Publications

Displaying 301 - 400 of 605
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1982). Cognitive styles in the use of spatial direction terms. In R. Jarvella, & W. Klein (Eds.), Speech, place, and action: Studies in deixis and related topics (pp. 251-268). Chichester: Wiley.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1973). Formele grammatica's in linguistiek en taalpsychologie (Vols. I-III). Deventer: Van Loghem Slaterus.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1962). Motion breaking and the perception of causality. In A. Michotte (Ed.), Causalité, permanence et réalité phénoménales: Etudes de psychologie expérimentale (pp. 244-258). Louvain: Publications Universitaires.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Plomp, R. (1962). Musical consonance and critical bandwidth. In Proceedings of the 4th International Congress Acoustics (pp. 55-55).
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1997). Kunnen lezen is ongewoon voor horenden en doven. Tijdschrift voor Jeugdgezondheidszorg, 29(2), 22-25.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1997). Language. In G. Adelman, & B. H. Smith (Eds.), Elsevier's encyclopedia of neuroscience (CD-ROM edition). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1982). Het lineariseringsprobleem van de spreker. Tijdschrift voor Taal- en Tekstwetenschap (TTT), 2(1), 1-15.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Hochleistung in Millisekunden: Sprechen und Sprache verstehen. Universitas, 44(511), 56-68.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1982). Linearization in describing spatial networks. In S. Peters, & E. Saarinen (Eds.), Processes, beliefs, and questions (pp. 199-220). Dordrecht - Holland: D. Reidel.

    Abstract

    The topic of this paper is the way in which speakers order information in discourse. I will refer to this issue with the term "linearization", and will begin with two types of general remarks. The first one concerns the scope and relevance of the problem with reference to some existing literature. The second set of general remarks will be about the place of linearization in a theory of the speaker. The following, and main part of this paper, will be a summary report of research of linearization in a limited, but well-defined domain of discourse, namely the description of spatial networks.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (2018). Is language natural to man? Some historical considerations. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 21, 127-131. doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.04.003.

    Abstract

    Since the Enlightenment period, natural theories of speech and language evolution have florished in the language sciences. Four ever returning core issues are highlighted in this paper: Firstly, Is language natural to man or just an invention? Secondly, Is language a specific human ability (a ‘language instinct’) or does it arise from general cognitive capacities we share with other animals? Thirdly, Has the evolution of language been a gradual process or did it rather suddenly arise, due to some ‘evolutionary twist’? Lastly, Is the child's language acquisition an appropriate model for language evolution?
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1980). On-line processing constraints on the properties of signed and spoken language. In U. Bellugi, & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Signed and spoken language: Biological constraints on linguistic form (pp. 141-160). Weinheim: Verlag Chemie.

    Abstract

    It is argued that the dominantly successive nature of language is largely mode-independent and holds equally for sign and for spoken language. A preliminary distinction is made between what is simultaneous or successive in the signal, and what is in the process; these need not coincide, and it is the successiveness of the process that is at stake. It is then discussed extensively for the word/sign level, and in a more preliminary fashion for the clause and discourse level that online processes are parallel in that they can simultaneously draw on various sources of knowledge (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic), but successive in that they can work at the interpretation of only one unit at a time. This seems to hold for both sign and spoken language. In the final section, conjectures are made about possible evolutionary explanations for these properties of language processing.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1973). Recente ontwikkelingen in de taalpsychologie. Forum der Letteren, 14(4), 235-254.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Bonarius, M. (1973). Suffixes as deep structure clues. Methodology and Science, 6(1), 7-37.

    Abstract

    Recent work on sentence recognition suggests that listeners use their knowledge of the language to directly infer deep structure syntactic relations from surface structure markers. Suffixes may be such clues, especially in agglutinative languages. A cross-language (Dutch-Finnish) experiment is reported, designed to investigate whether the suffix structure of Finnish words (as opposed to suffixless Dutch words) can facilitate prompted recall of sentences in case these suffixes differentiate between possible deep structures. The experiment, in which 80 subjects recall sentences at the occasion of prompt words, gives only slight confirmatory evidence. Meanwhile, another prompted recall effect (Blumenthal's) could not be replicated.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Kelter, S. (1982). Surface form and memory in question answering. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 78-106. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(82)90005-6.

    Abstract

    Speakers tend to repeat materials from previous talk. This tendency is experimentally established and manipulated in various question-answering situations. It is shown that a question's surface form can affect the format of the answer given, even if this form has little semantic or conversational consequence, as in the pair Q: (At) what time do you close. A: “(At)five o'clock.” Answerers tend to match the utterance to the prepositional (nonprepositional) form of the question. This “correspondence effect” may diminish or disappear when, following the question, additional verbal material is presented to the answerer. The experiments show that neither the articulatory buffer nor long-term memory is normally involved in this retention of recent speech. Retaining recent speech in working memory may fulfill a variety of functions for speaker and listener, among them the correct production and interpretation of surface anaphora. Reusing recent materials may, moreover, be more economical than regenerating speech anew from a semantic base, and thus contribute to fluency. But the realization of this strategy requires a production system in which linguistic formulation can take place relatively independent of, and parallel to, conceptual planning.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1982). Science policy: Three recent idols, and a goddess. IPO Annual Progress Report, 17, 32-35.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1980). Toegepaste aspecten van het taal-psychologisch onderzoek: Enkele inleidende overwegingen. In J. Matter (Ed.), Toegepaste aspekten van de taalpsychologie (pp. 3-11). Amsterdam: VU Boekhandel.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Working models of perception: Five general issues. In B. A. Elsendoorn, & H. Bouma (Eds.), Working models of perception (pp. 489-503). London: Academic Press.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1982). Zelfcorrecties in het spreekproces. KNAW: Mededelingen van de afdeling letterkunde, nieuwe reeks, 45(8), 215-228.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1982). Caste rank and verbal interaction in Western Tamilnadu. In D. B. McGilvray (Ed.), Caste ideology and interaction (pp. 98-203). Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1989). A review of Relevance [book review of Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: communication and cognition]. Journal of Linguistics, 25, 455-472.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1997). Contextualizing 'contextualization cues'. In S. Eerdmans, C. Prevignano, & P. Thibault (Eds.), Discussing communication analysis 1: John J. Gumperz (pp. 24-30). Lausanne: Beta Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1989). Conversation. In E. Barnouw (Ed.), International encyclopedia of communications (pp. 407-410). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1997). Deixis. In P. V. Lamarque (Ed.), Concise encyclopedia of philosophy of language (pp. 214-219). Oxford: Elsevier.
  • Levinson, S. C., Cutfield, S., Dunn, M., Enfield, N. J., & Meira, S. (Eds.). (2018). Demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    Demonstratives play a crucial role in the acquisition and use of language. Bringing together a team of leading scholars this detailed study, a first of its kind, explores meaning and use across fifteen typologically and geographically unrelated languages to find out what cross-linguistic comparisons and generalizations can be made, and how this might challenge current theory in linguistics, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Using a shared experimental task, rounded out with studies of natural language use, specialists in each of the languages undertook extensive fieldwork for this comparative study of semantics and usage. An introduction summarizes the shared patterns and divergences in meaning and use that emerge.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1997). From outer to inner space: Linguistic categories and non-linguistic thinking. In J. Nuyts, & E. Pederson (Eds.), Language and conceptualization (pp. 13-45). Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1997). Language and cognition: The cognitive consequences of spatial description in Guugu Yimithirr. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 7(1), 98-131. doi:10.1525/jlin.1997.7.1.98.

    Abstract

    This article explores the relation between language and cognition by examining the case of "absolute" (cardinal direction) spatial description in the Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr. This kind of spatial description is incongruent with the "relative" (e.g., left/right/front/back) spatial description familiar in European languages. Building on Haviland's 1993 analysis of Guugu Yimithirr directionals in speech and gesture, a series of informal experiments were developed. It is shown that Guugu Yimithirr speakers predominantly code for nonverbal memory in "absolute" concepts congruent with their language, while a comparative sample of Dutch speakers do so in "relative" concepts. Much anecdotal evidence also supports this. The conclusion is that Whorfian effects may in fact be demonstrable in the spatial domain.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1997). Language and cognition: The cognitive consequences of spatial description in Guugu Yimithirr. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 7(1), 1-35. doi:10.1525/jlin.1997.7.1.98.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2018). Introduction: Demonstratives: Patterns in diversity. In S. C. Levinson, S. Cutfield, M. Dunn, N. J. Enfield, & S. Meira (Eds.), Demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 1-42). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2018). Spatial cognition, empathy and language evolution. Studies in Pragmatics, 20, 16-21.

    Abstract

    The evolution of language and spatial cognition may have been deeply interconnected. The argument
    goes as follows: 1. Human native spatial abilities are poor, but we make up for it with linguistic
    and cultural prostheses; 2. The explanation for the loss of native spatial abilities may be
    that language has cannibalized the hippocampus, the mammalian mental ‘GPS’; 3. Consequently,
    language may have borrowed conceptual primitives from spatial cognition (in line with ‘localism’),
    these being differentially combined in different languages; 4. The hippocampus may have
    been colonized because: (a) space was prime subject matter for communication, (b) gesture uses
    space to represent space, and was likely precursor to language. In order to explain why the other
    great apes haven’t gone in the same direction, we need to invoke other factors, notably the ‘interaction
    engine’, the ensemble of interactional abilities that make cooperative communication possible
    and provide the matrix for the evolution and learning of language.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1982). Speech act theory: The state of the art. In V. Kinsella (Ed.), Surveys 2. Eight state-of-the-art articles on key areas in language teaching. Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1980). Speech act theory: The state of the art. Language teaching and linguistics: Abstracts, 5-24.

