Publications

Displaying 201 - 300 of 351
  • Majid, A. (2003). Into the deep. The Psychologist, 16(6), 300-300.
  • Mangione-Smith, R., Stivers, T., Elliott, M. N., McDonald, L., & Heritage, J. (2003). Online commentary during the physical examination: A communication tool for avoiding inappropriate antibiotic prescribing? Social Science and Medicine, 56(2), 313-320.
  • Marcus, G. F., & Fisher, S. E. (2003). FOXP2 in focus: What can genes tell us about speech and language? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 257-262. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00104-9.

    Abstract

    The human capacity for acquiring speech and language must derive, at least in part, from the genome. In 2001, a study described the first case of a gene, FOXP2, which is thought to be implicated in our ability to acquire spoken language. In the present article, we discuss how this gene was discovered, what it might do, how it relates to other genes, and what it could tell us about the nature of speech and language development. We explain how FOXP2 could, without being specific to the brain or to our own species, still provide an invaluable entry-point into understanding the genetic cascades and neural pathways that contribute to our capacity for speech and language.
  • Marlow, A. J., Fisher, S. E., Francks, C., MacPhie, I. L., Cherny, S. S., Richardson, A. J., Talcott, J. B., Stein, J. F., Monaco, A. P., & Cardon, L. R. (2003). Use of multivariate linkage analysis for dissection of a complex cognitive trait. American Journal of Human Genetics, 72(3), 561-570. doi:10.1086/368201.

    Abstract

    Replication of linkage results for complex traits has been exceedingly difficult, owing in part to the inability to measure the precise underlying phenotype, small sample sizes, genetic heterogeneity, and statistical methods employed in analysis. Often, in any particular study, multiple correlated traits have been collected, yet these have been analyzed independently or, at most, in bivariate analyses. Theoretical arguments suggest that full multivariate analysis of all available traits should offer more power to detect linkage; however, this has not yet been evaluated on a genomewide scale. Here, we conduct multivariate genomewide analyses of quantitative-trait loci that influence reading- and language-related measures in families affected with developmental dyslexia. The results of these analyses are substantially clearer than those of previous univariate analyses of the same data set, helping to resolve a number of key issues. These outcomes highlight the relevance of multivariate analysis for complex disorders for dissection of linkage results in correlated traits. The approach employed here may aid positional cloning of susceptibility genes in a wide spectrum of complex traits.
  • Martin, A. E., & McElree, B. (2009). Memory operations that support language comprehension: Evidence from verb-phrase ellipsis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(5), 1231-1239. doi:10.1037/a0016271.

    Abstract

    Comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) requires reevaluation of recently processed constituents, which often necessitates retrieval of information about the elided constituent from memory. A. E. Martin and B. McElree (2008) argued that representations formed during comprehension are content addressable and that VPE antecedents are retrieved from memory via a cue-dependent direct-access pointer rather than via a search process. This hypothesis was further tested by manipulating the location of interfering material—either before the onset of the antecedent (proactive interference; PI) or intervening between antecedent and ellipsis site (retroactive interference; RI). The speed–accuracy tradeoff procedure was used to measure the time course of VPE processing. The location of the interfering material affected VPE comprehension accuracy: RI conditions engendered lower accuracy than PI conditions. Crucially, location did not affect the speed of processing VPE, which is inconsistent with both forward and backward search mechanisms. The observed time-course profiles are consistent with the hypothesis that VPE antecedents are retrieved via a cue-dependent direct-access operation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
  • Massaro, D. W., & Jesse, A. (2009). Read my lips: Speech distortions in musical lyrics can be overcome (slightly) by facial information. Speech Communication, 51(7), 604-621. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2008.05.013.

    Abstract

    Understanding the lyrics of many contemporary songs is difficult, and an earlier study [Hidalgo-Barnes, M., Massaro, D.W., 2007. Read my lips: an animated face helps communicate musical lyrics. Psychomusicology 19, 3–12] showed a benefit for lyrics recognition when seeing a computer-animated talking head (Baldi) mouthing the lyrics along with hearing the singer. However, the contribution of visual information was relatively small compared to what is usually found for speech. In the current experiments, our goal was to determine why the face appears to contribute less when aligned with sung lyrics than when aligned with normal speech presented in noise. The first experiment compared the contribution of the talking head with the originally sung lyrics versus the case when it was aligned with the Festival text-to-speech synthesis (TtS) spoken at the original duration of the song’s lyrics. A small and similar influence of the face was found in both conditions. In the three experiments, we compared the presence of the face when the durations of the TtS were equated with the duration of the original musical lyrics to the case when the lyrics were read with typical TtS durations and this speech embedded in noise. The results indicated that the unusual temporally distorted durations of musical lyrics decreases the contribution of the visible speech from the face.
  • McQueen, J. M. (2003). The ghost of Christmas future: Didn't Scrooge learn to be good? Commentary on Magnuson, McMurray, Tanenhaus and Aslin (2003). Cognitive Science, 27(5), 795-799. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog2705_6.

    Abstract

    Magnuson, McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin [Cogn. Sci. 27 (2003) 285] suggest that they have evidence of lexical feedback in speech perception, and that this evidence thus challenges the purely feedforward Merge model [Behav. Brain Sci. 23 (2000) 299]. This evidence is open to an alternative explanation, however, one which preserves the assumption in Merge that there is no lexical-prelexical feedback during on-line speech processing. This explanation invokes the distinction between perceptual processing that occurs in the short term, as an utterance is heard, and processing that occurs over the longer term, for perceptual learning.
  • McQueen, J. M., Norris, D., & Cutler, A. (1994). Competition in spoken word recognition: Spotting words in other words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 621-638.

    Abstract

    Although word boundaries are rarely clearly marked, listeners can rapidly recognize the individual words of spoken sentences. Some theories explain this in terms of competition between multiply activated lexical hypotheses; others invoke sensitivity to prosodic structure. We describe a connectionist model, SHORTLIST, in which recognition by activation and competition is successful with a realistically sized lexicon. Three experiments are then reported in which listeners detected real words embedded in nonsense strings, some of which were themselves the onsets of longer words. Effects both of competition between words and of prosodic structure were observed, suggesting that activation and competition alone are not sufficient to explain word recognition in continuous speech. However, the results can be accounted for by a version of SHORTLIST that is sensitive to prosodic structure.
  • McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2003). Flow of information in the spoken word recognition system. Speech Communication, 41(1), 257-270. doi:10.1016/S0167-6393(02)00108-5.

    Abstract

    Spoken word recognition consists of two major component processes. First, at the prelexical stage, an abstract description of the utterance is generated from the information in the speech signal. Second, at the lexical stage, this description is used to activate all the words stored in the mental lexicon which match the input. These multiple candidate words then compete with each other. We review evidence which suggests that positive (match) and negative (mismatch) information of both a segmental and a suprasegmental nature is used to constrain this activation and competition process. We then ask whether, in addition to the necessary influence of the prelexical stage on the lexical stage, there is also feedback from the lexicon to the prelexical level. In two phonetic categorization experiments, Dutch listeners were asked to label both syllable-initial and syllable-final ambiguous fricatives (e.g., sounds ranging from [f] to [s]) in the word–nonword series maf–mas, and the nonword–word series jaf–jas. They tended to label the sounds in a lexically consistent manner (i.e., consistent with the word endpoints of the series). These lexical effects became smaller in listeners’ slower responses, even when the listeners were put under pressure to respond as fast as possible. Our results challenge models of spoken word recognition in which feedback modulates the prelexical analysis of the component sounds of a word whenever that word is heard
  • McQueen, J. M., Jesse, A., & Norris, D. (2009). No lexical–prelexical feedback during speech perception or: Is it time to stop playing those Christmas tapes? Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 1-18. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2009.03.002.

    Abstract

    The strongest support for feedback in speech perception comes from evidence of apparent lexical influence on prelexical fricative-stop compensation for coarticulation. Lexical knowledge (e.g., that the ambiguous final fricative of Christma? should be [s]) apparently influences perception of following stops. We argue that all such previous demonstrations can be explained without invoking lexical feedback. In particular, we show that one demonstration [Magnuson, J. S., McMurray, B., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Aslin, R. N. (2003). Lexical effects on compensation for coarticulation: The ghost of Christmash past. Cognitive Science, 27, 285–298] involved experimentally-induced biases (from 16 practice trials) rather than feedback. We found that the direction of the compensation effect depended on whether practice stimuli were words or nonwords. When both were used, there was no lexically-mediated compensation. Across experiments, however, there were lexical effects on fricative identification. This dissociation (lexical involvement in the fricative decisions but not in the following stop decisions made on the same trials) challenges interactive models in which feedback should cause both effects. We conclude that the prelexical level is sensitive to experimentally-induced phoneme-sequence biases, but that there is no feedback during speech perception.
  • Mead, S., Poulter, M., Uphill, J., Beck, J., Whitfield, J., Webb, T. E., Campbell, T., Adamson, G., Deriziotis, P., Tabrizi, S. J., Hummerich, H., Verzilli, C., Alpers, M. P., Whittaker, J. C., & Collinge, J. (2009). Genetic risk factors for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: A genome-wide association study. Lancet Neurology, 8(1), 57-66. doi:10.1016/S1474-4422(08)70265-5.

    Abstract

    BACKGROUND: Human and animal prion diseases are under genetic control, but apart from PRNP (the gene that encodes the prion protein), we understand little about human susceptibility to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) prions, the causal agent of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).METHODS: We did a genome-wide association study of the risk of vCJD and tested for replication of our findings in samples from many categories of human prion disease (929 samples) and control samples from the UK and Papua New Guinea (4254 samples), including controls in the UK who were genotyped by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. We also did follow-up analyses of the genetic control of the clinical phenotype of prion disease and analysed candidate gene expression in a mouse cellular model of prion infection. FINDINGS: The PRNP locus was strongly associated with risk across several markers and all categories of prion disease (best single SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism] association in vCJD p=2.5 x 10(-17); best haplotypic association in vCJD p=1 x 10(-24)). Although the main contribution to disease risk was conferred by PRNP polymorphic codon 129, another nearby SNP conferred increased risk of vCJD. In addition to PRNP, one technically validated SNP association upstream of RARB (the gene that encodes retinoic acid receptor beta) had nominal genome-wide significance (p=1.9 x 10(-7)). A similar association was found in a small sample of patients with iatrogenic CJD (p=0.030) but not in patients with sporadic CJD (sCJD) or kuru. In cultured cells, retinoic acid regulates the expression of the prion protein. We found an association with acquired prion disease, including vCJD (p=5.6 x 10(-5)), kuru incubation time (p=0.017), and resistance to kuru (p=2.5 x 10(-4)), in a region upstream of STMN2 (the gene that encodes SCG10). The risk genotype was not associated with sCJD but conferred an earlier age of onset. Furthermore, expression of Stmn2 was reduced 30-fold post-infection in a mouse cellular model of prion disease. INTERPRETATION: The polymorphic codon 129 of PRNP was the main genetic risk factor for vCJD; however, additional candidate loci have been identified, which justifies functional analyses of these biological pathways in prion disease.
  • Meeuwissen, M., Roelofs, A., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2003). Planning levels in naming and reading complex numerals. Memory & Cognition, 31(8), 1238-1249.

