledge. Through analogy, speakers draw on this knowledge to comprehend sensory referents and create new unconventional forms, which are easily understood by other members of the community. Analogy-making such as this allows speakers to capture fine-grained differences between sensory events, and effectively guide each other through the Semai sensory landscape. sensory specifics of various kinds. This studyillustrates how a diagrammatic iconic structure within sensory vocabulary creates networks of relational sensory knowledge. Through analogy, speakers draw on this knowledge to comprehend sensory referents and create new unconventional forms, which are easily understood by other members of the community. Analogy-making such as this allows speakers to capture fine-grained differences between sensory events, and effectively guide each other through the Semai sensory landscape.

Abstract

In sequences such as law and order, speakers of British English often insert /r/ between law and and. Acoustic analyses revealed such “intrusive” /r/ to be significantly shorter than canonical /r/. In a 2AFC experiment, native listeners heard British English sentences in which /r/ duration was manipulated across a word boundary [e.g., saw (r)ice], and orthographic and semantic factors were varied. These listeners responded categorically on the basis of acoustic evidence for /r/ alone, reporting ice after short /r/s, rice after long /r/s; orthographic and semantic factors had no effect. Dutch listeners proficient in English who heard the same materials relied less on durational cues than the native listeners, and were affected by both orthography and semantic bias. American English listeners produced intermediate responses to the same materials, being sensitive to duration (less so than native, more so than Dutch listeners), and to orthography (less so than the Dutch), but insensitive to the semantic manipulation. Listeners from language communities without common use of intrusive /r/ may thus interpret intrusive /r/ as canonical /r/, with a language difference increasing this propensity more than a dialect difference. Native listeners, however, efficiently distinguish intrusive from canonical /r/ by exploiting the relevant acoustic variation.

Abstract

This study investigated two questions. One is: To what degree is sentence processing beyond single words independent of the input modality (speech vs. reading)? The second question is: Which parts of the network recruited by both modalities is sensitive to syntactic complexity? These questions were investigated by having more than 200 participants read or listen to well-formed sentences or series of unconnected words. A largely left-hemisphere frontotemporoparietal network was found to be supramodal in nature, i.e., independent of input modality. In addition, the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LpMTG) were most clearly associated with left-branching complexity. The left anterior temporal lobe (LaTL) showed the greatest sensitivity to sentences that differed in right-branching complexity. Moreover, activity in LIFG and LpMTG increased from sentence onset to end, in parallel with an increase of the left-branching complexity. While LIFG, bilateral anterior temporal lobe, posterior MTG, and left inferior parietal lobe (LIPL) all contribute to the supramodal unification processes, the results suggest that these regions differ in their respective contributions to syntactic complexity related processing. The consequences of these findings for neurobiological models of language processing are discussed.

Abstract

Speakers’ visual attention to events is guided by linguistic conceptualization of information in spoken language
production and in language-specific ways. Does production of language-specific co-speech gestures further guide
speakers’ visual attention during message preparation? Here, we examine the link between visual attention and
multimodal event descriptions in Turkish. Turkish is a verb-framed language where speakers’ speech and gesture
show language specificity with path of motion mostly expressed within the main verb accompanied by path
gestures. Turkish-speaking adults viewed motion events while their eye movements were recorded during non-
linguistic (viewing-only) and linguistic (viewing-before-describing) tasks. The relative attention allocated to path
over manner was higher in the linguistic task compared to the non-linguistic task. Furthermore, the relative
attention allocated to path over manner within the linguistic task was higher when speakers (a) encoded path in
the main verb versus outside the verb and (b) used additional path gestures accompanying speech versus not.
Results strongly suggest that speakers’ visual attention is guided by language-specific event encoding not only in
speech but also in gesture. This provides evidence consistent with models that propose integration of speech and
gesture at the conceptualization level of language production and suggests that the links between the eye and the
mouth may be extended to the eye and the hand.

Abstract

This study investigates the lifespans of lexical traces for novel morphologically complex words. In two visual lexical decision experiments, a neologism was either primed by itself or by its stem. The target occurred 40 trials after the prime (Experiments 1 & 2), after a 12 hour delay (Experiment 1), or after a one week delay (Experiment 2). Participants recognized neologisms more quickly if they had seen them before in the experiment. These results show that memory traces for novel morphologically complex words already come into existence after a very first exposure and that they last for at least a week. We did not find evidence for a role of sleep in the formation of memory traces. Interestingly, Base Frequency appeared to play a role in the processing of the neologisms also when they were presented a second time and had their own memory traces.

Abstract

The sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) is a deep-diving cetacean with a global distribution and a multi-leveled, culturally segregated, social structure. While sperm whales have previously been described as ‘ocean nomads’, this might not be universal. We conducted surveys of sperm whales along the Lesser Antilles to document the acoustic repertoires, movements and distributions of Eastern Caribbean (EC) sperm whale cultural groups (called vocal clans). In addition to documenting a potential third vocal clan in the EC, we found strong evidence of fine-scale habitat partitioning between vocal clans with scales of horizontal movements an order of magnitude smaller than from comparable studies on Eastern Tropical Pacific sperm whales. These results suggest that sperm whales can display cultural ecological specialization and habitat partitioning on flexible spatial scales according to local conditions and broadens our perception of the ecological flexibility of the species. This study highlights the importance of incorporating multiple temporal and spatial scales to understand the impact of culture on ecological adaptability, as well as the dangers of extrapolating results across geographical areas and cultural groups.

Abstract

We address the problem of recommending relevant items to a user in order to "complete" a partial set of items already known. We consider the two scenarios of citation and subject label recommendation, which resemble different semantics of item co-occurrence: relatedness for co-citations and diversity for subject labels. We assess the influence of the completeness of an already known partial item set on the recommender performance. We also investigate data sparsity through a pruning parameter and the influence of using additional metadata. As recommender models, we focus on different autoencoders, which are particularly suited for reconstructing missing items in a set. We extend autoencoders to exploit a multi-modal input of text and structured data. Our experiments on six real-world datasets show that supplying the partial item set as input is helpful when item co-occurrence resembles relatedness, while metadata are effective when co-occurrence implies diversity. This outcome means that the semantics of item co-occurrence is an important factor. The simple item co-occurrence model is a strong baseline for citation recommendation. However, autoencoders have the advantage to enable exploiting additional metadata besides the partial item set as input and achieve comparable performance. For the subject label recommendation task, the title is the most important attribute. Adding more input modalities sometimes even harms the result. In conclusion, it is crucial to consider the semantics of the item co-occurrence for the choice of an appropriate recommendation model and carefully decide which metadata to exploit.

