Publications

Displaying 101 - 200 of 783
  • Cronin, K. A., West, V., & Ross, S. R. (2016). Investigating the Relationship between Welfare and Rearing Young in Captive Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 181, 166-172. doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2016.05.014.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    mmc1.pdf
  • Croxson, P., Forkel, S. J., Cerliani, L., & Thiebaut De Schotten, M. (2018). Structural Variability Across the Primate Brain: A Cross-Species Comparison. Cerebral Cortex, 28(11), 3829-3841. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhx244.

    Abstract

    A large amount of variability exists across human brains; revealed initially on a small scale by postmortem studies and,
    more recently, on a larger scale with the advent of neuroimaging. Here we compared structural variability between human
    and macaque monkey brains using grey and white matter magnetic resonance imaging measures. The monkey brain was
    overall structurally as variable as the human brain, but variability had a distinct distribution pattern, with some key areas
    showing high variability. We also report the first evidence of a relationship between anatomical variability and evolutionary
    expansion in the primate brain. This suggests a relationship between variability and stability, where areas of low variability
    may have evolved less recently and have more stability, while areas of high variability may have evolved more recently and
    be less similar across individuals. We showed specific differences between the species in key areas, including the amount of
    hemispheric asymmetry in variability, which was left-lateralized in the human brain across several phylogenetically recent
    regions. This suggests that cerebral variability may be another useful measure for comparison between species and may add
    another dimension to our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms.
  • Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2016). Bottoms up! How top-down pitfalls ensnare speech perception researchers too. Commentary on C. Firestone & B. Scholl: Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the evidence for 'top-down' effects. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, e236. doi:10.1017/S0140525X15002745.

    Abstract

    Not only can the pitfalls that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) identify be generalised across multiple studies within the field of visual perception, but also they have general application outside the field wherever perceptual and cognitive processing are compared. We call attention to the widespread susceptibility of research on the perception of speech to versions of the same pitfalls.
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & Williams, J. (1987). A note on the role of phonological expectations in speech segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 480-487. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(87)90103-3.

    Abstract

    Word-initial CVC syllables are detected faster in words beginning consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV-) than in words beginning consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC-). This effect was reported independently by M. Taft and G. Hambly (1985, Journal of Memory and Language, 24, 320–335) and by A. Cutler, J. Mehler, D. Norris, and J. Segui (1986, Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 385–400). Taft and Hambly explained the effect in terms of lexical factors. This explanation cannot account for Cutler et al.'s results, in which the effect also appeared with nonwords and foreign words. Cutler et al. suggested that CVCV-sequences might simply be easier to perceive than CVCC-sequences. The present study confirms this suggestion, and explains it as a reflection of listener expectations constructed on the basis of distributional characteristics of the language.
  • Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Segui, J. (1987). Phoneme identification and the lexicon. Cognitive Psychology, 19, 141-177. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(87)90010-7.
  • Cutler, A. (1991). Proceed with caution. New Scientist, (1799), 53-54.
  • Cutler, A., Butterfield, S., & Williams, J. (1987). The perceptual integrity of syllabic onsets. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 406-418. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(87)90099-4.
  • Cutler, A., & Carter, D. (1987). The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary. Computer Speech and Language, 2, 133-142. doi:10.1016/0885-2308(87)90004-0.

    Abstract

    Studies of human speech processing have provided evidence for a segmentation strategy in the perception of continuous speech, whereby a word boundary is postulated, and a lexical access procedure initiated, at each metrically strong syllable. The likely success of this strategy was here estimated against the characteristics of the English vocabulary. Two computerized dictionaries were found to list approximately three times as many words beginning with strong syllables (i.e. syllables containing a full vowel) as beginning with weak syllables (i.e. syllables containing a reduced vowel). Consideration of frequency of lexical word occurrence reveals that words beginning with strong syllables occur on average more often than words beginning with weak syllables. Together, these findings motivate an estimate for everyday speech recognition that approximately 85% of lexical words (i.e. excluding function words) will begin with strong syllables. This estimate was tested against a corpus of 190 000 words of spontaneous British English conversion. In this corpus, 90% of lexical words were found to begin with strong syllables. This suggests that a strategy of postulating word boundaries at the onset of strong syllables would have a high success rate in that few actual lexical word onsets would be missed.
  • Cutler, A. (1987). The task of the speaker and the task of the hearer [Commentary/Sperber & Wilson: Relevance]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 715-716.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1991). Word boundary cues in clear speech: A supplementary report. Speech Communication, 10, 335-353. doi:10.1016/0167-6393(91)90002-B.

    Abstract

    One of a listener's major tasks in understanding continuous speech is segmenting the speech signal into separate words. When listening conditions are difficult, speakers can help listeners by deliberately speaking more clearly. In four experiments, we examined how word boundaries are produced in deliberately clear speech. In an earlier report we showed that speakers do indeed mark word boundaries in clear speech, by pausing at the boundary and lengthening pre-boundary syllables; moreover, these effects are applied particularly to boundaries preceding weak syllables. In English, listeners use segmentation procedures which make word boundaries before strong syllables easier to perceive; thus marking word boundaries before weak syllables in clear speech will make clear precisely those boundaries which are otherwise hard to perceive. The present report presents supplementary data, namely prosodic analyses of the syllable following a critical word boundary. More lengthening and greater increases in intensity were applied in clear speech to weak syllables than to strong. Mean F0 was also increased to a greater extent on weak syllables than on strong. Pitch movement, however, increased to a greater extent on strong syllables than on weak. The effects were, however, very small in comparison to the durational effects we observed earlier for syllables preceding the boundary and for pauses at the boundary.
  • Dai, B., Chen, C., Long, Y., Zheng, L., Zhao, H., Bai, X., Liu, W., Zhang, Y., Liu, L., Guo, T., Ding, G., & Lu, C. (2018). Neural mechanisms for selectively tuning into the target speaker in a naturalistic noisy situation. Nature Communications, 9: 2405. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04819-z.

    Abstract

    The neural mechanism for selectively tuning in to a target speaker while tuning out the others in a multi-speaker situation (i.e., the cocktail-party effect) remains elusive. Here we addressed this issue by measuring brain activity simultaneously from a listener and from multiple speakers while they were involved in naturalistic conversations. Results consistently show selectively enhanced interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) between the listener and the attended speaker at left temporal–parietal junction, compared with that between the listener and the unattended speaker across different multi-speaker situations. Moreover, INS increases significantly prior to the occurrence of verbal responses, and even when the listener’s brain activity precedes that of the speaker. The INS increase is independent of brain-to-speech synchronization in both the anatomical location and frequency range. These findings suggest that INS underlies the selective process in a multi-speaker situation through neural predictions at the content level but not the sensory level of speech.

    Additional information

    Dai_etal_2018_sup.pdf
  • Damian, M. F., & Abdel Rahman, R. (2003). Semantic priming in the naming of objects and famous faces. British Journal of Psychology, 94(4), 517-527.

    Abstract

    Researchers interested in face processing have recently debated whether access to the name of a known person occurs in parallel with retrieval of semantic-biographical codes, rather than in a sequential fashion. Recently, Schweinberger, Burton, and Kelly (2001) took a failure to obtain a semantic context effect in a manual syllable judgment task on names of famous faces as support for this position. In two experiments, we compared the effects of visually presented categorically related prime words with either objects (e.g. prime: animal; target: dog) or faces of celebrities (e.g. prime: actor; target: Bruce Willis) as targets. Targets were either manually categorized with regard to the number of syllables (as in Schweinberger et al.), or they were overtly named. For neither objects nor faces was semantic priming obtained in syllable decisions; crucially, however, priming was obtained when objects and faces were overtly named. These results suggest that both face and object naming are susceptible to semantic context effects
  • Dediu, D. (2016). A multi-layered problem. IEEE CDS Newsletter, 13, 14-15.

    Abstract

    A response to Moving Beyond Nature-Nurture: a Problem of Science or Communication? by John Spencer, Mark Blumberg and David Shenk
  • Dediu, D. (2018). Making genealogical language classifications available for phylogenetic analysis: Newick trees, unified identifiers, and branch length. Language Dynamics and Change, 8(1), 1-21. doi:10.1163/22105832-00801001.

    Abstract

    One of the best-known types of non-independence between languages is caused by genealogical relationships due to descent from a common ancestor. These can be represented by (more or less resolved and controversial) language family trees. In theory, one can argue that language families should be built through the strict application of the comparative method of historical linguistics, but in practice this is not always the case, and there are several proposed classifications of languages into language families, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. A major stumbling block shared by most of them is that they are relatively difficult to use with computational methods, and in particular with phylogenetics. This is due to their lack of standardization, coupled with the general non-availability of branch length information, which encapsulates the amount of evolution taking place on the family tree. In this paper I introduce a method (and its implementation in R) that converts the language classifications provided by four widely-used databases (Ethnologue, WALS, AUTOTYP and Glottolog) intothe de facto Newick standard generally used in phylogenetics, aligns the four most used conventions for unique identifiers of linguistic entities (ISO 639-3, WALS, AUTOTYP and Glottocode), and adds branch length information from a variety of sources (the tree's own topology, an externally given numeric constant, or a distance matrix). The R scripts, input data and resulting Newick trees are available under liberal open-source licenses in a GitHub repository (https://github.com/ddediu/lgfam-newick), to encourage and promote the use of phylogenetic methods to investigate linguistic diversity and its temporal dynamics.
  • Dediu, D., & de Boer, B. (2016). Language evolution needs its own journal. Journal of Language Evolution, 1, 1-6. doi:10.1093/jole/lzv001.

    Abstract

    Interest in the origins and evolution of language has been around for as long as language has been around. However, only recently has the empirical study of language come of age. We argue that the field has sufficiently advanced that it now needs its own journal—the Journal of Language Evolution.
  • Dediu, D., & Christiansen, M. H. (2016). Language evolution: Constraints and opportunities from modern genetics. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 361-370. doi:10.1111/tops.12195.

    Abstract

    Our understanding of language, its origins and subsequent evolution (including language change) is shaped not only by data and theories from the language sciences, but also fundamentally by the biological sciences. Recent developments in genetics and evolutionary theory offer both very strong constraints on what scenarios of language evolution are possible and probable but also offer exciting opportunities for understanding otherwise puzzling phenomena. Due to the intrinsic breathtaking rate of advancement in these fields, the complexity, subtlety and sometimes apparent non-intuitiveness of the phenomena discovered, some of these recent developments have either being completely missed by language scientists, or misperceived and misrepresented. In this short paper, we offer an update on some of these findings and theoretical developments through a selection of illustrative examples and discussions that cast new light on current debates in the language sciences. The main message of our paper is that life is much more complex and nuanced than anybody could have predicted even a few decades ago, and that we need to be flexible in our theorizing instead of embracing a priori dogmas and trying to patch paradigms that are no longer satisfactory.
  • Dediu, D., & Levinson, S. C. (2018). Neanderthal language revisited: Not only us. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 21, 49-55. doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.01.001.

    Abstract

    Here we re-evaluate our 2013 paper on the antiquity of language (Dediu and Levinson, 2013) in the light of a surge of new information on human evolution in the last half million years. Although new genetic data suggest the existence of some cognitive differences between Neanderthals and modern humans — fully expected after hundreds of thousands of years of partially separate evolution, overall our claims that Neanderthals were fully articulate beings and that language evolution was gradual are further substantiated by the wealth of new genetic, paleontological and archeological evidence briefly reviewed here.
  • Dediu, D. (2016). Typology for the masses. Linguistic typology, 20(3), 579-581. doi:10.1515/lingty-2016-0029.
  • Defina, R. (2016). Do serial verb constructions describe single events? A study of co-speech gestures in Avatime. Language, 92(4), 890-910. doi:10.1353/lan.2016.0076.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0069
  • Defina, R. (2016). Serial verb constructions and their subtypes in Avatime. Studies in Language, 40(3), 648-680. doi:10.1075/sl.40.3.07def.
  • Degand, L., & Van Bergen, G. (2018). Discourse markers as turn-transition devices: Evidence from speech and instant messaging. Discourse Processes, 55, 47-71. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2016.1198136.

