Publications

Abstract

In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from five vowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with different consonants). In Experiment 1, the listeners’ native language was Dutch, in which vowel and consonant repertoires are similar in size. The difference between predictable and unpredictable contexts was comparable for vowel and consonant targets. In Experiments 2 and 3, the listeners’ native language was Spanish, which has four times as many consonants as vowels; here effects of an unpredictable consonant context on vowel detection were significantly greater than effects of an unpredictable vowel context on consonant detection. This finding suggests that listeners’ processing of phonemes takes into account the constitution of their language’s phonemic repertoire and the implications that this has for contextual variability.

Abstract

In this study we test the hypothesis that symbolic play represents a fertile context for language acquisition because its inherent ambiguity elicits communicative behaviours that positively influence development. Infant-caregiver dyads (N = 54) participated in two 20-minute play sessions six months apart (Time 1 = 18 months, Time 2 = 24 months). During each session the dyads played with two sets of toys that elicited either symbolic or functional play. The sessions were transcribed and coded for several features of dyadic interaction and speech; infants’ linguistic proficiency was measured via parental report. The two play contexts resulted in different communicative and linguistic behaviour. Notably, the symbolic play condition resulted in significantly greater conversational turn-taking than functional play, and also resulted in the greater use of questions and mimetics in infant-directed speech (IDS). In contrast, caregivers used more imperative clauses in functional play. Regression analyses showed that unique properties of symbolic play (i.e., turn-taking, yes-no questions, mimetics) positively predicted children’s language proficiency, whereas unique features of functional play (i.e., imperatives in IDS) negatively predicted proficiency. The results provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that symbolic play is a fertile context for language development, driven by the need to negotiate meaning.

Abstract

Recent constituent priming experiments show that Dutch and German prefixed verbs prime their stem, regardless of semantic transparency (e.g. Smolka et al. [(2014). ‘Verstehen’ (‘understand’) primes ‘stehen’ (‘stand’): Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs. Journal of Memory and Language, 72, 16–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.12.002]). We examine whether the processing of opaque verbs (e.g. herhalen “repeat”) involves the retrieval of only the whole-word meaning, or whether the lexical-semantic meaning of the stem (halen as “take/get”) is retrieved as well. We report the results of an auditory semantic priming experiment with Dutch prefixed verbs, testing whether the recognition of a semantic associate to the stem (BRENGEN “bring”) is facilitated by the presentation of an opaque prefixed verb. In contrast to prior visual studies, significant facilitation after semantically opaque primes is found, which suggests that the lexical-semantic meaning of stems in opaque words is retrieved. We examine the implications that these findings have for auditory word recognition, and for the way in which different types of meanings are represented and processed.

Abstract

In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving thousands of children across several research disciplines have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and automated algorithmic analysis called the LENAⓇ system, which aims to assess children’s language environment. While the system’s prevalence in the language acquisition domain is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation efforts on only some of its key characteristics. Here, we assess the LENAⓇ system’s accuracy across all of its key measures: speaker classification, Child Vocalization Counts (CVC), Conversational Turn Counts (CTC), and Adult Word Counts (AWC). Our assessment is based on manual annotation of clips that have been randomly or periodically sampled out of daylong recordings, collected from (a) populations similar to the system’s original training data (North American English-learning children aged 3-36 months), (b) children learning another dialect of English (UK), and (c) slightly older children growing up in a different linguistic and socio-cultural setting (Tsimane’ learners in rural Bolivia). We find reasonably high accuracy in some measures (AWC, CVC), with more problematic levels of performance in others (CTC, precision of male adults and other children). Statistical analyses do not support the view that performance is worse for children who are dissimilar from the LENAⓇ original training set. Whether LENAⓇ results are accurate enough for a given research, educational, or clinical application depends largely on the specifics at hand. We therefore conclude with a set of recommendations to help researchers make this determination for their goals.

Abstract

People in Western cultures are poor at naming smells and flavors. However, for wine and
coffee experts, describing smells and flavors is part of their daily routine. So are experts bet-
ter than lay people at conveying smells and flavors in language? If smells and flavors are
more easily linguistically expressed by experts, or more
“
codable
”
, then experts should be
better than novices at describing smells and flavors. If experts are indeed better, we can
also ask how general this advantage is: do experts show higher codability only for smells
and flavors they are expert in (i.e., wine experts for wine and coffee experts for coffee) or is
their linguistic dexterity more general? To address these questions, wine experts, coffee
experts, and novices were asked to describe the smell and flavor of wines, coffees, every-
day odors, and basic tastes. The resulting descriptions were compared on a number of
measures. We found expertise endows a modest advantage in smell and flavor naming.
Wine experts showed more consistency in how they described wine smells and flavors than
coffee experts, and novices; but coffee experts were not more consistent for coffee descriptions. Neither expert group was any more accurate at identifying everyday smells or tastes. Interestingly, both wine and coffee experts tended to use more source-based terms (e.g., vanilla) in descriptions of their own area of expertise whereas novices tended to use more
evaluative terms (e.g.,nice). However, the overall linguistic strategies for both groups were en par. To conclude, experts only have a limited, domain-specific advantage when communicating about smells and flavors. The ability to communicate about smells and flavors is a matter not only of perceptual training, but specific linguistic training too

Abstract

Whether the opportunity to breed and rear young improves the welfare of captive animals is currently debated. However, there is very little empirical data available to evaluate this relationship and this study is a first attempt to contribute objective data to this debate. We utilized the existing variation in the reproductive experiences of sanctuary chimpanzees at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia to investigate whether breeding and rearing young was associated with improved welfare for adult females (N = 43). We considered several behavioural welfare indicators, including rates of luxury behaviours and abnormal or stress-related behaviours under normal conditions and conditions inducing social stress. Furthermore, we investigated whether spending time with young was associated with good or poor welfare for adult females, regardless of their kin relationship. We used generalized linear mixed models and found no difference between adult females with and without dependent young on any welfare indices, nor did we find that time spent in proximity to unrelated young predicted welfare (all full-null model comparisons likelihood ratio tests P > 0.05). However, we did find that coprophagy was more prevalent among mother-reared than non-mother-reared individuals, in line with recent work suggesting this behaviour may have a different etiology than other behaviours often considered to be abnormal. In sum, the findings from this initial study lend support to the hypothesis that the opportunity to breed and rear young does not provide a welfare benefit for chimpanzees in captivity. We hope this investigation provides a valuable starting point for empirical study into the welfare implications of managed breeding.

Abstract

Handedness has been extensively studied because of its relationship with language and the over-representation of left-handers in some neurodevelopmental disorders. Using data from the UK Biobank, 23andMe and the International Handedness Consortium, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of handedness (N = 1,766,671). We found 41 loci associated (P < 5 × 10−8) with left-handedness and 7 associated with ambidexterity. Tissue-enrichment analysis implicated the CNS in the aetiology of handedness. Pathways including regulation of microtubules and brain morphology were also highlighted. We found suggestive positive genetic correlations between left-handedness and neuropsychiatric traits, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Furthermore, the genetic correlation between left-handedness and ambidexterity is low (rG = 0.26), which implies that these traits are largely influenced by different genetic mechanisms. Our findings suggest that handedness is highly polygenic and that the genetic variants that predispose to left-handedness may underlie part of the association with some psychiatric disorders.

Abstract

Native American English and non-native(Dutch)listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios(0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification
performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications.

Abstract

Not only can the pitfalls that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) identify be generalised across multiple studies within the field of visual perception, but also they have general application outside the field wherever perceptual and cognitive processing are compared. We call attention to the widespread susceptibility of research on the perception of speech to versions of the same pitfalls.

Abstract

Infants acquire whatever language is spoken in the environment into which they are born. The mental capability of the newborn child is not biased in any way towards the acquisition of one human language rather than another. Because psychologists who attempt to model the process of language comprehension are interested in the structure of the human mind, rather than in the properties of individual languages, strategies which they incorporate in their models are presumed to be universal, not language-specific. In other words, strategies of comprehension are presumed to be characteristic of the human language processing system, rather than, say, the French, English, or Igbo language processing systems. We report here, however, on a comprehension strategy which appears to be used by native speakers of French but not by native speakers of English.