    Abstract

    On the basis of evidence from studies of the naming and reading of numerals, Ferrand (1999) argued that the naming of objects is slower than reading their names, due to a greater response uncertainty in naming than in reading, rather than to an obligatory conceptual preparation for naming, but not for reading. We manipulated the need for conceptual preparation, while keeping response uncertainty constant in the naming and reading of complex numerals. In Experiment 1, participants named three-digit Arabic numerals either as house numbers or clock times. House number naming latencies were determined mostly by morphophonological factors, such as morpheme frequency and the number of phonemes, whereas clock time naming latencies revealed an additional conceptual involvement. In Experiment 2, the numerals were presented in alphabetic format and had to be read aloud. Reading latencies were determined mostly by morphophonological factors in both modes. These results suggest that conceptual preparation, rather than response uncertainty, is responsible for the difference between naming and reading latencies.
  • Menenti, L., Petersson, K. M., Scheeringa, R., & Hagoort, P. (2009). When elephants fly: Differential sensitivity of right and left inferior frontal gyri to discourse and world knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21, 2358-2368. doi:10.1162/jocn.2008.21163.

    Abstract

    Both local discourse and world knowledge are known to influence sentence processing. We investigated how these two sources of information conspire in language comprehension. Two types of critical sentences, correct and world knowledge anomalies, were preceded by either a neutral or a local context. The latter made the world knowledge anomalies more acceptable or plausible. We predicted that the effect of world knowledge anomalies would be weaker for the local context. World knowledge effects have previously been observed in the left inferior frontal region (Brodmann's area 45/47). In the current study, an effect of world knowledge was present in this region in the neutral context. We also observed an effect in the right inferior frontal gyrus, which was more sensitive to the discourse manipulation than the left inferior frontal gyrus. In addition, the left angular gyrus reacted strongly to the degree of discourse coherence between the context and critical sentence. Overall, both world knowledge and the discourse context affect the process of meaning unification, but do so by recruiting partly different sets of brain areas.
  • Menon, S., Rosenberg, K., Graham, S. A., Ward, E. M., Taylor, M. E., Drickamer, K., & Leckband, D. E. (2009). Binding-site geometry and flexibility in DC-SIGN demonstrated with surface force measurements. PNAS, 106, 11524-11529. doi:10.1073/pnas.0901783106.

    Abstract

    The dendritic cell receptor DC-SIGN mediates pathogen recognition by binding to glycans characteristic of pathogen surfaces, including those found on HIV. Clustering of carbohydrate-binding sites in the receptor tetramer is believed to be critical for targeting of pathogen glycans, but the arrangement of these sites remains poorly understood. Surface force measurements between apposed lipid bilayers displaying the extracellular domain of DC-SIGN and a neoglycolipid bearing an oligosaccharide ligand provide evidence that the receptor is in an extended conformation and that glycan docking is associated with a conformational change that repositions the carbohydrate-recognition domains during ligand binding. The results further show that the lateral mobility of membrane-bound ligands enhances the engagement of multiple carbohydrate-recognition domains in the receptor oligomer with appropriately spaced ligands. These studies highlight differences between pathogen targeting by DC-SIGN and receptors in which binding sites at fixed spacing bind to simple molecular patterns

    Additional information

    Menon_2009_Supporting_Information.pdf
  • Meyer, A. S., Roelofs, A., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2003). Word length effects in object naming: The role of a response criterion. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(1), 131-147. doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00509-0.

    Abstract

    According to Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) speakers generate the phonological and phonetic representations of successive syllables of a word in sequence and only begin to speak after having fully planned at least one complete phonological word. Therefore, speech onset latencies should be longer for long than for short words. We tested this prediction in four experiments in which Dutch participants named or categorized objects with monosyllabic or disyllabic names. Experiment 1 yielded a length effect on production latencies when objects with long and short names were tested in separate blocks, but not when they were mixed. Experiment 2 showed that the length effect was not due to a difference in the ease of object recognition. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using a within-participants design. In Experiment 4, the long and short target words appeared in a phrasal context. In addition to the speech onset latencies, we obtained the viewing times for the target objects, which have been shown to depend on the time necessary to plan the form of the target names. We found word length effects for both dependent variables, but only when objects with short and long names were presented in separate blocks. We argue that in pure and mixed blocks speakers used different response deadlines, which they tried to meet by either generating the motor programs for one syllable or for all syllables of the word before speech onset. Computer simulations using WEAVER++ support this view.
  • Meyer, A. S. (1994). Timing in sentence production. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 471-492. doi:doi:10.1006/jmla.1994.1022.

    Abstract

    Recently, a new theory of timing in sentence production has been proposed by Ferreira (1993). This theory assumes that at the phonological level, each syllable of an utterance is assigned one or more abstract timing units depending on its position in the prosodic structure. The number of timing units associated with a syllable determines the time interval between its onset and the onset of the next syllable. An interesting prediction from the theory, which was confirmed in Ferreira's experiments with speakers of American English, is that the time intervals between syllable onsets should only depend on the syllables' positions in the prosodic structure, but not on their segmental content. However, in the present experiments, which were carried out in Dutch, the intervals between syllable onsets were consistently longer for phonetically long syllables than for short syllables. The implications of this result for models of timing in sentence production are discussed.
  • Mitterer, H., & McQueen, J. M. (2009). Foreign subtitles help but native-language subtitles harm foreign speech perception. PLoS ONE, 4(11), e7785. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007785.

    Abstract

    Understanding foreign speech is difficult, in part because of unusual mappings between sounds and words. It is known that listeners in their native language can use lexical knowledge (about how words ought to sound) to learn how to interpret unusual speech-sounds. We therefore investigated whether subtitles, which provide lexical information, support perceptual learning about foreign speech. Dutch participants, unfamiliar with Scottish and Australian regional accents of English, watched Scottish or Australian English videos with Dutch, English or no subtitles, and then repeated audio fragments of both accents. Repetition of novel fragments was worse after Dutch-subtitle exposure but better after English-subtitle exposure. Native-language subtitles appear to create lexical interference, but foreign-language subtitles assist speech learning by indicating which words (and hence sounds) are being spoken.
  • Mitterer, H., & McQueen, J. M. (2009). Processing reduced word-forms in speech perception using probabilistic knowledge about speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35(1), 244-263. doi:10.1037/a0012730.

    Abstract

    Two experiments examined how Dutch listeners deal with the effects of connected-speech processes, specifically those arising from word-final /t/ reduction (e.g., whether Dutch [tas] is tas, bag, or a reduced-/t/ version of tast, touch). Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays containing 4 printed words, each associated with a geometrical shape. Minimal pairs (e.g., tas/tast) were either both above (boven) or both next to (naast) different shapes. Spoken instructions (e.g., “Klik op het woordje tas boven de ster,” [Click on the word bag above the star]) thus became unambiguous only on their final words. Prior to disambiguation, listeners' fixations were drawn to /t/-final words more when boven than when naast followed the ambiguous sequences. This behavior reflects Dutch speech-production data: /t/ is reduced more before /b/ than before /n/. We thus argue that probabilistic knowledge about the effect of following context in speech production is used prelexically in perception to help resolve lexical ambiguities caused by continuous-speech processes.
  • Mitterer, H., Horschig, J. M., Müsseler, J., & Majid, A. (2009). The influence of memory on perception: It's not what things look like, it's what you call them. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(6), 1557-1562. doi:10.1037/a0017019.

    Abstract

    World knowledge influences how we perceive the world. This study shows that this influence is at least partly mediated by declarative memory. Dutch and German participants categorized hues from a yellow-to-orange continuum on stimuli that were prototypically orange or yellow and that were also associated with these color labels. Both groups gave more “yellow” responses if an ambiguous hue occurred on a prototypically yellow stimulus. The language groups were also tested on a stimulus (traffic light) that is associated with the label orange in Dutch and with the label yellow in German, even though the objective color is the same for both populations. Dutch observers categorized this stimulus as orange more often than German observers, in line with the assumption that declarative knowledge mediates the influence of world knowledge on color categorization.

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  • Narasimhan, B. (2003). Motion events and the lexicon: The case of Hindi. Lingua, 113(2), 123-160. doi:10.1016/S0024-3841(02)00068-2.

    Abstract

    English, and a variety of Germanic languages, allow constructions such as the bottle floated into the cave , whereas languages such as Spanish, French, and Hindi are highly restricted in allowing manner of motion verbs to occur with path phrases. This typological observation has been accounted for in terms of the conflation of complex meaning in basic or derived verbs [Talmy, L., 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Shopen, T. (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57–149; Levin, B., Rappaport-Hovav, M., 1995. Unaccusativity: At the Syntax–Lexical Semantics Interface. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA], or the presence of path “satellites” with special grammatical properties in the lexicon of languages such as English, which allow such phrasal combinations [cf. Talmy, L., 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Shopen, T. (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57–149; Talmy, L., 1991. Path to realisation: via aspect and result. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, pp. 480–520]. I use data from Hindi to show that there is little empirical support for the claim that the constraint on the phrasal combination is correlated with differences in verb meaning or the presence of satellites in the lexicon of a language. However, proposals which eschew lexicalization accounts for more general aspectual constraints on the manner verb + path phrase combination in Spanish-type languages (Aske, J., 1989. Path Predicates in English and Spanish: A Closer look. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, pp. 1–14) cannot account for the full range of data in Hindi either. On the basis of these facts, I argue that an empirically adequate account can be formulated in terms of a general mapping constraint, formulated in terms of whether the lexical requirements of the verb strictly or weakly constrain its syntactic privileges of occurrence. In Hindi, path phrases can combine with manner of motion verbs only to the degree that they are compatible with the semantic profile of the verb. Path phrases in English, on the other hand, can extend the verb's “semantic profile” subject to certain constraints. I suggest that path phrases are licensed in English by the semantic requirements of the “construction” in which they appear rather than by the selectional requirements of the verb (Fillmore, C., Kay, P., O'Connor, M.C., 1988, Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions. Language 64, 501–538; Jackendoff, 1990, Semantic Structures. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; Goldberg, 1995, Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London).
  • Need, A. C., Ge, D., Weale, M. E., Maia, J., Feng, S., Heinzen, E. L., Shianna, K. V., Yoon, W., Kasperavičiūtė, D., Gennarelli, M., Strittmatter, W. J., Bonvicini, C., Rossi, G., Jayathilake, K., Cola, P. A., McEvoy, J. P., Keefe, R. S. E., Fisher, E. M. C., St. Jean, P. L., Giegling, I. and 13 moreNeed, A. C., Ge, D., Weale, M. E., Maia, J., Feng, S., Heinzen, E. L., Shianna, K. V., Yoon, W., Kasperavičiūtė, D., Gennarelli, M., Strittmatter, W. J., Bonvicini, C., Rossi, G., Jayathilake, K., Cola, P. A., McEvoy, J. P., Keefe, R. S. E., Fisher, E. M. C., St. Jean, P. L., Giegling, I., Hartmann, A. M., Möller, H.-J., Ruppert, A., Fraser, G., Crombie, C., Middleton, L. T., St. Clair, D., Roses, A. D., Muglia, P., Francks, C., Rujescu, D., Meltzer, H. Y., & Goldstein, D. B. (2009). A genome-wide investigation of SNPs and CNVs in schizophrenia. PLoS Genetics, 5(2), e1000373. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000373.