    Abstract

    Survey article
  • Levinson, S. C., Pederson, E., & Senft, G. (1997). Sprache und menschliche Orientierungsfähigkeiten. In Jahrbuch der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (pp. 322-327). München: Generalverwaltung der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1989). Pragmática [Spanish translation]. Barcelona: Teide.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2018). Yélî Dnye: Demonstratives in the language of Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea. In S. C. Levinson, S. Cutfield, M. Dunn, N. J. Enfield, & S. Meira (Eds.), Demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 318-342). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Levshina, N. (2018). Probabilistic grammar and constructional predictability: Bayesian generalized additive models of help. GLOSSA-a journal of general linguistics, 3(1): 55. doi:10.5334/gjgl.294.

    Abstract

    The present study investigates the construction with help followed by the bare or to-infinitive in seven varieties of web-based English from Australia, Ghana, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica and the USA. In addition to various factors known from the literature, such as register, minimization of cognitive complexity and avoidance of identity (horror aequi), it studies the effect of predictability of the infinitive given help and the other way round on the language user’s choice between the constructional variants. These probabilistic constraints are tested in a series of Bayesian generalized additive mixed-effects regression models. The results demonstrate that the to-infinitive is particularly frequent in contexts with low predictability, or, in information-theoretic terms, with high information content. This tendency is interpreted as communicatively efficient behaviour, when more predictable units of discourse get less formal marking, and less predictable ones get more formal marking. However, the strength, shape and directionality of predictability effects exhibit variation across the countries, which demonstrates the importance of the cross-lectal perspective in research on communicative efficiency and other universal functional principles.
  • Lewis, A. G., Schriefers, H., Bastiaansen, M., & Schoffelen, J.-M. (2018). Assessing the utility of frequency tagging for tracking memory-based reactivation of word representations. Scientific Reports, 8: 7897. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-26091-3.

    Abstract

    Reinstatement of memory-related neural activity measured with high temporal precision potentially provides a useful index for real-time monitoring of the timing of activation of memory content during cognitive processing. The utility of such an index extends to any situation where one is interested in the (relative) timing of activation of different sources of information in memory, a paradigm case of which is tracking lexical activation during language processing. Essential for this approach is that memory reinstatement effects are robust, so that their absence (in the average) definitively indicates that no lexical activation is present. We used electroencephalography to test the robustness of a reported subsequent memory finding involving reinstatement of frequency-specific entrained oscillatory brain activity during subsequent recognition. Participants learned lists of words presented on a background flickering at either 6 or 15 Hz to entrain a steady-state brain response. Target words subsequently presented on a non-flickering background that were correctly identified as previously seen exhibited reinstatement effects at both entrainment frequencies. Reliability of these statistical inferences was however critically dependent on the approach used for multiple comparisons correction. We conclude that effects are not robust enough to be used as a reliable index of lexical activation during language processing.

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  • Liang, S., Vega, R., Kong, X., Deng, W., Wang, Q., Ma, X., Li, M., Hu, X., Greenshaw, A. J., Greiner, R., & Li, T. (2018). Neurocognitive Graphs of First-Episode Schizophrenia and Major Depression Based on Cognitive Features. Neuroscience Bulletin, 34(2), 312-320. doi:10.1007/s12264-017-0190-6.

    Abstract

    Neurocognitive deficits are frequently observed in patients with schizophrenia and major depressive disorder (MDD). The relations between cognitive features may be represented by neurocognitive graphs based on cognitive features, modeled as Gaussian Markov random fields. However, it is unclear whether it is possible to differentiate between phenotypic patterns associated with the differential diagnosis of schizophrenia and depression using this neurocognitive graph approach. In this study, we enrolled 215 first-episode patients with schizophrenia (FES), 125 with MDD, and 237 demographically-matched healthy controls (HCs). The cognitive performance of all participants was evaluated using a battery of neurocognitive tests. The graphical LASSO model was trained with a one-vs-one scenario to learn the conditional independent structure of neurocognitive features of each group. Participants in the holdout dataset were classified into different groups with the highest likelihood. A partial correlation matrix was transformed from the graphical model to further explore the neurocognitive graph for each group. The classification approach identified the diagnostic class for individuals with an average accuracy of 73.41% for FES vs HC, 67.07% for MDD vs HC, and 59.48% for FES vs MDD. Both of the neurocognitive graphs for FES and MDD had more connections and higher node centrality than those for HC. The neurocognitive graph for FES was less sparse and had more connections than that for MDD. Thus, neurocognitive graphs based on cognitive features are promising for describing endophenotypes that may discriminate schizophrenia from depression.

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    Liang_etal_2017sup.pdf
  • Lieber, R., & Baayen, R. H. (1997). A semantic principle of auxiliary selection in Dutch. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 15(4), 789-845.

    Abstract

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

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  • Ligthart, S., Vaez, A., Võsa, U., Stathopoulou, M. G., De Vries, P. S., Prins, B. P., Van der Most, P. J., Tanaka, T., Naderi, E., Rose, L. M., Wu, Y., Karlsson, R., Barbalic, M., Lin, H., Pool, R., Zhu, G., Macé, A., Sidore, C., Trompet, S., Mangino, M. and 267 moreLigthart, S., Vaez, A., Võsa, U., Stathopoulou, M. G., De Vries, P. S., Prins, B. P., Van der Most, P. J., Tanaka, T., Naderi, E., Rose, L. M., Wu, Y., Karlsson, R., Barbalic, M., Lin, H., Pool, R., Zhu, G., Macé, A., Sidore, C., Trompet, S., Mangino, M., Sabater-Lleal, M., Kemp, J. P., Abbasi, A., Kacprowski, T., Verweij, N., Smith, A. V., Huang, T., Marzi, C., Feitosa, M. F., Lohman, K. K., Kleber, M. E., Milaneschi, Y., Mueller, C., Huq, M., Vlachopoulou, E., Lyytikäinen, L.-P., Oldmeadow, C., Deelen, J., Perola, M., Zhao, J. H., Feenstra, B., LifeLines Cohort Study, Amini, M., CHARGE Inflammation Working Group, Lahti, J., Schraut, K. E., Fornage, M., Suktitipat, B., Chen, W.-M., Li, X., Nutile, T., Malerba, G., Luan, J., Bak, T., Schork, N., Del Greco M., F., Thiering, E., Mahajan, A., Marioni, R. E., Mihailov, E., Eriksson, J., Ozel, A. B., Zhang, W., Nethander, M., Cheng, Y.-C., Aslibekyan, S., Ang, W., Gandin, I., Yengo, L., Portas, L., Kooperberg, C., Hofer, E., Rajan, K. B., Schurmann, C., Den Hollander, W., Ahluwalia, T. S., Zhao, J., Draisma, H. H. M., Ford, I., Timpson, N., Teumer, A., Huang, H., Wahl, S., Liu, Y., Huang, J., Uh, H.-W., Geller, F., Joshi, P. K., Yanek, L. R., Trabetti, E., Lehne, B., Vozzi, D., Verbanck, M., Biino, G., Saba, Y., Meulenbelt, I., O’Connell, J. R., Laakso, M., Giulianini, F., Magnusson, P. K. E., Ballantyne, C. M., Hottenga, J. J., Montgomery, G. W., Rivadineira, F., Rueedi, R., Steri, M., Herzig, K.-H., Stott, D. J., Menni, C., Franberg, M., St Pourcain, B., Felix, S. B., Pers, T. H., Bakker, S. J. L., Kraft, P., Peters, A., Vaidya, D., Delgado, G., Smit, J. H., Großmann, V., Sinisalo, J., Seppälä, I., Williams, S. R., Holliday, E. G., Moed, M., Langenberg, C., Räikkönen, K., Ding, J., Campbell, H., Sale, M. M., Chen, Y.-D.-I., James, A. L., Ruggiero, D., Soranzo, N., Hartman, C. A., Smith, E. N., Berenson, G. S., Fuchsberger, C., Hernandez, D., Tiesler, C. M. T., Giedraitis, V., Liewald, D., Fischer, K., Mellström, D., Larsson, A., Wang, Y., Scott, W. R., Lorentzon, M., Beilby, J., Ryan, K. A., Pennell, C. E., Vuckovic, D., Balkau, B., Concas, M. P., Schmidt, R., Mendes de Leon, C. F., Bottinger, E. P., Kloppenburg, M., Paternoster, L., Boehnke, M., Musk, A. W., Willemsen, G., Evans, D. M., Madden, P. A. F., Kähönen, M., Kutalik, Z., Zoledziewska, M., Karhunen, V., Kritchevsky, S. B., Sattar, N., Lachance, G., Clarke, R., Harris, T. B., Raitakari, O. T., Attia, J. R., Van Heemst, D., Kajantie, E., Sorice, R., Gambaro, G., Scott, R. A., Hicks, A. A., Ferrucci, L., Standl, M., Lindgren, C. M., Starr, J. M., Karlsson, M., Lind, L., Li, J. Z., Chambers, J. C., Mori, T. A., De Geus, E. J. C. N., Heath, A. C., Martin, N. G., Auvinen, J., Buckley, B. M., De Craen, A. J. M., Waldenberger, M., Strauch, K., Meitinger, T., Scott, R. J., McEvoy, M., Beekman, M., Bombieri, C., Ridker, P. M., Mohlke, K. L., Pedersen, N. L., Morrison, A. C., Boomsma, D. I., Whitfield, J. B., Strachan, D. P., Hofman, A., Vollenweider, P., Cucca, F., Jarvelin, M.-R., Jukema, J. W., Spector, T. D., Hamsten, A., Zeller, T., Uitterlinden, A. G., Nauck, M., Gudnason, V., Qi, L., Grallert, H., Borecki, I. B., Rotter, J. I., März, W., Wild, P. S., Lokki, M.-L., Boyle, M., Salomaa, V., Melbye, M., Eriksson, J. G., Wilson, J. F., Penninx, B. W. J. H., Becker, D. M., Worrall, B. B., Gibson, G., Krauss, R. M., Ciullo, M., Zaza, G., Wareham, N. J., Oldehinkel, A. J., Palmer, L. J., Murray, S. S., Pramstaller, P. P., Bandinelli, S., Heinrich, J., Ingelsson, E., Deary, I. J., Ma¨gi, R., Vandenput, L., Van der Harst, P., Desch, K. C., Kooner, J. S., Ohlsson, C., Hayward, C., Lehtima¨ki, T., Shuldiner, A. R., Arnett, D. K., Beilin, L. J., Robino, A., Froguel, P., Pirastu, M., Jess, T., Koenig, W., Loos, R. J. F., Evans, D. A., Schmidt, H., Smith, G. D., Slagboom, P. E., Eiriksdottir, G., Morris, A. P., Psaty, B. M., Tracy, R. P., Nolte, I. M., Boerwinkle, E., Visvikis-Siest, S., Reiner, A. P., Gross, M., Bis, J. C., Franke, L., Franco, O. H., Benjamin, E. J., Chasman, D. I., Dupuis, J., Snieder, H., Dehghan, A., & Alizadeh, B. Z. (2018). Genome Analyses of >200,000 Individuals Identify 58 Loci for Chronic Inflammation and Highlight Pathways that Link Inflammation and Complex Disorders. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 103(5), 691-706. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2018.09.009.