Abstract

This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1–36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., “ba” vs. “ee”). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to contain canonical transitions increased with age. Furthermore, this proportion exceeded 0.15 by around 7 months, replicating and extending previous findings on canonical vocalization development but using data from the natural environments of a culturally and linguistically diverse sample. This work explores how crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping establish developmental milestones relevant to multiple languages and cultures. Lower inter‐annotator reliability on the crowdsourcing platform, relative to more traditional in‐lab expert annotators, means that a larger number of unique annotators and/or annotations are required, and that crowdsourcing may not be a suitable method for more fine‐grained annotation decisions. Audio clips used for this project are compiled into a large‐scale infant vocalization corpus that is available for other researchers to use in future work.

Abstract

The authors used 2 “visual-world” eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent’s name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based competitor set.

Abstract

We present written naming norms from 153 young adult Dutch speakers for 1397 photographs (the BOSS set; see Brodeur, Dionne-Dostie, Montreuil, & Lepage, 2010; Brodeur, Guérard, & Bouras, 2014). From the norming study, we report the preferred (modal) name, alternative names, name agreement, and average object agreement. In addition, the data base includes Zipf frequency, word prevalence and Age of Acquisition for the modal picture names collected. Furthermore, we describe a subset of 359 photographs with very good name agreement and a subset of 35 photos with two common names. These sets may be particularly valuable for designing experiments. Though the participants typed the object names, comparisons with other datasets indicate that the collected norms are valuable for spoken naming studies as well.

Abstract

A response to Moving Beyond Nature-Nurture: a Problem of Science or Communication? by John Spencer, Mark Blumberg and David Shenk

Abstract

Interest in the origins and evolution of language has been around for as long as language has been around. However, only recently has the empirical study of language come of age. We argue that the field has sufficiently advanced that it now needs its own journal—the Journal of Language Evolution.

Abstract

Our understanding of language, its origins and subsequent evolution (including language change) is shaped not only by data and theories from the language sciences, but also fundamentally by the biological sciences. Recent developments in genetics and evolutionary theory offer both very strong constraints on what scenarios of language evolution are possible and probable but also offer exciting opportunities for understanding otherwise puzzling phenomena. Due to the intrinsic breathtaking rate of advancement in these fields, the complexity, subtlety and sometimes apparent non-intuitiveness of the phenomena discovered, some of these recent developments have either being completely missed by language scientists, or misperceived and misrepresented. In this short paper, we offer an update on some of these findings and theoretical developments through a selection of illustrative examples and discussions that cast new light on current debates in the language sciences. The main message of our paper is that life is much more complex and nuanced than anybody could have predicted even a few decades ago, and that we need to be flexible in our theorizing instead of embracing a priori dogmas and trying to patch paradigms that are no longer satisfactory.

Abstract

Serial verb constructions have often been said to refer to single conceptual events. However, evidence to support this claim has been elusive. This article introduces co-speech gestures as a new way of investigating the relationship. The alignment patterns of gestures with serial verb constructions and other complex clauses were compared in Avatime (Ka-Togo, Kwa, Niger-Congo). Serial verb constructions tended to occur with single gestures overlapping the entire construction. In contrast, other complex clauses were more likely to be accompanied by distinct gestures overlapping individual verbs. This pattern of alignment suggests that serial verb constructions are in fact used to describe single events.

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms that drive variation in children’s language acquisition requires large, population-representative datasets of children’s word learning across development. Parent report measures such as the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) are commonly used to collect such data, but the traditional paper-based forms make the curation of large datasets logistically challenging. Many CDI datasets are thus gathered using convenience samples, often recruited from communities in proximity to major research institutions. Here, we introduce Web-CDI, a web-based tool which allows researchers to collect CDI data online. Web-CDI contains functionality to collect and manage longitudinal data, share links to test administrations, and download vocabulary scores. To date, over 3,500 valid Web-CDI administrations have been completed. General trends found in past norming studies of the CDI are present in data collected from Web-CDI: scores of children’s productive vocabulary grow with age, female children show a slightly faster rate of vocabulary growth, and participants with higher levels of educational attainment report slightly higher vocabulary production scores than those with lower levels of education attainment. We also report results from an effort to oversample non-white, lower-education participants via online recruitment (N = 241). These data showed similar demographic trends to the full sample but this effort resulted in a high exclusion rate. We conclude by discussing implications and challenges for the collection of large, population-representative datasets.

Abstract

The discovery of the FOXP2 transcription factor, and its implication in a rare severe human speech and language disorder, has led to two decades of empirical studies focused on uncovering its roles in the brain using a range of in vitro and in vivo methods. Here, we discuss what we have learned about the regulation of FOXP2, its downstream effectors, and its modes of action as a transcription factor in brain development and function, providing an integrated overview of what is currently known about the critical molecular networks.

Abstract

Whereas large-scale statistical analyses can robustly identify disease-gene relationships, they do not accurately capture genotype-phenotype correlations or disease mechanisms. We use multiple lines of independent evidence to show that different variant types in a single gene, SATB1, cause clinically overlapping but distinct neurodevelopmental disorders. Clinical evaluation of 42 individuals carrying SATB1 variants identified overt genotype-phenotype relationships, associated with different pathophysiological mechanisms, established by functional assays. Missense variants in the CUT1 and CUT2 DNA-binding domains result in stronger chromatin binding, increased transcriptional repression and a severe phenotype. Contrastingly, variants predicted to result in haploinsufficiency are associated with a milder clinical presentation. A similarly mild phenotype is observed for individuals with premature protein truncating variants that escape nonsense-mediated decay and encode truncated proteins, which are transcriptionally active but mislocalized in the cell. Our results suggest that in-depth mutation-specific genotype-phenotype studies are essential to capture full disease complexity and to explain phenotypic variability.

Abstract

Intellectual disability (ID) is a common condition with considerable genetic heterogeneity. Next-generation sequencing of large cohorts has identified an increasing number of genes implicated in ID, but their roles in neurodevelopment remain largely unexplored. Here we report an ID syndrome caused by de novo heterozygous missense, nonsense, and frameshift mutations in BCL11A, encoding a transcription factor that is a putative member of the BAF swi/snf chromatin-remodeling complex. Using a comprehensive integrated approach to ID disease modeling, involving human cellular analyses coupled to mouse behavioral, neuroanatomical, and molecular phenotyping, we provide multiple lines of functional evidence for phenotypic effects. The etiological missense variants cluster in the amino-terminal region of human BCL11A, and we demonstrate that they all disrupt its localization, dimerization, and transcriptional regulatory activity, consistent with a loss of function. We show that Bcl11a haploinsufficiency in mice causes impaired cognition, abnormal social behavior, and microcephaly in accordance with the human phenotype. Furthermore, we identify shared aberrant transcriptional profiles in the cortex and hippocampus of these mouse models. Thus, our work implicates BCL11A haploinsufficiency in neurodevelopmental disorders and defines additional targets regulated by this gene, with broad relevance for our understanding of ID and related syndromes

Abstract

People differ in their ability to perceive second language (L2) sounds. In early bilinguals the variability in learning L2 phonemes stems from speech-specific capabilities (Díaz, Baus, Escera, Costa & Sebastián-Gallés, 2008). The present study addresses whether speech-specific capabilities similarly explain variability in late bilinguals. Event-related potentials were recorded (using a design similar to Díaz et al., 2008) in two groups of late Dutch–English bilinguals who were good or poor in overtly discriminating the L2 English vowels /ε-æ/. The mismatch negativity, an index of discrimination sensitivity, was similar between the groups in conditions involving pure tones (of different length, frequency, and presentation order) but was attenuated in poor L2 perceivers for native, unknown, and L2 phonemes. These results suggest that variability in L2 phonemic learning originates from speech-specific capabilities and imply a continuity of L2 phonemic learning mechanisms throughout the lifespan

Abstract

Sex differences in development and aging of human sulcal morphology have been understudied. We charted sex differences in trajectories and inter-individual variability of global sulcal depth, width, and length, pial surface area, exposed (hull) gyral surface area, unexposed sulcal surface area, cortical thickness, and cortex volume across the lifespan in a longitudinal sample (700 scans, 194 participants two scans, 104 three scans, age range: 16-70 years) of neurotypical males and females. After adjusting for brain volume, females had thicker cortex and steeper thickness decline until age 40 years; trajectories converged thereafter. Across sexes, sulcal shortening was faster before age 40, while sulcal shallowing and widening were faster thereafter. While hull area remained stable, sulcal surface area declined and was more strongly associated with sulcal shortening than with sulcal shallowing and widening. Males showed greater variability for cortex volume and thickness and lower variability for sulcal width. Across sexes, variability decreased with age for all measures except for cortical volume and thickness. Our findings highlight the association between loss of sulcal area, notably through sulcal shortening, with cortex volume loss. Studying sex differences in lifespan trajectories may improve knowledge of individual differences in brain development and the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric conditions.