    Abstract

    We report a genome-wide assessment of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and copy number variants (CNVs) in schizophrenia. We investigated SNPs using 871 patients and 863 controls, following up the top hits in four independent cohorts comprising 1,460 patients and 12,995 controls, all of European origin. We found no genome-wide significant associations, nor could we provide support for any previously reported candidate gene or genome-wide associations. We went on to examine CNVs using a subset of 1,013 cases and 1,084 controls of European ancestry, and a further set of 60 cases and 64 controls of African ancestry. We found that eight cases and zero controls carried deletions greater than 2 Mb, of which two, at 8p22 and 16p13.11-p12.4, are newly reported here. A further evaluation of 1,378 controls identified no deletions greater than 2 Mb, suggesting a high prior probability of disease involvement when such deletions are observed in cases. We also provide further evidence for some smaller, previously reported, schizophrenia-associated CNVs, such as those in NRXN1 and APBA2. We could not provide strong support for the hypothesis that schizophrenia patients have a significantly greater “load” of large (>100 kb), rare CNVs, nor could we find common CNVs that associate with schizophrenia. Finally, we did not provide support for the suggestion that schizophrenia-associated CNVs may preferentially disrupt genes in neurodevelopmental pathways. Collectively, these analyses provide the first integrated study of SNPs and CNVs in schizophrenia and support the emerging view that rare deleterious variants may be more important in schizophrenia predisposition than common polymorphisms. While our analyses do not suggest that implicated CNVs impinge on particular key pathways, we do support the contribution of specific genomic regions in schizophrenia, presumably due to recurrent mutation. On balance, these data suggest that very few schizophrenia patients share identical genomic causation, potentially complicating efforts to personalize treatment regimens.
  • Newbury, D. F., Winchester, L., Addis, L., Paracchini, S., Buckingham, L.-L., Clark, A., Cohen, W., Cowie, H., Dworzynski, K., Everitt, A., Goodyer, I. M., Hennessy, E., Kindley, A. D., Miller, L. L., Nasir, J., O'Hare, A., Shaw, D., Simkin, Z., Simonoff, E., Slonims, V. and 11 moreNewbury, D. F., Winchester, L., Addis, L., Paracchini, S., Buckingham, L.-L., Clark, A., Cohen, W., Cowie, H., Dworzynski, K., Everitt, A., Goodyer, I. M., Hennessy, E., Kindley, A. D., Miller, L. L., Nasir, J., O'Hare, A., Shaw, D., Simkin, Z., Simonoff, E., Slonims, V., Watson, J., Ragoussis, J., Fisher, S. E., Seckl, J. R., Helms, P. J., Bolton, P. F., Pickles, A., Conti-Ramsden, G., Baird, G., Bishop, D. V., & Monaco, A. P. (2009). CMIP and ATP2C2 modulate phonological short-term memory in language impairment. American Journal of Human Genetics, 85(2), 264-272. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2009.07.004.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    mmc1.pdf
  • Newman-Norlund, S. E., Noordzij, M. L., Newman-Norlund, R. D., Volman, I. A., De Ruiter, J. P., Hagoort, P., & Toni, I. (2009). Recipient design in tacit communication. Cognition, 111, 46-54. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.12.004.

    Abstract

    The ability to design tailored messages for specific listeners is an important aspect of
    human communication. The present study investigates whether a mere belief about an
    addressee’s identity influences the generation and production of a communicative message in
    a novel, non-verbal communication task. Participants were made to believe they were playing a game with a child or an adult partner, while a confederate acted as both child
    and adult partners with matched performance and response times. The participants’ belief
    influenced their behavior, spending longer when interacting with the presumed child
    addressee, but only during communicative portions of the game, i.e. using time as a tool
    to place emphasis on target information. This communicative adaptation attenuated with
    experience, and it was related to personality traits, namely Empathy and Need for Cognition
    measures. Overall, these findings indicate that novel nonverbal communicative interactions
    are selected according to a socio-centric perspective, and they are strongly
    influenced by participants’ traits.
  • Niemi, J., Laine, M., & Järvikivi, J. (2009). Paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology in the mental lexicon: Experimental evidence for a dissociation. The mental lexicon, 4(1), 26-40. doi:10.1075/ml.4.1.02nie.

    Abstract

    The present study discusses psycholinguistic evidence for a difference between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology by investigating the processing of Finnish inflected and cliticized words. The data are derived from three sources of Finnish: from single-word reading performance in an agrammatic deep dyslectic speaker, as well as from visual lexical decision and wordness/learnability ratings of cliticized vs. inflected items by normal Finnish speakers. The agrammatic speaker showed awareness of the suffixes in multimorphemic words, including clitics, since he attempted to fill in this slot with morphological material. However, he never produced a clitic — either as the correct response or as an error — in any morphological configuration (simplex, derived, inflected, compound). Moreover, he produced more nominative singular errors for case-inflected nouns than he did for the cliticized words, a pattern that is expected if case-inflected forms were closely associated with their lexical heads, i.e., if they were paradigmatic and cliticized words were not. Furthermore, a visual lexical decision task with normal speakers of Finnish, showed an additional processing cost (longer latencies and more errors on cliticized than on case-inflected noun forms). Finally, a rating task indicated no difference in relative wordness between these two types of words. However, the same cliticized words were judged harder to learn as L2 items than the inflected words, most probably due to their conceptual/semantic properties, in other words due to their lack of word-level translation equivalents in SAVE languages. Taken together, the present results suggest that the distinction between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology is psychologically real.
  • Nijland, L., & Janse, E. (Eds.). (2009). Auditory processing in speakers with acquired or developmental language disorders [Special Issue]. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 23(3).
  • Noordzij, M., Newman-Norlund, S. E., De Ruiter, J. P., Hagoort, P., Levinson, S. C., & Toni, I. (2009). Brain mechanisms underlying human communication. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 3:14. doi:10.3389/neuro.09.014.2009.

    Abstract

    Human communication has been described as involving the coding-decoding of a conventional symbol system, which could be supported by parts of the human motor system (i.e. the “mirror neurons system”). However, this view does not explain how these conventions could develop in the first place. Here we target the neglected but crucial issue of how people organize their non-verbal behavior to communicate a given intention without pre-established conventions. We have measured behavioral and brain responses in pairs of subjects during communicative exchanges occurring in a real, interactive, on-line social context. In two fMRI studies, we found robust evidence that planning new communicative actions (by a sender) and recognizing the communicative intention of the same actions (by a receiver) relied on spatially overlapping portions of their brains (the right posterior superior temporal sulcus). The response of this region was lateralized to the right hemisphere, modulated by the ambiguity in meaning of the communicative acts, but not by their sensorimotor complexity. These results indicate that the sender of a communicative signal uses his own intention recognition system to make a prediction of the intention recognition performed by the receiver. This finding supports the notion that our communicative abilities are distinct from both sensorimotor processes and language abilities.
  • Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2003). Perceptual learning in speech. Cognitive Psychology, 47(2), 204-238. doi:10.1016/S0010-0285(03)00006-9.

    Abstract

    This study demonstrates that listeners use lexical knowledge in perceptual learning of speech sounds. Dutch listeners first made lexical decisions on Dutch words and nonwords. The final fricative of 20 critical words had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]-final words (e.g., [WI tlo?], from witlof, chicory) and unambiguous [s]-final words (e.g., naaldbos, pine forest). Another group heard the reverse (e.g., ambiguous [na:ldbo?], unambiguous witlof). Listeners who had heard [?] in [f]-final words were subsequently more likely to categorize ambiguous sounds on an [f]–[s] continuum as [f] than those who heard [?] in [s]-final words. Control conditions ruled out alternative explanations based on selective adaptation and contrast. Lexical information can thus be used to train categorization of speech. This use of lexical information differs from the on-line lexical feedback embodied in interactive models of speech perception. In contrast to on-line feedback, lexical feedback for learning is of benefit to spoken word recognition (e.g., in adapting to a newly encountered dialect).
  • Nyberg, L., Marklund, P., Persson, J., Cabeza, R., Forkstam, C., Petersson, K. M., & Ingvar, M. (2003). Common prefrontal activations during working memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory. Neuropsychologia, 41(3), 371-377. doi:10.1016/S0028-3932(02)00168-9.

    Abstract

    Regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are typically activated in many different cognitive functions. In most studies, the focus has been on the role of specific PFC regions in specific cognitive domains, but more recently similarities in PFC activations across cognitive domains have been stressed. Such similarities may suggest that a region mediates a common function across a variety of cognitive tasks. In this study, we compared the activation patterns associated with tests of working memory, semantic memory and episodic memory. The results converged on a general involvement of four regions across memory tests. These were located in left frontopolar cortex, left mid-ventrolateral PFC, left mid-dorsolateral PFC and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. These findings provide evidence that some PFC regions are engaged during many different memory tests. The findings are discussed in relation to theories about the functional contribition of the PFC regions and the architecture of memory.
  • Nyberg, L., Sandblom, J., Jones, S., Stigsdotter Neely, A., Petersson, K. M., Ingvar, M., & Bäckman, L. (2003). Neural correlates of training-related memory improvement in adulthood and aging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100(23), 13728-13733. doi:10.1073/pnas.1735487100.

    Abstract

    Cognitive studies show that both younger and older adults can increase their memory performance after training in using a visuospatial mnemonic, although age-related memory deficits tend to be magnified rather than reduced after training. Little is known about the changes in functional brain activity that accompany training-induced memory enhancement, and whether age-related activity changes are associated with the size of training-related gains. Here, we demonstrate that younger adults show increased activity during memory encoding in occipito-parietal and frontal brain regions after learning the mnemonic. Older adults did not show increased frontal activity, and only those elderly persons who benefited from the mnemonic showed increased occipitoparietal activity. These findings suggest that age-related differences in cognitive reserve capacity may reflect both a frontal processing deficiency and a posterior production deficiency.
  • Obleser, J., & Eisner, F. (2009). Pre-lexical abstraction of speech in the auditory cortex. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 14-19. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.09.005.

    Abstract

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

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  • Ogasawara, N., & Warner, N. (2009). Processing missing vowels: Allophonic processing in Japanese. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24, 376 -411. doi:10.1080/01690960802084028.

    Abstract

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

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  • Ogdie, M. N., MacPhie, I. L., Minassian, S. L., Yang, M., Fisher, S. E., Francks, C., Cantor, R. M., McCracken, J. T., McGough, J. J., Nelson, S. F., Monaco, A. P., & Smalley, S. L. (2003). A genomewide scan for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in an extended sample: Suggestive linkage on 17p11. American Journal of Human Genetics, 72(5), 1268-1279. doi:10.1086/375139.

    Abstract

    Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD [MIM 143465]) is a common, highly heritable neurobehavioral disorder of childhood onset, characterized by hyperactivity, impulsivity, and/or inattention. As part of an ongoing study of the genetic etiology of ADHD, we have performed a genomewide linkage scan in 204 nuclear families comprising 853 individuals and 270 affected sibling pairs (ASPs). Previously, we reported genomewide linkage analysis of a “first wave” of these families composed of 126 ASPs. A follow-up investigation of one region on 16p yielded significant linkage in an extended sample. The current study extends the original sample of 126 ASPs to 270 ASPs and provides linkage analyses of the entire sample, using polymorphic microsatellite markers that define an ∼10-cM map across the genome. Maximum LOD score (MLS) analysis identified suggestive linkage for 17p11 (MLS=2.98) and four nominal regions with MLS values >1.0, including 5p13, 6q14, 11q25, and 20q13. These data, taken together with the fine mapping on 16p13, suggest two regions as highly likely to harbor risk genes for ADHD: 16p13 and 17p11. Interestingly, both regions, as well as 5p13, have been highlighted in genomewide scans for autism.
  • Orfanidou, E., Adam, R., McQueen, J. M., & Morgan, G. (2009). Making sense of nonsense in British Sign Language (BSL): The contribution of different phonological parameters to sign recognition. Memory & Cognition, 37(3), 302-315. doi:10.3758/MC.37.3.302.