    Abstract

    C-reactive protein (CRP) is a sensitive biomarker of chronic low-grade inflammation and is associated with multiple complex diseases. The genetic determinants of chronic inflammation remain largely unknown, and the causal role of CRP in several clinical outcomes is debated. We performed two genome-wide association studies (GWASs), on HapMap and 1000 Genomes imputed data, of circulating amounts of CRP by using data from 88 studies comprising 204,402 European individuals. Additionally, we performed in silico functional analyses and Mendelian randomization analyses with several clinical outcomes. The GWAS meta-analyses of CRP revealed 58 distinct genetic loci (p < 5 × 10−8). After adjustment for body mass index in the regression analysis, the associations at all except three loci remained. The lead variants at the distinct loci explained up to 7.0% of the variance in circulating amounts of CRP. We identified 66 gene sets that were organized in two substantially correlated clusters, one mainly composed of immune pathways and the other characterized by metabolic pathways in the liver. Mendelian randomization analyses revealed a causal protective effect of CRP on schizophrenia and a risk-increasing effect on bipolar disorder. Our findings provide further insights into the biology of inflammation and could lead to interventions for treating inflammation and its clinical consequences.
  • Liu, X., Gao, Y., Di, Q., Hu, J., Lu, C., Nan, Y., Booth, J. R., & Liu, L. (2018). Differences between child and adult large-scale functional brain networks for reading tasks. Human Brain Mapping, 39(2), 662-679. doi:10.1002/hbm.23871.

    Abstract

    Reading is an important high‐level cognitive function of the human brain, requiring interaction among multiple brain regions. Revealing differences between children's large‐scale functional brain networks for reading tasks and those of adults helps us to understand how the functional network changes over reading development. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging data of 17 adults (19–28 years old) and 16 children (11–13 years old), and graph theoretical analyses to investigate age‐related changes in large‐scale functional networks during rhyming and meaning judgment tasks on pairs of visually presented Chinese characters. We found that: (1) adults had stronger inter‐regional connectivity and nodal degree in occipital regions, while children had stronger inter‐regional connectivity in temporal regions, suggesting that adults rely more on visual orthographic processing whereas children rely more on auditory phonological processing during reading. (2) Only adults showed between‐task differences in inter‐regional connectivity and nodal degree, whereas children showed no task differences, suggesting the topological organization of adults’ reading network is more specialized. (3) Children showed greater inter‐regional connectivity and nodal degree than adults in multiple subcortical regions; the hubs in children were more distributed in subcortical regions while the hubs in adults were more distributed in cortical regions. These findings suggest that reading development is manifested by a shift from reliance on subcortical to cortical regions. Taken together, our study suggests that Chinese reading development is supported by developmental changes in brain connectivity properties, and some of these changes may be domain‐general while others may be specific to the reading domain.
  • Xu, S., Liu, P., Chen, Y., Chen, Y., Zhang, W., Zhao, H., Cao, Y., Wang, F., Jiang, N., Lin, S., Li, B., Zhang, Z., Wei, Z., Fan, Y., Jin, Y., He, L., Zhou, R., Dekker, J. D., Tucker, H. O., Fisher, S. E. and 4 moreXu, S., Liu, P., Chen, Y., Chen, Y., Zhang, W., Zhao, H., Cao, Y., Wang, F., Jiang, N., Lin, S., Li, B., Zhang, Z., Wei, Z., Fan, Y., Jin, Y., He, L., Zhou, R., Dekker, J. D., Tucker, H. O., Fisher, S. E., Yao, Z., Liu, Q., Xia, X., & Guo, X. (2018). Foxp2 regulates anatomical features that may be relevant for vocal behaviors and bipedal locomotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(35), 8799-8804. doi:10.1073/pnas.1721820115.

    Abstract

    Fundamental human traits, such as language and bipedalism, are associated with a range of anatomical adaptations in craniofacial shaping and skeletal remodeling. However, it is unclear how such morphological features arose during hominin evolution. FOXP2 is a brain-expressed transcription factor implicated in a rare disorder involving speech apraxia and language impairments. Analysis of its evolutionary history suggests that this gene may have contributed to the emergence of proficient spoken language. In the present study, through analyses of skeleton-specific knockout mice, we identified roles of Foxp2 in skull shaping and bone remodeling. Selective ablation of Foxp2 in cartilage disrupted pup vocalizations in a similar way to that of global Foxp2 mutants, which may be due to pleiotropic effects on craniofacial morphogenesis. Our findings also indicate that Foxp2 helps to regulate strength and length of hind limbs and maintenance of joint cartilage and intervertebral discs, which are all anatomical features that are susceptible to adaptations for bipedal locomotion. In light of the known roles of Foxp2 in brain circuits that are important for motor skills and spoken language, we suggest that this gene may have been well placed to contribute to coevolution of neural and anatomical adaptations related to speech and bipedal locomotion.

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  • Lloyd, S. E., Günther, W., Pearce, S. H. S., Thomson, A., Bianchi, M. L., Bosio, M., Craig, I. W., Fisher, S. E., Scheinman, S. J., Wrong, O., Jentsch, T. J., & Thakker, R. V. (1997). Characterisation of renal chloride channel, CLCN5, mutations in hypercalciuric nephrolithiasis (kidney stones) disorders. Human Molecular Genetics, 6(8), 1233-1239. doi:10.1093/hmg/6.8.1233.

    Abstract

    Mutations of the renal-specific chloride channel (CLCN5) gene, which is located on chromosome Xp11.22, are associated with hypercalciuric nephrolithiasis (kidney stones) in the Northern European and Japanese populations. CLCN5 encodes a 746 amino acid channel (CLC-5) that has approximately 12 transmembrane domains, and heterologous expression of wild-type CLC-5 in Xenopus oocytes has yielded outwardly rectifying chloride currents that were markedly reduced or abolished by these mutations. In order to assess further the structural and functional relationships of this recently cloned chloride channel, additional CLCN5 mutations have been identified in five unrelated families with this disorder. Three of these mutations were missense (G57V, G512R and E527D), one was a nonsense (R648Stop) and one was an insertion (30:H insertion). In addition, two of the mutations (30:H insertion and E527D) were demonstrated to be de novo, and the G57V and E527D mutations were identified in families of Afro-American and Indian origin, respectively. The G57V and 30:H insertion mutations represent the first CLCN5 mutations to be identified in the N-terminus region, and the R648Stop mutation, which has been observed previously in an unrelated family, suggests that this codon may be particularly prone to mutations. Heterologous expression of the mutations resulted in a marked reduction or abolition of the chloride currents, thereby establishing their functional importance. These results help to elucidate further the structure-function relationships of this renal chloride channel.
  • Long, M., Horton, W. S., Rohde, H., & Sorace, A. (2018). Individual differences in switching and inhibition predict perspective-taking across the lifespan. Cognition, 170, 25-30. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.09.004.

    Abstract

    Studies exploring the influence of executive functions (EF) on perspective-taking have focused on inhibition and working memory in young adults or clinical populations. Less consideration has been given to more complex capacities that also involve switching attention between perspectives, or to changes in EF and concomitant effects on perspective-taking across the lifespan. To address this, we assessed whether individual differences in inhibition and attentional switching in healthy adults (ages 17–84) predict performance on a task in which speakers identified targets for a listener with size-contrasting competitors in common or privileged ground. Modification differences across conditions decreased with age. Further, perspective taking interacted with EF measures: youngest adults’ sensitivity to perspective was best captured by their inhibitory performance; oldest adults’ sensitivity was best captured by switching performance. Perspective-taking likely involves multiple aspects of EF, as revealed by considering a wider range of EF tasks and individual capacities across the lifespan.
  • Long, M. (2018). The lifelong interplay between language and cognition: From language learning to perspective-taking, new insights into the ageing mind. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.
  • Lopopolo, A., Frank, S. L., Van den Bosch, A., Nijhof, A., & Willems, R. M. (2018). The Narrative Brain Dataset (NBD), an fMRI dataset for the study of natural language processing in the brain. In B. Devereux, E. Shutova, & C.-R. Huang (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2018 Workshop "Linguistic and Neuro-Cognitive Resources (LiNCR) (pp. 8-11). Paris: LREC.