Abstract

Adherence to medications is an important indicator of the quality of medication management and impacts on health outcomes and cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery. Electronic healthcare data (EHD) are increasingly used to estimate adherence in research and clinical practice, yet standardization and transparency of data processing are still a concern. Comprehensive and flexible open-source algorithms can facilitate the development of high-quality, consistent, and reproducible evidence in this field. Some EHD-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) include visualization of medication histories, but this is rarely integrated in adherence analyses and not easily accessible for data exploration or implementation in new clinical settings. We introduce AdhereR, a package for the widely used open-source statistical environment R, designed to support researchers in computing EHD-based adherence estimates and in visualizing individual medication histories and adherence patterns. AdhereR implements a set of functions that are consistent with current adherence guidelines, definitions and operationalizations. We illustrate the use of AdhereR with an example dataset of 2-year records of 100 patients and describe the various analysis choices possible and how they can be adapted to different health conditions and types of medications. The package is freely available for use and its implementation facilitates the integration of medication history visualizations in open-source CDSS platforms.

Abstract

Communication is facilitated when listeners allocate their attention to important information (focus) in the message, a process called "information structure." Linguistic cues like the preceding context and pitch accent help listeners to identify focused information. In multimodal communication, relevant information can be emphasized by nonverbal cues like beat gestures, which represent rhythmic nonmeaningful hand movements. Recent studies have found that linguistic and nonverbal attention cues are integrated independently in single sentences. However, it is possible that these two cues interact when information is embedded in context, because context allows listeners to predict what information is important. In an ERP study, we tested this hypothesis and asked listeners to view videos capturing a dialogue. In the critical sentence, focused and nonfocused words were accompanied by beat gestures, grooming hand movements, or no gestures. ERP results showed that focused words are processed more attentively than nonfocused words as reflected in an N1 and P300 component. Hand movements also captured attention and elicited a P300 component. Importantly, beat gesture and focus interacted in a late time window of 600-900 msec relative to target word onset, giving rise to a late positivity when nonfocused words were accompanied by beat gestures. Our results show that listeners integrate beat gesture with the focus of the message and that integration costs arise when beat gesture falls on nonfocused information. This suggests that beat gestures fulfill a unique focusing function in multimodal discourse processing and that they have to be integrated with the information structure of the message.

Abstract

We provide an annotated coding scheme for other-initiated repair, along with guidelines for building collections and aggregating cases based on interactionally relevant similarities and differences. The questions and categories of the scheme are grounded in inductive observations of conversational data and connected to a rich body of work on other-initiated repair in conversation analysis. The scheme is developed and tested in a 12-language comparative project and can serve as a stepping stone for future work on other-initiated repair and the systematic comparative study of conversational structures.

Abstract

Sound symbolism is a phenomenon with broad relevance to the study of language and mind, but there has been a disconnect between its investigations in linguistics and psychology. This study tests the sound-symbolic potential of ideophones—words described as iconic—in an experimental task that improves over prior work in terms of ecological validity and experimental control. We presented 203 ideophones from five languages to eighty-two Dutch listeners in a binary-choice task, in four versions: original recording, full diphone resynthesis, segments-only resynthesis, and prosody-only resynthesis. Listeners guessed the meaning of all four versions above chance, confirming the iconicity of ideophones and showing the viability of speech synthesis as a way of controlling for segmental and suprasegmental properties in experimental studies of sound symbolism. The success rate was more modest than prior studies using pseudowords like bouba/kiki, implying that assumptions based on such words cannot simply be transferred to natural languages. Prosody and segments together drive the effect: neither alone is sufficient, showing that segments and prosody work together as cues supporting iconic interpretations. The findings cast doubt on attempts to ascribe iconic meanings to segments alone and support a view of ideophones as words that combine arbitrariness and iconicity.We discuss the implications for theory and methods in the empirical study of sound symbolism and iconicity.

Abstract

Background Sanger sequencing, still the standard technique for genetic testing in most diagnostic laboratories and until recently widely used in research, is gradually being complemented by next-generation sequencing (NGS). No single mutation detection technique is however perfect in identifying all mutations. Therefore, we wondered to what extent inconsistencies between Sanger sequencing and NGS affect the molecular diagnosis of patients. Since mutations in SCN1A, the major gene implicated in epilepsy, are found in the majority of Dravet syndrome (DS) patients, we focused on missed SCN1A mutations. Methods We sent out a survey to 16 genetic centers performing SCN1A testing. Results We collected data on 28 mutations initially missed using Sanger sequencing. All patients were falsely reported as SCN1A mutation-negative, both due to technical limitations and human errors. Conclusion We illustrate the pitfalls of Sanger sequencing and most importantly provide evidence that SCN1A mutations are an even more frequent cause of DS than already anticipated.

Abstract

There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on previous research by testing whether phonological onset density slows lexical access in a large sample of 100 English-acquiring 30-month-olds. The children participated in a visual world looking-while-listening task, in which their attention was directed to one of two objects on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. We found moderate evidence of inhibitory effects of onset neighborhood density on lexical access and clear evidence for an interaction between onset neighborhood density and vocabulary, with larger effects of onset neighborhood density for children with larger vocabularies. Results suggest the lexicons of 30-month-olds exhibit lexical-level competition, with competition increasing with vocabulary size.

Abstract

How children learn grammar is one of the most fundamental questions in cognitive science. Two theoretical accounts, namely, the Early Abstraction and Usage-Based accounts, propose competing answers to this question. To compare the predictions of these accounts, we tested the comprehension of 92 24-month old children of transitive sentences with novel verbs (e.g., “The boy is gorping the girl!”) with the Intermodal Preferential Looking (IMPL) task. We found very little evidence that children looked to the target video at above-chance levels. Using mixed and mixture models, we tested the predictions the two accounts make about: (i) the structure of individual differences in the IMPL task and (ii) the relationship between vocabulary knowledge, lexical processing, and performance in the IMPL task. However, the results did not strongly support either of the two accounts. The implications for theories on language acquisition and for tasks developed for examining individual differences are discussed.

Abstract

Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn‐taking and vocabulary growth in English‐acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months provided several indices of the language environment, including the number of adult words children heard in their environment and their number of conversational turns. Vocabulary was measured independently via parental report. Growth curve analyses revealed a bidirectional relationship between conversational turns and vocabulary growth, controlling for the amount of words in children’s environments. The results are consistent with theoretical approaches that identify social interaction as a core component of early language acquisition.

Abstract

How a system represents information tightly constrains the kinds of problems it can solve. Humans routinely solve problems that appear to require abstract representations of stimulus properties and relations. How we acquire such representations has central importance in an account of human cognition. We briefly describe a theory of how a system can learn invariant responses to instances of similarity and relative magnitude, and how structured, relational representations can be learned from initially unstructured inputs. Two operations, comparing distributed representations and learning from the concomitant network dynamics in time, underpin the ability to learn these representations and to respond to invariance in the environment. Comparing analog representations of absolute magnitude produces invariant signals that carry information about similarity and relative magnitude. We describe how a system can then use this information to bootstrap learning structured (i.e., symbolic) concepts of relative magnitude from experience without assuming such representations a priori.

Abstract

Double verb constructions known as hendiadys have been studied primarily in literary texts and corpora of written language. Much less is known about their properties and usage in spoken language, where expressions such as ‘come and see’, ‘go and tell’, ‘sit and talk’ are particularly common, and where we can find an even richer diversity of other constructions. In this study, we investigate hendiadys in corpora of naturally occurring social interactions in four languages, Danish, English (US and UK), Finnish and Italian, with the objective of exploring whether hendiadys is used systematically in recurrent interactional and sequential circumstances, from which it is possible to identify the pragmatic function(s) that hendiadys may serve. Examining hendiadys in conversation also offers us a special window into its grammatical properties, for example when a speaker self-corrects from a non-hendiadic to a hendiadic expression, exposing the boundary between related grammatical forms and demonstrating the distinctiveness of hendiadys in context. More broadly, we demonstrate that hendiadys is systematically associated with talk about complainable matters, in environments characterised by a conflict, dissonance, or friction that is ongoing in the interaction or that is being reported by one participant to another. We also find that the utterance in which hendiadys is used is typically in a subsequent and possibly terminal position in the sequence, summarising or concluding it. Another key finding is that the complainable or conflictual element in these interactions is expressed primarily by the first conjunct of the hendiadic construction. Whilst the first conjunct is semantically subsidiary to the second, it is pragmatically the most important one. This analysis leads us to revisit a long-established asymmetry between the verbal components of hendiadys, and to bring to light the synergy of grammar and pragmatics in language usage.