    Abstract

    Do all components of a sign contribute equally to its recognition? In the present study, misperceptions in the sign-spotting task (based on the word-spotting task; Cutler & Norris, 1988) were analyzed to address this question. Three groups of deaf signers of British Sign Language (BSL) with different ages of acquisition (AoA) saw BSL signs combined with nonsense signs, along with combinations of two nonsense signs. They were asked to spot real signs and report what they had spotted. We will present an analysis of false alarms to the nonsense-sign combinations—that is, misperceptions of nonsense signs as real signs (cf. van Ooijen, 1996). Participants modified the movement and handshape parameters more than the location parameter. Within this pattern, however, there were differences as a function of AoA. These results show that the theoretical distinctions between form-based parameters in sign-language models have consequences for online processing. Vowels and consonants have different roles in speech recognition; similarly, it appears that movement, handshape, and location parameters contribute differentially to sign recognition.
  • Otten, M., & Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2009). Does working memory capacity affect the ability to predict upcoming words in discourse? Brain Research, 1291, 92-101. doi:doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2009.07.042.

    Abstract

    Prior research has indicated that readers and listeners can use information in the prior discourse to rapidly predict specific upcoming words, as the text is unfolding. Here we used event-related potentials to explore whether the ability to make rapid online predictions depends on a reader's working memory capacity (WMC). Readers with low WMC were hypothesized to differ from high WMC readers either in their overall capability to make predictions (because of their lack of cognitive resources). High and low WMC participants read highly constraining stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun, mixed with coherent but essentially unpredictive ‘prime control’ control stories that contained the same content words as the predictive stories. To test whether readers were anticipating upcoming words, critical nouns were preceded by a determiner whose gender agreed or disagreed with the gender of the expected noun. In predictive stories, both high and low WMC readers displayed an early negative deflection (300–600 ms) to unexpected determiners, which was not present in prime control stories. Only the low WMC participants displayed an additional later negativity (900–1500 ms) to unexpected determiners. This pattern of results suggests that WMC does not influence the ability to anticipate upcoming words per se, but does change the way in which readers deal with information that disconfirms the generated prediction.
  • Paterson, K. B., Liversedge, S. P., Rowland, C. F., & Filik, R. (2003). Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles. Cognition, 89(3), 263-294. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00126-4.

    Abstract

    We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6–7 years, 8–10 years, 11–12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.
  • Petersson, K. M., Sandblom, J., Elfgren, C., & Ingvar, M. (2003). Instruction-specific brain activations during episodic encoding: A generalized level of processing effect. Neuroimage, 20, 1795-1810. doi:10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00414-2.

    Abstract

    In a within-subject design we investigated the levels-of-processing (LOP) effect using visual material in a behavioral and a corresponding PET study. In the behavioral study we characterize a generalized LOP effect, using pleasantness and graphical quality judgments in the encoding situation, with two types of visual material, figurative and nonfigurative line drawings. In the PET study we investigate the related pattern of brain activations along these two dimensions. The behavioral results indicate that instruction and material contribute independently to the level of recognition performance. Therefore the LOP effect appears to stem both from the relative relevance of the stimuli (encoding opportunity) and an altered processing of stimuli brought about by the explicit instruction (encoding mode). In the PET study, encoding of visual material under the pleasantness (deep) instruction yielded left lateralized frontoparietal and anterior temporal activations while surface-based perceptually oriented processing (shallow instruction) yielded right lateralized frontoparietal, posterior temporal, and occipitotemporal activations. The result that deep encoding was related to the left prefrontal cortex while shallow encoding was related to the right prefrontal cortex, holding the material constant, is not consistent with the HERA model. In addition, we suggest that the anterior medial superior frontal region is related to aspects of self-referential semantic processing and that the inferior parts of the anterior cingulate as well as the medial orbitofrontal cortex is related to affective processing, in this case pleasantness evaluation of the stimuli regardless of explicit semantic content. Finally, the left medial temporal lobe appears more actively engaged by elaborate meaning-based processing and the complex response pattern observed in different subregions of the MTL lends support to the suggestion that this region is functionally segregated.
  • Pijnacker, J., Geurts, B., Van Lambalgen, M., Kan, C. C., Buitelaar, J. K., & Hagoort, P. (2009). Defeasible reasoning in high-functioning adults with autism: Evidence for impaired exception-handling. Neuropsychologia, 47, 644-651. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.11.011.

    Abstract

    While autism is one of the most intensively researched psychiatric disorders, little is known about reasoning skills of people with autism. The focus of this study was on defeasible inferences, that is inferences that can be revised in the light of new information. We used a behavioral task to investigate (a) conditional reasoning and (b) the suppression of conditional inferences in high-functioning adults with autism. In the suppression task a possible exception was made salient which could prevent a conclusion from being drawn. We predicted that the autism group would have difficulties dealing with such exceptions because they require mental flexibility to adjust to the context, which is often impaired in autism. The findings confirm our hypothesis that high-functioning adults with autism have a specific difficulty with exception-handling during reasoning. It is suggested that defeasible reasoning is also involved in other cognitive domains. Implications for neural underpinnings of reasoning and autism are discussed.
  • Pijnacker, J., Hagoort, P., Buitelaar, J., Teunisse, J.-P., & Geurts, B. (2009). Pragmatic inferences in high-functioning adults with autism and Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39(4), 607-618. doi:10.1007/s10803-008-0661-8.

    Abstract

    Although people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have severe problems with pragmatic aspects of language, little is known about their pragmatic reasoning. We carried out a behavioral study on highfunctioning adults with autistic disorder (n = 11) and Asperger syndrome (n = 17) and matched controls (n = 28) to investigate whether they are capable of deriving scalar implicatures, which are generally considered to be pragmatic inferences. Participants were presented with underinformative sentences like ‘‘Some sparrows are birds’’. This sentence is logically true, but pragmatically inappropriate if the scalar implicature ‘‘Not all sparrows are birds’’ is derived. The present findings indicate that the combined ASD group was just as likely as controls to derive scalar implicatures, yet there was a difference between participants with autistic disorder and Asperger syndrome, suggesting a potential differentiation between these disorders in pragmatic reasoning. Moreover, our results suggest that verbal intelligence is a constraint for task performance in autistic disorder but not in Asperger syndrome.
  • Poletiek, F. H., & Van Schijndel, T. J. P. (2009). Stimulus set size and statistical coverage of the grammar in artificial grammar learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(6), 1058-1064. doi:10.3758/PBR.16.6.1058.

    Abstract

    Adults and children acquire knowledge of the structure of their environment on the basis of repeated exposure to samples of structured stimuli. In the study of inductive learning, a straightforward issue is how much sample information is needed to learn the structure. The present study distinguishes between two measures for the amount of information in the sample: set size and the extent to which the set of exemplars statistically covers the underlying structure. In an artificial grammar learning experiment, learning was affected by the sample’s statistical coverage of the grammar, but not by its mere size. Our result suggests an alternative explanation of the set size effects on learning found in previous studies (McAndrews & Moscovitch, 1985; Meulemans & Van der Linden, 1997), because, as we argue, set size was confounded with statistical coverage in these studies. nt]mis|This research was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We thank Jarry Porsius for his help with the data analyses.
  • Poletiek, F. H. (2009). Popper's Severity of Test as an intuitive probabilistic model of hypothesis testing. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(1), 99-100. doi:10.1017/S0140525X09000454.
  • Poletiek, F. H., & Wolters, G. (2009). What is learned about fragments in artificial grammar learning? A transitional probabilities approach. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62(5), 868-876. doi:10.1080/17470210802511188.

    Abstract

    Learning local regularities in sequentially structured materials is typically assumed to be based on encoding of the frequencies of these regularities. We explore the view that transitional probabilities between elements of chunks, rather than frequencies of chunks, may be the primary factor in artificial grammar learning (AGL). The transitional probability model (TPM) that we propose is argued to provide an adaptive and parsimonious strategy for encoding local regularities in order to induce sequential structure from an input set of exemplars of the grammar. In a variant of the AGL procedure, in which participants estimated the frequencies of bigrams occurring in a set of exemplars they had been exposed to previously, participants were shown to be more sensitive to local transitional probability information than to mere pattern frequencies.
  • Powlesland, A. S., Hitchen, P. G., Parry, S., Graham, S. A., Barrio, M. M., Elola, M. T., Mordoh, J., Dell, A., Drickamer, K., & Taylor, M. E. (2009). Targeted glycoproteomic identification of cancer cell glycosylation. Glycobiology, 9, 899-909. doi:10.1093/glycob/cwp065.

    Abstract

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

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  • Praamstra, P., Meyer, A. S., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Neurophysiological manifestations of auditory phonological processing: Latency variation of a negative ERP component timelocked to phonological mismatch. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 6(3), 204-219. doi:10.1162/jocn.1994.6.3.204.

    Abstract

    Two experiments examined phonological priming effects on reaction times, error rates, and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures in an auditory lexical decision task. In Experiment 1 related prime-target pairs rhymed, and in Experiment 2 they alliterated (i.e., shared the consonantal onset and vowel). Event-related potentials were recorded in a delayed response task. Reaction times and error rates were obtained both for the delayed and an immediate response task. The behavioral data of Experiment 1 provided evidence for phonological facilitation of word, but not of nonword decisions. The brain potentials were more negative to unrelated than to rhyming word-word pairs between 450 and 700 msec after target onset. This negative enhancement was not present for word-nonword pairs. Thus, the ERP results match the behavioral data. The behavioral data of Experiment 2 provided no evidence for phonological Facilitation. However, between 250 and 450 msec after target onset, i.e., considerably earlier than in Experiment 1, brain potentials were more negative for unrelated than for alliterating word and word-nonword pairs. It is argued that the ERP effects in the two experiments could be modulations of the same underlying component, possibly the N400. The difference in the timing of the effects is likely to be due to the fact that the shared segments in related stimulus pairs appeared in different word positions in the two experiments.
  • Protopapas, A., & Gerakaki, S. (2009). Development of processing stress diacritics in reading Greek. Scientific Studies of Reading, 13(6), 453-483. doi:10.1080/10888430903034788.

    Abstract

    In Greek orthography, stress position is marked with a diacritic. We investigated the developmental course of processing the stress diacritic in Grades 2 to 4. Ninety children read 108 pseudowords presented without or with a diacritic either in the same or in a different position relative to the source word. Half of the pseudowords resembled the words they were derived from. Results showed that lexical sources of stress assignment were active in Grade 2 and remained stronger than the diacritic through Grade 4. The effect of the diacritic increased more rapidly and approached the lexical effect with increasing grade. In a second experiment, 90 children read 54 words and 54 pseudowords. The pattern of results for words was similar to that for nonwords suggesting that findings regarding stress assignment using nonwords may generalize to word reading. Decoding of the diacritic does not appear to be the preferred option for developing readers.
  • Pylkkänen, L., Martin, A. E., McElree, B., & Smart, A. (2009). The Anterior Midline Field: Coercion or decision making? Brain and Language, 108(3), 184-190. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.06.006.