    Abstract

    We present the Narrative Brain Dataset, an fMRI dataset that was collected during spoken presentation of short excerpts of three
    stories in Dutch. Together with the brain imaging data, the dataset contains the written versions of the stimulation texts. The texts are
    accompanied with stochastic (perplexity and entropy) and semantic computational linguistic measures. The richness and unconstrained
    nature of the data allows the study of language processing in the brain in a more naturalistic setting than is common for fMRI studies.
    We hope that by making NBD available we serve the double purpose of providing useful neural data to researchers interested in natural
    language processing in the brain and to further stimulate data sharing in the field of neuroscience of language.
  • Lumaca, M., Ravignani, A., & Baggio, G. (2018). Music evolution in the laboratory: Cultural transmission meets neurophysiology. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12: 246. doi:10.3389%2Ffnins.2018.00246.

    Abstract

    In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the biological and cultural evolution of music, and specifically in the role played by perceptual and cognitive factors in shaping core features of musical systems, such as melody, harmony, and rhythm. One proposal originates in the language sciences. It holds that aspects of musical systems evolve by adapting gradually, in the course of successive generations, to the structural and functional characteristics of the sensory and memory systems of learners and “users” of music. This hypothesis has found initial support in laboratory experiments on music transmission. In this article, we first review some of the most important theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of music evolution. Next, we identify a major current limitation of these studies, i.e., the lack of direct neural support for the hypothesis of cognitive adaptation. Finally, we discuss a recent experiment in which this issue was addressed by using event-related potentials (ERPs). We suggest that the introduction of neurophysiology in cultural transmission research may provide novel insights on the micro-evolutionary origins of forms of variation observed in cultural systems.
  • Lupyan, G., Wendorf, A., Berscia, L. M., & Paul, J. (2018). Core knowledge or language-augmented cognition? The case of geometric reasoning. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 252-254). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.062.
  • Lutzenberger, H. (2018). Manual and nonmanual features of name signs in Kata Kolok and sign language of the Netherlands. Sign Language Studies, 18(4), 546-569. doi:10.1353/sls.2018.0016.

    Abstract

    Name signs are based on descriptions, initialization, and loan translations. Nyst and Baker (2003) have found crosslinguistic similarities in the phonology of name signs, such as a preference for one-handed signs and for the head location. Studying Kata Kolok (KK), a rural sign language without indigenous fingerspelling, strongly suggests that one-handedness is not correlated to initialization, but represents a more general feature of name sign phonology. Like in other sign languages, the head location is used frequently in both KK and Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) name signs. The use of nonmanuals, however, is strikingly different. NGT name signs are always accompanied by mouthings, which are absent in KK. Instead, KK name signs may use mouth gestures; these may disambiguate manually identical name signs, and even form independent name signs without any manual features
  • Mai, F., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2018). Using deep learning for title-based semantic subject indexing to reach competitive performance to full-text. In J. Chen, M. A. Gonçalves, J. M. Allen, E. A. Fox, M.-Y. Kan, & V. Petras (Eds.), JCDL '18: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 169-178). New York: ACM.

    Abstract

    For (semi-)automated subject indexing systems in digital libraries, it is often more practical to use metadata such as the title of a publication instead of the full-text or the abstract. Therefore, it is desirable to have good text mining and text classification algorithms that operate well already on the title of a publication. So far, the classification performance on titles is not competitive with the performance on the full-texts if the same number of training samples is used for training. However, it is much easier to obtain title data in large quantities and to use it for training than full-text data. In this paper, we investigate the question how models obtained from training on increasing amounts of title training data compare to models from training on a constant number of full-texts. We evaluate this question on a large-scale dataset from the medical domain (PubMed) and from economics (EconBiz). In these datasets, the titles and annotations of millions of publications are available, and they outnumber the available full-texts by a factor of 20 and 15, respectively. To exploit these large amounts of data to their full potential, we develop three strong deep learning classifiers and evaluate their performance on the two datasets. The results are promising. On the EconBiz dataset, all three classifiers outperform their full-text counterparts by a large margin. The best title-based classifier outperforms the best full-text method by 9.4%. On the PubMed dataset, the best title-based method almost reaches the performance of the best full-text classifier, with a difference of only 2.9%.
  • Mainz, N. (2018). Vocabulary knowledge and learning: Individual differences in adult native speakers. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Majid, A. (2018). Cultural factors shape olfactory language [Reprint]. In D. Howes (Ed.), Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources. Volume 3 (pp. 307-310). London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Majid, A., Roberts, S. G., Cilissen, L., Emmorey, K., Nicodemus, B., O'Grady, L., Woll, B., LeLan, B., De Sousa, H., Cansler, B. L., Shayan, S., De Vos, C., Senft, G., Enfield, N. J., Razak, R. A., Fedden, S., Tufvesson, S., Dingemanse, M., Ozturk, O., Brown, P. and 6 moreMajid, A., Roberts, S. G., Cilissen, L., Emmorey, K., Nicodemus, B., O'Grady, L., Woll, B., LeLan, B., De Sousa, H., Cansler, B. L., Shayan, S., De Vos, C., Senft, G., Enfield, N. J., Razak, R. A., Fedden, S., Tufvesson, S., Dingemanse, M., Ozturk, O., Brown, P., Hill, C., Le Guen, O., Hirtzel, V., Van Gijn, R., Sicoli, M. A., & Levinson, S. C. (2018). Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(45), 11369-11376. doi:10.1073/pnas.1720419115.

    Abstract

    Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. This predicts that humans ought to be better at communicating about sight and hearing than the other senses, and decades of work based on English and related languages certainly suggests this is true. However, how well does this reflect the diversity of languages and communities worldwide? To test whether there is a universal hierarchy of the senses, stimuli from the five basic senses were used to elicit descriptions in 20 diverse languages, including 3 unrelated sign languages. We found that languages differ fundamentally in which sensory domains they linguistically code systematically, and how they do so. The tendency for better coding in some domains can be explained in part by cultural preoccupations. Although languages seem free to elaborate specific sensory domains, some general tendencies emerge: for example, with some exceptions, smell is poorly coded. The surprise is that, despite the gradual phylogenetic accumulation of the senses, and the imbalances in the neural tissue dedicated to them, no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language.
  • Majid, A. (2018). Humans are neglecting our sense of smell. Here's what we could gain by fixing that. Time, March 7, 2018: 5130634.
  • Majid, A., & Kruspe, N. (2018). Hunter-gatherer olfaction is special. Current Biology, 28(3), 409-413. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.014.

    Abstract

    People struggle to name odors, but this
    limitation is not universal. Majid and
    Kruspe investigate whether superior
    olfactory performance is due to
    subsistence, ecology, or language family.
    By comparing closely related
    communities in the Malay Peninsula, they
    find that only hunter-gatherers are
    proficient odor namers, suggesting that
    subsistence is crucial.

    Additional information

    The data are archived at RWAAI
  • Majid, A. (2018). Language and cognition. In H. Callan (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

    Abstract

    What is the relationship between the language we speak and the way we think? Researchers working at the interface of language and cognition hope to understand the complex interplay between linguistic structures and the way the mind works. This is thorny territory in anthropology and its closely allied disciplines, such as linguistics and psychology.

    Additional information

    home page encyclopedia
  • Majid, A., Burenhult, N., Stensmyr, M., De Valk, J., & Hansson, B. S. (2018). Olfactory language and abstraction across cultures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 373: 20170139. doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0139.

    Abstract

    Olfaction presents a particularly interesting arena to explore abstraction in language. Like other abstract domains, such as time, odours can be difficult to conceptualize. An odour cannot be seen or held, it can be difficult to locate in space, and for most people odours are difficult to verbalize. On the other hand, odours give rise to primary sensory experiences. Every time we inhale we are using olfaction to make sense of our environment. We present new experimental data from 30 Jahai hunter-gatherers from the Malay Peninsula and 30 matched Dutch participants from the Netherlands in an odour naming experiment. Participants smelled monomolecular odorants and named odours while reaction times, odour descriptors and facial expressions were measured. We show that while Dutch speakers relied on concrete descriptors, i.e. they referred to odour sources (e.g. smells like lemon), the Jahai used abstract vocabulary to name the same odours (e.g. musty). Despite this differential linguistic categorization, analysis of facial expressions showed that the two groups, nevertheless, had the same initial emotional reactions to odours. Critically, these cross-cultural data present a challenge for how to think about abstraction in language.
  • Mamus, E., & Karadöller, D. Z. (2018). Anıları Zihinde Canlandırma [Imagery in autobiographical memories]. In S. Gülgöz, B. Ece, & S. Öner (Eds.), Hayatı Hatırlamak: Otobiyografik Belleğe Bilimsel Yaklaşımlar [Remembering Life: Scientific Approaches to Autobiographical Memory] (pp. 185-200). Istanbul, Turkey: Koç University Press.
  • Mamus, E., & Boduroglu, A. (2018). The role of context on boundary extension. Visual Cognition, 26(2), 115-130. doi:10.1080/13506285.2017.1399947.