Abstract

The actions and feelings questionnaire (AFQ) provides a short, self-report measure of how well someone uses and understands visual communicative signals such as gestures. The objective of this study was to translate and cross-culturally adapt the AFQ into Dutch (AFQ-NL) and validate this new version in neurotypical and autistic populations. Translation and adaptation of the AFQ consisted of forward translation, synthesis, back translation, and expert review. In order to validate the AFQ-NL, we assessed convergent and divergent validity. We additionally assessed internal consistency using Cronbach’s alpha. Validation and reliability outcomes were all satisfactory. The AFQ-NL is a valid adaptation that can be used for both autistic and neurotypical populations in the Netherlands.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that visuospatial attentional performance is not stable over time but fluctuates in a rhythmic fashion. These attentional rhythms allow for sampling of different visuospatial locations in each cycle of this rhythm. However, it is still unclear in which paradigmatic circumstances rhythmic attention becomes evident. First, it is unclear at what spatial locations rhythmic attention occurs. Second, it is unclear how the behavioural relevance of each spatial location determines the rhythmic sampling patterns. Here, we aim to elucidate these two issues. Firstly, we aim to find evidence of rhythmic attention at the predicted (i.e. cued) location under moderately informative predictor value, replicating earlier studies. Secondly, we hypothesise that rhythmic attentional sampling behaviour will be affected by the behavioural relevance of the sampled location, ranging from non-informative to fully informative. To these aims, we used a modified Egly-Driver task with three conditions: a fully informative cue, a moderately informative cue (replication condition), and a non-informative cue. We did not find evidence of rhythmic sampling at cued locations, failing to replicate earlier studies. Nor did we find differences in rhythmic sampling under different predictive values of the cue. The current data does not allow for robust conclusions regarding the non-cued locations due to the absence of a priori hypotheses. Post-hoc explorative data analyses, however, clearly indicate that attention samples non-cued locations in a theta-rhythmic manner, specifically when the cued location bears higher behavioural relevance than the non-cued locations.

Abstract

Purpose

Common diagnostic next-generation sequencing strategies are not optimized to identify inherited variants in genes associated with dominant neurodevelopmental disorders as causal when the transmitting parent is clinically unaffected, leaving a significant number of cases with neurodevelopmental disorders undiagnosed.
Methods

We characterized 21 families with inherited heterozygous missense or protein-truncating variants in CHD3, a gene in which de novo variants cause Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome.
Results

Computational facial and Human Phenotype Ontology–based comparisons showed that the phenotype of probands with inherited CHD3 variants overlaps with the phenotype previously associated with de novo CHD3 variants, whereas heterozygote parents are mildly or not affected, suggesting variable expressivity. In addition, similarly reduced expression levels of CHD3 protein in cells of an affected proband and of healthy family members with a CHD3 protein-truncating variant suggested that compensation of expression from the wild-type allele is unlikely to be an underlying mechanism. Notably, most inherited CHD3 variants were maternally transmitted.
Conclusion

Our results point to a significant role of inherited variation in Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, a finding that is critical for correct variant interpretation and genetic counseling and warrants further investigation toward understanding the broader contributions of such variation to the landscape of human disease.

Abstract

Abstract Neuroimaging has played an important part in advancing our understanding of the neurobiology of obsessive?compulsive disorder (OCD). At the same time, neuroimaging studies of OCD have had notable limitations, including reliance on relatively small samples. International collaborative efforts to increase statistical power by combining samples from across sites have been bolstered by the ENIGMA consortium; this provides specific technical expertise for conducting multi-site analyses, as well as access to a collaborative community of neuroimaging scientists. In this article, we outline the background to, development of, and initial findings from ENIGMA's OCD working group, which currently consists of 47 samples from 34 institutes in 15 countries on 5 continents, with a total sample of 2,323 OCD patients and 2,325 healthy controls. Initial work has focused on studies of cortical thickness and subcortical volumes, structural connectivity, and brain lateralization in children, adolescents and adults with OCD, also including the study on the commonalities and distinctions across different neurodevelopment disorders. Additional work is ongoing, employing machine learning techniques. Findings to date have contributed to the development of neurobiological models of OCD, have provided an important model of global scientific collaboration, and have had a number of clinical implications. Importantly, our work has shed new light on questions about whether structural and functional alterations found in OCD reflect neurodevelopmental changes, effects of the disease process, or medication impacts. We conclude with a summary of ongoing work by ENIGMA-OCD, and a consideration of future directions for neuroimaging research on OCD within and beyond ENIGMA.

Abstract

This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input children hear may help or hinder them in uncovering the flavor flexibility of modals. Our results show that the way parents use modals may obscure the fact that they can express epistemic flavors: modals are very rarely used epistemically. Yet, children eventually figure it out; our results suggest that some do so even before age 3. To investigate how children pick up on epistemic flavors, we explore distributional cues that distinguish roots and epistemics. The semantic literature argues they differ in “temporal orientation” (Condoravdi, 2002): while epistemics can have present or past orientation, root modals tend to be constrained to future orientation (Werner 2006; Klecha, 2016; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018). We show that in child-directed speech, this constraint is well-reflected in the distribution of aspectual features of roots and epistemics, but that the signal might be weak given the strong usage bias towards roots. We discuss (a) what these results imply for how children might acquire adult-like modal representations, and (b) possible learning paths towards adult-like modal representations.

Abstract

Synesthesia provides an elegant model to investigate neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in subjective experience in humans. In grapheme–color synesthesia, written letters induce color sensations, accompanied by activation of color area V4. Competing hypotheses suggest that enhanced V4 activity during synesthesia is either induced by direct bottom-up cross-activation from grapheme processing areas within the fusiform gyrus, or indirectly via higher-order parietal areas. Synesthetes differ in the way synesthetic color is perceived: “projector” synesthetes experience color externally colocalized with a presented grapheme, whereas “associators” report an internally evoked association. Using dynamic causal modeling for fMRI, we show that V4 cross-activation during synesthesia was induced via a bottom-up pathway (within fusiform gyrus) in projector synesthetes, but via a top-down pathway (via parietal lobe) in associators. These findings show how altered coupling within the same network of active regions leads to differences in subjective experience. Our findings reconcile the two most influential cross-activation accounts of synesthesia.

Abstract

An introductory study of the perception of stochastically specified events is reported. The initial problem was to determine whether the perceiver can split visual input data of this kind into random and determined components. The inability of subjects to do so with the stimulus material used (a filmlike sequence of dot patterns), led to the more general question of how subjects code this kind of visual material. To meet the difficulty of defining the subjects' responses, two experiments were designed. In both, patterns were presented as a rapid sequence of dots on a screen. The patterns were more or less disturbed by “noise,” i.e. the dots did not appear exactly at their proper places. In the first experiment the response was a rating on a semantic scale, in the second an identification from among a set of alternative patterns. The results of these experiments give some insight in the coding systems adopted by the subjects. First, noise appears to be detrimental to pattern recognition, especially to patterns with little spread. Second, this shows connections with the factors obtained from analysis of the semantic ratings, e.g. easily disturbed patterns show a large drop in the semantic regularity factor, when only a little noise is added.