    Abstract

    To study the neural bases of semantic composition in language processing without confounds from syntactic composition, recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies have investigated the processing of constructions that exhibit some type of syntax-semantics mismatch. The most studied case of such a mismatch is complement coercion; expressions such as the author began the book, where an entity-denoting noun phrase is coerced into an eventive meaning in order to match the semantic properties of the event-selecting verb (e.g., ‘the author began reading/writing the book’). These expressions have been found to elicit increased activity in the Anterior Midline Field (AMF), an MEG component elicited at frontomedial sensors at ∼400 ms after the onset of the coercing noun [Pylkkänen, L., & McElree, B. (2007). An MEG study of silent meaning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 11]. Thus, the AMF constitutes a potential neural correlate of coercion. However, the AMF was generated in ventromedial prefrontal regions, which are heavily associated with decision-making. This raises the possibility that, instead of semantic processing, the AMF effect may have been related to the experimental task, which was a sensicality judgment. We tested this hypothesis by assessing the effect of coercion when subjects were simply reading for comprehension, without a decision-task. Additionally, we investigated coercion in an adjectival rather than a verbal environment to further generalize the findings. Our results show that an AMF effect of coercion is elicited without a decision-task and that the effect also extends to this novel syntactic environment. We conclude that in addition to its role in non-linguistic higher cognition, ventromedial prefrontal regions contribute to the resolution of syntax-semantics mismatches in language processing.
  • Qin, S., Rijpkema, M., Tendolkar, I., Piekema, C., Hermans, E. J., Binder, M., Petersson, K. M., Luo, J., & Fernández, G. (2009). Dissecting medial temporal lobe contributions to item and associative memory formation. NeuroImage, 46, 874-881. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.02.039.

    Abstract

    A fundamental and intensively discussed question is whether medial temporal lobe (MTL) processes that lead to non-associative item memories differ in their anatomical substrate from processes underlying associative memory formation. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we implemented a novel design to dissociate brain activity related to item and associative memory formation not only by subsequent memory performance and anatomy but also in time, because the two constituents of each pair to be memorized were presented sequentially with an intra-pair delay of several seconds. Furthermore, the design enabled us to reduce potential differences in memory strength between item and associative memory by increasing task difficulty in the item recognition memory test. Confidence ratings for correct item recognition for both constituents did not differ between trials in which only item memory was correct and trials in which item and associative memory were correct. Specific subsequent memory analyses for item and associative memory formation revealed brain activity that appears selectively related to item memory formation in the posterior inferior temporal, posterior parahippocampal, and perirhinal cortices. In contrast, hippocampal and inferior prefrontal activity predicted successful retrieval of newly formed inter-item associations. Our findings therefore suggest that different MTL subregions indeed play distinct roles in the formation of item memory and inter-item associative memory as expected by several dual process models of the MTL memory system.
  • Reesink, G., Singer, R., & Dunn, M. (2009). Explaining the linguistic diversity of Sahul using population models. PLoS Biology, 7(11), e1000241. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000241.

    Abstract

    The region of the ancient Sahul continent (present day Australia and New Guinea, and surrounding islands) is home to extreme linguistic diversity. Even apart from the huge Austronesian language family, which spread into the area after the breakup of the Sahul continent in the Holocene, there are hundreds of languages from many apparently unrelated families. On each of the subcontinents, the generally accepted classification recognizes one large, widespread family and a number of unrelatable smaller families. If these language families are related to each other, it is at a depth which is inaccessible to standard linguistic methods. We have inferred the history of structural characteristics of these languages under an admixture model, using a Bayesian algorithm originally developed to discover populations on the basis of recombining genetic markers. This analysis identifies 10 ancestral language populations, some of which can be identified with clearly defined phylogenetic groups. The results also show traces of early dispersals, including hints at ancient connections between Australian languages and some Papuan groups (long hypothesized, never before demonstrated). Systematic language contact effects between members of big phylogenetic groups are also detected, which can in some cases be identified with a diffusional or substrate signal. Most interestingly, however, there remains striking evidence of a phylogenetic signal, with many languages showing negligible amounts of admixture.
  • Reis, A., Guerreiro, M., & Petersson, K. M. (2003). A sociodemographic and neuropsychological characterization of an illiterate population. Applied Neuropsychology, 10, 191-204. doi:10.1207/s15324826an1004_1.

    Abstract

    The objectives of this article are to characterize the performance and to discuss the performance differences between literate and illiterate participants in a well-defined study population.We describe the participant-selection procedure used to investigate this population. Three groups with similar sociocultural backgrounds living in a relatively homogeneous fishing community in southern Portugal were characterized in terms of socioeconomic and sociocultural background variables and compared on a simple neuropsychological test battery; specifically, a literate group with more than 4 years of education (n = 9), a literate group with 4 years of education (n = 26), and an illiterate group (n = 31) were included in this study.We compare and discuss our results with other similar studies on the effects of literacy and illiteracy. The results indicate that naming and identification of real objects, verbal fluency using ecologically relevant semantic criteria, verbal memory, and orientation are not affected by literacy or level of formal education. In contrast, verbal working memory assessed with digit span, verbal abstraction, long-term semantic memory, and calculation (i.e., multiplication) are significantly affected by the level of literacy. We indicate that it is possible, with proper participant-selection procedures, to exclude general cognitive impairment and to control important sociocultural factors that potentially could introduce bias when studying the specific effects of literacy and level of formal education on cognitive brain function.
  • Reis, A., & Petersson, K. M. (2003). Educational level, socioeconomic status and aphasia research: A comment on Connor et al. (2001)- Effect of socioeconomic status on aphasia severity and recovery. Brain and Language, 87, 449-452. doi:10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00140-8.

    Abstract

    Is there a relation between socioeconomic factors and aphasia severity and recovery? Connor, Obler, Tocco, Fitzpatrick, and Albert (2001) describe correlations between the educational level and socioeconomic status of aphasic subjects with aphasia severity and subsequent recovery. As stated in the introduction by Connor et al. (2001), studies of the influence of educational level and literacy (or illiteracy) on aphasia severity have yielded conflicting results, while no significant link between socioeconomic status and aphasia severity and recovery has been established. In this brief note, we will comment on their findings and conclusions, beginning first with a brief review of literacy and aphasia research, and complexities encountered in these fields of investigation. This serves as a general background to our specific comments on Connor et al. (2001), which will be focusing on methodological issues and the importance of taking normative values in consideration when subjects with different socio-cultural or socio-economic backgrounds are assessed.
  • Richards, J. B., Waterworth, D., O'Rahilly, S., Hivert, M.-F., Loos, R. J. F., Perry, J. R. B., Tanaka, T., Timpson, N. J., Semple, R. K., Soranzo, N., Song, K., Rocha, N., Grundberg, E., Dupuis, J., Florez, J. C., Langenberg, C., Prokopenko, I., Saxena, R., Sladek, R., Aulchenko, Y. and 47 moreRichards, J. B., Waterworth, D., O'Rahilly, S., Hivert, M.-F., Loos, R. J. F., Perry, J. R. B., Tanaka, T., Timpson, N. J., Semple, R. K., Soranzo, N., Song, K., Rocha, N., Grundberg, E., Dupuis, J., Florez, J. C., Langenberg, C., Prokopenko, I., Saxena, R., Sladek, R., Aulchenko, Y., Evans, D., Waeber, G., Erdmann, J., Burnett, M.-S., Sattar, N., Devaney, J., Willenborg, C., Hingorani, A., Witteman, J. C. M., Vollenweider, P., Glaser, B., Hengstenberg, C., Ferrucci, L., Melzer, D., Stark, K., Deanfield, J., Winogradow, J., Grassl, M., Hall, A. S., Egan, J. M., Thompson, J. R., Ricketts, S. L., König, I. R., Reinhard, W., Grundy, S., Wichmann, H.-E., Barter, P., Mahley, R., Kesaniemi, Y. A., Rader, D. J., Reilly, M. P., Epstein, S. E., Stewart, A. F. R., Van Duijn, C. M., Schunkert, H., Burling, K., Deloukas, P., Pastinen, T., Samani, N. J., McPherson, R., Davey Smith, G., Frayling, T. M., Wareham, N. J., Meigs, J. B., Mooser, V., Spector, T. D., & Consortium, G. (2009). A genome-wide association study reveals variants in ARL15 that influence adiponectin levels. PLoS Genetics, 5(12): e1000768. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000768.

    Abstract

    The adipocyte-derived protein adiponectin is highly heritable and inversely associated with risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) and coronary heart disease (CHD). We meta-analyzed 3 genome-wide association studies for circulating adiponectin levels (n = 8,531) and sought validation of the lead single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 5 additional cohorts (n = 6,202). Five SNPs were genome-wide significant in their relationship with adiponectin (P<} or =5x10(-8)). We then tested whether these 5 SNPs were associated with risk of T2D and CHD using a Bonferroni-corrected threshold of P{< or =0.011 to declare statistical significance for these disease associations. SNPs at the adiponectin-encoding ADIPOQ locus demonstrated the strongest associations with adiponectin levels (P-combined = 9.2x10(-19) for lead SNP, rs266717, n = 14,733). A novel variant in the ARL15 (ADP-ribosylation factor-like 15) gene was associated with lower circulating levels of adiponectin (rs4311394-G, P-combined = 2.9x10(-8), n = 14,733). This same risk allele at ARL15 was also associated with a higher risk of CHD (odds ratio [OR] = 1.12, P = 8.5x10(-6), n = 22,421) more nominally, an increased risk of T2D (OR = 1.11, P = 3.2x10(-3), n = 10,128), and several metabolic traits. Expression studies in humans indicated that ARL15 is well-expressed in skeletal muscle. These findings identify a novel protein, ARL15, which influences circulating adiponectin levels and may impact upon CHD risk.
  • Roelofs, A. (2003). Shared phonological encoding processes and representations of languages in bilingual speakers. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(2), 175-204. doi:10.1080/01690960143000515.

    Abstract

    Four form-preparation experiments investigated whether aspects of phonological encoding processes and representations are shared between languages in bilingual speakers. The participants were Dutch--English bilinguals. Experiment 1 showed that the basic rightward incrementality revealed in studies for the first language is also observed for second-language words. In Experiments 2 and 3, speakers were given words to produce that did or did not share onset segments, and that came or did not come from different languages. It was found that when onsets were shared among the response words, those onsets were prepared, even when the words came from different languages. Experiment 4 showed that preparation requires prior knowledge of the segments and that knowledge about their phonological features yields no effect. These results suggest that both first- and second-language words are phonologically planned through the same serial order mechanism and that the representations of segments common to the languages are shared.
  • Roelofs, A. (2003). Goal-referenced selection of verbal action: Modeling attentional control in the Stroop task. Psychological Review, 110(1), 88-125.