    Abstract

    In this article we investigate the relation between discourse markers and turn-transition strategies in face-to-face conversations and Instant Messaging (IM), that is, unplanned, real-time, text-based, computer-mediated communication. By means of a quantitative corpus study of utterances containing a discourse marker, we show that utterance-final discourse markers are used more often in IM than in face-to-face conversations. Moreover, utterance-final discourse markers are shown to occur more often at points of turn-transition compared with points of turn-maintenance in both types of conversation. From our results we conclude that the discourse markers in utterance-final position can function as a turn-transition mechanism, signaling that the turn is over and the floor is open to the hearer. We argue that this linguistic turn-taking strategy is essentially similar in face-to-face and IM communication. Our results add to the evidence that communication in IM is more like speech than like writing.
  • Den Hoed, J., Sollis, E., Venselaar, H., Estruch, S. B., Derizioti, P., & Fisher, S. E. (2018). Functional characterization of TBR1 variants in neurodevelopmental disorder. Scientific Reports, 8: 14279. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-32053-6.

    Abstract

    Recurrent de novo variants in the TBR1 transcription factor are implicated in the etiology of sporadic autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Disruptions include missense variants located in the T-box DNA-binding domain and previous work has demonstrated that they disrupt TBR1 protein function. Recent screens of thousands of simplex families with sporadic ASD cases uncovered additional T-box variants in TBR1 but their etiological relevance is unclear. We performed detailed functional analyses of de novo missense TBR1 variants found in the T-box of ASD cases, assessing many aspects of protein function, including subcellular localization, transcriptional activity and protein-interactions. Only two of the three tested variants severely disrupted TBR1 protein function, despite in silico predictions that all would be deleterious. Furthermore, we characterized a putative interaction with BCL11A, a transcription factor that was recently implicated in a neurodevelopmental syndrome involving developmental delay and language deficits. Our findings enhance understanding of molecular functions of TBR1, as well as highlighting the importance of functional testing of variants that emerge from next-generation sequencing, to decipher their contributions to neurodevelopmental disorders like ASD.

    Additional information

    Electronic supplementary material
  • Devanna, P., Van de Vorst, M., Pfundt, R., Gilissen, C., & Vernes, S. C. (2018). Genome-wide investigation of an ID cohort reveals de novo 3′UTR variants affecting gene expression. Human Genetics, 137(9), 717-721. doi:10.1007/s00439-018-1925-9.

    Abstract

    Intellectual disability (ID) is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder with genetically heterogeneous causes. Large-scale sequencing has led to the identification of many gene-disrupting mutations; however, a substantial proportion of cases lack a molecular diagnosis. As such, there remains much to uncover for a complete understanding of the genetic underpinnings of ID. Genetic variants present in non-coding regions of the genome have been highlighted as potential contributors to neurodevelopmental disorders given their role in regulating gene expression. Nevertheless the functional characterization of non-coding variants remains challenging. We describe the identification and characterization of de novo non-coding variation in 3′UTR regulatory regions within an ID cohort of 50 patients. This cohort was previously screened for structural and coding pathogenic variants via CNV, whole exome and whole genome analysis. We identified 44 high-confidence single nucleotide non-coding variants within the 3′UTR regions of these 50 genomes. Four of these variants were located within predicted miRNA binding sites and were thus hypothesised to have regulatory consequences. Functional testing showed that two of the variants interfered with miRNA-mediated regulation of their target genes, AMD1 and FAIM. Both these variants were found in the same individual and their functional consequences may point to a potential role for such variants in intellectual disability.

    Additional information

    439_2018_1925_MOESM1_ESM.docx
  • Devanna, P., Chen, X. S., Ho, J., Gajewski, D., Smith, S. D., Gialluisi, A., Francks, C., Fisher, S. E., Newbury, D. F., & Vernes, S. C. (2018). Next-gen sequencing identifies non-coding variation disrupting miRNA binding sites in neurological disorders. Molecular Psychiatry, 23(5), 1375-1384. doi:10.1038/mp.2017.30.

    Abstract

    Understanding the genetic factors underlying neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders is a major challenge given their prevalence and potential severity for quality of life. While large-scale genomic screens have made major advances in this area, for many disorders the genetic underpinnings are complex and poorly understood. To date the field has focused predominantly on protein coding variation, but given the importance of tightly controlled gene expression for normal brain development and disorder, variation that affects non-coding regulatory regions of the genome is likely to play an important role in these phenotypes. Herein we show the importance of 3 prime untranslated region (3'UTR) non-coding regulatory variants across neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. We devised a pipeline for identifying and functionally validating putatively pathogenic variants from next generation sequencing (NGS) data. We applied this pipeline to a cohort of children with severe specific language impairment (SLI) and identified a functional, SLI-associated variant affecting gene regulation in cells and post-mortem human brain. This variant and the affected gene (ARHGEF39) represent new putative risk factors for SLI. Furthermore, we identified 3′UTR regulatory variants across autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder NGS cohorts demonstrating their impact on neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. Our findings show the importance of investigating non-coding regulatory variants when determining risk factors contributing to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. In the future, integration of such regulatory variation with protein coding changes will be essential for uncovering the genetic causes of complex neurological disorders and the fundamental mechanisms underlying health and disease

    Additional information

    mp201730x1.docx
  • Dias, C., Estruch, S. B., Graham, S. A., McRae, J., Sawiak, S. J., Hurst, J. A., Joss, S. K., Holder, S. E., Morton, J. E., Turner, C., Thevenon, J., Mellul, K., Sánchez-Andrade, G., Ibarra-Soria, X., Derizioti, P., Santos, R. F., Lee, S.-C., Faivre, L., Kleefstra, T., Liu, P. and 3 moreDias, C., Estruch, S. B., Graham, S. A., McRae, J., Sawiak, S. J., Hurst, J. A., Joss, S. K., Holder, S. E., Morton, J. E., Turner, C., Thevenon, J., Mellul, K., Sánchez-Andrade, G., Ibarra-Soria, X., Derizioti, P., Santos, R. F., Lee, S.-C., Faivre, L., Kleefstra, T., Liu, P., Hurles, M. E., DDD Study, Fisher, S. E., & Logan, D. W. (2016). BCL11A haploinsufficiency causes an intellectual disability syndrome and dysregulates transcription. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 99(2), 253-274. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2016.05.030.

    Abstract

    Intellectual disability (ID) is a common condition with considerable genetic heterogeneity. Next-generation sequencing of large cohorts has identified an increasing number of genes implicated in ID, but their roles in neurodevelopment remain largely unexplored. Here we report an ID syndrome caused by de novo heterozygous missense, nonsense, and frameshift mutations in BCL11A, encoding a transcription factor that is a putative member of the BAF swi/snf chromatin-remodeling complex. Using a comprehensive integrated approach to ID disease modeling, involving human cellular analyses coupled to mouse behavioral, neuroanatomical, and molecular phenotyping, we provide multiple lines of functional evidence for phenotypic effects. The etiological missense variants cluster in the amino-terminal region of human BCL11A, and we demonstrate that they all disrupt its localization, dimerization, and transcriptional regulatory activity, consistent with a loss of function. We show that Bcl11a haploinsufficiency in mice causes impaired cognition, abnormal social behavior, and microcephaly in accordance with the human phenotype. Furthermore, we identify shared aberrant transcriptional profiles in the cortex and hippocampus of these mouse models. Thus, our work implicates BCL11A haploinsufficiency in neurodevelopmental disorders and defines additional targets regulated by this gene, with broad relevance for our understanding of ID and related syndromes
  • Diaz, B., Mitterer, H., Broersma, M., Escara, C., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2016). Variability in L2 phonemic learning originates from speech-specific capabilities: An MMN study on late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19(5), 955-970. doi:10.1017/S1366728915000450.

    Abstract

    People differ in their ability to perceive second language (L2) sounds. In early bilinguals the variability in learning L2 phonemes stems from speech-specific capabilities (Díaz, Baus, Escera, Costa & Sebastián-Gallés, 2008). The present study addresses whether speech-specific capabilities similarly explain variability in late bilinguals. Event-related potentials were recorded (using a design similar to Díaz et al., 2008) in two groups of late Dutch–English bilinguals who were good or poor in overtly discriminating the L2 English vowels /ε-æ/. The mismatch negativity, an index of discrimination sensitivity, was similar between the groups in conditions involving pure tones (of different length, frequency, and presentation order) but was attenuated in poor L2 perceivers for native, unknown, and L2 phonemes. These results suggest that variability in L2 phonemic learning originates from speech-specific capabilities and imply a continuity of L2 phonemic learning mechanisms throughout the lifespan
  • Dima, A. L., & Dediu, D. (2016). Computation of Adherence to Medications and Visualization of Medication Histories in R with AdhereR: Towards Transparent and Reproducible Use of Electronic Healthcare Data. PLoS One, 12(4): e0174426. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0174426.

    Abstract

    Adherence to medications is an important indicator of the quality of medication management and impacts on health outcomes and cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery. Electronic healthcare data (EHD) are increasingly used to estimate adherence in research and clinical practice, yet standardization and transparency of data processing are still a concern. Comprehensive and flexible open-source algorithms can facilitate the development of high-quality, consistent, and reproducible evidence in this field. Some EHD-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) include visualization of medication histories, but this is rarely integrated in adherence analyses and not easily accessible for data exploration or implementation in new clinical settings. We introduce AdhereR, a package for the widely used open-source statistical environment R, designed to support researchers in computing EHD-based adherence estimates and in visualizing individual medication histories and adherence patterns. AdhereR implements a set of functions that are consistent with current adherence guidelines, definitions and operationalizations. We illustrate the use of AdhereR with an example dataset of 2-year records of 100 patients and describe the various analysis choices possible and how they can be adapted to different health conditions and types of medications. The package is freely available for use and its implementation facilitates the integration of medication history visualizations in open-source CDSS platforms.
  • Dimitrova, D. V., Chu, M., Wang, L., Ozyurek, A., & Hagoort, P. (2016). Beat that word: How listeners integrate beat gesture and focus in multimodal speech discourse. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 28(9), 1255-1269. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00963.

    Abstract

    Communication is facilitated when listeners allocate their attention to important information (focus) in the message, a process called "information structure." Linguistic cues like the preceding context and pitch accent help listeners to identify focused information. In multimodal communication, relevant information can be emphasized by nonverbal cues like beat gestures, which represent rhythmic nonmeaningful hand movements. Recent studies have found that linguistic and nonverbal attention cues are integrated independently in single sentences. However, it is possible that these two cues interact when information is embedded in context, because context allows listeners to predict what information is important. In an ERP study, we tested this hypothesis and asked listeners to view videos capturing a dialogue. In the critical sentence, focused and nonfocused words were accompanied by beat gestures, grooming hand movements, or no gestures. ERP results showed that focused words are processed more attentively than nonfocused words as reflected in an N1 and P300 component. Hand movements also captured attention and elicited a P300 component. Importantly, beat gesture and focus interacted in a late time window of 600-900 msec relative to target word onset, giving rise to a late positivity when nonfocused words were accompanied by beat gestures. Our results show that listeners integrate beat gesture with the focus of the message and that integration costs arise when beat gesture falls on nonfocused information. This suggests that beat gestures fulfill a unique focusing function in multimodal discourse processing and that they have to be integrated with the information structure of the message.
  • Dimroth, C. (1998). Indiquer la portée en allemand L2: Une étude longitudinale de l'acquisition des particules de portée. AILE (Acquisition et Interaction en Langue étrangère), 11, 11-34.
  • Dingemanse, M., Kendrick, K. H., & Enfield, N. J. (2016). A Coding Scheme for Other-Initiated Repair across Languages. Open Linguistics, 2, 35-46. doi:10.1515/opli-2016-0002.