Abstract

The monitoring theory of language perception proposes that competing representations that are caused by strong expectancy violations can trigger a conflict which elicits reprocessing of the input to check for possible processing errors. This monitoring process is thought to be reflected by the P600 component in the EEG. The present study further investigated this monitoring process by comparing syntactic and spelling violations in an EEG and an fMRI experiment. To assess the effect of conflict strength, misspellings were embedded in sentences that were weakly or strongly predictive of a critical word. In support of the monitoring theory, syntactic and spelling violations elicited similarly distributed P600 effects. Furthermore, the P600 effect was larger to misspellings in the strongly compared to the weakly predictive sentences. The fMRI results showed that both syntactic and spelling violations increased activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG), while only the misspellings activated additional areas. Conflict strength did not affect the hemodynamic response to spelling violations. These results extend the idea that the lIFG is involved in implementing cognitive control in the presence of representational conflicts in general to the processing of errors in language perception.

Abstract

A corpus of Dutch falling-rising intonation contours with early nuclear accent was elicited from nine speakers with a view to establishing the extent to which the low F0 target immediately preceding the final rise, was attracted by a post-nuclear stressed syllable (PNS) in either of the last two words or by Second Occurrence Contrastive Focus (SOCF) on either of these words. We found a small effect of foot type, which we interpret as due to a rhythmic 'trochaic enhancement' effect. The results show that neither PNS nor SOCF influences the location of the low F0 target, which appears consistently to be timed with reference to the utterance end. It is speculated that there are two ways in which postnuclear tones can be timed. The first is by means of a phonological association with a post-nuclear stressed syllable, as in Athenian Greek and Roermond Dutch. The second is by a fixed distance from the utterance end or from the target of an adjacent tone. Accordingly, two phonological mechanisms are defended, association and edge alignment, such that all tones edge-align, but only some associate. Specifically, no evidence was found for a third situation that can be envisaged, in which a post-nuclear tone is gradiently attracted to a post-nuclear stress.

Abstract

I thank the speakers of Yurakaré who have taught me their language for sharing their knowledge with me. I would furthermore like to thank Grev Corbett, Michael Cysouw, and an anonymous reviewer for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. All remaining errors are mine. The research reported in this paper was made possible by grants from Prof. Pieter Muysken’s Spinoza project Lexicon & Syntax, the University of Surrey, the DoBeS foundation, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, for which I am grateful. Pronominal affixes in polysynthetic languages have an ambiguous status in the sense that they have characteristics normally associated with free pronouns as well as characteristics associated with agreement markers. This situation arises because pronominal affixes represent intermediate stages in a diachronic development from independent pronouns to agreement markers. Because this diachronic change is not abrupt, pronominal affixes can show different characteristics from language to language. By presenting an in-depth discussion of the pronominal affixes of Yurakaré, an unclassified language from Bolivia, I argue that these so-called intermediate stages as typically attested in polysynthetic languages actually represent economical systems that combine advantages of agreement markers and of free pronouns. In terms of diachronic development, such ‘intermediate’ systems, being functionally well-adapted, appear to be rather stable, and it can even be reinforced by subsequent diachronic developments.

Abstract

Yurakaré (unclassified, central Bolivia) marks core arguments on the verb by means of pronominal affixes. Subjects are suffixed, objects are prefixed. There are six types of head-marked objects in Yurakaré, each with its own morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Distributional patterns suggest that the six objects can be divided into two larger groups reminiscent of the typologically recognized direct vs. indirect object distinction. This paper looks at the interaction of this complex system of participant marking and verbal semantics. By investigating the participant-marking patterns of nine verb classes (four representing a gradual decrease of patienthood of the P participant, five a gradual decrease of agentivity of the A participant), I come to the conclusion that grammatical roles in Yurakaré can be defined semantically, and case frames are to a high degree determined by verbal semantics.

Abstract

Humans respond to unfair situations in various ways. Experimental research has revealed that non-human species also respond to unequal situ- ations in the form of inequity aversions when they have the disadvantage. The current study focused on play fights in gorillas to explore for the first time, to our knowledge, if/how non-human species respond to inequities in natural social settings. Hitting causes a naturally occurring inequity among individuals and here it was specifically assessed how the hitters and their partners engaged in play chases that followed the hitting. The results of this work showed that the hitters significantly more often moved first to run away immediately after the encounter than their partners. These findings provide evidence that non-human species respond to inequities by trying to maintain their competitive advantages. We conclude that non-human pri- mates, like humans, may show different responses to inequities and that they may modify them depending on if they have the advantage or the disadvantage.

Abstract

Listeners require context to understand the highly reduced words that occur in casual speech. The present study reports four auditory lexical decision experiments in which the role of semantic context in the comprehension of reduced versus unreduced speech was investigated. Experiments 1 and 2 showed semantic priming for combinations of unreduced, but not reduced, primes and low-frequency targets. In Experiment 3, we crossed the reduction of the prime with the reduction of the target. Results showed no semantic priming from reduced primes, regardless of the reduction of the targets. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that reduced and unreduced primes facilitate upcoming low-frequency related words equally if the interstimulus interval is extended. These results suggest that semantically related words need more time to be recognized after reduced primes, but once reduced primes have been fully (semantically) processed, these primes can facilitate the recognition of upcoming words as well as do unreduced primes.

Abstract

Although cross-linguistic influence at the level of morphosyntax is one of the most intensively studied topics in child bilingualism, the circumstances under which it occurs remain unclear. In this meta-analysis, we measured the effect size of cross-linguistic influence and systematically assessed its predictors in 750 simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children in 17 unique language combinations across 26 experimental studies. We found a significant small to moderate average effect size of cross-linguistic influence, indicating that cross-linguistic influence is part and parcel of bilingual development. Language dominance, operationalized as societal language, was a significant predictor of cross-linguistic influence, whereas surface overlap, language domain and age were not. Perhaps an even more important finding was that definitions and operationalisations of cross-linguistic influence and its predictors varied considerably between studies. This could explain the absence of a comprehensive theory in the field. To solve this issue, we argue for a more uniform method of studying cross-linguistic influence.

Abstract

The present study explored whether language-nonselective access in bilinguals occurs across word classes in a sentence context. Dutch–English bilinguals were auditorily presented with English (L2) sentences while looking at a visual world. The sentences contained interlingual homophones from distinct lexical categories (e.g., the English verb spoke, which overlaps phonologically with the Dutch noun for ghost, spook). Eye movement recordings showed that depictions of referents of the Dutch (L1) nouns attracted more visual attention than unrelated distractor pictures in sentences containing homophones. This finding shows that native language objects are activated during second language verb processing despite the structural information provided by the sentence context. Research highlights We show that native language words are activated during second language sentence processing. We tested this in a visual world setting on homophones with a different word class across languages. Fixations show that processing second language verbs activated native language nouns.