    Abstract

    This article presents a new account of the color-word Stroop phenomenon ( J. R. Stroop, 1935) based on an implemented model of word production, WEAVER++ ( W. J. M. Levelt, A. Roelofs, & A. S. Meyer, 1999b; A. Roelofs, 1992, 1997c). Stroop effects are claimed to arise from processing interactions within the language-production architecture and explicit goal-referenced control. WEAVER++ successfully simulates 16 classic data sets, mostly taken from the review by C. M. MacLeod (1991), including incongruency, congruency, reverse-Stroop, response-set, semantic-gradient, time-course, stimulus, spatial, multiple-task, manual, bilingual, training, age, and pathological effects. Three new experiments tested the account against alternative explanations. It is shown that WEAVER++ offers a more satisfactory account of the data than other models.
  • Rossi, G. (2009). Il discorso scritto interattivo degli SMS: Uno studio pragmatico del "messaggiare". Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia, 33, 143-193. doi:10.1400/148734.
  • Rowland, C. F., Pine, J. M., Lieven, E. V., & Theakston, A. L. (2003). Determinants of acquisition order in wh-questions: Re-evaluating the role of caregiver speech. Journal of Child Language, 30(3), 609-635. doi:10.1017/S0305000903005695.

    Abstract

    Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguistic factors; the syntactic function of the wh-word that heads the question and the semantic generality (or ‘lightness’) of the main verb (Bloom, Merkin & Wootten, 1982; Bloom, 1991). Another more recent view, however, is that acquisition is influenced by the relative frequency with which children hear particular wh-words and verbs in their input (e.g. Rowland & Pine, 2000). In the present study over 300 hours of naturalistic data from twelve two- to three-year-old children and their mothers were analysed in order to assess the relative contribution of complexity and input frequency to wh-question acquisition. The analyses revealed, first, that the acquisition order of wh-questions could be predicted successfully from the frequency with which particular wh-words and verbs occurred in the children's input and, second, that syntactic and semantic complexity did not reliably predict acquisition once input frequency was taken into account. These results suggest that the relationship between acquisition and complexity may be a by-product of the high correlation between complexity and the frequency with which mothers use particular wh-words and verbs. We interpret the results in terms of a constructivist view of language acquisition.
  • Rowland, C. F., & Theakston, A. L. (2009). The acquisition of auxiliary syntax: A longitudinal elicitation study. Part 2: The modals and auxiliary DO. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52, 1471-1492. doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2009/08-0037a).

    Abstract

    Purpose: The study of auxiliary acquisition is central to work on language development and has attracted theoretical work from both nativist and constructivist approaches. This study is part of a 2-part companion set that represents a unique attempt to trace the development of auxiliary syntax by using a longitudinal elicitation methodology. The aim of the research described in this part is to track the development of modal auxiliaries and auxiliary DO in questions and declaratives to provide a more complete picture of the development of the auxiliary system in English-speaking children. Method: Twelve English-speaking children participated in 2 tasks designed to elicit auxiliaries CAN, WILL, and DOES in declaratives and yes/no questions. They completed each task 6 times in total between the ages of 2;10 (years;months) and 3;6. Results: The children’s levels of correct use of the target auxiliaries differed in complex ways according to auxiliary, polarity, and sentence structure, and these relations changed over development. An analysis of the children’s errors also revealed complex interactions between these factors. Conclusions: These data cannot be explained in full by existing theories of auxiliary acquisition. Researchers working within both generativist and constructivist frameworks need to develop more detailed theories of acquisition that predict the pattern of acquisition observed.
  • Rowland, C. F., & Pine, J. M. (2003). The development of inversion in wh-questions: a reply to Van Valin. Journal of Child Language, 30(1), 197-212. doi:10.1017/S0305000902005445.

    Abstract

    Van Valin (Journal of Child Language29, 2002, 161–75) presents a critique of Rowland & Pine (Journal of Child Language27, 2000, 157–81) and argues that the wh-question data from Adam (in Brown, A first language, Cambridge, MA, 1973) cannot be explained in terms of input frequencies as we suggest. Instead, he suggests that the data can be more successfully accounted for in terms of Role and Reference Grammar. In this note we re-examine the pattern of inversion and uninversion in Adam's wh-questions and argue that the RRG explanation cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain.
  • De Ruiter, J. P., Rossignol, S., Vuurpijl, L., Cunningham, D. W., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2003). SLOT: A research platform for investigating multimodal communication. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 35(3), 408-419.

    Abstract

    In this article, we present the spatial logistics task (SLOT) platform for investigating multimodal communication between 2 human participants. Presented are the SLOT communication task and the software and hardware that has been developed to run SLOT experiments and record the participants’ multimodal behavior. SLOT offers a high level of flexibility in varying the context of the communication and is particularly useful in studies of the relationship between pen gestures and speech. We illustrate the use of the SLOT platform by discussing the results of some early experiments. The first is an experiment on negotiation with a one-way mirror between the participants, and the second is an exploratory study of automatic recognition of spontaneous pen gestures. The results of these studies demonstrate the usefulness of the SLOT platform for conducting multimodal communication research in both human– human and human–computer interactions.
  • De Ruiter, L. E. (2009). The prosodic marking of topical referents in the German "Vorfeld" by children and adults. The Linguistic Review, 26, 329-354. doi:10.1515/tlir.2009.012.

    Abstract

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

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  • Salverda, A. P., Dahan, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2003). The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension. Cognition, 90(1), 51-89. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00139-2.

    Abstract

    Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process.
  • Sankoff, G., & Brown, P. (1976). The origins of syntax in discourse: A case study of Tok Pisin relatives. Language, 52(3), 631-666.

    Abstract

    The structure of relative clauses has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and a number of authors have carried out analyses of the syntax of relativization. In our investigation of syntactic structure and change in New Guinea Tok Pisin, we find that the basic processes involved in relativization have much broader discourse functions, and that relativization is only a special instance of the application of general ‘bracketing’ devices used in the organization of information. Syntactic structure, in this case, can be understood as a component of, and derivative from, discourse structure.
  • Scharenborg, O., ten Bosch, L., Boves, L., & Norris, D. (2003). Bridging automatic speech recognition and psycholinguistics: Extending Shortlist to an end-to-end model of human speech recognition [Letter to the editor]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 114, 3032-3035. doi:10.1121/1.1624065.

    Abstract

    This letter evaluates potential benefits of combining human speech recognition ~HSR! and automatic speech recognition by building a joint model of an automatic phone recognizer ~APR! and a computational model of HSR, viz., Shortlist @Norris, Cognition 52, 189–234 ~1994!#. Experiments based on ‘‘real-life’’ speech highlight critical limitations posed by some of the simplifying assumptions made in models of human speech recognition. These limitations could be overcome by avoiding hard phone decisions at the output side of the APR, and by using a match between the input and the internal lexicon that flexibly copes with deviations from canonical phonemic representations.
  • Scharenborg, O., Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2003). ‘Early recognition’ of words in continuous speech. Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, 2003 IEEE Workshop, 61-66. doi:10.1109/ASRU.2003.1318404.

    Abstract

    In this paper, we present an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a computational model of human speech recognition – SpeM – that is capable of computing ‘word activations’ during the recognition process, in addition to doing normal speech recognition, a task in which conventional ASR architectures only provide output after the end of an utterance. We explain the notion of word activation and show that it can be used for ‘early recognition’, i.e. recognising a word before the end of the word is available. Our ASR system was tested on 992 continuous speech utterances, each containing at least one target word: a city name of at least two syllables. The results show that early recognition was obtained for 72.8% of the target words that were recognised correctly. Also, it is shown that word activation can be used as an effective confidence measure.
  • Scheeringa, R., Petersson, K. M., Oostenveld, R., Norris, D. G., Hagoort, P., & Bastiaansen, M. C. M. (2009). Trial-by-trial coupling between EEG and BOLD identifies networks related to alpha and theta EEG power increases during working memory maintenance. Neuroimage, 44, 1224-1238. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.08.041.

    Abstract

    PET and fMRI experiments have previously shown that several brain regions in the frontal and parietal lobe are involved in working memory maintenance. MEG and EEG experiments have shown parametric increases with load for oscillatory activity in posterior alpha and frontal theta power. In the current study we investigated whether the areas found with fMRI can be associated with these alpha and theta effects by measuring simultaneous EEG and fMRI during a modified Sternberg task This allowed us to correlate EEG at the single trial level with the fMRI BOLD signal by forming a regressor based on single trial alpha and theta
    power estimates. We observed a right posterior, parametric alpha power increase, which was functionally related to decreases in BOLD in the primary visual cortex and in the posterior part of the right middle temporal gyrus. We relate this finding to the inhibition of neuronal activity that may interfere with WM maintenance. An observed parametric increase in frontal theta power was correlated to a decrease in BOLD in
    regions that together form the default mode network. We did not observe correlations between oscillatory EEG phenomena and BOLD in the traditional WM areas. In conclusion, the study shows that simultaneous EEG fMRI recordings can be successfully used to identify the emergence of functional networks in the brain during the execution of a cognitive task.
  • Schiller, N. O., Münte, T. F., Horemans, I., & Jansma, B. M. (2003). The influence of semantic and phonological factors on syntactic decisions: An event-related brain potential study. Psychophysiology, 40(6), 869-877. doi:10.1111/1469-8986.00105.

    Abstract

    During language production and comprehension, information about a word's syntactic properties is sometimes needed. While the decision about the grammatical gender of a word requires access to syntactic knowledge, it has also been hypothesized that semantic (i.e., biological gender) or phonological information (i.e., sound regularities) may influence this decision. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while native speakers of German processed written words that were or were not semantically and/or phonologically marked for gender. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants were faster in making a gender decision when words were semantically and/or phonologically gender marked than when this was not the case, although the phonological effects were less clear. In conclusion, our data provide evidence that even though participants performed a grammatical gender decision, this task can be influenced by semantic and phonological factors.
  • Schiller, N. O., Bles, M., & Jansma, B. M. (2003). Tracking the time course of phonological encoding in speech production: An event-related brain potential study on internal monitoring. Cognitive Brain Research, 17(3), 819-831. doi:10.1016/S0926-6410(03)00204-0.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the time course of phonological encoding during speech production planning. Previous research has shown that conceptual/semantic information precedes syntactic information in the planning of speech production and that syntactic information is available earlier than phonological information. Here, we studied the relative time courses of the two different processes within phonological encoding, i.e. metrical encoding and syllabification. According to one prominent theory of language production, metrical encoding involves the retrieval of the stress pattern of a word, while syllabification is carried out to construct the syllabic structure of a word. However, the relative timing of these two processes is underspecified in the theory. We employed an implicit picture naming task and recorded event-related brain potentials to obtain fine-grained temporal information about metrical encoding and syllabification. Results revealed that both tasks generated effects that fall within the time window of phonological encoding. However, there was no timing difference between the two effects, suggesting that they occur approximately at the same time.
  • Schiller, N. O., & Caramazza, A. (2003). Grammatical feature selection in noun phrase production: Evidence from German and Dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(1), 169-194. doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00508-9.

    Abstract

    In this study, we investigated grammatical feature selection during noun phrase production in German and Dutch. More specifically, we studied the conditions under which different grammatical genders select either the same or different determiners or suffixes. Pictures of one or two objects paired with a gender-congruent or a gender-incongruent distractor word were presented. Participants named the pictures using a singular or plural noun phrase with the appropriate determiner and/or adjective in German or Dutch. Significant effects of gender congruency were only obtained in the singular condition where the selection of determiners is governed by the target’s gender, but not in the plural condition where the determiner is identical for all genders. When different suffixes were to be selected in the gender-incongruent condition, no gender congruency effect was obtained. The results suggest that the so-called gender congruency effect is really a determiner congruency effect. The overall pattern of results is interpreted as indicating that grammatical feature selection is an automatic consequence of lexical node selection and therefore not subject to interference from other grammatical features. This implies that lexical node and grammatical feature selection operate with distinct principles.
  • Schiller, N., Horemans, I., Ganushchak, L. Y., & Koester, D. (2009). Event-related brain potentials during monitoring of speech errors. NeuroImage, 44, 520-530. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.09.019.