    Abstract

    We provide an annotated coding scheme for other-initiated repair, along with guidelines for building collections and aggregating cases based on interactionally relevant similarities and differences. The questions and categories of the scheme are grounded in inductive observations of conversational data and connected to a rich body of work on other-initiated repair in conversation analysis. The scheme is developed and tested in a 12-language comparative project and can serve as a stepping stone for future work on other-initiated repair and the systematic comparative study of conversational structures.
  • Dingemanse, M. (2018). Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 3(1): 4. doi:10.5334/gjgl.444.

    Abstract

    Ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics, and including onomatopoeia) have been systematically studied in linguistics since the 1850s, when they were first described as a lexical class of vivid sensory words in West-African languages. This paper surveys the research history of ideophones, from its roots in African linguistics to its fruits in general linguistics and typology around the globe. It shows that despite a recurrent narrative of marginalisation, work on ideophones has made an impact in many areas of linguistics, from theories of phonological features to typologies of manner and motion, and from sound symbolism to sensory language. Due to their hybrid nature as gradient vocal gestures that grow roots in discrete linguistic systems, ideophones provide opportunities to reframe typological questions, reconsider the role of language ideology in linguistic scholarship, and rethink the margins of language. With ideophones increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences, this review synthesises past theoretical insights and empirical findings in order to enable future work to build on them.
  • Dingemanse, M., Schuerman, W. L., Reinisch, E., Tufvesson, S., & Mitterer, H. (2016). What sound symbolism can and cannot do: Testing the iconicity of ideophones from five languages. Language, 92(2), e117-e133. doi:10.1353/lan.2016.0034.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    https://muse.jhu.edu/article/619540
  • Djemie, T., Weckhuysen, S., von Spiczak, S., Carvill, G. L., Jaehn, J., Anttonen, A. K., Brilstra, E., Caglayan, H. S., De Kovel, C. G. F., Depienne, C., Gaily, E., Gennaro, E., Giraldez, B. G., Gormley, P., Guerrero-Lopez, R., Guerrini, R., Hamalainen, E., Hartmann, `., Hernandez-Hernandez, L., Hjalgrim, H. and 26 moreDjemie, T., Weckhuysen, S., von Spiczak, S., Carvill, G. L., Jaehn, J., Anttonen, A. K., Brilstra, E., Caglayan, H. S., De Kovel, C. G. F., Depienne, C., Gaily, E., Gennaro, E., Giraldez, B. G., Gormley, P., Guerrero-Lopez, R., Guerrini, R., Hamalainen, E., Hartmann, `., Hernandez-Hernandez, L., Hjalgrim, H., Koeleman, B. P., Leguern, E., Lehesjoki, A. E., Lemke, J. R., Leu, C., Marini, C., McMahon, J. M., Mei, D., Moller, R. S., Muhle, H., Myers, C. T., Nava, C., Serratosa, J. M., Sisodiya, S. M., Stephani, U., Striano, P., van Kempen, M. J., Verbeek, N. E., Usluer, S., Zara, F., Palotie, A., Mefford, H. C., Scheffer, I. E., De Jonghe, P., Helbig, I., & Suls, A. (2016). Pitfalls in genetic testing: the story of missed SCN1A mutations. Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, 4(4), 457-64. doi:10.1002/mgg3.217.

    Abstract

    Background Sanger sequencing, still the standard technique for genetic testing in most diagnostic laboratories and until recently widely used in research, is gradually being complemented by next-generation sequencing (NGS). No single mutation detection technique is however perfect in identifying all mutations. Therefore, we wondered to what extent inconsistencies between Sanger sequencing and NGS affect the molecular diagnosis of patients. Since mutations in SCN1A, the major gene implicated in epilepsy, are found in the majority of Dravet syndrome (DS) patients, we focused on missed SCN1A mutations. Methods We sent out a survey to 16 genetic centers performing SCN1A testing. Results We collected data on 28 mutations initially missed using Sanger sequencing. All patients were falsely reported as SCN1A mutation-negative, both due to technical limitations and human errors. Conclusion We illustrate the pitfalls of Sanger sequencing and most importantly provide evidence that SCN1A mutations are an even more frequent cause of DS than already anticipated.
  • Doherty, M., & Klein, W. (Eds.). (1991). Übersetzung [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (84).
  • Doumas, L. A. A., & Martin, A. E. (2018). Learning structured representations from experience. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 69, 165-203. doi:10.1016/bs.plm.2018.10.002.

    Abstract

    How a system represents information tightly constrains the kinds of problems it can solve. Humans routinely solve problems that appear to require structured representations of stimulus properties and the relations between them. An account of how we might acquire such representations has central importance for theories of human cognition. We describe how a system can learn structured relational representations from initially unstructured inputs using comparison, sensitivity to time, and a modified Hebbian learning algorithm. We summarize how the model DORA (Discovery of Relations by Analogy) instantiates this approach, which we call predicate learning, as well as how the model captures several phenomena from cognitive development, relational reasoning, and language processing in the human brain. Predicate learning offers a link between models based on formal languages and models which learn from experience and provides an existence proof for how structured representations might be learned in the first place.
  • Drijvers, L., & Trujillo, J. P. (2018). Commentary: Transcranial magnetic stimulation over left inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortex disrupts gesture-speech integration. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12: 256. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00256.

    Abstract

    A commentary on
    Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation over Left Inferior Frontal and Posterior Temporal Cortex Disrupts Gesture-Speech Integration

    by Zhao, W., Riggs, K., Schindler, I., and Holle, H. (2018). J. Neurosci. 10, 1748–1717. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1748-17.2017
  • Drijvers, L., Ozyurek, A., & Jensen, O. (2018). Alpha and beta oscillations index semantic congruency between speech and gestures in clear and degraded speech. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 30(8), 1086-1097. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01301.

    Abstract

    Previous work revealed that visual semantic information conveyed by gestures can enhance degraded speech comprehension, but the mechanisms underlying these integration processes under adverse listening conditions remain poorly understood. We used MEG to investigate how oscillatory dynamics support speech–gesture integration when integration load is manipulated by auditory (e.g., speech degradation) and visual semantic (e.g., gesture congruency) factors. Participants were presented with videos of an actress uttering an action verb in clear or degraded speech, accompanied by a matching (mixing gesture + “mixing”) or mismatching (drinking gesture + “walking”) gesture. In clear speech, alpha/beta power was more suppressed in the left inferior frontal gyrus and motor and visual cortices when integration load increased in response to mismatching versus matching gestures. In degraded speech, beta power was less suppressed over posterior STS and medial temporal lobe for mismatching compared with matching gestures, showing that integration load was lowest when speech was degraded and mismatching gestures could not be integrated and disambiguate the degraded signal. Our results thus provide novel insights on how low-frequency oscillatory modulations in different parts of the cortex support the semantic audiovisual integration of gestures in clear and degraded speech: When speech is clear, the left inferior frontal gyrus and motor and visual cortices engage because higher-level semantic information increases semantic integration load. When speech is degraded, posterior STS/middle temporal gyrus and medial temporal lobe are less engaged because integration load is lowest when visual semantic information does not aid lexical retrieval and speech and gestures cannot be integrated.
  • Drijvers, L., Mulder, K., & Ernestus, M. (2016). Alpha and gamma band oscillations index differential processing of acoustically reduced and full forms. Brain and Language, 153-154, 27-37. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2016.01.003.

    Abstract

    Reduced forms like yeshay for yesterday often occur in conversations. Previous behavioral research reported a processing advantage for full over reduced forms. The present study investigated whether this processing advantage is reflected in a modulation of alpha (8–12 Hz) and gamma (30+ Hz) band activity. In three electrophysiological experiments, participants listened to full and reduced forms in isolation (Experiment 1), sentence-final position (Experiment 2), or mid-sentence position (Experiment 3). Alpha power was larger in response to reduced forms than to full forms, but only in Experiments 1 and 2. We interpret these increases in alpha power as reflections of higher auditory cognitive load. In all experiments, gamma power only increased in response to full forms, which we interpret as showing that lexical activation spreads more quickly through the semantic network for full than for reduced forms. These results confirm a processing advantage for full forms, especially in non-medial sentence position.
  • Drijvers, L., Ozyurek, A., & Jensen, O. (2018). Hearing and seeing meaning in noise: Alpha, beta and gamma oscillations predict gestural enhancement of degraded speech comprehension. Human Brain Mapping, 39(5), 2075-2087. doi:10.1002/hbm.23987.

    Abstract

    During face-to-face communication, listeners integrate speech with gestures. The semantic information conveyed by iconic gestures (e.g., a drinking gesture) can aid speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions. In this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we investigated the spatiotemporal neural oscillatory activity associated with gestural enhancement of degraded speech comprehension. Participants watched videos of an actress uttering clear or degraded speech, accompanied by a gesture or not and completed a cued-recall task after watching every video. When gestures semantically disambiguated degraded speech comprehension, an alpha and beta power suppression and a gamma power increase revealed engagement and active processing in the hand-area of the motor cortex, the extended language network (LIFG/pSTS/STG/MTG), medial temporal lobe, and occipital regions. These observed low- and high-frequency oscillatory modulations in these areas support general unification, integration and lexical access processes during online language comprehension, and simulation of and increased visual attention to manual gestures over time. All individual oscillatory power modulations associated with gestural enhancement of degraded speech comprehension predicted a listener's correct disambiguation of the degraded verb after watching the videos. Our results thus go beyond the previously proposed role of oscillatory dynamics in unimodal degraded speech comprehension and provide first evidence for the role of low- and high-frequency oscillations in predicting the integration of auditory and visual information at a semantic level.

    Additional information

    hbm23987-sup-0001-suppinfo01.docx
  • Drijvers, L., & Ozyurek, A. (2018). Native language status of the listener modulates the neural integration of speech and iconic gestures in clear and adverse listening conditions. Brain and Language, 177-178, 7-17. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2018.01.003.

    Abstract

    Native listeners neurally integrate iconic gestures with speech, which can enhance degraded speech comprehension. However, it is unknown how non-native listeners neurally integrate speech and gestures, as they might process visual semantic context differently than natives. We recorded EEG while native and highly-proficient non-native listeners watched videos of an actress uttering an action verb in clear or degraded speech, accompanied by a matching ('to drive'+driving gesture) or mismatching gesture ('to drink'+mixing gesture). Degraded speech elicited an enhanced N400 amplitude compared to clear speech in both groups, revealing an increase in neural resources needed to resolve the spoken input. A larger N400 effect was found in clear speech for non-natives compared to natives, but in degraded speech only for natives. Non-native listeners might thus process gesture more strongly than natives when speech is clear, but need more auditory cues to facilitate access to gestural semantic information when speech is degraded.
  • Drozd, K. F. (1995). Child English pre-sentential negation as metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. Journal of Child Language, 22(3), 583-610. doi:10.1017/S030500090000996X.