Abstract

Music is often described in the laboratory and in the classroom as a beneficial tool for memory encoding and retention, with a particularly strong effect when words are sung to familiar compared to unfamiliar melodies. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this memory benefit, especially for benefits related to familiar music are not well understood. The current study examined whether neural tracking of the slow syllable rhythms of speech and song is modulated by melody familiarity. Participants became familiar with twelve novel melodies over four days prior to MEG testing. Neural tracking of the same utterances spoken and sung revealed greater cerebro-acoustic phase coherence for sung compared to spoken utterances, but did not show an effect of familiar melody when stimuli were grouped by their assigned (trained) familiarity. When participant's subjective ratings of perceived familiarity during the MEG testing session were used to group stimuli, however, a large effect of familiarity was observed. This effect was not specific to song, as it was observed in both sung and spoken utterances. Exploratory analyses revealed some in-session learning of unfamiliar and spoken utterances, with increased neural tracking for untrained stimuli by the end of the MEG testing session. Our results indicate that top-down factors like familiarity are strong modulators of neural tracking for music and language. Participants’ neural tracking was related to their perception of familiarity, which was likely driven by a combination of effects from repeated listening, stimulus-specific melodic simplicity, and individual differences. Beyond simply the acoustic features of music, top-down factors built into the music listening experience, like repetition and familiarity, play a large role in the way we attend to and encode information presented in a musical context.

Abstract

The current study investigated the effects of phonologically related context pictures on the naming latencies of target words in Japanese and Chinese. Reading bare words in alphabetic languages has been shown to be rather immune to effects of context stimuli, even when these stimuli are presented in advance of the target word (e. g., Glaser & Dungelhoff, 1984; Roelofs, 2003). However, recently, semantic context effects of distractor pictures on the naming latencies of Japanese kanji (but not Chinese hanzi) words have been observed (Verdonschot, La Heij, & Schiller, 2010). In the present study, we further investigated this issue using phonologically related (i.e., homophonic) context pictures when naming target words in either Chinese or Japanese. We found that pronouncing bare nouns in Japanese is sensitive to phonologically related context pictures, whereas this is not the case in Chinese. The difference between these two languages is attributed to processing costs caused by multiple pronunciations for Japanese kanji.

Abstract

Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation paradigm. To shed more light on the functional unit of phonological encoding in Japanese, a language often described as being mora based, we report the results of 4 experiments using word reading tasks and masked priming. Experiment 1 demonstrated using Japanese kana script that primes, which overlapped in the whole mora with target words, sped up word reading latencies but not when just the onset overlapped. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated a possible role of script by using combinations of romaji (Romanized Japanese) and hiragana; again, facilitation effects were found only when the whole mora and not the onset segment overlapped. Experiment 4 distinguished mora priming from syllable priming and revealed that the mora priming effects obtained in the first 3 experiments are also obtained when a mora is part of a syllable. Again, no priming effect was found for single segments. Our findings suggest that the mora and not the segment (phoneme) is the basic functional phonological unit in Japanese language production planning.

Abstract

In English, Dutch, and other Germanic languages the initial phonological unit used in word production has been shown to be the phoneme; conversely, others have revealed that in Chinese this is the atonal syllable and in Japanese the mora. The current paper is, to our knowledge, the first to report chronometric data on Vietnamese phonological encoding. Vietnamese, a tonal language, is of interest as, despite its Austroasiatic roots, it has clear similarities with Chinese through extended contact over a prolonged period. Four experiments (i.e., masked priming, phonological Stroop, picture naming with written distractors, picture naming with auditory distractors) have been conducted to investigate Vietnamese phonological encoding. Results show that in all four experiments both onset effects as well as whole syllable effects emerge. This indicates that the fundamental phonological encoding unit during Vietnamese language production is the phoneme despite its apparent similarities to Chinese. This result might have emerged due to tone assignment being a qualitatively different process in Vietnamese compared to Chinese.

Abstract

Rhythm and vocal production learning are building blocks of human music and speech. Vocal learning has been hypothesized as a prerequisite for rhythmic capacities. Yet, no mammalian vocal learner but humans have shown the capacity to flexibly and spontaneously discriminate rhythmic patterns. Here we tested untrained rhythm discrimination in a mammalian vocal learning species, the harbour seal (Phoca vitulina). Twenty wild-born seals were exposed to music-like playbacks of conspecific call sequences varying in basic rhythmic properties. These properties were called length, sequence regularity, and overall tempo. All three features significantly influenced seals' reaction (number of looks and their duration), demonstrating spontaneous rhythm discrimination in a vocal learning mammal. This finding supports the rhythm–vocal learning hypothesis and showcases pinnipeds as promising models for comparative research on rhythmic phylogenies.

Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of verb placement by Moroccan and Turkish second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Elicited production data corroborate earlier findings from L2 German that learners who do not produce auxiliaries do not raise lexical verbs over negation, whereas learners who produce auxiliaries do. Data from elicited imitation and sentence matching support this pattern and show that learners can have grammatical knowledge of auxiliary placement before they can produce auxiliaries. With lexical verbs, they do not show such knowledge. These results present further evidence for the different behavior of auxiliary and lexical verbs in early stages of L2 acquisition.

Abstract

Vocal learning, the ability to produce modified vocalizations via learning from acoustic signals, is a key trait in the evolution of speech. While extensively studied in songbirds, mammalian models for vocal learning are rare. Bats present a promising study system given their gregarious natures, small size, and the ability of some species to be maintained in captive colonies. We utilize the pale spear-nosed bat (Phyllostomus discolor) and report advances in establishing this species as a tractable model for understanding vocal learning. We have taken an interdisciplinary approach, aiming to provide an integrated understanding across genomics (Part I), neurobiology (Part II), and transgenics (Part III). In Part I, we generated new, high-quality genome annotations of coding genes and noncoding microRNAs to facilitate functional and evolutionary studies. In Part II, we traced connections between auditory-related brain regions and reported neuroimaging to explore the structure of the brain and gene expression patterns to highlight brain regions. In Part III, we created the first successful transgenic bats by manipulating the expression of FoxP2, a speech-related gene. These interdisciplinary approaches are facilitating a mechanistic and evolutionary understanding of mammalian vocal learning and can also contribute to other areas of investigation that utilize P. discolor or bats as study species.