Abstract

During communication in real-life settings, the brain integrates information from auditory and visual modalities to form a unified percept of our environment. In the current magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we used rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) to generate steady-state evoked fields and investigated the integration of audiovisual information in a semantic context. We presented participants with videos of an actress uttering action verbs (auditory; tagged at 61 Hz) accompanied by a gesture (visual; tagged at 68 Hz, using a projector with a 1440 Hz refresh rate). Integration ease was manipulated by auditory factors (clear/degraded speech) and visual factors (congruent/incongruent gesture). We identified MEG spectral peaks at the individual (61/68 Hz) tagging frequencies. We furthermore observed a peak at the intermodulation frequency of the auditory and visually tagged signals (fvisual – fauditory = 7 Hz), specifically when integration was easiest (i.e., when speech was clear and accompanied by a congruent gesture). This intermodulation peak is a signature of nonlinear audiovisual integration, and was strongest in left inferior frontal gyrus and left temporal regions; areas known to be involved in speech-gesture integration. The enhanced power at the intermodulation frequency thus reflects the ease of integration and demonstrates that speech-gesture information interacts in higher-order language areas. Furthermore, we provide a proof-of-principle of the use of RIFT to study the integration of audiovisual stimuli, in relation to, for instance, semantic context.

Abstract

Reduced forms like yeshay for yesterday often occur in conversations. Previous behavioral research reported a processing advantage for full over reduced forms. The present study investigated whether this processing advantage is reflected in a modulation of alpha (8–12 Hz) and gamma (30+ Hz) band activity. In three electrophysiological experiments, participants listened to full and reduced forms in isolation (Experiment 1), sentence-final position (Experiment 2), or mid-sentence position (Experiment 3). Alpha power was larger in response to reduced forms than to full forms, but only in Experiments 1 and 2. We interpret these increases in alpha power as reflections of higher auditory cognitive load. In all experiments, gamma power only increased in response to full forms, which we interpret as showing that lexical activation spreads more quickly through the semantic network for full than for reduced forms. These results confirm a processing advantage for full forms, especially in non-medial sentence position.

Abstract

The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the comprehension of language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect language comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss–Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation – Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss–Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients' lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448–450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain–behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann's area 46, and Brodmann's area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas were not found to significantly alter language comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis suggested that the middle temporal gyrus may be more important for comprehension at the word level, while the other regions may play a greater role at the level of the sentence. These results are consistent with those seen in recent functional neuroimaging studies and offer complementary data in the effort to understand the brain areas underlying language comprehension.

Abstract

There is ample evidence that native and non-native listeners use lexical knowledge to retune their native phonetic categories following ambiguous pronunciations. The present study investigates whether a non-native ambiguous sound can retune non-native phonetic categories. After a brief exposure to an ambiguous British English [l/ɹ] sound, Dutch listeners demonstrated retuning. This retuning was, however, asymmetrical: the non-native listeners seemed to show (more) retuning of the /ɹ/ category than of the /l/ category, suggesting that non-native listeners can retune non-native phonetic categories. This asymmetry is argued to be related to the large phonetic variability of /r/ in both Dutch and English.

Abstract

Rhythmic neural activity synchronizes with certain rhythmic behaviors, such as breathing, sniffing, saccades, and speech. The extent to which neural oscillations synchronize with higher-level and more complex behaviors is largely unknown. Here we investigated electrophysiological synchronization with keyboard typing, which is an omnipresent behavior daily engaged by an uncountably large number of people. Keyboard typing is rhythmic with frequency characteristics roughly the same as neural oscillatory dynamics associated with cognitive control, notably through midfrontal theta (4 -7 Hz) oscillations. We tested the hypothesis that synchronization occurs between typing and midfrontal theta, and breaks down when errors are committed. Thirty healthy participants typed words and sentences on a keyboard without visual feedback, while EEG was recorded. Typing rhythmicity was investigated by inter-keystroke interval analyses and by a kernel density estimation method. We used a multivariate spatial filtering technique to investigate frequency-specific synchronization between typing and neuronal oscillations. Our results demonstrate theta rhythmicity in typing (around 6.5 Hz) through the two different behavioral analyses. Synchronization between typing and neuronal oscillations occurred at frequencies ranging from 4 to 15 Hz, but to a larger extent for lower frequencies. However, peak synchronization frequency was idiosyncratic across subjects, therefore not specific to theta nor to midfrontal regions, and correlated somewhat with peak typing frequency. Errors and trials associated with stronger cognitive control were not associated with changes in synchronization at any frequency. As a whole, this study shows that brain-behavior synchronization does occur during keyboard typing but is not specific to midfrontal theta.

Abstract

By the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whether these differences influence vocabulary development. As part of the longitudinal Language 0–5 Project, 78 10-month-old infants were tested on their ability to interpret three dynamic motion events, involving (a) caused-motion, (b) chasing behaviour, and (c) goal-directed movement. Planned analyses found that infants showed evidence of understanding the first two event types, but not the third. Looking behaviour in each task was not meaningfully related to vocabulary development, nor were there any correlations between the tasks. The results of additional exploratory analyses and simulations suggested that the infants’ understanding of each event may not be predictive of their vocabulary development, and that looking times in these tasks may not be reliably capturing any meaningful individual differences in their knowledge. This raises questions about how to convert experimental group designs to individual differences measures, and how to interpret infant looking time behaviour.

Abstract

The Core Trustworthy Data Repository Requirements were developed by the DSA–WDS Partnership Working Group on Repository Audit and Certification, a Working Group (WG) of the Research Data Alliance . The goal of the effort was to create a set of harmonized common requirements for certification of repositories at the core level, drawing from criteria already put in place by the Data Seal of Approval (DSA: www.datasealofapproval.org) and the ICSU World Data System (ICSU-WDS: https://www.icsu-wds.org/services/certification). An additional goal of the project was to develop common procedures to be implemented by both DSA and ICSU-WDS. Ultimately, the DSA and ICSU-WDS plan to collaborate on a global framework for repository certification that moves from the core to the extended (nestor-Seal DIN 31644), to the formal (ISO 16363) level.

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between low- and high-level aspects of reading by studying the interplay between word processing, as measured with eye tracking, and narrative absorption and liking, as measured with questionnaires. Specifically, we focused on how individual differences in sensitivity to lexical word characteristics—measured as the effect of these characteristics on gaze duration—were related to narrative absorption and liking. By reanalyzing a large data set consisting of three previous eye-tracking experiments in which subjects (N = 171) read literary short stories, we replicated the well-established finding that word length, lemma frequency, position in sentence, age of acquisition, and orthographic neighborhood size of words influenced gaze duration. More importantly, we found that individual differences in the degree of sensitivity to three of these word characteristics, i.e., word length, lemma frequency, and age of acquisition, were negatively related to print exposure and to a lesser degree to narrative absorption and liking. Even though the underlying mechanisms of this relationship are still unclear, we believe the current findings underline the need to map out the interplay between, on the one hand, the technical and, on the other hand, the subjective processes of reading by studying reading behavior in more natural settings.

Abstract

Although various studies have shown that narrative reading draws on social-cognitive abilities, not much is known about the precise aspects of narrative processing that engage these abilities. We hypothesized that the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint—expressed by elements that provide access to the inner world of characters—might play an important role in engaging social-cognitive abilities. Using eye tracking, we studied the effect of lexical markers of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional viewpoint on eye movements during reading of a 5,000-word narrative. Next, we investigated how this relationship was modulated by individual differences in social-cognitive abilities. Our results show diverging patterns of eye movements for perceptual viewpoint markers on the one hand, and cognitive and emotional viewpoint markers on the other. Whereas the former are processed relatively fast compared to non-viewpoint markers, the latter are processed relatively slow. Moreover, we found that social-cognitive abilities impacted the processing of words in general, and of perceptual and cognitive viewpoint markers in particular, such that both perspective-taking abilities and self-reported perspective-taking traits facilitated the processing of these markers. All in all, our study extends earlier findings that social cognition is of importance for story reading, showing that individual differences in social-cognitive abilities are related to the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint.