    Abstract

    This paper presents a study of the spontaneous pre-sentential negations
    of ten English-speaking children between the ages of 1; 6 and 3; 4 which
    supports the hypothesis that child English nonanaphoric pre-sentential
    negation is a form of metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. A
    detailed discourse analysis reveals that children's pre-sentential negatives
    like No Nathaniel a king (i) are characteristically echoic, and (it)
    typically express objection and rectification, two characteristic functions
    of exclamatory negation in adult discourse, e.g. Don't say 'Nathaniel's a
    king'! A comparison of children's pre-sentential negations with their
    internal predicate negations using not and don't reveals that the two
    negative constructions are formally and functionally distinct. I argue
    that children's nonanaphoric pre-sentential negatives constitute an
    independent, well-formed class of discourse negation. They are not
    'primitive' constructions derived from the miscategorization of emphatic
    no in adult speech or children's 'inventions'. Nor are they an
    early derivational variant of internal sentence negation. Rather, these
    negatives reflect young children's competence in using grammatical
    negative constructions appropriately in discourse.
  • Drozdova, P., Van Hout, R., & Scharenborg, O. (2016). Lexically-guided perceptual learning in non-native listening. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19(5), 914-920. doi:10.1017/S136672891600002X.

    Abstract

    There is ample evidence that native and non-native listeners use lexical knowledge to retune their native phonetic categories following ambiguous pronunciations. The present study investigates whether a non-native ambiguous sound can retune non-native phonetic categories. After a brief exposure to an ambiguous British English [l/ɹ] sound, Dutch listeners demonstrated retuning. This retuning was, however, asymmetrical: the non-native listeners seemed to show (more) retuning of the /ɹ/ category than of the /l/ category, suggesting that non-native listeners can retune non-native phonetic categories. This asymmetry is argued to be related to the large phonetic variability of /r/ in both Dutch and English.
  • Duñabeitia, J. A., Crepaldi, D., Meyer, A. S., New, B., Pliatsikas, C., Smolka, E., & Brysbaert, M. (2018). MultiPic: A standardized set of 750 drawings with norms for six European languages. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(4), 808-816. doi:10.1080/17470218.2017.1310261.

    Abstract

    Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited. Therefore, we constructed a new set of 750 colored pictures of concrete concepts. This set, MultiPic, constitutes a new valuable tool for cognitive scientists investigating language, visual perception, memory and/or attention in monolingual or multilingual populations. Importantly, the MultiPic databank has been normed in six different European languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and German). All stimuli and norms are freely available at http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic

    Additional information

    http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic
  • Dunn, M. (2003). Pioneers of Island Melanesia project. Oceania Newsletter, 30/31, 1-3.
  • Edmunds, R., L'Hours, H., Rickards, L., Trilsbeek, P., Vardigan, M., & Mokrane, M. (2016). Core trustworthy data repositories requirements. Zenodo, 168411. doi:10.5281/zenodo.168411.

    Abstract

    The Core Trustworthy Data Repository Requirements were developed by the DSA–WDS Partnership Working Group on Repository Audit and Certification, a Working Group (WG) of the Research Data Alliance . The goal of the effort was to create a set of harmonized common requirements for certification of repositories at the core level, drawing from criteria already put in place by the Data Seal of Approval (DSA: www.datasealofapproval.org) and the ICSU World Data System (ICSU-WDS: https://www.icsu-wds.org/services/certification). An additional goal of the project was to develop common procedures to be implemented by both DSA and ICSU-WDS. Ultimately, the DSA and ICSU-WDS plan to collaborate on a global framework for repository certification that moves from the core to the extended (nestor-Seal DIN 31644), to the formal (ISO 16363) level.
  • Eekhof, L. S., Eerland, A., & Willems, R. M. (2018). Readers’ insensitivity to tense revealed: No differences in mental simulation during reading of present and past tense stories. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1): 16. doi:10.1525/collabra.121.

    Abstract

    While the importance of mental simulation during literary reading has long been recognized, we know little about the factors that determine when, what, and how much readers mentally simulate. Here we investigate the influence of a specific text characteristic, namely verb tense (present vs. past), on mental simulation during literary reading. Verbs usually denote the actions and events that take place in narratives and hence it is hypothesized that verb tense will influence the amount of mental simulation elicited in readers. Although the present tense is traditionally considered to be more “vivid”, this study is one of the first to experimentally assess this claim. We recorded eye-movements while subjects read stories in the past or present tense and collected data regarding self-reported levels of mental simulation, transportation and appreciation. We found no influence of tense on any of the offline measures. The eye-tracking data showed a slightly more complex pattern. Although we did not find a main effect of sensorimotor simulation content on reading times, we were able to link the degree to which subjects slowed down when reading simulation eliciting content to offline measures of attention and transportation, but this effect did not interact with the tense of the story. Unexpectedly, we found a main effect of tense on reading times per word, with past tense stories eliciting longer first fixation durations and gaze durations. However, we were unable to link this effect to any of the offline measures. In sum, this study suggests that tense does not play a substantial role in the process of mental simulation elicited by literary stories.

    Additional information

    Data Accessibility
  • Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., Senft, B., & Senft, G. (1987). Trobriander (Ost-Neuguinea, Trobriand Inseln, Kaile'una) Fadenspiele 'ninikula'. Publikation zu Wissenschaftlichen Filmen, Sektion Ethnologie, 25, 1-15.
  • Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., & Senft, G. (1991). Trobriander (Papua-Neu-guinea, Trobriand -Inseln, Kaile'una) Tänze zur Einleitung des Erntefeier-Rituals. Film E 3129. Trobriander (Papua-Neuguinea, Trobriand-Inseln, Kiriwina); Ausschnitte aus einem Erntefesttanz. Film E3130. Publikationen zu wissenschaftlichen Filmen. Sektion Ethnologie, 17, 1-17.
  • Eichert, N., Peeters, D., & Hagoort, P. (2018). Language-driven anticipatory eye movements in virtual reality. Behavior Research Methods, 50(3), 1102-1115. doi:10.3758/s13428-017-0929-z.

    Abstract

    Predictive language processing is often studied by measuring eye movements as participants look at objects on a computer screen while they listen to spoken sentences. The use of this variant of the visual world paradigm has shown that information encountered by a listener at a spoken verb can give rise to anticipatory eye movements to a target object, which is taken to indicate that people predict upcoming words. The ecological validity of such findings remains questionable, however, because these computer experiments used two-dimensional (2D) stimuli that are mere abstractions of real world objects. Here we present a visual world paradigm study in a three-dimensional (3D) immersive virtual reality environment. Despite significant changes in the stimulus material and the different mode of stimulus presentation, language-mediated anticipatory eye movements were observed. These findings thus indicate prediction of upcoming words in language comprehension in a more naturalistic setting where natural depth cues are preserved. Moreover, the results confirm the feasibility of using eye-tracking in rich and multimodal 3D virtual environments.

    Additional information

    13428_2017_929_MOESM1_ESM.docx
  • Eising, E., Huisman, S. M., Mahfouz, A., Vijfhuizen, L. S., Anttila, V., Winsvold, B. S., Kurth, T., Ikram, M. A., Freilinger, T., Kaprio, J., Boomsma, D. I., van Duijn, C. M., Järvelin, M.-R.-R., Zwart, J.-A., Quaye, L., Strachan, D. P., Kubisch, C., Dichgans, M., Davey Smith, G., Stefansson, K. and 9 moreEising, E., Huisman, S. M., Mahfouz, A., Vijfhuizen, L. S., Anttila, V., Winsvold, B. S., Kurth, T., Ikram, M. A., Freilinger, T., Kaprio, J., Boomsma, D. I., van Duijn, C. M., Järvelin, M.-R.-R., Zwart, J.-A., Quaye, L., Strachan, D. P., Kubisch, C., Dichgans, M., Davey Smith, G., Stefansson, K., Palotie, A., Chasman, D. I., Ferrari, M. D., Terwindt, G. M., de Vries, B., Nyholt, D. R., Lelieveldt, B. P., van den Maagdenberg, A. M., & Reinders, M. J. (2016). Gene co‑expression analysis identifies brain regions and cell types involved in migraine pathophysiology: a GWAS‑based study using the Allen Human Brain Atlas. Human Genetics, 135(4), 425-439. doi:10.1007/s00439-016-1638-x.

    Abstract

    Migraine is a common disabling neurovascular brain disorder typically characterised by attacks of severe headache and associated with autonomic and neurological symptoms. Migraine is caused by an interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified over a dozen genetic loci associated with migraine. Here, we integrated migraine GWAS data with high-resolution spatial gene expression data of normal adult brains from the Allen Human Brain Atlas to identify specific brain regions and molecular pathways that are possibly involved in migraine pathophysiology. To this end, we used two complementary methods. In GWAS data from 23,285 migraine cases and 95,425 controls, we first studied modules of co-expressed genes that were calculated based on human brain expression data for enrichment of genes that showed association with migraine. Enrichment of a migraine GWAS signal was found for five modules that suggest involvement in migraine pathophysiology of: (i) neurotransmission, protein catabolism and mitochondria in the cortex; (ii) transcription regulation in the cortex and cerebellum; and (iii) oligodendrocytes and mitochondria in subcortical areas. Second, we used the high-confidence genes from the migraine GWAS as a basis to construct local migraine-related co-expression gene networks. Signatures of all brain regions and pathways that were prominent in the first method also surfaced in the second method, thus providing support that these brain regions and pathways are indeed involved in migraine pathophysiology.
  • Eising, E., De Leeuw, C., Min, J. L., Anttila, V., Verheijen, M. H. G., Terwindt, G. M., Dichgans, M., Freilinger, T., Kubisch, C., Ferrari, M. D., Smit, A. B., De Vries, B., Palotie, A., Van Den Maagdenberg, A. M. J. M., & Posthuma, D. (2016). Involvement of astrocyte and oligodendrocyte gene sets in migraine. Cephalalgia, 36(7), 640-647. doi:10.1177/0333102415618614.

    Abstract

    Migraine is a common episodic brain disorder characterized by recurrent attacks of severe unilateral headache and additional neurological symptoms. Two main migraine types can be distinguished based on the presence of aura symptoms that can accompany the headache: migraine with aura and migraine without aura. Multiple genetic and environmental factors confer disease susceptibility. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) indicate that migraine susceptibility genes are involved in various pathways, including neurotransmission, which have already been implicated in genetic studies of monogenic familial hemiplegic migraine, a subtype of migraine with aura. Methods To further explore the genetic background of migraine, we performed a gene set analysis of migraine GWAS data of 4954 clinic-based patients with migraine, as well as 13,390 controls. Curated sets of synaptic genes and sets of genes predominantly expressed in three glial cell types (astrocytes, microglia and oligodendrocytes) were investigated. Discussion Our results show that gene sets containing astrocyte- and oligodendrocyte-related genes are associated with migraine, which is especially true for gene sets involved in protein modification and signal transduction. Observed differences between migraine with aura and migraine without aura indicate that both migraine types, at least in part, seem to have a different genetic background.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2003). Producing and editing diagrams using co-speech gesture: Spatializing non-spatial relations in explanations of kinship in Laos. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 13(1), 7-50. doi:10.1525/jlin.2003.13.1.7.