Abstract

Forkhead-box protein P2 is a transcription factor that has been associated with intriguing aspects of cognitive function in humans, non-human mammals, and song-learning birds. Heterozygous mutations of the human FOXP2 gene cause a monogenic speech and language disorder. Reduced functional dosage of the mouse version (Foxp2) causes deficient cortico-striatal synaptic plasticity and impairs motor-skill learning. Moreover, the songbird orthologue appears critically important for vocal learning. Across diverse vertebrate species, this well-conserved transcription factor is highly expressed in the developing and adult central nervous system. Very little is known about the mechanisms regulated by Foxp2 during brain development. We used an integrated functional genomics strategy to robustly define Foxp2-dependent pathways, both direct and indirect targets, in the embryonic brain. Specifically, we performed genome-wide in vivo ChIP–chip screens for Foxp2-binding and thereby identified a set of 264 high-confidence neural targets under strict, empirically derived significance thresholds. The findings, coupled to expression profiling and in situ hybridization of brain tissue from wild-type and mutant mouse embryos, strongly highlighted gene networks linked to neurite development. We followed up our genomics data with functional experiments, showing that Foxp2 impacts on neurite outgrowth in primary neurons and in neuronal cell models. Our data indicate that Foxp2 modulates neuronal network formation, by directly and indirectly regulating mRNAs involved in the development and plasticity of neuronal connections

Abstract

Yarkoni’s analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to diversification, and focused on understanding sources of variation.

Abstract

Background

Head circumference is associated with intelligence and tracks from childhood into adulthood.
Methods

We performed a genome-wide association study meta-analysis and follow-up of head circumference in a total of 29,192 participants between 6 and 30 months of age.
Results

Seven loci reached genome-wide significance in the combined discovery and replication analysis of which three loci near ARFGEF2, MYCL1, and TOP1, were novel. We observed positive genetic correlations for early-life head circumference with adult intracranial volume, years of schooling, childhood and adult intelligence, but not with adult psychiatric, neurological, or personality-related phenotypes.
Conclusions

The results of this study indicate that the biological processes underlying early-life head circumference overlap largely with those of adult head circumference. The associations of early-life head circumference with cognitive outcomes across the life course are partly explained by genetics.

Abstract

Precision turn-taking may constitute a crucial part of the human endowment for communication. If so, it should be implemented similarly across language modalities, as in signed vs. spoken language. Here in the first experimental study of turn-end prediction in sign language, we find support for the idea that signed language, like spoken language, involves turn-type prediction and turn-end anticipation. In both cases, turns eliciting specific responses like questions accelerate anticipation. We also show remarkable cross-modality predictive capacity: non-signers anticipate sign turn-ends surprisingly well. Finally, we show that despite non-signers’ ability to intuitively predict signed turn-ends, early native signers do it much better by using their access to linguistic signals (here, question markers). As shown in prior work, question formation facilitates prediction, and age of sign language acquisition affects accuracy. The study thus sheds light on the kind of features that may facilitate turn-taking universally, and those that are language-specific.

Abstract

How do new languages develop systematic ways to talk about sensory experiences, such as color? To what extent is the evolution of color terms guided by societal factors? This paper describes the color lexicon of a rural sign language called Kata Kolok which emerged approximately one century ago in a Balinese village. Kata Kolok has four color signs: black, white, red and a blue-green term. In addition, two non-conventionalized means are used to provide color descriptions: naming relevant objects, and pointing to objects in the vicinity. Comparison with Balinese culture and spoken Balinese brings to light discrepancies between the systems, suggesting that neither cultural practices nor language contact have driven the formation of color signs in Kata Kolok. The few lexicographic investigations from other rural sign languages report limitations in the domain of color. On the other hand, larger, urban signed languages have extensive systems, for example, Australian Sign Language has up to nine color terms (Woodward 1989: 149). These comparisons support the finding that, rural sign languages like Kata Kolok fail to provide the societal pressures for the lexicon to expand further.

Abstract

Language acquisition in both natural and artificial language learning settings crucially depends on extracting information from sequence input. A shared sequence learning mechanism is thus assumed to underlie both natural and artificial language learning. A growing body of empirical evidence is consistent with this hypothesis. By means of artificial language learning experiments, we may therefore gain more insight in this shared mechanism. In this paper, we review empirical evidence from artificial language learning and computational modelling studies, as well as natural language data, and suggest that there are two key factors that help determine processing complexity in sequence learning, and thus in natural language processing. We propose that the specific ordering of non-adjacent dependencies (i.e., nested or crossed), as well as the number of non-adjacent dependencies to be resolved simultaneously (i.e., two or three) are important factors in gaining more insight into the boundaries of human sequence learning; and thus, also in natural language processing. The implications for theories of linguistic competence are discussed.

Abstract

The role of attentional control in lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in two patients with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and one control patient with non-LIFG damage. Experiment 1 confirmed that the LIFG patients had attentional control deficits compared to normal controls while the non-LIFG patient was relatively unimpaired. Experiment 2 showed that all three patients did as well as normal controls in using biasing sentence context to resolve lexical ambiguities involving balanced ambiguous words, but only the LIFG patients took an abnormally long time on lexical ambiguities that resolved toward a subordinate meaning of biased ambiguous words. Taken together, the results suggest that attentional control plays an important role in the resolution of certain lexical ambiguities – those that induce strong interference from context-inappropriate meanings (i.e., dominant meanings of biased ambiguous words).

Abstract

To highlight relevant information in dialogues, both wh-question context and pitch accent in answers can be used, such that focused information gains more attention and is processed more elaborately. To evaluate the relative influence of context and pitch accent on the depth of semantic processing, we measured Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to auditorily presented wh-question-answer pairs. A semantically incongruent word in the answer occurred either in focus or non-focus position as determined by the context, and this word was either accented or unaccented. Semantic incongruency elicited different N400 effects in different conditions. The largest N400 effect was found when the question-marked focus was accented, while the other three conditions elicited smaller N400 effects. The results suggest that context and accentuation interact. Thus accented focused words were processed more deeply compared to conditions where focus and accentuation mismatched, or when the new information had no marking. In addition, there seems to be sex differences in the depth of semantic processing. For males, a significant N400 effect was observed only when the question-marked focus was accented, reduced N400 effects were found in the other dialogues. In contrast, females produced similar N400 effects in all the conditions. These results suggest that regardless of external cues, females tend to engage in more elaborate semantic processing compared to males.