    Abstract

    Boundary extension (BE) is a memory error in which observers remember more of a scene than they actually viewed. This error reflects one’s prediction that a scene naturally continues and is driven by scene schema and contextual knowledge. In two separate experiments we investigated the necessity of context and scene schema in BE. In Experiment 1, observers viewed scenes that either contained semantically consistent or inconsistent objects as well as objects on white backgrounds. In both types of scenes and in the no-background condition there was a BE effect; critically, semantic inconsistency in scenes reduced the magnitude of BE. In Experiment 2 when we used abstract shapes instead of meaningful objects, there was no BE effect. We suggest that although scene schema is necessary to elicit BE, contextual consistency is not required.
  • Manahova, M. E., Mostert, P., Kok, P., Schoffelen, J.-M., & De Lange, F. P. (2018). Stimulus familiarity and expectation jointly modulate neural activity in the visual ventral stream. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 30(9), 1366-1377. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01281.

    Abstract

    Prior knowledge about the visual world can change how a visual stimulus is processed. Two forms of prior knowledge are often distinguished: stimulus familiarity (i.e., whether a stimulus has been seen before) and stimulus expectation (i.e., whether a stimulus is expected to occur, based on the context). Neurophysiological studies in monkeys have shown suppression of spiking activity both for expected and for familiar items in object-selective inferotemporal cortex. It is an open question, however, if and how these types of knowledge interact in their modulatory effects on the sensory response. To address this issue and to examine whether previous findings generalize to noninvasively measured neural activity in humans, we separately manipulated stimulus familiarity and expectation while noninvasively recording human brain activity using magnetoencephalography. We observed independent suppression of neural activity by familiarity and expectation, specifically in the lateral occipital complex, the putative human homologue of monkey inferotemporal cortex. Familiarity also led to sharpened response dynamics, which was predominantly observed in early visual cortex. Together, these results show that distinct types of sensory knowledge jointly determine the amount of neural resources dedicated to object processing in the visual ventral stream.
  • Mandy, W., Pellicano, L., St Pourcain, B., Skuse, D., & Heron, J. (2018). The development of autistic social traits across childhood and adolescence in males and females. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 59(11), 1143-1151. doi:10.1111/jcpp.12913.

    Abstract

    Background

    Autism is a dimensional condition, representing the extreme end of a continuum of social competence that extends throughout the general population. Currently, little is known about how autistic social traits (ASTs), measured across the full spectrum of severity, develop during childhood and adolescence, including whether there are developmental differences between boys and girls. Therefore, we sought to chart the trajectories of ASTs in the general population across childhood and adolescence, with a focus on gender differences.
    Methods

    Participants were 9,744 males (n = 4,784) and females (n = 4,960) from ALSPAC, a UK birth cohort study. ASTs were assessed when participants were aged 7, 10, 13 and 16 years, using the parent‐report Social Communication Disorders Checklist. Data were modelled using latent growth curve analysis.
    Results

    Developmental trajectories of males and females were nonlinear, showing a decline from 7 to 10 years, followed by an increase between 10 and 16 years. At 7 years, males had higher levels of ASTs than females (mean raw score difference = 0.88, 95% CI [.72, 1.04]), and were more likely (odds ratio [OR] = 1.99; 95% CI, 1.82, 2.16) to score in the clinical range on the SCDC. By 16 years this gender difference had disappeared: males and females had, on average, similar levels of ASTs (mean difference = 0.00, 95% CI [−0.19, 0.19]) and were equally likely to score in the SCDC's clinical range (OR = 0.91, 95% CI, 0.73, 1.10). This was the result of an increase in females’ ASTs between 10 and 16 years.
    Conclusions

    There are gender‐specific trajectories of autistic social impairment, with females more likely than males to experience an escalation of ASTs during early‐ and midadolescence. It remains to be discovered whether the observed female adolescent increase in ASTs represents the genuine late onset of social difficulties or earlier, subtle, pre‐existing difficulties becoming more obvious.

    Additional information

    jcpp12913-sup-0001-supinfo.docx
  • Mani, N., Mishra, R. K., & Huettig, F. (Eds.). (2018). The interactive mind: Language, vision and attention. Chennai: Macmillan Publishers India.
  • Mani, N., Mishra, R. K., & Huettig, F. (2018). Introduction to 'The Interactive Mind: Language, Vision and Attention'. In N. Mani, R. K. Mishra, & F. Huettig (Eds.), The Interactive Mind: Language, Vision and Attention (pp. 1-2). Chennai: Macmillan Publishers India.
  • Marslen-Wilsen, W., & Tyler, L. K. (Eds.). (1980). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report Nr.1 1980. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Martin, A. E. (2018). Cue integration during sentence comprehension: Electrophysiological evidence from ellipsis. PLoS One, 13(11): e0206616. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0206616.

    Abstract

    Language processing requires us to integrate incoming linguistic representations with representations of past input, often across intervening words and phrases. This computational situation has been argued to require retrieval of the appropriate representations from memory via a set of features or representations serving as retrieval cues. However, even within in a cue-based retrieval account of language comprehension, both the structure of retrieval cues and the particular computation that underlies direct-access retrieval are still underspecified. Evidence from two event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments that show cue-based interference from different types of linguistic representations during ellipsis comprehension are consistent with an architecture wherein different cue types are integrated, and where the interaction of cue with the recent contents of memory determines processing outcome, including expression of the interference effect in ERP componentry. I conclude that retrieval likely includes a computation where cues are integrated with the contents of memory via a linear weighting scheme, and I propose vector addition as a candidate formalization of this computation. I attempt to account for these effects and other related phenomena within a broader cue-based framework of language processing.
  • Martin, A. E., & McElree, B. (2018). Retrieval cues and syntactic ambiguity resolution: Speed-accuracy tradeoff evidence. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33(6), 769-783. doi:10.1080/23273798.2018.1427877.

    Abstract

    Language comprehension involves coping with ambiguity and recovering from misanalysis. Syntactic ambiguity resolution is associated with increased reading times, a classic finding that has shaped theories of sentence processing. However, reaction times conflate the time it takes a process to complete with the quality of the behavior-related information available to the system. We therefore used the speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure (SAT) to derive orthogonal estimates of processing time and interpretation accuracy, and tested whether stronger retrieval cues (via semantic relatedness: neighed->horse vs. fell->horse) aid interpretation during recovery. On average, ambiguous sentences took 250ms longer (SAT rate) to interpret than unambiguous controls, demonstrating veridical differences in processing time. Retrieval cues more strongly related to the true subject always increased accuracy, regardless of ambiguity. These findings are consistent with a language processing architecture where cue-driven operations give rise to interpretation, and wherein diagnostic cues aid retrieval, regardless of parsing difficulty or structural uncertainty.
  • Maslowski, M., Meyer, A. S., & Bosker, H. R. (2018). Listening to yourself is special: Evidence from global speech rate tracking. PLoS One, 13(9): e0203571. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0203571.

    Abstract

    Listeners are known to use adjacent contextual speech rate in processing temporally ambiguous speech sounds. For instance, an ambiguous vowel between short /A/ and long /a:/ in Dutch sounds relatively long (i.e., as /a:/) embedded in a fast precursor sentence, but short in a slow sentence. Besides the local speech rate, listeners also track talker-specific global speech rates. However, it is yet unclear whether other talkers' global rates are encoded with reference to a listener's self-produced rate. Three experiments addressed this question. In Experiment 1, one group of participants was instructed to speak fast, whereas another group had to speak slowly. The groups were compared on their perception of ambiguous /A/-/a:/ vowels embedded in neutral rate speech from another talker. In Experiment 2, the same participants listened to playback of their own speech and again evaluated target vowels in neutral rate speech. Neither of these experiments provided support for the involvement of self-produced speech in perception of another talker's speech rate. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 but with a new participant sample that was unfamiliar with the participants from Experiment 2. This experiment revealed fewer /a:/ responses in neutral speech in the group also listening to a fast rate, suggesting that neutral speech sounds slow in the presence of a fast talker and vice versa. Taken together, the findings show that self-produced speech is processed differently from speech produced by others. They carry implications for our understanding of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in rate-dependent speech perception in dialogue settings.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1997). Cognitive processes in speech perception. In W. J. Hardcastle, & J. D. Laver (Eds.), The handbook of phonetic sciences (pp. 556-585). Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Mei, C., Fedorenko, E., Amor, D. J., Boys, A., Hoeflin, C., Carew, P., Burgess, T., Fisher, S. E., & Morgan, A. T. (2018). Deep phenotyping of speech and language skills in individuals with 16p11.2 deletion. European journal of human genetics, 26(5), 676-686. doi:10.1038/s41431-018-0102-x.

    Abstract

    Recurrent deletions of a ~600-kb region of 16p11.2 have been associated with a highly penetrant form of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Yet prior findings have been based on a small, potentially biased sample using retrospectively collected data. We examine the prevalence of CAS in a larger cohort of individuals with 16p11.2 deletion using a prospectively designed assessment battery. The broader speech and language phenotype associated with carrying this deletion was also examined. 55 participants with 16p11.2 deletion (47 children, 8 adults) underwent deep phenotyping to test for the presence of CAS and other speech and language diagnoses. Standardized tests of oral motor functioning, speech production, language, and non-verbal IQ were conducted. The majority of children (77%) and half of adults (50%) met criteria for CAS. Other speech outcomes were observed including articulation or phonological errors (i.e., phonetic and cognitive-linguistic errors, respectively), dysarthria (i.e., neuromuscular speech disorder), minimal verbal output, and even typical speech in some. Receptive and expressive language impairment was present in 73% and 70% of children, respectively. Co-occurring neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., autism) and non-verbal IQ did not correlate with the presence of CAS. Findings indicate that CAS is highly prevalent in children with 16p11.2 deletion with symptoms persisting into adulthood for many. Yet CAS occurs in the context of a broader speech and language profile and other neurobehavioral deficits. Further research will elucidate specific genetic and neural pathways leading to speech and language deficits in individuals with 16p11.2 deletions, resulting in more targeted speech therapies addressing etiological pathways.
  • Merkx, D., & Scharenborg, O. (2018). Articulatory feature classification using convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 2142-2146). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2275.