    Abstract

    This article presents a description of two sequences of talk by urban speakers of Lao (a southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos) in which co-speech gesture plays a central role in explanations of kinship relations and terminology. The speakers spontaneously use hand gestures and gaze to spatially diagram relationships that have no inherent spatial structure. The descriptive sections of the article are prefaced by a discussion of the semiotic complexity of illustrative gestures and gesture diagrams. Gestured signals feature iconic, indexical, and symbolic components, usually in combination, as well as using motion and three-dimensional space to convey meaning. Such diagrams show temporal persistence and structural integrity despite having been projected in midair by evanescent signals (i.e., handmovements anddirected gaze). Speakers sometimes need or want to revise these spatial representations without destroying their structural integrity. The need to "edit" gesture diagrams involves such techniques as hold-and-drag, hold-and-work-with-free-hand, reassignment-of-old-chunk-tonew-chunk, and move-body-into-new-space.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2003). The definition of WHAT-d'you-call-it: Semantics and pragmatics of 'recognitional deixis'. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(1), 101-117. doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00066-8.

    Abstract

    Words such as what -d'you-call-it raise issues at the heart of the semantics/pragmatics interface. Expressions of this kind are conventionalised and have meanings which, while very general, are explicitly oriented to the interactional nature of the speech context, drawing attention to a speaker's assumption that the listener can figure out what the speaker is referring to. The details of such meanings can account for functional contrast among similar expressions, in a single language as well as cross-linguistically. The English expressions what -d'you-call-it and you-know-what are compared, along with a comparable Lao expression meaning, roughly, ‘that thing’. Proposed definitions of the meanings of these expressions account for their different patterns of use. These definitions include reference to the speech act participants, a point which supports the view that what -d'you-call-it words can be considered deictic. Issues arising from the descriptive section of this paper include the question of how such terms are derived, as well as their degree of conventionality.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2003). Demonstratives in space and interaction: Data from Lao speakers and implications for semantic analysis. Language, 79(1), 82-117.

    Abstract

    The semantics of simple (i.e. two-term) systems of demonstratives have in general hitherto been treated as inherently spatial and as marking a symmetrical opposition of distance (‘proximal’ versus ‘distal’), assuming the speaker as a point of origin. More complex systems are known to add further distinctions, such as visibility or elevation, but are assumed to build on basic distinctions of distance. Despite their inherently context-dependent nature, little previous work has based the analysis of demonstratives on evidence of their use in real interactional situations. In this article, video recordings of spontaneous interaction among speakers of Lao (Southwestern Tai, Laos) are examined in an analysis of the two Lao demonstrative determiners nii4 and nan4. A hypothesis of minimal encoded semantics is tested against rich contextual information, and the hypothesis is shown to be consistent with the data. Encoded conventional meanings must be kept distinct from contingent contextual information and context-dependent pragmatic implicatures. Based on examples of the two Lao demonstrative determiners in exophoric uses, the following claims are made. The term nii4 is a semantically general demonstrative, lacking specification of ANY spatial property (such as location or distance). The term nan4 specifies that the referent is ‘not here’ (encoding ‘location’ but NOT ‘distance’). Anchoring the semantic specification in a deictic primitive ‘here’ allows a strictly discrete intensional distinction to be mapped onto an extensional range of endless elasticity. A common ‘proximal’ spatial interpretation for the semantically more general term nii4 arises from the paradigmatic opposition of the two demonstrative determiners. This kind of analysis suggests a reappraisal of our general understanding of the semantics of demonstrative systems universally. To investigate the question in sufficient detail, however, rich contextual data (preferably collected on video) is necessary
  • Erard, M. (2016). Solving Australia's language puzzle. Science, 353(6306), 1357-1359. doi:10.1126/science.353.6306.1357.
  • Ergin, R., Meir, I., Ilkbasaran, D., Padden, C., & Jackendoff, R. (2018). The Development of Argument Structure in Central Taurus Sign Language. Sign Language & Linguistics, 18(4), 612-639. doi:10.1353/sls.2018.0018.

    Abstract

    One of the fundamental issues for a language is its capacity to express
    argument structure unambiguously. This study presents evidence
    for the emergence and the incremental development of these
    basic mechanisms in a newly developing language, Central Taurus
    Sign Language. Our analyses identify universal patterns in both the
    emergence and development of these mechanisms and in languagespecific
    trajectories.
  • Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Predicting the unpredictable: The phonological interpretation of neutralized segments in Dutch. Language, 79(1), 5-38.

    Abstract

    Among the most fascinating data for phonology are those showing how speakers incorporate new words and foreign words into their language system, since these data provide cues to the actual principles underlying language. In this article, we address how speakers deal with neutralized obstruents in new words. We formulate four hypotheses and test them on the basis of Dutch word-final obstruents, which are neutral for [voice]. Our experiments show that speakers predict the characteristics ofneutralized segments on the basis ofphonologically similar morphemes stored in the mental lexicon. This effect of the similar morphemes can be modeled in several ways. We compare five models, among them STOCHASTIC OPTIMALITY THEORY and ANALOGICAL MODELING OF LANGUAGE; all perform approximately equally well, but they differ in their complexity, with analogical modeling oflanguage providing the most economical explanation.
  • Ernestus, M., Giezenaar, G., & Dikmans, M. (2016). Ikfstajezotuuknie: Half uitgesproken woorden in alledaagse gesprekken. Les, 199, 7-9.

    Abstract

    Amsterdam klinkt in informele gesprekken vaak als Amsdam en Rotterdam als Rodam, zonder dat de meeste moedertaalsprekers zich daar bewust van zijn. In alledaagse situaties valt een aanzienlijk deel van de klanken weg. Daarnaast worden veel klanken zwakker gearticuleerd (bijvoorbeeld een d als een j, als de mond niet helemaal afgesloten wordt). Het lijkt waarschijnlijk dat deze half uitgesproken woorden een probleem vormen voor tweedetaalleerders. Gereduceerde vormen kunnen immers sterk afwijken van de vormen die deze leerders geleerd hebben. Of dit werkelijk zo is, hebben de auteurs onderzocht in twee studies. Voordat ze deze twee studies bespreken, vertellen ze eerst kort iets over de verschillende typen reducties die voorkomen.
  • Estruch, S. B., Graham, S. A., Quevedo, M., Vino, A., Dekkers, D. H. W., Deriziotis, P., Sollis, E., Demmers, J., Poot, R. A., & Fisher, S. E. (2018). Proteomic analysis of FOXP proteins reveals interactions between cortical transcription factors associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. Human Molecular Genetics, 27(7), 1212-1227. doi:10.1093/hmg/ddy035.

    Abstract

    FOXP transcription factors play important roles in neurodevelopment, but little is known about how their transcriptional activity is regulated. FOXP proteins cooperatively regulate gene expression by forming homo- and hetero-dimers with each other. Physical associations with other transcription factors might also modulate the functions of FOXP proteins. However, few FOXP-interacting transcription factors have been identified so far. Therefore, we sought to discover additional transcription factors that interact with the brain-expressed FOXP proteins, FOXP1, FOXP2 and FOXP4, through affinity-purifications of protein complexes followed by mass spectrometry. We identified seven novel FOXP-interacting transcription factors (NR2F1, NR2F2, SATB1, SATB2, SOX5, YY1 and ZMYM2), five of which have well-established roles in cortical development. Accordingly, we found that these transcription factors are co-expressed with FoxP2 in the deep layers of the cerebral cortex and also in the Purkinje cells of the cerebellum, suggesting that they may cooperate with the FoxPs to regulate neural gene expression in vivo. Moreover, we demonstrated that etiological mutations of FOXP1 and FOXP2, known to cause neurodevelopmental disorders, severely disrupted the interactions with FOXP-interacting transcription factors. Additionally, we pinpointed specific regions within FOXP2 sequence involved in mediating these interactions. Thus, by expanding the FOXP interactome we have uncovered part of a broader neural transcription factor network involved in cortical development, providing novel molecular insights into the transcriptional architecture underlying brain development and neurodevelopmental disorders.
  • Estruch, S. B., Graham, S. A., Chinnappa, S. M., Deriziotis, P., & Fisher, S. E. (2016). Functional characterization of rare FOXP2 variants in neurodevelopmental disorder. Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 8: 44. doi:10.1186/s11689-016-9177-2.
  • Estruch, S. B., Graham, S. A., Deriziotis, P., & Fisher, S. E. (2016). The language-related transcription factor FOXP2 is post-translationally modified with small ubiquitin-like modifiers. Scientific Reports, 6: 20911. doi:10.1038/srep20911.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    srep20911-s1.pdf
  • Ho, Y. Y. W., Evans, D. M., Montgomery, G. W., Henders, A. K., Kemp, J. P., Timpson, N. J., St Pourcain, B., Heath, A. C., Madden, P. A. F., Loesch, D. Z., McNevin, D., Daniel, R., Davey-Smith, G., Martin, N. G., & Medland, S. E. (2016). Common genetic variants influence whorls in fingerprint patterns. Journal of Investigative Dermatology, 136(4), 859-862. doi:10.1016/j.jid.2015.10.062.
  • Evans, N., Bergqvist, H., & San Roque, L. (2018). The grammar of engagement I: Framework and initial exemplification. Language and Cognition, 10, 110-140. doi:10.1017/langcog.2017.21.

    Abstract

    Human language offers rich ways to track, compare, and engage the attentional and epistemic states of interlocutors. While this task is central to everyday communication, our knowledge of the cross-linguistic grammatical means that target such intersubjective coordination has remained basic. In two serialised papers, we introduce the term ‘engagement’ to refer to grammaticalised means for encoding the relative mental directedness of speaker and addressee towards an entity or state of affairs, and describe examples of engagement systems from around the world. Engagement systems express the speaker’s assumptions about the degree to which their attention or knowledge is shared (or not shared) by the addressee. Engagement categories can operate at the level of entities in the here-and-now (deixis), in the unfolding discourse (definiteness vs indefiniteness), entire event-depicting propositions (through markers with clausal scope), and even metapropositions (potentially scoping over evidential values). In this first paper, we introduce engagement and situate it with respect to existing work on intersubjectivity in language. We then explore the key role of deixis in coordinating attention and expressing engagement, moving through increasingly intercognitive deictic systems from those that focus on the the location of the speaker, to those that encode the attentional state of the addressee.
  • Evans, N., Bergqvist, H., & San Roque, L. (2018). The grammar of engagement II: Typology and diachrony. Language and Cognition, 10(1), 141-170. doi:10.1017/langcog.2017.22.

    Abstract

    Engagement systems encode the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee, and are thus underpinned by our social cognitive capacities. In our first foray into engagement (Part 1), we focused on specialised semantic contrasts as found in entity-level deictic systems, tailored to the primal scenario for establishing joint attention. This second paper broadens out to an exploration of engagement at the level of events and even metapropositions, and comments on how such systems may evolve. The languages Andoke and Kogi demonstrate what a canonical system of engagement with clausal scope looks like, symmetrically assigning ‘knowing’ and ‘unknowing’ values to speaker and addressee. Engagement is also found cross-cutting other epistemic categories such as evidentiality, for example where a complex assessment of relative speaker and addressee awareness concerns the source of information rather than the proposition itself. Data from the language Abui reveal that one way in which engagement systems can develop is by upscoping demonstratives, which normally denote entities, to apply at the level of events. We conclude by stressing the need for studies that focus on what difference it makes, in terms of communicative behaviour, for intersubjective coordination to be managed by engagement systems as opposed to other, non-grammaticalised means.
  • Everaerd, D., Klumpers, F., Zwiers, M., Guadalupe, T., Franke, B., Van Oostrum, I., Schene, A., Fernandez, G., & Tendolkar, I. (2016). Childhood abuse and deprivation are associated with distinct sex-dependent differences in brain morphology. Neuropsychopharmacology, 41, 1716-1723. doi:10.1038/npp.2015.344.