    Abstract

    When we perceive speech, our goal is to extract the meaning of the verbal message which includes semantic processing. However, how deeply do we process speech in different situations? In two experiments, native Dutch participants heard spoken sentences describing simultaneously presented pictures. Sentences either correctly described the pictures or contained an anomalous final word (i.e. a semantically or phonologically incongruent word). In the first experiment, spoken sentences were task-irrelevant and both anomalous conditions elicited similar centro-parietal N400s that were larger in amplitude than the N400 for the correct condition. In the second experiment, we ensured that participants processed the same stimuli semantically. In an early time window, we found similar phonological mismatch negativities for both anomalous conditions compared to the correct condition. These negativities were followed by an N400 that was larger for semantic than phonological errors. Together, these data suggest that we process speech semantically, even if the speech is task-irrelevant. Once listeners allocate more cognitive resources to the processing of speech, we suggest that they make predictions for upcoming words, presumably by means of the production system and an internal monitoring loop, to facilitate lexical processing of the perceived speech
  • Schoffelen, J.-M., & Gross, J. (2009). Source connectivity analysis with MEG and EEG. Human Brain Mapping, 30, 1857-1865. doi: 10.1002/hbm.20745.

    Abstract

    Interactions between functionally specialized brain regions are crucial for normal brain function. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) are techniques suited to capture these interactions, because they provide whole head measurements of brain activity in the millisecond range. More than one sensor picks up the activity of an underlying source. This field spread severely limits the utility of connectivity measures computed directly between sensor recordings. Consequentially, neuronal interactions should be studied on the level of the reconstructed sources. This article reviews several methods that have been applied to investigate interactions between brain regions in source space. We will mainly focus on the different measures used to quantify connectivity, and on the different strategies adopted to identify regions of interest. Despite various successful accounts of MEG and EEG source connectivity, caution with respect to the interpretation of the results is still warranted. This is due to the fact that effects of field spread can never be completely abolished in source space. However, in this very exciting and developing field of research this cautionary note should not discourage researchers from further investigation into the connectivity between neuronal sources.
  • Schuppler, B., van Doremalen, J., Scharenborg, O., Cranen, B., & Boves, L. (2009). Using temporal information for improving articulatory-acoustic feature classification. Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, IEEE 2009 Workshop, 70-75. doi:10.1109/ASRU.2009.5373314.

    Abstract

    This paper combines acoustic features with a high temporal and a high frequency resolution to reliably classify articulatory events of short duration, such as bursts in plosives. SVM classification experiments on TIMIT and SVArticulatory showed that articulatory-acoustic features (AFs) based on a combination of MFCCs derived from a long window of 25ms and a short window of 5ms that are both shifted with 2.5ms steps (Both) outperform standard MFCCs derived with a window of 25 ms and a shift of 10 ms (Baseline). Finally, comparison of the TIMIT and SVArticulatory results showed that for classifiers trained on data that allows for asynchronously changing AFs (SVArticulatory) the improvement from Baseline to Both is larger than for classifiers trained on data where AFs change simultaneously with the phone boundaries (TIMIT).
  • Scott, S. K., McGettigan, C., & Eisner, F. (2009). A little more conversation, a little less action: Candidate roles for motor cortex in speech perception. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(4), 295-302. doi:10.1038/nrn2603.

    Abstract

    The motor theory of speech perception assumes that activation of the motor system is essential in the perception of speech. However, deficits in speech perception and comprehension do not arise from damage that is restricted to the motor cortex, few functional imaging studies reveal activity in motor cortex during speech perception, and the motor cortex is strongly activated by many different sound categories. Here, we evaluate alternative roles for the motor cortex in spoken communication and suggest a specific role in sensorimotor processing in conversation. We argue that motor-cortex activation it is essential in joint speech, particularly for the timing of turn-taking.
  • Scott, L. J., Muglia, P., Kong, X. Q., Guan, W., Flickinger, M., Upmanyu, R., Tozzi, F., Li, J. Z., Burmeister, M., Absher, D., Thompson, R. C., Francks, C., Meng, F., Antoniades, A., Southwick, A. M., Schatzberg, A. F., Bunney, W. E., Barchas, J. D., Jones, E. G., Day, R. and 13 moreScott, L. J., Muglia, P., Kong, X. Q., Guan, W., Flickinger, M., Upmanyu, R., Tozzi, F., Li, J. Z., Burmeister, M., Absher, D., Thompson, R. C., Francks, C., Meng, F., Antoniades, A., Southwick, A. M., Schatzberg, A. F., Bunney, W. E., Barchas, J. D., Jones, E. G., Day, R., Matthews, K., McGuffin, P., Strauss, J. S., Kennedy, J. L., Middleton, L., Roses, A. D., Watson, S. J., Vincent, J. B., Myers, R. M., Farmer, A. E., Akil, H., Burns, D. K., & Boehnke, M. (2009). Genome-wide association and meta-analysis of bipolar disorder in individuals of European ancestry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(18), 7501-7506. doi:10.1073/pnas.0813386106.

    Abstract

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

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  • Segaert, K., Nygård, G. E., & Wagemans, J. (2009). Identification of everyday objects on the basis of kinetic contours. Vision Research, 49(4), 417-428. doi:10.1016/j.visres.2008.11.012.

    Abstract

    Using kinetic contours derived from everyday objects, we investigated how motion affects object identification. In order not to be distinguishable when static, kinetic contours were made from random dot displays consisting of two regions, inside and outside the object contour. In Experiment 1, the dots were moving in only one of two regions. The objects were identified nearly equally well as soon as the dots either in the figure or in the background started to move. RTs decreased with increasing motion coherence levels and were shorter for complex, less compact objects than for simple, more compact objects. In Experiment 2, objects could be identified when the dots were moving both in the figure and in the background with speed and direction differences between the two. A linear increase in either the speed difference or the direction difference caused a linear decrease in RT for correct identification. In addition, the combination of speed and motion differences appeared to be super-additive.
  • Seidl, A., Cristia, A., Bernard, A., & Onishi, K. H. (2009). Allophonic and phonemic contrasts in infants' learning of sound patterns. Language Learning and Development, 5, 191-202. doi:10.1080/15475440902754326.

    Abstract

    French-learning 11-month-old and English-learning 11- and 4-month-old infants were familiarized with consonant–vowel–consonant syllables in which the final consonants were dependent on whether the preceding vowel was oral or nasal. Oral and nasal vowels are present in the ambient language of all participants, but vowel nasality is phonemic (contrastive) in French and allophonic (noncontrastive) in English. After familiarization, infants heard novel syllables that either followed or violated the familiarized patterns. French-learning 11-month-olds and English-learning 4-month-olds displayed a reliable pattern of preference demonstrating learning and generalization of the patterns, while English-learning 11-month-olds oriented equally to syllables following and violating the familiarized patterns. The results are consistent with an experience-driven reduction of attention to allophonic contrasts by as early as 11 months, which influences phonotactic learning.
  • Seifart, F. (2003). Marqueurs de classe généraux et spécifiques en Miraña. Faits de Langues, 21, 121-132.
  • Sekine, K. (2009). Changes in frame of reference use across the preschool years: A longitudinal study of the gestures and speech produced during route descriptions. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24(2), 218-238. doi:10.1080/01690960801941327.

    Abstract

    This study longitudinally investigated developmental changes in the frame of reference used by children in their gestures and speech. Fifteen children, between 4 and 6 years of age, were asked once a year to describe their route home from their nursery school. When the children were 4 years old, they tended to produce gestures that directly and continuously indicated their actual route in a large gesture space. In contrast, as 6-year-olds, their gestures were segmented and did not match the actual route. Instead, at age 6, the children seemed to create a virtual space in front of themselves to symbolically describe their route. These results indicate that the use of frames of reference develops across the preschool years, shifting from an actual environmental to an abstract environmental frame of reference. Factors underlying the development of frame of reference, including verbal encoding skills and experience, are discussed.
  • Senft, G. (1994). Ein Vorschlag, wie man standardisiert Daten zum Thema 'Sprache, Kognition und Konzepte des Raumes' in verschiedenen Kulturen erheben kann. Linguistische Berichte, 154, 413-429.
  • Senft, G. (2009). [Review of the book Geschichten und Gesänge von der Insel Nias in Indonesien ed. by Johannes Maria Hämmerle]. Rundbrief - Forum für Mitglieder des Pazifik-Netzwerkes e.V., 78/09, 29-31.
  • Senft, G. (1994). [Review of the book Language, culture and society: An introduction by Zdenek Salzmann]. Man, 29, 756-757.
  • Senft, G. (2003). [Review of the book Representing space in Oceania: Culture in language and mind ed. by Giovanni Bennardo]. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 112, 169-171.
  • Senft, G. (1994). Grammaticalisation of body-part terms in Kilivila. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, 25, 98-99.
  • Senft, G. (1994). Spatial reference in Kilivila: The Tinkertoy Matching Games - A case study. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, 25, 55-93.
  • Senft, G. (1994). These 'Procrustean' feelings: Some of my problems in describing Kilivila. Semaian, 11, 86-105.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2009). Concerning the roots of transformational generative grammar [Review article]. Historiographia Linguistica, 36, 97-115. doi:10.1075/hl.36.1.05seu.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1976). Clitic pronoun clusters. Italian Linguistics, 2, 7-35.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1994). [Review of the Dictionary of St. Lucian Creole, part 1: Kweyol- English', part 2: English-Kweyol compiled by Jones E. Mondesir and ed. by Lawrence D. Carrington]. Linguistics, 32(1), 157-158. doi:10.1515/ling.1991.29.4.719.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1963). Naar aanleiding van Dr. F. Balk-Smit Duyzentkunst "De Grammatische Functie". Levende Talen, 219, 179-186.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1989). Neue Entwicklungen im Wahrheitsbegriff. Studia Leibnitiana, 21(2), 155-173.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2009). The clitics mechanism in French and Italian. Probus, 21(1), 83-142. doi:10.1515/prbs.2009.004.