Abstract

For native (L1) English readers, masked presentations of past-tense verb primes (e.g., fell and looked) produce faster lexical decision latencies to their present-tense targets (e.g., FALL and LOOK) than orthographically related (e.g., fill and loose) or unrelated (e.g., master and bank) primes. This facilitation observed with morphologically related prime-target pairs (morphological priming) is generally taken as evidence for strong connections based on morphological relationships in the L1 lexicon. It is unclear, however, if similar, morphologically based, connections develop in non-native (L2) lexicons. Several earlier studies with L2 English readers have reported mixed results. The present experiments examine whether past-tense verb primes (both regular and irregular verbs) significantly facilitate target lexical decisions for Japanese-English bilinguals beyond any facilitation provided by prime-target orthographic similarity. Overall, past-tense verb primes facilitated lexical decisions to their present-tense targets relative to both orthographically related and unrelated primes. Replicating previous masked priming experiments with L2 readers, orthographically related primes also facilitated target recognition relative to unrelated primes, confirming that orthographic similarity facilitates L2 target recognition. The additional facilitation from past-tense verb primes beyond that provided by orthographic primes suggests that, in the L2 English lexicon, connections based on morphological relationships develop in a way that is similar to how they develop in the L1 English lexicon even though the connections and processing of lower level, lexical/orthographic information may differ. Further analyses involving L2 proficiency revealed that as L2 proficiency increased, orthographic facilitation was reduced, indicating that there is a decrease in the fuzziness in orthographic representations in the L2 lexicon with increased proficiency.

Abstract

Two cross-modal priming studies investigated the recognition of English words spoken with a foreign accent. Auditory English primes were either typical of a Dutch accent or typical of a Japanese accent in English and were presented to both Dutch and Japanese L2 listeners. Lexical-decision times to subsequent visual target words revealed that foreign-accented words can facilitate word recognition for L2 listeners if at least one of two requirements is met: the foreign-accented production is in accordance with the language background of the L2 listener, or the foreign accent is perceptually confusable with the standard pronunciation for the L2 listener. If neither one of the requirements is met, no facilitatory effect of foreign accents on L2 word recognition is found. Taken together, these findings suggest that linguistic experience with a foreign accent affects the ability to recognize words carrying this accent, and there is furthermore a general benefit for L2 listeners for recognizing foreign-accented words that are perceptually confusable with the standard pronunciation.

Abstract

Recordings of calls may be used to assess population structure for acoustic species. This can be particularly effective if there are identity calls, produced nearly exclusively by just one population segment. The identity call method, IDcall, classifies calls into types using contaminated mixture models, and then clusters repertoires of calls into identity clades (potential population segments) using identity calls that are characteristic of the repertoires in each identity clade. We show how to calculate the Bayesian posterior probabilities that each repertoire is a member of each identity clade, and display this information as a stacked bar graph. This methodology (IDcallPP) is introduced using the output of IDcall but could easily be adapted to estimate posterior probabilities of clade membership when acoustic clades are delineated using other methods. This output is similar to that of the STRUCTURE software which uses molecular genetic data to assess population structure and has become a standard in conservation genetics. The technique introduced here should be a valuable asset to those who use acoustic data to address evolution, ecology, or conservation, and creates a methodological and conceptual bridge between geneticists and acousticians who aim to assess population structure.

Abstract

Early language development is known to be under genetic influence, but the genes affecting normal variation in the general population remain largely elusive. Recent studies of disorder reported that variants of the CNTNAP2 gene are associated both with language deficits in specific language impairment (SLI) and with language delays in autism. We tested the hypothesis that these CNTNAP2 variants affect communicative behavior, measured at 2 years of age in a large epidemiological sample, the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study. Singlepoint analyses of 1149 children (606 males, 543 emales) revealed patterns of association which were strikingly reminiscent of those observed in previous investigations of impaired language, centered on the same genetic markers, and with a consistent direction of effect (rs2710102, p = .0239; rs759178, p = .0248). Based on these findings we performed analyses of four-marker haplotypes of rs2710102- s759178-rs17236239-rs2538976, and identified significant association (haplotype TTAA, p = .049; haplotype GCAG, p = .0014). Our study suggests that common variants in the exon 13-15 region of CNTNAP2 influence early language acquisition, as assessed at age 2, in the general population. We propose that these CNTNAP2 variants increase susceptibility to SLI or autism when they occur together with other risk factors.

Abstract

For many traits, males show greater variability than females, with possible implications for understanding sex differences in health and disease. Here, the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta‐Analysis) Consortium presents the largest‐ever mega‐analysis of sex differences in variability of brain structure, based on international data spanning nine decades of life. Subcortical volumes, cortical surface area and cortical thickness were assessed in MRI data of 16,683 healthy individuals 1‐90 years old (47% females). We observed significant patterns of greater male than female between‐subject variance for all subcortical volumetric measures, all cortical surface area measures, and 60% of cortical thickness measures. This pattern was stable across the lifespan for 50% of the subcortical structures, 70% of the regional area measures, and nearly all regions for thickness. Our findings that these sex differences are present in childhood implicate early life genetic or gene‐environment interaction mechanisms. The findings highlight the importance of individual differences within the sexes, that may underpin sex‐specific vulnerability to disorders.

Abstract

Does language comprehension depend, in part, on neural systems for action? In previous studies, motor areas of the brain were activated when people read or listened to action verbs, but it remains unclear whether such activation is functionally relevant for comprehension. In the experiments reported here, we used off-line theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation to investigate whether a causal relationship exists between activity in premotor cortex and action-language understanding. Right-handed participants completed a lexical decision task, in which they read verbs describing manual actions typically performed with the dominant hand (e.g., “to throw,” “to write”) and verbs describing nonmanual actions (e.g., “to earn,” “to wander”). Responses to manual-action verbs (but not to nonmanual-action verbs) were faster after stimulation of the hand area in left premotor cortex than after stimulation of the hand area in right premotor cortex. These results suggest that premotor cortex has a functional role in action-language understanding.

Abstract

We investigated how visual and linguistic information interact in the perception of emotion. We borrowed a phenomenon from film theory which states that presentation of an as such neutral visual scene intensifies the percept of fear or suspense induced by a different channel of information, such as language. Our main aim was to investigate how neutral visual scenes can enhance responses to fearful language content in parts of the brain involved in the perception of emotion. Healthy participants’ brain activity was measured (using functional magnetic resonance imaging) while they read fearful and less fearful sentences presented with or without a neutral visual scene. The main idea is that the visual scenes intensify the fearful content of the language by subtly implying and concretizing what is described in the sentence. Activation levels in the right anterior temporal pole were selectively increased when a neutral visual scene was paired with a fearful sentence, compared to reading the sentence alone, as well as to reading of non-fearful sentences presented with the same neutral scene. We conclude that the right anterior temporal pole serves a binding function of emotional information across domains such as visual and linguistic information.