    Abstract

    Childhood adversity (CA) has been associated with long-term structural brain alterations and an increased risk for psychiatric disorders. Evidence is emerging that subtypes of CA, varying in the dimensions of threat and deprivation, lead to distinct neural and behavioral outcomes. However, these specific associations have yet to be established without potential confounders such as psychopathology. Moreover, differences in neural development and psychopathology necessitate the exploration of sexual dimorphism. Young healthy adult subjects were selected based on history of CA from a large database to assess gray matter (GM) differences associated with specific subtypes of adversity. We compared voxel-based morphometry data of subjects reporting specific childhood exposure to abuse (n = 127) or deprivation (n = 126) and a similar sized group of controls (n = 129) without reported CA. Subjects were matched on age, gender, and educational level. Differences between CA subtypes were found in the fusiform gyrus and middle occipital gyms, where subjects with a history of deprivation showed reduced GM compared with subjects with a history of abuse. An interaction between sex and CA subtype was found. Women showed less GM in the visual posterior precuneal region after both subtypes of CA than controls. Men had less GM in the postcentral gyms after childhood deprivation compared with abuse. Our results suggest that even in a healthy population, CA subtypes are related to specific alterations in brain structure, which are modulated by sex. These findings may help understand neurodevelopmental consequences related to CA
  • Everett, C., Blasi, D. E., & Roberts, S. G. (2016). Language evolution and climate: The case of desiccation and tone. Journal of Language Evolution, 1, 33-46. doi:10.1093/jole/lzv004.

    Abstract

    We make the case that, contra standard assumption in linguistic theory, the sound systems of human languages are adapted to their environment. While not conclusive, this plausible case rests on several points discussed in this work: First, human behavior is generally adaptive and the assumption that this characteristic does not extend to linguistic structure is empirically unsubstantiated. Second, animal communication systems are well known to be adaptive within species across a variety of phyla and taxa. Third, research in laryngology demonstrates clearly that ambient desiccation impacts the performance of the human vocal cords. The latter point motivates a clear, testable hypothesis with respect to the synchronic global distribution of language types. Fourth, this hypothesis is supported in our own previous work, and here we discuss new approaches being developed to further explore the hypothesis. We conclude by suggesting that the time has come to more substantively examine the possibility that linguistic sound systems are adapted to their physical ecology
  • Everett, C., Blasi, D., & Roberts, S. G. (2016). Response: Climate and language: has the discourse shifted? Journal of Language Evolution, 1(1), 83-87. doi:10.1093/jole/lzv013.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    AppendixResponseToHammarstrom.pdf
  • Fairs, A., Bögels, S., & Meyer, A. S. (2018). Dual-tasking with simple linguistic tasks: Evidence for serial processing. Acta Psychologica, 191, 131-148. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.09.006.

    Abstract

    In contrast to the large amount of dual-task research investigating the coordination of a linguistic and a nonlinguistic
    task, little research has investigated how two linguistic tasks are coordinated. However, such research
    would greatly contribute to our understanding of how interlocutors combine speech planning and listening in
    conversation. In three dual-task experiments we studied how participants coordinated the processing of an
    auditory stimulus (S1), which was either a syllable or a tone, with selecting a name for a picture (S2). Two SOAs,
    of 0 ms and 1000 ms, were used. To vary the time required for lexical selection and to determine when lexical
    selection took place, the pictures were presented with categorically related or unrelated distractor words. In
    Experiment 1 participants responded overtly to both stimuli. In Experiments 2 and 3, S1 was not responded to
    overtly, but determined how to respond to S2, by naming the picture or reading the distractor aloud. Experiment
    1 yielded additive effects of SOA and distractor type on the picture naming latencies. The presence of semantic
    interference at both SOAs indicated that lexical selection occurred after response selection for S1. With respect to
    the coordination of S1 and S2 processing, Experiments 2 and 3 yielded inconclusive results. In all experiments,
    syllables interfered more with picture naming than tones. This is likely because the syllables activated phonological
    representations also implicated in picture naming. The theoretical and methodological implications of the
    findings are discussed.

    Additional information

    1-s2.0-S0001691817305589-mmc1.pdf
  • Fan, Q., Guo, X., Tideman, J. W. L., Williams, K. M., Yazar, S., Hosseini, S. M., Howe, L. D., St Pourcain, B., Evans, D. M., Timpson, N. J., McMahon, G., Hysi, P. G., Krapohl, E., Wang, Y. X., Jonas, J. B., Baird, P. N., Wang, J. J., Cheng, C. Y., Teo, Y. Y., Wong, T. Y. and 17 moreFan, Q., Guo, X., Tideman, J. W. L., Williams, K. M., Yazar, S., Hosseini, S. M., Howe, L. D., St Pourcain, B., Evans, D. M., Timpson, N. J., McMahon, G., Hysi, P. G., Krapohl, E., Wang, Y. X., Jonas, J. B., Baird, P. N., Wang, J. J., Cheng, C. Y., Teo, Y. Y., Wong, T. Y., Ding, X., Wojciechowski, R., Young, T. L., Parssinen, O., Oexle, K., Pfeiffer, N., Bailey-Wilson, J. E., Paterson, A. D., Klaver, C. C. W., Plomin, R., Hammond, C. J., Mackey, D. A., He, M. G., Saw, S. M., Williams, C., Guggenheim, J. A., & Cream, C. (2016). Childhood gene-environment interactions and age-dependent effects of genetic variants associated with refractive error and myopia: The CREAM Consortium. Scientific Reports, 6: 25853. doi:10.1038/srep25853.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    srep25853-s1.pdf
  • Fan, Q., Verhoeven, V. J., Wojciechowski, R., Barathi, V. A., Hysi, P. G., Guggenheim, J. A., Höhn, R., Vitart, V., Khawaja, A. P., Yamashiro, K., Hosseini, S. M., Lehtimäki, T., Lu, Y., Haller, T., Xie, J., Delcourt, C., Pirastu, M., Wedenoja, J., Gharahkhani, P., Venturini, C. and 83 moreFan, Q., Verhoeven, V. J., Wojciechowski, R., Barathi, V. A., Hysi, P. G., Guggenheim, J. A., Höhn, R., Vitart, V., Khawaja, A. P., Yamashiro, K., Hosseini, S. M., Lehtimäki, T., Lu, Y., Haller, T., Xie, J., Delcourt, C., Pirastu, M., Wedenoja, J., Gharahkhani, P., Venturini, C., Miyake, M., Hewitt, A. W., Guo, X., Mazur, J., Huffman, J. E., Williams, K. M., Polasek, O., Campbell, H., Rudan, I., Vatavuk, Z., Wilson, J. F., Joshi, P. K., McMahon, G., St Pourcain, B., Evans, D. M., Simpson, C. L., Schwantes-An, T.-H., Igo, R. P., Mirshahi, A., Cougnard-Gregoire, A., Bellenguez, C., Blettner, M., Raitakari, O., Kähönen, M., Seppälä, I., Zeller, T., Meitinger, T., Ried, J. S., Gieger, C., Portas, L., Van Leeuwen, E. M., Amin, N., Uitterlinden, A. G., Rivadeneira, F., Hofman, A., Vingerling, J. R., Wang, Y. X., Wang, X., Boh, E.-T.-H., Ikram, M. K., Sabanayagam, C., Gupta, P., Tan, V., Zhou, L., Ho, C. E., Lim, W., Beuerman, R. W., Siantar, R., Tai, E.-S., Vithana, E., Mihailov, E., Khor, C.-C., Hayward, C., Luben, R. N., Foster, P. J., Klein, B. E., Klein, R., Wong, H.-S., Mitchell, P., Metspalu, A., Aung, T., Young, T. L., He, M., Pärssinen, O., Van Duijn, C. M., Wang, J. J., Williams, C., Jonas, J. B., Teo, Y.-Y., Mackey, D. A., Oexle, K., Yoshimura, N., Paterson, A. D., Pfeiffer, N., Wong, T.-Y., Baird, P. N., Stambolian, D., Bailey-Wilson, J. E., Cheng, C.-Y., Hammond, C. J., Klaver, C. C., Saw, S.-M., & Consortium for Refractive Error and Myopia (CREAM) (2016). Meta-analysis of gene–environment-wide association scans accounting for education level identifies additional loci for refractive error. Nature Communications, 7: 11008. doi:10.1038/ncomms11008.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    Fan_etal_2016sup.pdf
  • Fear, B. D., Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1995). The strong/weak syllable distinction in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97, 1893-1904. doi:10.1121/1.412063.

    Abstract

    Strong and weak syllables in English can be distinguished on the basis of vowel quality, of stress, or of both factors. Critical for deciding between these factors are syllables containing unstressed unreduced vowels, such as the first syllable of automata. In this study 12 speakers produced sentences containing matched sets of words with initial vowels ranging from stressed to reduced, at normal and at fast speech rates. Measurements of the duration, intensity, F0, and spectral characteristics of the word-initial vowels showed that unstressed unreduced vowels differed significantly from both stressed and reduced vowels. This result held true across speaker sex and dialect. The vowels produced by one speaker were then cross-spliced across the words within each set, and the resulting words' acceptability was rated by listeners. In general, cross-spliced words were only rated significantly less acceptable than unspliced words when reduced vowels interchanged with any other vowel. Correlations between rated acceptability and acoustic characteristics of the cross-spliced words demonstrated that listeners were attending to duration, intensity, and spectral characteristics. Together these results suggest that unstressed unreduced vowels in English pattern differently from both stressed and reduced vowels, so that no acoustic support for a binary categorical distinction exists; nevertheless, listeners make such a distinction, grouping unstressed unreduced vowels by preference with stressed vowels
  • Fedorenko, E., Morgan, A., Murray, E., Cardinaux, A., Mei, C., Tager-Flusberg, H., Fisher, S. E., & Kanwisher, N. (2016). A highly penetrant form of childhood apraxia of speech due to deletion of 16p11.2. European Journal of Human Genetics, 24(2), 302-306. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2015.149.

    Abstract

    Individuals with heterozygous 16p11.2 deletions reportedly suffer from a variety of difficulties with speech and language. Indeed, recent copy-number variant screens of children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), a specific and rare motor speech disorder, have identified three unrelated individuals with 16p11.2 deletions. However, the nature and prevalence of speech and language disorders in general, and CAS in particular, is unknown for individuals with 16p11.2 deletions. Here we took a genotype-first approach, conducting detailed and systematic characterization of speech abilities in a group of 11 unrelated children ascertained on the basis of 16p11.2 deletions. To obtain the most precise and replicable phenotyping, we included tasks that are highly diagnostic for CAS, and we tested children under the age of 18 years, an age group where CAS has been best characterized. Two individuals were largely nonverbal, preventing detailed speech analysis, whereas the remaining nine met the standard accepted diagnostic criteria for CAS. These results link 16p11.2 deletions to a highly penetrant form of CAS. Our findings underline the need for further precise characterization of speech and language profiles in larger groups of affected individuals, which will also enhance our understanding of how genetic pathways contribute to human communication disorders.
  • Felemban, D., Verdonschot, R. G., Iwamoto, Y., Uchiyama, Y., Kakimoto, N., Kreiborg, S., & Murakami, S. (2018). A quantitative experimental phantom study on MRI image uniformity. Dentomaxillofacial Radiology, 47(6): 20180077. doi:10.1259/dmfr.20180077.