    Abstract

    The article concentrates on the question of the composition, the internal ordering and the placement of clitic-clusters (C-clusters) in French and Italian, though clitic data from other languages are drawn in occasionally. The system proposed is top-down transformational, in the terms of Semantic Syntax (Seuren, Blackwell, 1996). Clitics are taken to originate in underlying structure as canonical argument terms or adverbial constituents of clauses. During the process of transformation from semantic to surface form, nonfocus, nonsubject, pronominal argument terms are assigned values for the features of animacy ([±an]), dative status ([±dat]) and reflexivity ([±refl]). On the basis of these, the rule feature cm, inducing clitic movement, is assigned or withheld. Plus-values increase, and minus-values reduce, the “semantic weight” of the clitics in question. Pronouns without the feature cm are not cliticised and stay in their canonical term position in their full phonological form. Pronouns with the feature cm are attached to the nearest verb form giving rise to clitic clusters, which accounts for the composition of well-formed C-clusters. The attachment of clitics to a cluster occurs in a fixed order, which accounts for the ordering of clitics in well-formed clusters. Branching directionality, together with a theory of complementation, accounts for the placement of C-clusters. Clitics often take on a reduced phonological form. It is argued that, in French and Italian, which are languages with a right-branching syntax and a left-branching flectional morphology, postverbal clitics, or enclitics, are part of left-branching structures and hence fit naturally into the morphology. They are best categorised as affixes. Occasionally, as in Italian glielo, dative clitics (e.g., gli) turn preceding lighter clitics (e.g., lo) into affixes, resulting in the left-branching structure glielo, where -lo is an affix. In a brief Intermezzo, instances are shown of the irregular but revealing lui-le-lui phenomenon in French, and its much less frequent analog in Italian. On these assumptions, supported by the official orthographies, the clitic systems of French and Italian largely coincide. This new analysis of the facts in question invites further reflection on the interface between syntax and morphology. The final section deals with reflexive clitics. There, the system begins to be unable to account for the observed facts. At this end, therefore, the system is allowed to remain fraying, till further research brings greater clarity.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1994). Soaps and serials. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 9(1), 131-149. doi:10.1075/jpcl.9.1.18seu.
  • Seuren, P. A. M., & Hamans, C. (2009). Semantic conditioning of syntactic rules: Evidentiality and auxiliation in English and Dutch. Folia Linguistica, 43(1), 135-169. doi:10.1515/FLIN.2009.004.

    Abstract

    Ever since the category of evidentiality has been identified in the verbal grammar of certain languages, it has been assumed that evidentiality plays no role in the grammars of those languages that have not incorporated it into their verb morphology or at least their verb clusters. The present paper attempts to show that even if evidentiality is not visible in the verbal grammar of English and Dutch, it appears to be a motivating factor, both historically and synchronically, in the process whereby evidential predicates are made to play a subordinate syntactic role with regard to their embedded subject clause. This process, known as AUXILIATION (Kuteva 2001), appears to manifest itself in a variety of, often successive, grammatical processes or rules, such as Subject-to-Subject Raising (the subject of the embedded clause becomes the subject of the main verb, as in John is likely to be late), V-ING (as in The man stopped breathing), Incorporation-by-Lowering (the evidential main verb is lowered on to the V-constituent of the embedded subject clause, as in John may have left), or Incorporation-by-Raising (also known as Predicate Raising), not or hardly attested in English but dominant in Dutch. A list is provided of those English (and Dutch) predicates that induce one of the above-mentioned auxiliation rules and it is checked how many of those have an evidential meaning. This is set off against evidential predicates that do not induce an auxiliation rule. It results that, for English and Dutch, lexical evidentiality is a powerful determinant for the induction of syntactic auxiliation.
  • Simon-Thomas, E. R., Keltner, D. J., Sauter, D., Sinicropi-Yao, L., & Abramson, A. (2009). The voice conveys specific emotions: Evidence from vocal burst displays. Emotion, 9, 838-846. doi:10.1037/a0017810.

    Abstract

    Studies of emotion signaling inform claims about the taxonomic structure, evolutionary origins, and physiological correlates of emotions. Emotion vocalization research has tended to focus on a limited set of emotions: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, happiness, and for the voice, also tenderness. Here, we examine how well brief vocal bursts can communicate 22 different emotions: 9 negative (Study 1) and 13 positive (Study 2), and whether prototypical vocal bursts convey emotions more reliably than heterogeneous vocal bursts (Study 3). Results show that vocal bursts communicate emotions like anger, fear, and sadness, as well as seldom-studied states like awe, compassion, interest, and embarrassment. Ancillary analyses reveal family-wise patterns of vocal burst expression. Errors in classification were more common within emotion families (e.g., ‘self-conscious,’ ‘pro-social’) than between emotion families. The three studies reported highlight the voice as a rich modality for emotion display that can inform fundamental constructs about emotion.
  • Smith, M. R., Cutler, A., Butterfield, S., & Nimmo-Smith, I. (1989). The perception of rhythm and word boundaries in noise-masked speech. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 32, 912-920.

    Abstract

    The present experiment tested the suggestion that human listeners may exploit durational information in speech to parse continuous utterances into words. Listeners were presented with six-syllable unpredictable utterances under noise-masking, and were required to judge between alternative word strings as to which best matched the rhythm of the masked utterances. For each utterance there were four alternative strings: (a) an exact rhythmic and word boundary match, (b) a rhythmic mismatch, and (c) two utterances with the same rhythm as the masked utterance, but different word boundary locations. Listeners were clearly able to perceive the rhythm of the masked utterances: The rhythmic mismatch was chosen significantly less often than any other alternative. Within the three rhythmically matched alternatives, the exact match was chosen significantly more often than either word boundary mismatch. Thus, listeners both perceived speech rhythm and used durational cues effectively to locate the position of word boundaries.
  • Smits, R., Warner, N., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2003). Unfolding of phonetic information over time: A database of Dutch diphone perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113(1), 563-574. doi:10.1121/1.1525287.

    Abstract

    We present the results of a large-scale study on speech perception, assessing the number and type of perceptual hypotheses which listeners entertain about possible phoneme sequences in their language. Dutch listeners were asked to identify gated fragments of all 1179 diphones of Dutch, providing a total of 488 520 phoneme categorizations. The results manifest orderly uptake of acoustic information in the signal. Differences across phonemes in the rate at which fully correct recognition was achieved arose as a result of whether or not potential confusions could occur with other phonemes of the language ~long with short vowels, affricates with their initial components, etc.!. These data can be used to improve models of how acoustic phonetic information is mapped onto the mental lexicon during speech comprehension.
  • Snijders, T. M., Vosse, T., Kempen, G., Van Berkum, J. J. A., Petersson, K. M., & Hagoort, P. (2009). Retrieval and unification of syntactic structure in sentence comprehension: An fMRI study using word-category ambiguity. Cerebral Cortex, 19, 1493-1503. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn187.

    Abstract

    Sentence comprehension requires the retrieval of single word information from long-term memory, and the integration of this information into multiword representations. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging study explored the hypothesis that the left posterior temporal gyrus supports the retrieval of lexical-syntactic information, whereas left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) contributes to syntactic unification. Twenty-eight subjects read sentences and word sequences containing word-category (noun–verb) ambiguous words at critical positions. Regions contributing to the syntactic unification process should show enhanced activation for sentences compared to words, and only within sentences display a larger signal for ambiguous than unambiguous conditions. The posterior LIFG showed exactly this predicted pattern, confirming our hypothesis that LIFG contributes to syntactic unification. The left posterior middle temporal gyrus was activated more for ambiguous than unambiguous conditions (main effect over both sentences and word sequences), as predicted for regions subserving the retrieval of lexical-syntactic information from memory. We conclude that understanding language involves the dynamic interplay between left inferior frontal and left posterior temporal regions.

    Additional information

    suppl1.pdf suppl2_dutch_stimulus.pdf
  • Spinelli, E., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2003). Processing resyllabified words in French. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(2), 233-254. doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00513-2.
  • Stewart, A. J., Kidd, E., & Haigh, M. (2009). Early sensitivity to discourse-level anomalies: Evidence from self-paced reading. Discourse Processes, 46(1), 46-69. doi:10.1080/01638530802629091.

    Abstract

    Two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the speed with which readers were sensitive to discourse-level anomalies. An account arguing for delayed sensitivity (Guzman & Klin, 2000 Guzman, A. E. and Klin, C. M. 2000. Maintaining global coherence in reading: The role of sentence boundaries.. Memory & Cognition, 28: 722–730. [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) was contrasted with one allowing for rapid sensitivity (Myers & O'Brien, 1998 Myers, J. L. and O'Brien, E. J. 1998. Accessing the discourse representation during reading.. Discourse Processes, 26: 131–157. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). Anomalies related to spatial information (Experiment 1) and character-attribute information (Experiment 2) were examined. Both experiments found that readers displayed rapid sensitivity to the anomalous information. A reading time penalty was observed for the region of text containing the anomalous information. This finding is most compatible with an account of text processing whereby incoming words are rapidly evaluated with respect to prior context. They are not consistent with an account that argues for delayed integration. Results are discussed in light of their implications for competing models of text processing.
  • Stewart, A. J., Haigh, M., & Kidd, E. (2009). An investigation into the online processing of counterfactual and indicative conditionals. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62(11), 2113-2125. doi:10.1080/17470210902973106.

    Abstract

    The ability to represent conditional information is central to human cognition. In two self-paced reading experiments we investigated how readers process counterfactual conditionals (e.g., If Darren had been athletic, he could probably have played on the rugby team ) and indicative conditionals (e.g., If Darren is athletic, he probably plays on the rugby team ). In Experiment 1 we focused on how readers process counterfactual conditional sentences. We found that processing of the antecedent of counterfactual conditionals was rapidly constrained by prior context (i.e., knowing whether Darren was or was not athletic). A reading-time penalty was observed for the critical region of text comprising the last word of the antecedent and the first word of the consequent when the information in the antecedent did not fit with prior context. In Experiment 2 we contrasted counterfactual conditionals with indicative conditionals. For counterfactual conditionals we found the same effect on the critical region as we found in Experiment 1. In contrast, however, we found no evidence that processing of the antecedent of indicative conditionals was constrained by prior context. For indicative conditionals (but not for counterfactual conditionals), the results we report are consistent with the suppositional account of conditionals. We propose that current theories of conditionals need to be able to account for online processing differences between indicative and counterfactual conditionals
  • Stivers, T., Mangione-Smith, R., Elliott, M. N., McDonald, L., & Heritage, J. (2003). Why do physicians think parents expect antibiotics? What parents report vs what physicians believe. Journal of Family Practice, 52(2), 140-147.
  • Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., Hoymann, G., Rossano, F., De Ruiter, J. P., Yoon, K.-E., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106 (26), 10587-10592. doi:10.1073/pnas.0903616106.

    Abstract

    Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations.

    Additional information

    Stivers_2009_universals_suppl.pdf
  • Swaab, T., Brown, C. M., & Hagoort, P. (2003). Understanding words in sentence contexts: The time course of ambiguity resolution. Brain and Language, 86(2), 326-343. doi:10.1016/S0093-934X(02)00547-3.

    Abstract

    Spoken language comprehension requires rapid integration of information from multiple linguistic sources. In the present study we addressed the temporal aspects of this integration process by focusing on the time course of the selection of the appropriate meaning of lexical ambiguities (“bank”) in sentence contexts. Successful selection of the contextually appropriate meaning of the ambiguous word is dependent upon the rapid binding of the contextual information in the sentence to the appropriate meaning of the ambiguity. We used the N400 to identify the time course of this binding process. The N400 was measured to target words that followed three types of context sentences. In the concordant context, the sentence biased the meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous word so that it was related to the target. In the discordant context, the sentence context biased the meaning so that it was not related to the target. In the unrelated control condition, the sentences ended in an unambiguous noun that was unrelated to the target. Half of the concordant sentences biased the dominant meaning, and the other half biased the subordinate meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous words. The ISI between onset of the target word and offset of the sentence-final word of the context sentence was 100 ms in one version of the experiment, and 1250 ms in the second version. We found that (i) the lexically dominant meaning is always partly activated, independent of context, (ii) initially both dominant and subordinate meaning are (partly) activated, which suggests that contextual and lexical factors both contribute to sentence interpretation without context completely overriding lexical information, and (iii) strong lexical influences remain present for a relatively long period of time.

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