    Abstract

    The ultimate goal of our research is to improve an existing speech-based computational model of human speech recognition on the task of simulating the role of fine-grained phonetic information in human speech processing. As part of this work we are investigating articulatory feature classifiers that are able to create reliable and accurate transcriptions of the articulatory behaviour encoded in the acoustic speech signal. Articulatory feature (AF) modelling of speech has received a considerable amount of attention in automatic speech recognition research. Different approaches have been used to build AF classifiers, most notably multi-layer perceptrons. Recently, deep neural networks have been applied to the task of AF classification. This paper aims to improve AF classification by investigating two different approaches: 1) investigating the usefulness of a deep Convolutional neural network (CNN) for AF classification; 2) integrating the Mel filtering operation into the CNN architecture. The results showed a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy of the CNNs over state-of-the-art AF classification results for Dutch, most notably in the minority classes. Integrating the Mel filtering operation into the CNN architecture did not further improve classification performance.
  • Meyer, A. S. (1997). Conceptual influences on grammatical planning units. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 859-863. doi:10.1080/016909697386745.
  • Meyer, A. S., Alday, P. M., Decuyper, C., & Knudsen, B. (2018). Working together: Contributions of corpus analyses and experimental psycholinguistics to understanding conversation. Frontiers in Psychology, 9: 525. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00525.

    Abstract

    As conversation is the most important way of using language, linguists and psychologists should combine forces to investigate how interlocutors deal with the cognitive demands arising during conversation. Linguistic analyses of corpora of conversation are needed to understand the structure of conversations, and experimental work is indispensable for understanding the underlying cognitive processes. We argue that joint consideration of corpus and experimental data is most informative when the utterances elicited in a lab experiment match those extracted from a corpus in relevant ways. This requirement to compare like with like seems obvious but is not trivial to achieve. To illustrate this approach, we report two experiments where responses to polar (yes/no) questions were elicited in the lab and the response latencies were compared to gaps between polar questions and answers in a corpus of conversational speech. We found, as expected, that responses were given faster when they were easy to plan and planning could be initiated earlier than when they were harder to plan and planning was initiated later. Overall, in all but one condition, the latencies were longer than one would expect based on the analyses of corpus data. We discuss the implication of this partial match between the data sets and more generally how corpus and experimental data can best be combined in studies of conversation.

    Additional information

    Data_Sheet_1.pdf
  • Micklos, A., Macuch Silva, V., & Fay, N. (2018). The prevalence of repair in studies of language evolution. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 316-318). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.075.
  • Mitterer, H., Reinisch, E., & McQueen, J. M. (2018). Allophones, not phonemes in spoken-word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 98, 77-92. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2017.09.005.

    Abstract

    What are the phonological representations that listeners use to map information about the segmental content of speech onto the mental lexicon during spoken-word recognition? Recent evidence from perceptual-learning paradigms seems to support (context-dependent) allophones as the basic representational units in spoken-word recognition. But recent evidence from a selective-adaptation paradigm seems to suggest that context-independent phonemes also play a role. We present three experiments using selective adaptation that constitute strong tests of these representational hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we tested generalization of selective adaptation using different allophones of Dutch /r/ and /l/ – a case where generalization has not been found with perceptual learning. In Experiments 2 and 3, we tested generalization of selective adaptation using German back fricatives in which allophonic and phonemic identity were varied orthogonally. In all three experiments, selective adaptation was observed only if adaptors and test stimuli shared allophones. Phonemic identity, in contrast, was neither necessary nor sufficient for generalization of selective adaptation to occur. These findings and other recent data using the perceptual-learning paradigm suggest that pre-lexical processing during spoken-word recognition is based on allophones, and not on context-independent phonemes
  • Mitterer, H., Brouwer, S., & Huettig, F. (2018). How important is prediction for understanding spontaneous speech? In N. Mani, R. K. Mishra, & F. Huettig (Eds.), The Interactive Mind: Language, Vision and Attention (pp. 26-40). Chennai: Macmillan Publishers India.
  • Monster, I., & Lev-Ari, S. (2018). The effect of social network size on hashtag adoption on Twitter. Cognitive Science, 42(8), 3149-3158. doi:10.1111/cogs.12675.

    Abstract

    Propagation of novel linguistic terms is an important aspect of language use and language
    change. Here, we test how social network size influences people’s likelihood of adopting novel
    labels by examining hashtag use on Twitter. Specifically, we test whether following fewer Twitter
    users leads to more varied and malleable hashtag use on Twitter , because each followed user is
    ascribed greater weight and thus exerts greater influence on the following user. Focusing on Dutch
    users tweeting about the terrorist attack in Brussels in 2016, we show that people who follow
    fewer other users use a larger number of unique hashtags to refer to the event, reflecting greater
    malleability and variability in use. These results have implications for theories of language learning, language use, and language change.
  • Monteiro, M., Rieger, S., Steinmüller, U., & Skiba, R. (1997). Deutsch als Fremdsprache: Fachsprache im Ingenieurstudium. Frankfurt am Main: IKO - Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation.
  • Morgan, A. T., van Haaften, L., van Hulst, K., Edley, C., Mei, C., Tan, T. Y., Amor, D., Fisher, S. E., & Koolen, D. A. (2018). Early speech development in Koolen de Vries syndrome limited by oral praxis and hypotonia. European journal of human genetics, 26, 75-84. doi:10.1038/s41431-017-0035-9.

    Abstract

    Communication disorder is common in Koolen de Vries syndrome (KdVS), yet its specific symptomatology has not been examined, limiting prognostic counselling and application of targeted therapies. Here we examine the communication phenotype associated with KdVS. Twenty-nine participants (12 males, 4 with KANSL1 variants, 25 with 17q21.31 microdeletion), aged 1.0–27.0 years were assessed for oral-motor, speech, language, literacy, and social functioning. Early history included hypotonia and feeding difficulties. Speech and language development was delayed and atypical from onset of first words (2; 5–3; 5 years of age on average). Speech was characterised by apraxia (100%) and dysarthria (93%), with stuttering in some (17%). Speech therapy and multi-modal communication (e.g., sign-language) was critical in preschool. Receptive and expressive language abilities were typically commensurate (79%), both being severely affected relative to peers. Children were sociable with a desire to communicate, although some (36%) had pragmatic impairments in domains, where higher-level language was required. A common phenotype was identified, including an overriding ‘double hit’ of oral hypotonia and apraxia in infancy and preschool, associated with severely delayed speech development. Remarkably however, speech prognosis was positive; apraxia resolved, and although dysarthria persisted, children were intelligible by mid-to-late childhood. In contrast, language and literacy deficits persisted, and pragmatic deficits were apparent. Children with KdVS require early, intensive, speech motor and language therapy, with targeted literacy and social language interventions as developmentally appropriate. Greater understanding of the linguistic phenotype may help unravel the relevance of KANSL1 to child speech and language development.

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  • Mostert, P., Albers, A. M., Brinkman, L., Todorova, L., Kok, P., & De Lange, F. P. (2018). Eye movement-related confounds in neural decoding of visual working memory representations. eNeuro, 5(4): ENEURO.0401-17.2018. doi:10.1523/ENEURO.0401-17.2018.

    Abstract

    A relatively new analysis technique, known as neural decoding or multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), has become increasingly popular for cognitive neuroimaging studies over recent years. These techniques promise to uncover the representational contents of neural signals, as well as the underlying code and the dynamic profile thereof. A field in which these techniques have led to novel insights in particular is that of visual working memory (VWM). In the present study, we subjected human volunteers to a combined VWM/imagery task while recording their neural signals using magnetoencephalography (MEG). We applied multivariate decoding analyses to uncover the temporal profile underlying the neural representations of the memorized item. Analysis of gaze position however revealed that our results were contaminated by systematic eye movements, suggesting that the MEG decoding results from our originally planned analyses were confounded. In addition to the eye movement analyses, we also present the original analyses to highlight how these might have readily led to invalid conclusions. Finally, we demonstrate a potential remedy, whereby we train the decoders on a functional localizer that was specifically designed to target bottom-up sensory signals and as such avoids eye movements. We conclude by arguing for more awareness of the potentially pervasive and ubiquitous effects of eye movement-related confounds.
  • Mulder, K., Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2018). Analyzing EEG Signals in Auditory Speech Comprehension Using Temporal Response Functions and Generalized Additive Models. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 1452-1456). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1676.

    Abstract

    Analyzing EEG signals recorded while participants are listening to continuous speech with the purpose of testing linguistic hypotheses is complicated by the fact that the signals simultaneously reflect exogenous acoustic excitation and endogenous linguistic processing. This makes it difficult to trace subtle differences that occur in mid-sentence position. We apply an analysis based on multivariate temporal response functions to uncover subtle mid-sentence effects. This approach is based on a per-stimulus estimate of the response of the neural system to speech input. Analyzing EEG signals predicted on the basis of the response functions might then bring to light conditionspecific differences in the filtered signals. We validate this approach by means of an analysis of EEG signals recorded with isolated word stimuli. Then, we apply the validated method to the analysis of the responses to the same words in the middle of meaningful sentences.
  • Mulder, K., Van Heuven, W. J., & Dijkstra, T. (2018). Revisiting the neighborhood: How L2 proficiency and neighborhood manipulation affect bilingual processing. Frontiers in Psychology, 9: 1860. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01860.