    Abstract

    Objectives: Our goal was to assess MR image uniformity by investigating aspects influencing said uniformity via a method laid out by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA).
    Methods: Six metallic materials embedded in a glass phantom were scanned (i.e. Au, Ag, Al, Au-Ag-Pd alloy, Ti and Co-Cr alloy) as well as a reference image. Sequences included spin echo (SE) and gradient echo (GRE) scanned in three planes (i.e. axial, coronal, and sagittal). Moreover, three surface coil types (i.e. head and neck, Brain, and temporomandibular joint coils) and two image correction methods (i.e. surface coil intensity correction or SCIC, phased array uniformity enhancement or PURE) were employed to evaluate their effectiveness on image uniformity. Image uniformity was assessed using the National Electrical Manufacturers Association peak-deviation non-uniformity method.
    Results: Results showed that temporomandibular joint coils elicited the least uniform image and brain coils outperformed head and neck coils when metallic materials were present. Additionally, when metallic materials were present, spin echo outperformed gradient echo especially for Co-Cr (particularly in the axial plane). Furthermore, both SCIC and PURE improved image uniformity compared to uncorrected images, and SCIC slightly surpassed PURE when metallic metals were present. Lastly, Co-Cr elicited the least uniform image while other metallic materials generally showed similar patterns (i.e. no significant deviation from images without metallic metals).
    Conclusions: Overall, a quantitative understanding of the factors influencing MR image uniformity (e.g. coil type, imaging method, metal susceptibility, and post-hoc correction method) is advantageous to optimize image quality, assists clinical interpretation, and may result in improved medical and dental care.
  • Felker, E. R., Troncoso Ruiz, A., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2018). The ventriloquist paradigm: Studying speech processing in conversation with experimental control over phonetic input. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(4), EL304-EL309. doi:10.1121/1.5063809.

    Abstract

    This article presents the ventriloquist paradigm, an innovative method for studying speech processing in dialogue whereby participants interact face-to-face with a confederate who, unbeknownst to them, communicates by playing pre-recorded speech. Results show that the paradigm convinces more participants that the speech is live than a setup without the face-to-face element, and it elicits more interactive conversation than a setup in which participants believe their partner is a computer. By reconciling the ecological validity of a conversational context with full experimental control over phonetic exposure, the paradigm offers a wealth of new possibilities for studying speech processing in interaction.
  • Felser, C., Roberts, L., Marinis, T., & Gross, R. (2003). The processing of ambiguous sentences by first and second language learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(3), 453-489.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their first language participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. Although the learners’ disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical–semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent noun phrases (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners’ performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study, in that the children’s attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that children, monolingual adults, and adult L2 learners differ in the extent to which they are guided by phrase structure and lexical–semantic information during sentence processing.
  • Ferreri, L., & Verga, L. (2016). Benefits of music on verbal learning and memory: How and when does it work? Music Perception, 34(2), 167-182. doi:10.1525/mp.2016.34.2.167.

    Abstract

    A long-standing debate in cognitive neurosciences concerns the effect of music on verbal learning and memory. Research in this field has largely provided conflicting results in both clinical as well as non-clinical populations. Although several studies have shown a positive effect of music on the encoding and retrieval of verbal stimuli, music has also been suggested to hinder mnemonic performance by dividing attention. In an attempt to explain this conflict, we review the most relevant literature on the effects of music on verbal learning and memory. Furthermore, we specify several mechanisms through which music may modulate these cognitive functions. We suggest that the extent to which music boosts these cognitive functions relies on experimental factors, such as the relative complexity of musical and verbal stimuli employed. These factors should be carefully considered in further studies, in order to reliably establish how and when music boosts verbal memory and learning. The answers to these questions are not only crucial for our knowledge of how music influences cognitive and brain functions, but may have important clinical implications. Considering the increasing number of approaches using music as a therapeutic tool, the importance of understanding exactly how music works can no longer be underestimated.
  • Filippi, P. (2016). Emotional and Interactional Prosody across Animal Communication Systems: A Comparative Approach to the Emergence of Language. Frontiers in Psychology, 7: 1393. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01393.

    Abstract

    Across a wide range of animal taxa, prosodic modulation of the voice can express emotional information and is used to coordinate vocal interactions between multiple individuals. Within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I hypothesize that the ability for emotional and interactional prosody (EIP) paved the way for the evolution of linguistic prosody – and perhaps also of music, continuing to play a vital role in the acquisition of language. In support of this hypothesis, I review three research fields: (i) empirical studies on the adaptive value of EIP in non-human primates, mammals, songbirds, anurans, and insects; (ii) the beneficial effects of EIP in scaffolding language learning and social development in human infants; (iii) the cognitive relationship between linguistic prosody and the ability for music, which has often been identified as the evolutionary precursor of language.
  • Filippi, P., Jadoul, Y., Ravignani, A., Thompson, B., & de Boer, B. (2016). Seeking Temporal Predictability in Speech: Comparing Statistical Approaches on 18 World Languages. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10: 586. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00586.

    Abstract

    Temporal regularities in speech, such as interdependencies in the timing of speech events, are thought to scaffold early acquisition of the building blocks in speech. By providing on-line clues to the location and duration of upcoming syllables, temporal structure may aid segmentation and clustering of continuous speech into separable units. This hypothesis tacitly assumes that learners exploit predictability in the temporal structure of speech. Existing measures of speech timing tend to focus on first-order regularities among adjacent units, and are overly sensitive to idiosyncrasies in the data they describe. Here, we compare several statistical methods on a sample of 18 languages, testing whether syllable occurrence is predictable over time. Rather than looking for differences between languages, we aim to find across languages (using clearly defined acoustic, rather than orthographic, measures), temporal predictability in the speech signal which could be exploited by a language learner. First, we analyse distributional regularities using two novel techniques: a Bayesian ideal learner analysis, and a simple distributional measure. Second, we model higher-order temporal structure—regularities arising in an ordered series of syllable timings—testing the hypothesis that non-adjacent temporal structures may explain the gap between subjectively-perceived temporal regularities, and the absence of universally-accepted lower-order objective measures. Together, our analyses provide limited evidence for predictability at different time scales, though higher-order predictability is difficult to reliably infer. We conclude that temporal predictability in speech may well arise from a combination of individually weak perceptual cues at multiple structural levels, but is challenging to pinpoint.
  • Fisher, S. E., Hatchwell, E., Chand, A., Ockenden, N., Monaco, A. P., & Craig, I. W. (1995). Construction of two YAC contigs in human Xp11.23-p11.22, one encompassing the loci OATL1, GATA, TFE3, and SYP, the other linking DXS255 to DXS146. Genomics, 29(2), 496-502. doi:10.1006/geno.1995.9976.

    Abstract

    We have constructed two YAC contigs in the Xp11.23-p11.22 interval of the human X chromosome, a region that was previously poorly characterized. One contig, of at least 1.4 Mb, links the pseudogene OATL1 to the genes GATA1, TFE3, and SYP and also contains loci implicated in Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome and synovial sarcoma. A second contig, mapping proximal to the first, is estimated to be over 2.1 Mb and links the hypervariable locus DXS255 to DXS146, and also contains a chloride channel gene that is responsible for hereditary nephrolithiasis. We have used plasmid rescue, inverse PCR, and Alu-PCR to generate 20 novel markers from this region, 1 of which is polymorphic, and have positioned these relative to one another on the basis of YAC analysis. The order of previously known markers within our contigs, Xpter-OATL1-GATA-TFE3-SYP-DXS255146- Xcen, agrees with genomic pulsed-field maps of the region. In addition, we have constructed a rare-cutter restriction map for a 710-kb region of the DXS255-DXS146 contig and have identified three CPG islands. These contigs and new markers will provide a useful resource for more detailed analysis of Xp11.23-p11.22, a region implicated in several genetic diseases.
  • Fisher, S. E., Lai, C. S., & Monaco, a. A. P. (2003). Deciphering the genetic basis of speech and language disorders. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 26, 57-80. doi:10.1146/annurev.neuro.26.041002.131144.

    Abstract

    A significant number of individuals have unexplained difficulties with acquiring normal speech and language, despite adequate intelligence and environmental stimulation. Although developmental disorders of speech and language are heritable, the genetic basis is likely to involve several, possibly many, different risk factors. Investigations of a unique three-generation family showing monogenic inheritance of speech and language deficits led to the isolation of the first such gene on chromosome 7, which encodes a transcription factor known as FOXP2. Disruption of this gene causes a rare severe speech and language disorder but does not appear to be involved in more common forms of language impairment. Recent genome-wide scans have identified at least four chromosomal regions that may harbor genes influencing the latter, on chromosomes 2, 13, 16, and 19. The molecular genetic approach has potential for dissecting neurological pathways underlying speech and language disorders, but such investigations are only just beginning.
  • Fisher, S. E., Van Bakel, I., Lloyd, S. E., Pearce, S. H. S., Thakker, R. V., & Craig, I. W. (1995). Cloning and characterization of CLCN5, the human kidney chloride channel gene implicated in Dent disease (an X-linked hereditary nephrolithiasis). Genomics, 29, 598-606. doi:10.1006/geno.1995.9960.

    Abstract

    Dent disease, an X-linked familial renal tubular disorder, is a form of Fanconi syndrome associated with proteinuria, hypercalciuria, nephrocalcinosis, kidney stones, and eventual renal failure. We have previously used positional cloning to identify the 3' part of a novel kidney-specific gene (initially termed hClC-K2, but now referred to as CLCN5), which is deleted in patients from one pedigree segregating Dent disease. Mutations that disrupt this gene have been identified in other patients with this disorder. Here we describe the isolation and characterization of the complete open reading frame of the human CLCN5 gene, which is predicted to encode a protein of 746 amino acids, with significant homology to all known members of the ClC family of voltage-gated chloride channels. CLCN5 belongs to a distinct branch of this family, which also includes the recently identified genes CLCN3 and CLCN4. We have shown that the coding region of CLCN5 is organized into 12 exons, spanning 25-30 kb of genomic DNA, and have determined the sequence of each exon-intron boundary. The elucidation of the coding sequence and exon-intron organization of CLCN5 will both expedite the evaluation of structure/function relationships of these ion channels and facilitate the screening of other patients with renal tubular dysfunction for mutations at this locus.
  • Fisher, S. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K. E., Monaco, A. P., & Pembrey, M. E. (1998). Localisation of a gene implicated in a severe speech and language disorder. Nature Genetics, 18, 168 -170. doi:10.1038/ng0298-168.

    Abstract

    Between 2 and 5% of children who are otherwise unimpaired have significant difficulties in acquiring expressive and/or receptive language, despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. While twin studies indicate a significant role for genetic factors in developmental disorders of speech and language, the majority of families segregating such disorders show complex patterns of inheritance, and are thus not amenable for conventional linkage analysis. A rare exception is the KE family, a large three-generation pedigree in which approximately half of the members are affected with a severe speech and language disorder which appears to be transmitted as an autosomal dominant monogenic trait. This family has been widely publicised as suffering primarily from a defect in the use of grammatical suffixation rules, thus supposedly supporting the existence of genes specific to grammar. The phenotype, however, is broader in nature, with virtually every aspect of grammar and of language affected. In addition, affected members have a severe orofacial dyspraxia, and their speech is largely incomprehensible to the naive listener. We initiated a genome-wide search for linkage in the KE family and have identified a region on chromosome 7 which co-segregates with the speech and language disorder (maximum lod score = 6.62 at theta = 0.0), confirming autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance. Further analysis of microsatellites from within the region enabled us to fine map the locus responsible (designated SPCH1) to a 5.6-cM interval in 7q31, thus providing an important step towards its identification. Isolation of SPCH1 may offer the first insight into the molecular genetics of the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.
  • FitzPatrick, I., & Indefrey, P. (2016). Accessing Conceptual Representations for Speaking [Editorial]. Frontiers in Psychology, 7: 1216. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01216.