Abstract

Migraine is a common disabling neurovascular brain disorder typically characterised by attacks of severe headache and associated with autonomic and neurological symptoms. Migraine is caused by an interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified over a dozen genetic loci associated with migraine. Here, we integrated migraine GWAS data with high-resolution spatial gene expression data of normal adult brains from the Allen Human Brain Atlas to identify specific brain regions and molecular pathways that are possibly involved in migraine pathophysiology. To this end, we used two complementary methods. In GWAS data from 23,285 migraine cases and 95,425 controls, we first studied modules of co-expressed genes that were calculated based on human brain expression data for enrichment of genes that showed association with migraine. Enrichment of a migraine GWAS signal was found for five modules that suggest involvement in migraine pathophysiology of: (i) neurotransmission, protein catabolism and mitochondria in the cortex; (ii) transcription regulation in the cortex and cerebellum; and (iii) oligodendrocytes and mitochondria in subcortical areas. Second, we used the high-confidence genes from the migraine GWAS as a basis to construct local migraine-related co-expression gene networks. Signatures of all brain regions and pathways that were prominent in the first method also surfaced in the second method, thus providing support that these brain regions and pathways are indeed involved in migraine pathophysiology.

Abstract

Migraine is a common episodic brain disorder characterized by recurrent attacks of severe unilateral headache and additional neurological symptoms. Two main migraine types can be distinguished based on the presence of aura symptoms that can accompany the headache: migraine with aura and migraine without aura. Multiple genetic and environmental factors confer disease susceptibility. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) indicate that migraine susceptibility genes are involved in various pathways, including neurotransmission, which have already been implicated in genetic studies of monogenic familial hemiplegic migraine, a subtype of migraine with aura. Methods To further explore the genetic background of migraine, we performed a gene set analysis of migraine GWAS data of 4954 clinic-based patients with migraine, as well as 13,390 controls. Curated sets of synaptic genes and sets of genes predominantly expressed in three glial cell types (astrocytes, microglia and oligodendrocytes) were investigated. Discussion Our results show that gene sets containing astrocyte- and oligodendrocyte-related genes are associated with migraine, which is especially true for gene sets involved in protein modification and signal transduction. Observed differences between migraine with aura and migraine without aura indicate that both migraine types, at least in part, seem to have a different genetic background.

Abstract

This paper discusses four experiments on Dutch which show that distinctive phonological features differ in their relevance for word recognition. The relevance of a feature for word recognition depends on its phonological stability, that is, the extent to which that feature is generally realized in accordance with its lexical specification in the relevant word position. If one feature value is uninformative, all values of that feature are less relevant for word recognition, with the least informative feature being the least relevant. Features differ in their relevance both in spoken and written word recognition, though the differences are more pronounced in auditory lexical decision than in self-paced reading.

Abstract

This study addresses the question to what extent the production of regular past tense forms in Dutch is a¤ected by analogical processes. We report an experiment in which native speakers of Dutch listened to existing regular verbs over headphones, and had to indicate which of the past tense allomorphs, te or de, was appropriate for these verbs. According to generative analyses, the choice between the two su‰xes is completely regular and governed by the underlying [voice]-specification of the stem-final segment. In this approach, no analogical e¤ects are expected. In connectionist and analogical approaches, by contrast, the phonological similarity structure in the lexicon is expected to a¤ect lexical processing. Our experimental results support the latter approach: all participants created more nonstandard past tense forms, produced more inconsistency errors, and responded more slowly for verbs with stronger analogical support for the nonstandard form.

Abstract

Amsterdam klinkt in informele gesprekken vaak als Amsdam en Rotterdam als Rodam, zonder dat de meeste moedertaalsprekers zich daar bewust van zijn. In alledaagse situaties valt een aanzienlijk deel van de klanken weg. Daarnaast worden veel klanken zwakker gearticuleerd (bijvoorbeeld een d als een j, als de mond niet helemaal afgesloten wordt). Het lijkt waarschijnlijk dat deze half uitgesproken woorden een probleem vormen voor tweedetaalleerders. Gereduceerde vormen kunnen immers sterk afwijken van de vormen die deze leerders geleerd hebben. Of dit werkelijk zo is, hebben de auteurs onderzocht in twee studies. Voordat ze deze twee studies bespreken, vertellen ze eerst kort iets over de verschillende typen reducties die voorkomen.

Abstract

Mutations affecting the transcription factor FOXP2 cause a rare form of severe speech and language disorder. Although it is clear that sufficient FOXP2 expression is crucial for normal brain development, little is known about how this transcription factor is regulated. To investigate post-translational mechanisms for FOXP2 regulation, we searched for protein interaction partners of FOXP2, and identified members of the PIAS family as novel FOXP2 interactors. PIAS proteins mediate post-translational modification of a range of target proteins with small ubiquitin-like modifiers (SUMOs). We found that FOXP2 can be modified with all three human SUMO proteins and that PIAS1 promotes this process. An aetiological FOXP2 mutation found in a family with speech and language disorder markedly reduced FOXP2 SUMOylation. We demonstrate that FOXP2 is SUMOylated at a single major site, which is conserved in all FOXP2 vertebrate orthologues and in the paralogues FOXP1 and FOXP4. Abolishing this site did not lead to detectable changes in FOXP2 subcellular localization, stability, dimerization or transcriptional repression in cellular assays, but the conservation of this site suggests a potential role for SUMOylation in regulating FOXP2 activity in vivo.

Abstract

Childhood adversity (CA) has been associated with long-term structural brain alterations and an increased risk for psychiatric disorders. Evidence is emerging that subtypes of CA, varying in the dimensions of threat and deprivation, lead to distinct neural and behavioral outcomes. However, these specific associations have yet to be established without potential confounders such as psychopathology. Moreover, differences in neural development and psychopathology necessitate the exploration of sexual dimorphism. Young healthy adult subjects were selected based on history of CA from a large database to assess gray matter (GM) differences associated with specific subtypes of adversity. We compared voxel-based morphometry data of subjects reporting specific childhood exposure to abuse (n = 127) or deprivation (n = 126) and a similar sized group of controls (n = 129) without reported CA. Subjects were matched on age, gender, and educational level. Differences between CA subtypes were found in the fusiform gyrus and middle occipital gyms, where subjects with a history of deprivation showed reduced GM compared with subjects with a history of abuse. An interaction between sex and CA subtype was found. Women showed less GM in the visual posterior precuneal region after both subtypes of CA than controls. Men had less GM in the postcentral gyms after childhood deprivation compared with abuse. Our results suggest that even in a healthy population, CA subtypes are related to specific alterations in brain structure, which are modulated by sex. These findings may help understand neurodevelopmental consequences related to CA

Abstract

We make the case that, contra standard assumption in linguistic theory, the sound systems of human languages are adapted to their environment. While not conclusive, this plausible case rests on several points discussed in this work: First, human behavior is generally adaptive and the assumption that this characteristic does not extend to linguistic structure is empirically unsubstantiated. Second, animal communication systems are well known to be adaptive within species across a variety of phyla and taxa. Third, research in laryngology demonstrates clearly that ambient desiccation impacts the performance of the human vocal cords. The latter point motivates a clear, testable hypothesis with respect to the synchronic global distribution of language types. Fourth, this hypothesis is supported in our own previous work, and here we discuss new approaches being developed to further explore the hypothesis. We conclude by suggesting that the time has come to more substantively examine the possibility that linguistic sound systems are adapted to their physical ecology

Abstract

We begin by thanking the respondents for their thoughtful comments and insightful leads. The overall impression we are left with by this exchange is one of progress, even if no consensus remains about the particular hypothesis we raise. To date, there has been a failure to seriously engage with the possibility that humans might adapt their communication to ecological factors. In these exchanges, we see signs of serious engagement with that possibility. Most respondents expressed agreement with the notion that our central premise—that language is ecologically adaptive—requires further exploration and may in fact be operative. We are pleased to see this shift in discourse, and to witness a heightening appreciation of possible ecological constraints on language evolution. It is that shift in discourse that represents progress in our view. Our hope is that future work will continue to explore these issues, paying careful attention to the fact that the human larynx is clearly sensitive to characteristics of ambient air. More generally, we think this exchange is indicative of the growing realization that inquiries into language development must consider potential external factors (see Dediu 2015)...