    Abstract

    We conducted three neighborhood experiments with Dutch-English bilinguals to test effects of L2 proficiency and neighborhood characteristics within and between languages. In the past 20 years, the English (L2) proficiency of this population has considerably increased. To consider the impact of this development on neighborhood effects, we conducted a strict replication of the English lexical decision task by van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger (1998, Exp. 4). In line with our prediction, English characteristics (neighborhood size, word and bigram frequency) dominated the word and nonword responses, while the nonwords also revealed an interaction of English and Dutch neighborhood size.
    The prominence of English was tested again in two experiments introducing a stronger neighborhood manipulation. In English lexical decision and progressive demasking, English items with no orthographic neighbors at all were contrasted with items having neighbors in English or Dutch (‘hermits’) only, or in both languages. In both tasks, target processing was affected strongly by the presence of English neighbors, but only weakly by Dutch neighbors. Effects are interpreted in terms of two underlying processing mechanisms: language-specific global lexical activation and lexical competition.
  • Mulhern, M. S., Stumpel, C., Stong, N., Brunner, H. G., Bier, L., Lippa, N., Riviello, J., Rouhl, R. P. W., Kempers, M., Pfundt, R., Stegmann, A. P. A., Kukolich, M. K., Telegrafi, A., Lehman, A., Lopez-Rangel, E., Houcinat, N., Barth, M., Den Hollander, N., Hoffer, M. J. V., Weckhuysen, S. and 31 moreMulhern, M. S., Stumpel, C., Stong, N., Brunner, H. G., Bier, L., Lippa, N., Riviello, J., Rouhl, R. P. W., Kempers, M., Pfundt, R., Stegmann, A. P. A., Kukolich, M. K., Telegrafi, A., Lehman, A., Lopez-Rangel, E., Houcinat, N., Barth, M., Den Hollander, N., Hoffer, M. J. V., Weckhuysen, S., Roovers, J., Djemie, T., Barca, D., Ceulemans, B., Craiu, D., Lemke, J. R., Korff, C., Mefford, H. C., Meyers, C. T., Siegler, Z., Hiatt, S. M., Cooper, G. M., Bebin, E. M., Snijders Blok, L., Veenstra-Knol, H. E., Baugh, E. H., Brilstra, E. H., Volker-Touw, C. M. L., Van Binsbergen, E., Revah-Politi, A., Pereira, E., McBrian, D., Pacault, M., Isidor, B., Le Caignec, C., Gilbert-Dussardier, B., Bilan, F., Heinzen, E. L., Goldstein, D. B., Stevens, S. J. C., & Sands, T. T. (2018). NBEA: Developmental disease gene with early generalized epilepsy phenotypes. Annals of Neurology, 84(5), 788-795. doi:10.1002/ana.25350.

    Abstract

    NBEA is a candidate gene for autism, and de novo variants have been reported in neurodevelopmental disease (NDD) cohorts. However, NBEA has not been rigorously evaluated as a disease gene, and associated phenotypes have not been delineated. We identified 24 de novo NBEA variants in patients with NDD, establishing NBEA as an NDD gene. Most patients had epilepsy with onset in the first few years of life, often characterized by generalized seizure types, including myoclonic and atonic seizures. Our data show a broader phenotypic spectrum than previously described, including a myoclonic-astatic epilepsy–like phenotype in a subset of patients.

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  • Nieuwland, M. S., Politzer-Ahles, S., Heyselaar, E., Segaert, K., Darley, E., Kazanina, N., Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn, S., Bartolozzi, F., Kogan, V., Ito, A., Mézière, D., Barr, D. J., Rousselet, G., Ferguson, H. J., Busch-Moreno, S., Fu, X., Tuomainen, J., Kulakova, E., Husband, E. M., Donaldson, D. I. and 3 moreNieuwland, M. S., Politzer-Ahles, S., Heyselaar, E., Segaert, K., Darley, E., Kazanina, N., Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn, S., Bartolozzi, F., Kogan, V., Ito, A., Mézière, D., Barr, D. J., Rousselet, G., Ferguson, H. J., Busch-Moreno, S., Fu, X., Tuomainen, J., Kulakova, E., Husband, E. M., Donaldson, D. I., Kohút, Z., Rueschemeyer, S.-A., & Huettig, F. (2018). Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension. eLife, 7: e33468. doi:10.7554/eLife.33468.

    Abstract

    Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment (‘cloze’). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words.

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    Data sets
  • Niso, G., Gorgolewski, K. J., Bock, E., Brooks, T. L., Flandin, G., Gramfort, A., Henson, R. N., Jas, M., Litvak, V., Moreau, J. T., Oostenveld, R., Schoffelen, J.-M., Tadel, F., Wexler, J., & Baillet, S. (2018). MEG-BIDS, the brain imaging data structure extended to magnetoencephalography. Scientific Data, 5: 180110. doi:10.1038/sdata.2018.110.

    Abstract

    We present a significant extension of the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) to support the specific
    aspects of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data. MEG measures brain activity with millisecond
    temporal resolution and unique source imaging capabilities. So far, BIDS was a solution to organise
    magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. The nature and acquisition parameters of MRI and MEG data
    are strongly dissimilar. Although there is no standard data format for MEG, we propose MEG-BIDS as a
    principled solution to store, organise, process and share the multidimensional data volumes produced
    by the modality. The standard also includes well-defined metadata, to facilitate future data
    harmonisation and sharing efforts. This responds to unmet needs from the multimodal neuroimaging
    community and paves the way to further integration of other techniques in electrophysiology. MEGBIDS
    builds on MRI-BIDS, extending BIDS to a multimodal data structure. We feature several dataanalytics
    software that have adopted MEG-BIDS, and a diverse sample of open MEG-BIDS data
    resources available to everyone.
  • Noordman, L. G., & Vonk, W. (1997). The different functions of a conjunction in constructing a representation of the discourse. In J. Costermans, & M. Fayol (Eds.), Processing interclausal relationships: studies in the production and comprehension of text (pp. 75-94). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Noppeney, U., Jones, S. A., Rohe, T., & Ferrari, A. (2018). See what you hear – How the brain forms representations across the senses. Neuroforum, 24(4), 257-271. doi:10.1515/nf-2017-A066.

    Abstract

    Our senses are constantly bombarded with a myriad of signals. To make sense of this cacophony, the brain needs to integrate signals emanating from a common source, but segregate signals originating from the different sources. Thus, multisensory perception relies critically on inferring the world’s causal structure (i. e. one common vs. multiple independent sources). Behavioural research has shown that the brain arbitrates between sensory integration and segregation consistent with the principles of Bayesian Causal Inference. At the neural level, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) studies have shown that the brain accomplishes Bayesian Causal Inference by dynamically encoding multiple perceptual estimates across the sensory processing hierarchies. Only at the top of the hierarchy in anterior parietal cortices did the brain form perceptual estimates that take into account the observer’s uncertainty about the world’s causal structure consistent with Bayesian Causal Inference.
  • Norcliffe, E. (2018). Egophoricity and evidentiality in Guambiano (Nam Trik). In S. Floyd, E. Norcliffe, & L. San Roque (Eds.), Egophoricity (pp. 305-345). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Egophoric verbal marking is a typological feature common to Barbacoan languages, but otherwise unknown in the Andean sphere. The verbal systems of three out of the four living Barbacoan languages, Cha’palaa, Tsafiki and Awa Pit, have previously been shown to express egophoric contrasts. The status of Guambiano has, however, remained uncertain. In this chapter, I show that there are in fact two layers of egophoric or egophoric-like marking visible in Guambiano’s grammar. Guambiano patterns with certain other (non-Barbacoan) languages in having ego-categories which function within a broader evidential system. It is additionally possible to detect what is possibly a more archaic layer of egophoric marking in Guambiano’s verbal system. This marking may be inherited from a common Barbacoan system, thus pointing to a potential genealogical basis for the egophoric patterning common to these languages. The multiple formal expressions of egophoricity apparent both within and across the four languages reveal how egophoric contrasts are susceptible to structural renewal, suggesting a pan-Barbacoan preoccupation with the linguistic encoding of self-knowledge.
  • Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2018). Commentary on “Interaction in spoken word recognition models". Frontiers in Psychology, 9: 1568. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01568.
  • Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1997). The possible-word constraint in the segmentation of continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology, 34, 191-243. doi:10.1006/cogp.1997.0671.

    Abstract

    We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to constraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language. This Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input which could not be a word - for instance, a single consonant. In two word-spotting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detectapple,for example, infapple(where [f] alone would be an impossible word), than invuffapple(wherevuffcould be a word of English). We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based model of continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process of competition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced. This implementation accurately simulates both the present results and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation.
  • Ostarek, M. (2018). Envisioning language: An exploration of perceptual processes in language comprehension. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Ostarek, M., Ishag, I., Joosen, D., & Huettig, F. (2018). Saccade trajectories reveal dynamic interactions of semantic and spatial information during the processing of implicitly spatial words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(10), 1658-1670. doi:10.1037/xlm0000536.