Abstract

A debated issue in the relationship between language and thought is how our linguistic abilities are involved in understanding the intentions of others (‘mentalizing’). The results of both theoretical and empirical work have been used to argue that linguistic, and more specifically, grammatical, abilities are crucial in representing the mental states of others. Here we contribute to this debate by investigating how damage to the language system influences the generation and understanding of intentional communicative behaviors. Four patients with pervasive language difficulties (severe global or agrammatic aphasia) engaged in an experimentally controlled non-verbal communication paradigm, which required signaling and understanding a communicative message. Despite their profound language problems they were able to engage in recipient design as well as intention recognition, showing similar indicators of mentalizing as have been observed in the neurologically healthy population. Our results show that aspects of the ability to communicate remain present even when core capacities of the language system are dysfunctional

Abstract

Do people use sensori-motor cortices to understand language? Here we review neurocognitive studies of language comprehension in healthy adults and evaluate their possible contributions to theories of language in the brain. We start by sketching the minimal predictions that an embodied theory of language understanding makes for empirical research, and then survey studies that have been offered as evidence for embodied semantic representations. We explore four debated issues: first, does activation of sensori-motor cortices during action language understanding imply that action semantics relies on mirror neurons? Second, what is the evidence that activity in sensori-motor cortices plays a functional role in understanding language? Third, to what extent do responses in perceptual and motor areas depend on the linguistic and extra-linguistic context? And finally, can embodied theories accommodate language about abstract concepts? Based on the available evidence, we conclude that sensori-motor cortices are activated during a variety of language comprehension tasks, for both concrete and abstract language. Yet, this activity depends on the context in which perception and action words are encountered. Although modality-specific cortical activity is not a sine qua non of language processing even for language about perception and action, sensori-motor regions of the brain appear to make functional contributions to the construction of meaning, and should therefore be incorporated into models of the neurocognitive architecture of language.

Abstract

Marr and Poggio’s levels of description are one of the most well-known theoretical constructs of twentieth century cognitive science. It entails that behavior can and should be considered at three different levels: computation, algorithm, and implementation. In this contribution focus is on the computational level of description, the level that describes the “why” of cognition. I argue that the computational level should be taken as a starting point in devising experiments in cognitive (neuro)science. Instead, the starting point in empirical practice often is a focus on the stimulus or on some capacity of the cognitive system. The “why” of cognition tends to be ignored when designing research, and is not considered in subsequent inference from experimental results. The overall aim of this manuscript is to show how re-appreciation of the computational level of description as a starting point for experiments can lead to more informative experimentation.

Abstract

Purpose:This study investigated to what extent iconic co-speech gestures helpword intelligibility in sentence context in two different linguistic maskers (nativevs. foreign). It was hypothesized that sentence recognition improves with thepresence of iconic co-speech gestures and with foreign compared to nativebabble.Method:Thirty-two native Dutch participants performed a Dutch word recogni-tion task in context in which they were presented with videos in which anactress uttered short Dutch sentences (e.g.,Ze begint te openen,“She starts toopen”). Participants were presented with a total of six audiovisual conditions: nobackground noise (i.e., clear condition) without gesture, no background noise withgesture, French babble without gesture, French babble with gesture, Dutch bab-ble without gesture, and Dutch babble with gesture; and they were asked to typedown what was said by the Dutch actress. The accurate identification of theaction verbs at the end of the target sentences was measured.Results:The results demonstrated that performance on the task was better inthe gesture compared to the nongesture conditions (i.e., gesture enhancementeffect). In addition, performance was better in French babble than in Dutchbabble.Conclusions:Listeners benefit from iconic co-speech gestures during commu-nication and from foreign background speech compared to native. Theseinsights into multimodal communication may be valuable to everyone whoengages in multimodal communication and especially to a public who oftenworks in public places where competing speech is present in the background.

Abstract

The evolution of basic color terms in language is claimed to be stimulated by technological development, involving technological control of color or exposure to artificially colored objects. Accordingly, technologically “simple” non-industrialized societies are expected to have poor lexicalization of color, i.e., only rudimentary lexica of 2, 3 or 4 basic color terms, with unnamed gaps in the color space. While it may indeed be the case that technology stimulates lexical growth of color terms, it is sometimes considered a sine qua non for color salience and lexicalization. We provide novel evidence that this overlooks the role of the natural environment, and people's engagement with the environment, in the evolution of color vocabulary. We introduce the Maniq—nomadic hunter-gatherers with no color technology, but who have a basic color lexicon of 6 or 7 terms, thus of the same order as large languages like Vietnamese and Hausa, and who routinely talk about color. We examine color language in Maniq and compare it to available data in other languages to demonstrate it has remarkably high consensual color term usage, on a par with English, and high coding efficiency. This shows colors can matter even for non-industrialized societies, suggesting technology is not necessary for color language. Instead, factors such as perceptual prominence of color in natural environments, its practical usefulness across communicative contexts, and symbolic importance can all stimulate elaboration of color language.

Abstract

Words typically form the basis of psycholinguistic and computational linguistic studies about sentence processing. However, recent evidence shows the basic units during reading, i.e., the items in the mental lexicon, are not always words, but could also be sub-word and supra-word units. To recognize these units, human readers require a cognitive mechanism to learn and detect them. In this paper, we assume eye fixations during reading reveal the locations of the cognitive units, and that the cognitive units are analogous with the text units discovered by unsupervised segmentation models. We predict eye fixations by model-segmented units on both English and Dutch text. The results show the model-segmented units predict eye fixations better than word units. This finding suggests that the predictive performance of model-segmented units indicates their plausibility as cognitive units. The Less-is-Better (LiB) model, which finds the units that minimize both long-term and working memory load, offers advantages both in terms of prediction score and efficiency among alternative models. Our results also suggest that modeling the least-effort principle for the management of long-term and working memory can lead to inferring cognitive units. Overall, the study supports the theory that the mental lexicon stores not only words but also smaller and larger units, suggests that fixation locations during reading depend on these units, and shows that unsupervised segmentation models can discover these units.

Abstract

In sentence comprehension, the parser in many languages has the option to use both the morphological form of a noun and its lexical representation when evaluating agreement. The additional step of consulting the lexicon incurs processing costs, and an important question is whether the parser takes that step even when the formal cues alone are sufficiently reliable to evaluate agreement. Our study addressed this question using electrophysiology in Zulu, a language where both grammatical gender and number features are reliably expressed formally by noun class prefixes, but only gender features are lexically specified. We observed reduced, more topographically focal LAN, and more frontally distributed alpha/beta power effects for gender compared to number agreement violations. These differences provide evidence that for gender mismatches, even though the formal cues are reliable, the parser nevertheless takes the additional step of consulting the noun's lexical representation, a step which is not available for number.