Abstract

Myopia, currently at epidemic levels in East Asia, is a leading cause of untreatable visual impairment. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in adults have identified 39 loci associated with refractive error and myopia. Here, the age-of-onset of association between genetic variants at these 39 loci and refractive error was investigated in 5200 children assessed longitudinally across ages 7-15 years, along with gene-environment interactions involving the major environmental risk-factors, nearwork and time outdoors. Specific variants could be categorized as showing evidence of: (a) early-onset effects remaining stable through childhood, (b) early-onset effects that progressed further with increasing age, or (c) onset later in childhood (N = 10, 5 and 11 variants, respectively). A genetic risk score (GRS) for all 39 variants explained 0.6% (P = 6.6E-08) and 2.3% (P = 6.9E-21) of the variance in refractive error at ages 7 and 15, respectively, supporting increased effects from these genetic variants at older ages. Replication in multi-ancestry samples (combined N = 5599) yielded evidence of childhood onset for 6 of 12 variants present in both Asians and Europeans. There was no indication that variant or GRS effects altered depending on time outdoors, however 5 variants showed nominal evidence of interactions with nearwork (top variant, rs7829127 in ZMAT4; P = 6.3E-04).

Abstract

Myopia is the most common human eye disorder and it results from complex genetic and environmental causes. The rapidly increasing prevalence of myopia poses a major public health challenge. Here, the CREAM consortium performs a joint meta-analysis to test single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) main effects and SNP × education interaction effects on refractive error in 40,036 adults from 25 studies of European ancestry and 10,315 adults from 9 studies of Asian ancestry. In European ancestry individuals, we identify six novel loci (FAM150B-ACP1, LINC00340, FBN1, DIS3L-MAP2K1, ARID2-SNAT1 and SLC14A2) associated with refractive error. In Asian populations, three genome-wide significant loci AREG, GABRR1 and PDE10A also exhibit strong interactions with education (P<8.5 × 10−5), whereas the interactions are less evident in Europeans. The discovery of these loci represents an important advance in understanding how gene and environment interactions contribute to the heterogeneity of myopia

Abstract

Some theorists posit the existence of a ‘core’ grammar that virtually all native speakers acquire, and a ‘peripheral’ grammar that many do not. We investigated the viability of such a categorical distinction in the Dutch language. We first consulted linguists’ intuitions as to the ‘core’ or ‘peripheral’ status of a wide range of grammatical structures. We then tested a selection of core- and peripheral-rated structures on naïve participants with varying levels of literacy experience, using grammaticality judgment as a proxy for receptive knowledge. Overall, participants demonstrated better knowledge of ‘core’ structures than ‘peripheral’ structures, but the considerable variability within these categories was strongly suggestive of a continuum rather than a categorical distinction between them. We also hypothesised that individual differences in the knowledge of core and peripheral structures would reflect participants’ literacy experience. This was supported only by a small trend in our data. The results fit best with the notion that more frequent syntactic structures are mastered by more people than infrequent ones and challenge the received sense of a categorical core-periphery distinction.

Abstract

Language comprehenders can use syntactic cues to generate predictions online about upcoming language. Previous research with reading-impaired adults and healthy, low-proficiency adult and child learners suggests that reading skills are related to prediction in spoken language comprehension. Here we investigated whether differences in literacy are also related to predictive spoken language processing in non-reading-impaired proficient adult readers with varying levels of literacy experience. Using the visual world paradigm enabled us to measure prediction based on syntactic cues in the spoken sentence, prior to the (predicted) target word. Literacy experience was found to be the strongest predictor of target anticipation, independent of general cognitive abilities. These findings suggest that a) experience with written language can enhance syntactic prediction of spoken language in normal adult language users, and b) processing skills can be transferred to related tasks (from reading to listening) if the domains involve similar processes (e.g., predictive dependencies) and representations (e.g., syntactic).

Abstract

‘Book language’ offers a richer linguistic experience than typical conversational speech in terms of its syntactic properties. Here, we investigated the role of long-term syntactic experience on syntactic knowledge and processing. In a pre-registered study with 161 adult native Dutch speakers with varying levels of literacy, we assessed the contribution of individual differences in written language experience to offline and online syntactic processes. Offline syntactic knowledge was assessed as accuracy in an auditory grammaticality judgment task in which we tested violations of four Dutch grammatical norms. Online syntactic processing was indexed by syntactic priming of the Dutch dative alternation, using a comprehension-to-production priming paradigm with auditory presentation. Controlling for the contribution of non-verbal IQ, verbal working memory, and processing speed, we observed a robust effect of literacy experience on the detection of grammatical norm violations in spoken sentences, suggesting that exposure to the syntactic complexity and diversity of written language has specific benefits for general (modality-independent) syntactic knowledge. We replicated previous results by finding robust comprehension-to-production structural priming, both with and without lexical overlap between prime and target. Although literacy experience affected the usage of syntactic alternates in our large sample, it did not modulate their priming. We conclude that amount of experience with written language increases explicit awareness of grammatical norm violations and changes the usage of (PO vs. DO) dative spoken sentences but has no detectable effect on their implicit syntactic priming in proficient language users. These findings constrain theories about the effect of long-term experience on syntactic processing.

Abstract

Individuals with heterozygous 16p11.2 deletions reportedly suffer from a variety of difficulties with speech and language. Indeed, recent copy-number variant screens of children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), a specific and rare motor speech disorder, have identified three unrelated individuals with 16p11.2 deletions. However, the nature and prevalence of speech and language disorders in general, and CAS in particular, is unknown for individuals with 16p11.2 deletions. Here we took a genotype-first approach, conducting detailed and systematic characterization of speech abilities in a group of 11 unrelated children ascertained on the basis of 16p11.2 deletions. To obtain the most precise and replicable phenotyping, we included tasks that are highly diagnostic for CAS, and we tested children under the age of 18 years, an age group where CAS has been best characterized. Two individuals were largely nonverbal, preventing detailed speech analysis, whereas the remaining nine met the standard accepted diagnostic criteria for CAS. These results link 16p11.2 deletions to a highly penetrant form of CAS. Our findings underline the need for further precise characterization of speech and language profiles in larger groups of affected individuals, which will also enhance our understanding of how genetic pathways contribute to human communication disorders.

Abstract

Perceptual learning of novel accents is a critical skill for second-language speech perception, but little is known about the mechanisms that facilitate perceptual learning in communicative contexts. To study perceptual learning in an interactive dialogue setting while maintaining experimental control of the phonetic input, we employed an innovative experimental method incorporating prerecorded speech into a naturalistic conversation. Using both computer-based and face-to-face dialogue settings, we investigated the effect of two types of learning mechanisms in interaction: explicit corrective feedback and implicit lexical guidance. Dutch participants played an information-gap game featuring minimal pairs with an accented English speaker whose /ε/ pronunciations were shifted to /ɪ/. Evidence for the vowel shift came either from corrective feedback about participants’ perceptual mistakes or from onscreen lexical information that constrained their interpretation of the interlocutor’s words. Corrective feedback explicitly contrasting the minimal pairs was more effective than generic feedback. Additionally, both receiving lexical guidance and exhibiting more uptake for the vowel shift improved listeners’ subsequent online processing of accented words. Comparable learning effects were found in both the computer-based and face-to-face interactions, showing that our results can be generalized to a more naturalistic learning context than traditional computer-based perception training programs.

Abstract

Learning a script with mirrored graphs (e.g., d ≠ b) requires overcoming the evolutionary-old perceptual tendency to process mirror images as equivalent. Thus, breaking mirror invariance offers an important tool for understanding cultural re-shaping of evolutionarily ancient cognitive mechanisms. Here we investigated the role of script (i.e., presence vs. absence of mirrored graphs: Latin alphabet vs. Tamil) by revisiting mirror-image processing by illiterate, Tamil monoliterate, and Tamil-Latin-alphabet bi-literate adults. Participants performed two same-different tasks (one orientation-based, another shape-based) on Latin-alphabet letters. Tamil monoliterate were significantly better than illiterate and showed good explicit mirror-image discrimination. However, only bi-literate adults fully broke mirror invariance: slower shape-based judgments for mirrored than identical pairs and reduced disadvantage in orientation-based over shape-based judgments of mirrored pairs. These findings suggest learning a script with mirrored graphs is the strongest force for breaking mirror invariance.