    Abstract

    Implicit up/down words, such as bird and foot, systematically influence performance on visual tasks involving immediately following targets in compatible vs. incompatible locations. Recent studies have observed that the semantic relation between prime words and target pictures can strongly influence the size and even the direction of the effect: Semantically related targets are processed faster in congruent vs. incongruent locations (location-specific priming), whereas unrelated targets are processed slower in congruent locations. Here, we used eye-tracking to investigate the moment-to-moment processes underlying this pattern. Our reaction time results for related targets replicated the location-specific priming effect and showed a trend towards interference for unrelated targets. We then used growth curve analysis to test how up/down words and their match vs. mismatch with immediately following targets in terms of semantics and vertical location influences concurrent saccadic eye movements. There was a strong main effect of spatial association on linear growth with up words biasing changes in y-coordinates over time upwards relative to down words (and vice versa). Similar to the RT data, this effect was strongest for semantically related targets and reversed for unrelated targets. Intriguingly, all conditions showed a bias in the congruent direction in the initial stage of the saccade. Then, at around halfway into the saccade the effect kept increasing in the semantically related condition, and reversed in the unrelated condition. These results suggest that online processing of up/down words triggers direction-specific oculomotor processes that are dynamically modulated by the semantic relation between prime words and targets.
  • Ozker, M., Yoshor, D., & Beauchamp, M. (2018). Converging evidence from electrocorticography and BOLD fMRI for a sharp functional boundary in superior temporal gyrus related to multisensory speech processing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12: 141. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00141.

    Abstract

    Although humans can understand speech using the auditory modality alone, in noisy environments visual speech information from the talker’s mouth can rescue otherwise unintelligible auditory speech. To investigate the neural substrates of multisensory speech perception, we compared neural activity from the human superior temporal gyrus (STG) in two datasets. One dataset consisted of direct neural recordings (electrocorticography, ECoG) from surface electrodes implanted in epilepsy patients (this dataset has been previously published). The second dataset consisted of indirect measures of neural activity using blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD fMRI). Both ECoG and fMRI participants viewed the same clear and noisy audiovisual speech stimuli and performed the same speech recognition task. Both techniques demonstrated a sharp functional boundary in the STG, spatially coincident with an anatomical boundary defined by the posterior edge of Heschl’s gyrus. Cortex on the anterior side of the boundary responded more strongly to clear audiovisual speech than to noisy audiovisual speech while cortex on the posterior side of the boundary did not. For both ECoG and fMRI measurements, the transition between the functionally distinct regions happened within 10 mm of anterior-to-posterior distance along the STG. We relate this boundary to the multisensory neural code underlying speech perception and propose that it represents an important functional division within the human speech perception network.
  • Ozker, M., Yoshor, D., & Beauchamp, M. (2018). Frontal cortex selects representations of the talker’s mouth to aid in speech perception. eLife, 7: e30387. doi:10.7554/eLife.30387.
  • Ozyurek, A. (2018). Cross-linguistic variation in children’s multimodal utterances. In M. Hickmann, E. Veneziano, & H. Jisa (Eds.), Sources of variation in first language acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners (pp. 123-138). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Our ability to use language is multimodal and requires tight coordination between what is expressed in speech and in gesture, such as pointing or iconic gestures that convey semantic, syntactic and pragmatic information related to speakers’ messages. Interestingly, what is expressed in gesture and how it is coordinated with speech differs in speakers of different languages. This paper discusses recent findings on the development of children’s multimodal expressions taking cross-linguistic variation into account. Although some aspects of speech-gesture development show language-specificity from an early age, it might still take children until nine years of age to exhibit fully adult patterns of cross-linguistic variation. These findings reveal insights about how children coordinate different levels of representations given that their development is constrained by patterns that are specific to their languages.
  • Ozyurek, A., & Trabasso, T. (1997). Evaluation during the understanding of narratives. Discourse Processes, 23(3), 305-337. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=12673020&site=ehost-live.

    Abstract

    Evaluation plays a role in the telling and understanding of narratives, in communicative interaction, emotional understanding, and in psychological well-being. This article reports a study of evaluation by describing how readers monitor the concerns of characters over the course of a narrative. The main hypothesis is that readers tract the well-being via the expression of a character's internal states. Reader evaluations were revealed in think aloud protocols obtained during reading of narrative texts, one sentence at a time. Five kinds of evaluative inferences were found: appraisals (good versus bad), preferences (like versus don't like), emotions (happy versus frustrated), goals (want versus don't want), or purposes (to attain or maintain X versus to prevent or avoid X). Readers evaluated all sentences. The mean rate of evaluation per sentence was 0.55. Positive and negative evaluations over the course of the story indicated that things initially went badly for characters, improved with the formulation and execution of goal plans, declined with goal failure, and improved as characters formulated new goals and succeeded. The kind of evaluation made depended upon the episodic category of the event and the event's temporal location in the story. Evaluations also served to explain or predict events. In making evaluations, readers stayed within the frame of the story and perspectives of the character or narrator. They also moved out of the narrative frame and addressed evaluations towards the experimenter in a communicative context.
  • Ozyurek, A. (2018). Role of gesture in language processing: Toward a unified account for production and comprehension. In S.-A. Rueschemeyer, & M. G. Gaskell (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 592-607). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198786825.013.25.

    Abstract

    Use of language in face-to-face context is multimodal. Production and perception of speech take place in the context of visual articulators such as lips, face, or hand gestures which convey relevant information to what is expressed in speech at different levels of language. While lips convey information at the phonological level, gestures contribute to semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic information, as well as to discourse cohesion. This chapter overviews recent findings showing that speech and gesture (e.g. a drinking gesture as someone says, “Would you like a drink?”) interact during production and comprehension of language at the behavioral, cognitive, and neural levels. Implications of these findings for current psycholinguistic theories and how they can be expanded to consider the multimodal context of language processing are discussed.
  • Pallier, C., Cutler, A., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (1997). Prosodic structure and phonetic processing: A cross-linguistic study. In Proceedings of EUROSPEECH 97 (pp. 2131-2134). Grenoble, France: ESCA.

    Abstract

    Dutch and Spanish differ in how predictable the stress pattern is as a function of the segmental content: it is correlated with syllable weight in Dutch but not in Spanish. In the present study, two experiments were run to compare the abilities of Dutch and Spanish speakers to separately process segmental and stress information. It was predicted that the Spanish speakers would have more difficulty focusing on the segments and ignoring the stress pattern than the Dutch speakers. The task was a speeded classification task on CVCV syllables, with blocks of trials in which the stress pattern could vary versus blocks in which it was fixed. First, we found interference due to stress variability in both languages, suggesting that the processing of segmental information cannot be performed independently of stress. Second, the effect was larger for Spanish than for Dutch, suggesting that that the degree of interference from stress variation may be partially mitigated by the predictability of stress placement in the language.
  • Palva, J. M., Wang, S. H., Palva, S., Zhigalov, A., Monto, S., Brookes, M. J., & Schoffelen, J.-M. (2018). Ghost interactions in MEG/EEG source space: A note of caution on inter-areal coupling measures. NeuroImage, 173, 632-643. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.02.032.

    Abstract

    When combined with source modeling, magneto- (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) can be used to study
    long-range interactions among cortical processes non-invasively. Estimation of such inter-areal connectivity is
    nevertheless hindered by instantaneous field spread and volume conduction, which artificially introduce linear
    correlations and impair source separability in cortical current estimates. To overcome the inflating effects of linear
    source mixing inherent to standard interaction measures, alternative phase- and amplitude-correlation based
    connectivity measures, such as imaginary coherence and orthogonalized amplitude correlation have been proposed.
    Being by definition insensitive to zero-lag correlations, these techniques have become increasingly popular
    in the identification of correlations that cannot be attributed to field spread or volume conduction. We show here,
    however, that while these measures are immune to the direct effects of linear mixing, they may still reveal large
    numbers of spurious false positive connections through field spread in the vicinity of true interactions. This
    fundamental problem affects both region-of-interest-based analyses and all-to-all connectome mappings. Most
    importantly, beyond defining and illustrating the problem of spurious, or “ghost” interactions, we provide a
    rigorous quantification of this effect through extensive simulations. Additionally, we further show that signal
    mixing also significantly limits the separability of neuronal phase and amplitude correlations. We conclude that
    spurious correlations must be carefully considered in connectivity analyses in MEG/EEG source space even when
    using measures that are immune to zero-lag correlations.
  • Pascucci, D., Hervais-Adelman, A., & Plomp, G. (2018). Gating by induced A-Gamma asynchrony in selective attention. Human Brain Mapping, 39(10), 3854-3870. doi:10.1002/hbm.24216.

    Abstract

    Visual selective attention operates through top–down mechanisms of signal enhancement and suppression, mediated by a-band oscillations. The effects of such top–down signals on local processing in primary visual cortex (V1) remain poorly understood. In this work, we characterize the interplay between large-s cale interactions and local activity changes in V1 that orchestrat es selective attention, using Granger-causality and phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) analysis of EEG source signals. The task required participants to either attend to or ignore oriented gratings. Results from time-varying, directed connectivity analysis revealed frequency-specific effects of attentional selection: bottom–up g-band influences from visual areas increased rapidly in response to attended stimuli while distributed top–down a-band influences originated from parietal cortex in response to ignored stimuli. Importantly, the results revealed a critical interplay between top–down parietal signals and a–g PAC in visual areas.
    Parietal a-band influences disrupted the a–g coupling in visual cortex, which in turn reduced the amount of g-band outflow from visual area s. Our results are a first demon stration of how directed interactions affect cross-frequency coupling in downstream areas depending on task demands. These findings suggest that parietal cortex realizes selective attention by disrupting cross-frequency coupling at target regions, which prevents them from propagating task-irrelevant information.
  • Patterson, R. D., & Cutler, A. (1989). Auditory preprocessing and recognition of speech. In A. Baddeley, & N. Bernsen (Eds.), Research directions in cognitive science: A european perspective: Vol. 1. Cognitive psychology (pp. 23-60). London: Erlbaum.
  • Pawley, A., & Hammarström, H. (2018). The Trans New Guinea family. In B. Palmer (Ed.), Papuan Languages and Linguistics (pp. 21-196). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

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