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the locus of age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency (WF) effects in Chinese spoken picture naming, using a picture–word interference task. We conducted four experiments manipulating the properties of picture names (AoA in Experiments 1 and 2, while controlling WF; and WF in Experiments 3 and 4, while controlling AoA), and the relations between distractors and targets (semantic or phonological relatedness). Both Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated AoA effects in picture naming; pictures of early acquired concepts were named faster than those acquired later. There was an interaction between AoA and semantic relatedness, but not between AoA and phonological relatedness, suggesting localisation of AoA effects at the stage of lexical access in picture naming. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated WF effects: pictures of high-frequency concepts were named faster than those of low-frequency concepts. WF interacted with both phonological and semantic relatedness, suggesting localisation of WF effects at multiple levels of picture naming, including lexical access and phonological encoding. Our findings show that AoA and WF effects exist in Chinese spoken word production and may arise at related processes of lexical selection.

Abstract

Background: The current study aims to investigate the association between the presence of a sibling and early childhood development (ECD). (2) Methods: Data were obtained from a large-scale population-based cohort in Shanghai. Children were followed from three to six years old. Based on birth order, the sample was divided into four groups: single child, younger child, elder child, and single-elder transfer (transfer from single-child to elder-child). Psychosocial well-being and school readiness were assessed with the total difficulties score from the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the overall development score from the early Human Capability Index (eHCI), respectively. A multilevel model was conducted to evaluate the main effect of each sibling group and the group × age interaction effect on psychosocial well-being and school readiness. (3) Results: Across all measures, children in the younger child group presented with lower psychosocial problems (β = −0.96, 95% CI: −1.44, −0.48, p < 0.001) and higher school readiness scores (β = 1.56, 95% CI: 0.61, 2.51, p = 0.001). No significant difference, or marginally significant difference, was found between the elder group and the single-child group. Compared to the single-child group, the single-elder transfer group presented with slower development on both psychosocial well-being (Age × Group: β = 0.37, 95% CI: 0.18, 0.56, p < 0.001) and school readiness (Age × Group: β = −0.75, 95% CI: −1.10, −0.40, p < 0.001). The sibling-ECD effects did not differ between children from families of low versus high socioeconomic status. (4) Conclusion: The current study suggested the presence of a sibling was not associated with worse development outcomes in general. Rather, children with an elder sibling are more likely to present with better ECD.

Abstract

Importance: Screen time has become an integral part of children's daily lives. Nevertheless, the developmental consequences of screen exposure in young children remain unclear.

Objective: To investigate the screen time trajectory from 6 to 72 months of age and its association with children's development at age 72 months in a prospective birth cohort.

Design, setting, and participants: Women in Shanghai, China, who were at 34 to 36 gestational weeks and had an expected delivery date between May 2012 and July 2013 were recruited for this cohort study. Their children were followed up at 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 72 months of age. Children's screen time was classified into 3 groups at age 6 months: continued low (ie, stable amount of screen time), late increasing (ie, sharp increase in screen time at age 36 months), and early increasing (ie, large amount of screen time in early stages that remained stable after age 36 months). Cognitive development was assessed by specially trained research staff in a research clinic. Of 262 eligible mother-offspring pairs, 152 dyads had complete data regarding all variables of interest and were included in the analyses. Data were analyzed from September 2019 to November 2021.

Exposures: Mothers reported screen times of children at 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 72 months of age.

Main outcomes and measures: The cognitive development of children was evaluated using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, 4th edition, at age 72 months. Social-emotional development was measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, which was completed by the child's mother. The study described demographic characteristics, maternal mental health, child's temperament at age 6 months, and mental development at age 12 months by subgroups clustered by a group-based trajectory model. Group difference was examined by analysis of variance.

Results: A total of 152 mother-offspring dyads were included in this study, including 77 girls (50.7%) and 75 boys (49.3%) (mean [SD] age of the mothers was 29.7 [3.3] years). Children's screen time trajectory from age 6 to 72 months was classified into 3 groups: continued low (110 [72.4%]), late increasing (17 [11.2%]), and early increasing (25 [16.4%]). Compared with the continued low group, the late increasing group had lower scores on the Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient (β coefficient, -8.23; 95% CI, -15.16 to -1.30; P < .05) and the General Ability Index (β coefficient, -6.42; 95% CI, -13.70 to 0.86; P = .08); the early increasing group presented with lower scores on the Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient (β coefficient, -6.68; 95% CI, -12.35 to -1.02; P < .05) and the Cognitive Proficiency Index (β coefficient, -10.56; 95% CI, -17.23 to -3.90; P < .01) and a higher total difficulties score (β coefficient, 2.62; 95% CI, 0.49-4.76; P < .05).

Conclusions and relevance: This cohort study found that excessive screen time in early years was associated with poor cognitive and social-emotional development. This finding may be helpful in encouraging awareness among parents of the importance of onset and duration of children's screen time.

Abstract

This paper constitutes a research proposal based on Rousse-Malpalt’s
(2019) dissertation, which extensively examines the effectiveness of the
Accelerative Integrated Method (AIM) in second language (L2) learning.
Although it has been found that AIM is a greatly effective method in comparison with non-implicit teaching methods, the reasons behind its success and effectiveness are yet unknown. As Semantic Memory (SM) is the component of memory responsible for the conceptualization and storage of knowledge, this paper sets to propose an investigation of its role in the learning process of AIM and provide with insights as to why the embodied experience of learning with AIM is more effective than others. The tasks proposed for administration take into account the factors of gestures being related to a learner’s memorization process and Semantic Memory. Lastly, this paper provides with a future research idea about the learning mechanisms of sign languages in people with hearing deficits and healthy population, aiming to indicate which brain mechanisms benefit from the teaching method of AIM and reveal important brain functions for SLA via AIM.

Abstract

The interplay between categorical and continuous aspects of the speech signal remains central and yet controversial in the fields of phonetics and phonology. The division between phonological abstractions and phonetic variations has been particularly relevant to the unraveling of diverse communicative functions of pitch in the domain of prosody. Pitch influences vocal communication in two major but fundamentally different ways, and lexical and intonational tones exquisitely capture these functions. Lexical tone contrasts convey lexical meanings as well as derivational meanings at the word level and are grammatically encoded as discrete structures. Intonational tones, on the other hand, signal post-lexical meanings at the phrasal level and typically allow gradient pragmatic variations. Since categorical and gradient uses of pitch are ubiquitous and closely intertwined in their physiological and psychological processes, further research is warranted for a more detailed understanding of their structural and functional characterisations. This Research Topic addresses this matter from a wide range of perspectives, including first and second language acquisition, speech production and perception, structural and functional diversity, and working with distinct languages and experimental measures. In the following, we provide a short overview of the contributions submitted to this topic

Abstract

Review: User friendliness of the first dictionary of Sign Language of the Netherlands can be improved

Abstract

(Needed: staff for residential care home with good eye-hand coordination. Measuring NGT-skills.)

Abstract

(The Corpus NGT and the daily practice of language teaching)

Abstract

(The Corpus NGT and teacher NGT/interpreter NGT training)