Abstract

To form a percept of the multisensory world, the brain needs to integrate signals from common sources weighted by their reliabilities and segregate those from independent sources. Previously, we have shown that anterior parietal cortices combine sensory signals into representations that take into account the signals’ causal structure (i.e., common versus independent sources) and their sensory reliabilities as predicted by Bayesian causal inference. The current study asks to what extent and how attentional mechanisms can actively control how sensory signals are combined for perceptual inference. In a pre- and postcueing paradigm, we presented observers with audiovisual signals at variable spatial disparities. Observers were precued to attend to auditory or visual modalities prior to stimulus presentation and postcued to report their perceived auditory or visual location. Combining psychophysics, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and Bayesian modelling, we demonstrate that the brain moulds multisensory inference via two distinct mechanisms. Prestimulus attention to vision enhances the reliability and influence of visual inputs on spatial representations in visual and posterior parietal cortices. Poststimulus report determines how parietal cortices flexibly combine sensory estimates into spatial representations consistent with Bayesian causal inference. Our results show that distinct neural mechanisms control how signals are combined for perceptual inference at different levels of the cortical hierarchy.

Abstract

A long-standing debate in cognitive neurosciences concerns the effect of music on verbal learning and memory. Research in this field has largely provided conflicting results in both clinical as well as non-clinical populations. Although several studies have shown a positive effect of music on the encoding and retrieval of verbal stimuli, music has also been suggested to hinder mnemonic performance by dividing attention. In an attempt to explain this conflict, we review the most relevant literature on the effects of music on verbal learning and memory. Furthermore, we specify several mechanisms through which music may modulate these cognitive functions. We suggest that the extent to which music boosts these cognitive functions relies on experimental factors, such as the relative complexity of musical and verbal stimuli employed. These factors should be carefully considered in further studies, in order to reliably establish how and when music boosts verbal memory and learning. The answers to these questions are not only crucial for our knowledge of how music influences cognitive and brain functions, but may have important clinical implications. Considering the increasing number of approaches using music as a therapeutic tool, the importance of understanding exactly how music works can no longer be underestimated.

Abstract

Across a wide range of animal taxa, prosodic modulation of the voice can express emotional information and is used to coordinate vocal interactions between multiple individuals. Within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I hypothesize that the ability for emotional and interactional prosody (EIP) paved the way for the evolution of linguistic prosody – and perhaps also of music, continuing to play a vital role in the acquisition of language. In support of this hypothesis, I review three research fields: (i) empirical studies on the adaptive value of EIP in non-human primates, mammals, songbirds, anurans, and insects; (ii) the beneficial effects of EIP in scaffolding language learning and social development in human infants; (iii) the cognitive relationship between linguistic prosody and the ability for music, which has often been identified as the evolutionary precursor of language.

Abstract

Temporal regularities in speech, such as interdependencies in the timing of speech events, are thought to scaffold early acquisition of the building blocks in speech. By providing on-line clues to the location and duration of upcoming syllables, temporal structure may aid segmentation and clustering of continuous speech into separable units. This hypothesis tacitly assumes that learners exploit predictability in the temporal structure of speech. Existing measures of speech timing tend to focus on first-order regularities among adjacent units, and are overly sensitive to idiosyncrasies in the data they describe. Here, we compare several statistical methods on a sample of 18 languages, testing whether syllable occurrence is predictable over time. Rather than looking for differences between languages, we aim to find across languages (using clearly defined acoustic, rather than orthographic, measures), temporal predictability in the speech signal which could be exploited by a language learner. First, we analyse distributional regularities using two novel techniques: a Bayesian ideal learner analysis, and a simple distributional measure. Second, we model higher-order temporal structure—regularities arising in an ordered series of syllable timings—testing the hypothesis that non-adjacent temporal structures may explain the gap between subjectively-perceived temporal regularities, and the absence of universally-accepted lower-order objective measures. Together, our analyses provide limited evidence for predictability at different time scales, though higher-order predictability is difficult to reliably infer. We conclude that temporal predictability in speech may well arise from a combination of individually weak perceptual cues at multiple structural levels, but is challenging to pinpoint.

Abstract

Dance is ubiquitous among humans and has received attention from several disciplines. Ethnographic documentation suggests that dance has a signaling function in social interaction. It can influence mate preferences and facilitate social bonds. Research has provided insights into the proximate mechanisms of dance, individually or when dancing with partners or in groups. Here, we review dance research from an evolutionary perspective. We propose that human dance evolved from ordinary (non-communicative) movements to communicate socially relevant information accurately. The need for accurate social signaling may have accompanied increases in group size and population density. Because of its complexity in production and display, dance may have evolved as a vehicle for expressing social and cultural information. Mating-related qualities and motives may have been the predominant information derived from individual dance movements, whereas group dance offers the opportunity for the exchange of socially relevant content, for coordinating actions among group members, for signaling coalitional strength, and for stabilizing group structures. We conclude that, despite the cultural diversity in dance movements and contexts, the primary communicative functions of dance may be the same across societies.

Abstract

Determining when a partner’s spoken or musical turn will end requires well-honed predictive abilities. Evidence suggests that our motor systems are activated during perception of both speech and music, and it has been argued that motor simulation is used to predict turn-ends across domains. Here we used a dual-task interference paradigm to investigate whether motor simulation of our partner’s action underlies our ability to make accurate turn-end predictions in speech and in music. Furthermore, we explored how specific this simulation is to the action being predicted. We conducted two experiments, one investigating speech turn-ends, and one investigating music turn-ends. In each, 34 proficient pianists predicted turn-endings while (1) passively listening, (2) producing an effector-specific motor activity (mouth/hand movement), or (3) producing a task- and effector-specific motor activity (mouthing words/fingering a piano melody). In the speech experiment, any movement during speech perception disrupted predictions of spoken turn-ends, whether the movement was task-specific or not. In the music experiment, only task-specific movement (i.e., fingering a piano melody) disrupted predictions of musical turn-ends. These findings support the use of motor simulation to make turn-end predictions in both speech and music but suggest that the specificity of this simulation may differ between domains.

Abstract

Between 2 and 5% of children who are otherwise unimpaired have significant difficulties in acquiring expressive and/or receptive language, despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. While twin studies indicate a significant role for genetic factors in developmental disorders of speech and language, the majority of families segregating such disorders show complex patterns of inheritance, and are thus not amenable for conventional linkage analysis. A rare exception is the KE family, a large three-generation pedigree in which approximately half of the members are affected with a severe speech and language disorder which appears to be transmitted as an autosomal dominant monogenic trait. This family has been widely publicised as suffering primarily from a defect in the use of grammatical suffixation rules, thus supposedly supporting the existence of genes specific to grammar. The phenotype, however, is broader in nature, with virtually every aspect of grammar and of language affected. In addition, affected members have a severe orofacial dyspraxia, and their speech is largely incomprehensible to the naive listener. We initiated a genome-wide search for linkage in the KE family and have identified a region on chromosome 7 which co-segregates with the speech and language disorder (maximum lod score = 6.62 at theta = 0.0), confirming autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance. Further analysis of microsatellites from within the region enabled us to fine map the locus responsible (designated SPCH1) to a 5.6-cM interval in 7q31, thus providing an important step towards its identification. Isolation of SPCH1 may offer the first insight into the molecular genetics of the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.

Abstract

Embodied song practices involve the transformation of songs from the acoustic modality into an embodied-visual form, to increase meaningful access for d/Deaf audiences. This goes beyond the translation of lyrics, by combining poetic sign language with other bodily movements to embody the para-linguistic expressive and musical features that enhance the message of a song. To date, the limited research into this phenomenon has focussed on linguistic features and interactions with rhythm. The relationship between bodily actions and music has not been probed beyond an assumed implication of conformance. However, as the primary objective is to communicate equivalent meanings, the ways that the acoustic and embodied-visual signals relate to each other should reveal something about underlying conceptual agreement. This paper draws together a range of pertinent theories from within a grounded cognition framework including semiotics, analogy mapping and cross-modal correspondences. These theories are applied to embodiment strategies used by prominent d/Deaf and hearing Dutch practitioners, to unpack the relationship between acoustic songs, their embodied representations, and their broader conceptual and affective meanings. This leads to the proposition that meaning primarily arises through shared patterns of internal relations across a range of amodal and cross-modal features with an emphasis on dynamic qualities. These analogous patterns can inform metaphorical interpretations and trigger shared emotional responses. This exploratory survey offers insights into the nature of cross-modal and embodied meaning-making, as a jumping-off point for further research.

Abstract

Systematic investigations into the role of semantics in the speech production process have remained elusive. This special issue aims at moving forward toward a more detailed account of how precisely conceptual information is used to access the lexicon in speaking and what corresponding format of conceptual representations needs to be assumed. The studies presented in this volume investigated effects of conceptual processing on different processing stages of language production, including sentence formulation, lemma selection, and word form access.

Abstract

From the study of sign languages we know that the visual modality robustly supports the encoding of conventionalized linguistic elements, yet while the same possibility exists for the visual bodily behavior of speakers of spoken languages, such practices are often referred to as ‘gestural’ and are not usually described in linguistic terms. This article describes a practice of speakers of the Brazilian indigenous language Nheengatú of pointing to positions along the east-west axis of the sun’s arc for time-of-day reference, and illustrates how it satisfies any of the common criteria for linguistic elements, as a system of standardized and productive form-meaning pairings whose contributions to propositional meaning remain stable across contexts. First, examples from a video corpus of natural speech demonstrate these conventionalized properties of Nheengatú time reference across multiple speakers. Second, a series of video-based elicitation stimuli test several dimensions of its conventionalization for nine participants. The results illustrate why modality is not an a priori reason that linguistic properties cannot develop in the visual practices that accompany spoken language. The conclusion discusses different possible morphosyntactic and pragmatic analyses for such conventionalized visual elements and asks whether they might be more crosslinguistically common than we presently know.

Abstract

This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation—when one party
signals a problemwith producing or perceiving another’s turn at talk—into the domain
of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the
timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair
accompanies their turn with a “hold”—when relatively dynamic movements are
temporarily andmeaningfully held static—this positionwill not be disengaged until the
problem is resolved and the sequence closed. We base this finding on qualitative and
quantitative analysis of corpora of conversational interaction from three unrelated languages representing two different modalities: Northern Italian, the Cha’palaa language of Ecuador, and Argentine Sign Language. The cross-linguistic similarities
uncovered by this comparison suggest that visual bodily practices have been
semiotized for similar interactive functions across different languages and modalities
due to common pressures in face-to-face interaction.

Abstract

Language perception studies on bilinguals often show that words that share form and meaning across languages (cognates) are easier to process than words that share only meaning. This facilitatory phenomenon is known as the cognate effect. Most previous studies have shown this effect visually, whereas the auditory modality as well as the interplay between type of similarity and modality remain largely unexplored. In this study, highly proficient late Spanish–English bilinguals carried out a lexical decision task in their second language, both visually and auditorily. Words had high or low phonological and orthographic similarity, fully crossed. We also included orthographically identical words (perfect cognates). Our results suggest that similarity in the same modality (i.e., orthographic similarity in the visual modality and phonological similarity in the auditory modality) leads to improved signal detection, whereas similarity across modalities hinders it. We provide support for the idea that perfect cognates are a special category within cognates. Results suggest a need for a conceptual and practical separation between types of similarity in cognate studies. The theoretical implication is that the representations of items are active in both modalities of the non-target language during language processing, which needs to be incorporated to our current processing models.

Abstract

Language perception studies on bilinguals often show that words that share form and meaning across
languages (cognates) are easier to process than words that share only meaning. This facilitatory
phenomenon is known as the cognate effect. Most previous studies have shown this effect visually,
whereas the auditory modality as well as the interplay between type of similarity and modality
remain largely unexplored. In this study, highly proficient late Spanish–English bilinguals carried out
a lexical decision task in their second language, both visually and auditorily. Words had high or low
phonological and orthographic similarity, fully crossed. We also included orthographically identical
words (perfect cognates). Our results suggest that similarity in the same modality (i.e., orthographic
similarity in the visual modality and phonological similarity in the auditory modality) leads to
improved signal detection, whereas similarity across modalities hinders it. We provide support for
the idea that perfect cognates are a special category within cognates. Results suggest a need for a
conceptual and practical separation between types of similarity in cognate studies. The theoretical
implication is that the representations of items are active in both modalities of the non‑target
language during language processing, which needs to be incorporated to our current processing
models.

Abstract

Several quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that influence developmental dyslexia (reading disability [RD]) have been mapped to chromosome regions by linkage analysis. The most consistently replicated area of linkage is on chromosome 6p23-21.3. We used association analysis in 223 siblings from the United Kingdom to identify an underlying QTL on 6p22.2. Our association study implicates a 77-kb region spanning the gene TTRAP and the first four exons of the neighboring uncharacterized gene KIAA0319. The region of association is also directly upstream of a third gene, THEM2. We found evidence of these associations in a second sample of siblings from the United Kingdom, as well as in an independent sample of twin-based sibships from Colorado. One main RD risk haplotype that has a frequency of ∼12% was found in both the U.K. and U.S. samples. The haplotype is not distinguished by any protein-coding polymorphisms, and, therefore, the functional variation may relate to gene expression. The QTL influences a broad range of reading-related cognitive abilities but has no significant impact on general cognitive performance in these samples. In addition, the QTL effect may be largely limited to the severe range of reading disability.

Abstract

Prior language input is not lost but integrated with the current input. This principle is demonstrated by “reservoir computing”: Untrained recurrent neural networks project input sequences onto a random point in high-dimensional state space. Earlier inputs can be retrieved from this projection, albeit less reliably so as more input is received. The bottleneck is therefore not “Now-or-Never” but “Sooner-is-Better.

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a devastating psychiatric illness with high heritability. Brain structure and function differ, on average, between people with schizophrenia and healthy individuals. As common genetic associations are emerging for both schizophrenia and brain imaging phenotypes, we can now use genome-wide data to investigate genetic overlap. Here we integrated results from common variant studies of schizophrenia (33,636 cases, 43,008 controls) and volumes of several (mainly subcortical) brain structures (11,840 subjects). We did not find evidence of genetic overlap between schizophrenia risk and subcortical volume measures either at the level of common variant genetic architecture or for single genetic markers. These results provide a proof of concept (albeit based on a limited set of structural brain measures) and define a roadmap for future studies investigating the genetic covariance between structural or functional brain phenotypes and risk for psychiatric disorders

Abstract

Do people incrementally incorporate the meaning of quantifier expressions to understand an unfolding sentence? Most previous studies concluded that quantifiers do not immediately influence how a sentence is understood based on the observation that online N400-effects differed from offline plausibility judgments. Those studies, however, used serial visual presentation (SVP), which involves unnatural reading. In the current ERP-experiment, we presented spoken positive and negative quantifier sentences (“Practically all/practically no postmen prefer delivering mail, when the weather is good/bad during the day”). Different from results obtained in a previously reported SVP-study (Nieuwland, 2016) sentence truth-value N400 effects occurred in positive and negative quantifier sentences alike, reflecting fully incremental quantifier comprehension. This suggests that the prosodic information available during spoken language comprehension supports the generation of online predictions for upcoming words and that, at least for quantifier sentences, comprehension of spoken language may proceed more incrementally than comprehension during SVP reading.

Abstract

Evolution, as we currently understand it, strikes a delicate balance between animals' ancestral history and adaptations to their current niche. Similarities between species are generally considered inherited from a common ancestor whereas observed differences are considered as more recent evolution. Hence comparing species can provide insights into the evolutionary history. Comparative neuroimaging has recently emerged as a novel subdiscipline, which uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify similarities and differences in brain structure and function across species. Whereas invasive histological and molecular techniques are superior in spatial resolution, they are laborious, post-mortem, and oftentimes limited to specific species. Neuroimaging, by comparison, has the advantages of being applicable across species and allows for fast, whole-brain, repeatable, and multi-modal measurements of the structure and function in living brains and post-mortem tissue. In this review, we summarise the current state of the art in comparative anatomy and function of the brain and gather together the main scientific questions to be explored in the future of the fascinating new field of brain evolution derived from comparative neuroimaging.

Abstract

Language learning requires mastering multiple tasks, including segmenting speech to identify words, and learning the syntactic role of these words within sentences. A key question in language acquisition research is the extent to which these tasks are sequential or successive, and consequently whether they may be driven by distinct or similar computations. We explored a classic artificial language learning paradigm, where the language structure is defined in terms of non-adjacent dependencies. We show that participants are able to use the same statistical information at the same time to segment continuous speech to both identify words and to generalise over the structure, when the generalisations were over novel speech that the participants had not previously experienced. We suggest that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the most economical explanation for the effects is that speech segmentation and grammatical generalisation are dependent on similar statistical processing mechanisms.