    Abstract

    Systematic investigations into the role of semantics in the speech production process have remained elusive. This special issue aims at moving forward toward a more detailed account of how precisely conceptual information is used to access the lexicon in speaking and what corresponding format of conceptual representations needs to be assumed. The studies presented in this volume investigated effects of conceptual processing on different processing stages of language production, including sentence formulation, lemma selection, and word form access.
  • Floyd, S. (2016). [Review of the book Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America ed. by Suzanne Oakdale and Magnus Course]. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26(1), 110-111. doi:10.1111/jola.12112.
  • Floyd, S. (2016). Modally hybrid grammar? Celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú. Language, 92(1), 31-64. doi:10.1353/lan.2016.0013.

    Abstract

    From the study of sign languages we know that the visual modality robustly supports the encoding of conventionalized linguistic elements, yet while the same possibility exists for the visual bodily behavior of speakers of spoken languages, such practices are often referred to as ‘gestural’ and are not usually described in linguistic terms. This article describes a practice of speakers of the Brazilian indigenous language Nheengatú of pointing to positions along the east-west axis of the sun’s arc for time-of-day reference, and illustrates how it satisfies any of the common criteria for linguistic elements, as a system of standardized and productive form-meaning pairings whose contributions to propositional meaning remain stable across contexts. First, examples from a video corpus of natural speech demonstrate these conventionalized properties of Nheengatú time reference across multiple speakers. Second, a series of video-based elicitation stimuli test several dimensions of its conventionalization for nine participants. The results illustrate why modality is not an a priori reason that linguistic properties cannot develop in the visual practices that accompany spoken language. The conclusion discusses different possible morphosyntactic and pragmatic analyses for such conventionalized visual elements and asks whether they might be more crosslinguistically common than we presently know.
  • Floyd, S., San Roque, L., & Majid, A. (2018). Smell is coded in grammar and frequent in discourse: Cha'palaa olfactory language in cross-linguistic perspective. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 28(2), 175-196. doi:10.1111/jola.12190.

    Abstract

    It has long been claimed that there is no lexical field of smell, and that smell is of too little validity to be expressed in grammar. We demonstrate both claims are false. The Cha'palaa language (Ecuador) has at least 15 abstract smell terms, each of which is formed using a type of classifier previously thought not to exist. Moreover, using conversational corpora we show that Cha'palaa speakers also talk about smell more than Imbabura Quechua and English speakers. Together, this shows how language and social interaction may jointly reflect distinct cultural orientations towards sensory experience in general and olfaction in particular.
  • Floyd, S., Manrique, E., Rossi, G., & Torreira, F. (2016). Timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: Evidence from three languages. Discourse Processes, 53(3), 175-204. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2014.992680.

    Abstract

    This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation—when one party
    signals a problemwith producing or perceiving another’s turn at talk—into the domain
    of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the
    timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair
    accompanies their turn with a “hold”—when relatively dynamic movements are
    temporarily andmeaningfully held static—this positionwill not be disengaged until the
    problem is resolved and the sequence closed. We base this finding on qualitative and
    quantitative analysis of corpora of conversational interaction from three unrelated languages representing two different modalities: Northern Italian, the Cha’palaa language of Ecuador, and Argentine Sign Language. The cross-linguistic similarities
    uncovered by this comparison suggest that visual bodily practices have been
    semiotized for similar interactive functions across different languages and modalities
    due to common pressures in face-to-face interaction.
  • Floyd, S., Rossi, G., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Dingemanse, M., Kendrick, K. H., Zinken, J., & Enfield, N. J. (2018). Universals and cultural diversity in the expression of gratitude. Royal Society Open Science, 5: 180391. doi:10.1098/rsos.180391.

    Abstract

    Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects — social, psychological, and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying "thank you" as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here we ask to what extent people actually express gratitude in different societies by focussing on episodes of everyday life where someone obtains a good, service, or support from another, and comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. What we find is that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of people’s rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be conflated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on social reciprocity with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.
  • Forkel, S. J., & Catani, M. (2018). Lesion mapping in acute stroke aphasia and its implications for recovery. Neuropsychologia, 115, 88-100. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.03.036.

    Abstract

    Patients with stroke offer a unique window into understanding human brain function. Mapping stroke lesions poses several challenges due to the complexity of the lesion anatomy and the mechanisms causing local and remote disruption on brain networks. In this prospective longitudinal study, we compare standard and advanced approaches to white matter lesion mapping applied to acute stroke patients with aphasia. Eighteen patients with acute left hemisphere stroke were recruited and scanned within two weeks from symptom onset. Aphasia assessment was performed at baseline and six-month follow-up. Structural and diffusion MRI contrasts indicated an area of maximum overlap in the anterior external/extreme capsule with diffusion images showing a larger overlap extending into posterior perisylvian regions. Anatomical predictors of recovery included damage to ipsilesional tracts (as shown by both structural and diffusion images) and contralesional tracts (as shown by diffusion images only). These findings indicate converging results from structural and diffusion lesion mapping methods but also clear differences between the two approaches in their ability to identify predictors of recovery outside the lesioned regions.
  • Frances, C., Costa, A., & Baus, C. (2018). On the effects of regional accents on memory and credibility. Acta Psychologica, 186, 63-70. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.04.003.

    Abstract

    The information we obtain from how speakers sound—for example their accent—affects how we interpret the messages they convey. A clear example is foreign accented speech, where reduced intelligibility and speaker's social categorization (out-group member) affect memory and the credibility of the message (e.g., less trustworthiness). In the present study, we go one step further and ask whether evaluations of messages are also affected by regional accents—accents from a different region than the listener. In the current study, we report results from three experiments on immediate memory recognition and immediate credibility assessments as well as the illusory truth effect. These revealed no differences between messages conveyed in local—from the same region as the participant—and regional accents—from native speakers of a different country than the participants. Our results suggest that when the accent of a speaker has high intelligibility, social categorization by accent does not seem to negatively affect how we treat the speakers' messages.
  • Frances, C., Costa, A., & Baus, C. (2018). On the effects of regional accents on memory and credibility. Acta Psychologica, 186, 63-70. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.04.003.

    Abstract

    The information we obtain from how speakers sound—for example their accent—affects how we interpret the
    messages they convey. A clear example is foreign accented speech, where reduced intelligibility and speaker's
    social categorization (out-group member) affect memory and the credibility of the message (e.g., less trust-
    worthiness). In the present study, we go one step further and ask whether evaluations of messages are also
    affected by regional accents—accents from a different region than the listener. In the current study, we report
    results from three experiments on immediate memory recognition and immediate credibility assessments as well
    as the illusory truth effect. These revealed no differences between messages conveyed in local—from the same
    region as the participant—and regional accents—from native speakers of a different country than the partici-
    pants. Our results suggest that when the accent of a speaker has high intelligibility, social categorization by
    accent does not seem to negatively affect how we treat the speakers' messages.
  • Francisco, A. A., Takashima, A., McQueen, J. M., Van den Bunt, M., Jesse, A., & Groen, M. A. (2018). Adult dyslexic readers benefit less from visual input during audiovisual speech processing: fMRI evidence. Neuropsychologia, 117, 454-471. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.07.009.

    Abstract

    The aim of the present fMRI study was to investigate whether typical and dyslexic adult readers differed in the neural correlates of audiovisual speech processing. We tested for Blood Oxygen-Level Dependent (BOLD) activity differences between these two groups in a 1-back task, as they processed written (word, illegal consonant strings) and spoken (auditory, visual and audiovisual) stimuli. When processing written stimuli, dyslexic readers showed reduced activity in the supramarginal gyrus, a region suggested to play an important role in phonological processing, but only when they processed strings of consonants, not when they read words. During the speech perception tasks, dyslexic readers were only slower than typical readers in their behavioral responses in the visual speech condition. Additionally, dyslexic readers presented reduced neural activation in the auditory, the visual, and the audiovisual speech conditions. The groups also differed in terms of superadditivity, with dyslexic readers showing decreased neural activation in the regions of interest. An additional analysis focusing on vision-related processing during the audiovisual condition showed diminished activation for the dyslexic readers in a fusiform gyrus cluster. Our results thus suggest that there are differences in audiovisual speech processing between dyslexic and normal readers. These differences might be explained by difficulties in processing the unisensory components of audiovisual speech, more specifically, dyslexic readers may benefit less from visual information during audiovisual speech processing than typical readers. Given that visual speech processing supports the development of phonological skills fundamental in reading, differences in processing of visual speech could contribute to differences in reading ability between typical and dyslexic readers.
  • Francks, C., DeLisi, L. E., Fisher, S. E., Laval, S. H., Rue, J. E., Stein, J. F., & Monaco, A. P. (2003). Confirmatory evidence for linkage of relative hand skill to 2p12-q11 [Letter to the editor]. American Journal of Human Genetics, 72(2), 499-502. doi:10.1086/367548.
  • Francks, C., Fisher, S. E., Marlow, A. J., MacPhie, I. L., Taylor, K. E., Richardson, A. J., Stein, J. F., & Monaco, A. P. (2003). Familial and genetic effects on motor coordination, laterality, and reading-related cognition. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(11), 1970-1977. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.160.11.1970.

    Abstract

    OBJECTIVE: Recent research has provided evidence for a genetically mediated association between language or reading-related cognitive deficits and impaired motor coordination. Other studies have identified relationships between lateralization of hand skill and cognitive abilities. With a large sample, the authors aimed to investigate genetic relationships between measures of reading-related cognition, hand motor skill, and hand skill lateralization.

    METHOD: The authors applied univariate and bivariate correlation and familiality analyses to a range of measures. They also performed genomewide linkage analysis of hand motor skill in a subgroup of 195 sibling pairs.

    RESULTS: Hand motor skill was significantly familial (maximum heritability=41%), as were reading-related measures. Hand motor skill was weakly but significantly correlated with reading-related measures, such as nonword reading and irregular word reading. However, these correlations were not significantly familial in nature, and the authors did not observe linkage of hand motor skill to any chromosomal regions implicated in susceptibility to dyslexia. Lateralization of hand skill was not correlated with reading or cognitive ability.

    CONCLUSIONS: The authors confirmed a relationship between lower motor ability and poor reading performance. However, the genetic effects on motor skill and reading ability appeared to be largely or wholly distinct, suggesting that the correlation between these traits may have arisen from environmental influences. Finally, the authors found no evidence that reading disability and/or low general cognitive ability were associated with ambidexterity.
  • Francks, C., DeLisi, L. E., Shaw, S. H., Fisher, S. E., Richardson, A. J., Stein, J. F., & Monaco, A. P. (2003). Parent-of-origin effects on handedness and schizophrenia susceptibility on chromosome 2p12-q11. Human Molecular Genetics, 12(24), 3225-3230. doi:10.1093/hmg/ddg362.

    Abstract

    Schizophrenia and non-right-handedness are moderately associated, and both traits are often accompanied by abnormalities of asymmetrical brain morphology or function. We have found linkage previously of chromosome 2p12-q11 to a quantitative measure of handedness, and we have also found linkage of schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder to this same chromosomal region in a separate study. Now, we have found that in one of our samples (191 reading-disabled sibling pairs), the relative hand skill of siblings was correlated more strongly with paternal than maternal relative hand skill. This led us to re-analyse 2p12-q11 under parent-of-origin linkage models. We found linkage of relative hand skill in the RD siblings to 2p12-q11 with P=0.0000037 for paternal identity-by-descent sharing, whereas the maternally inherited locus was not linked to the trait (P>0.2). Similarly, in affected-sib-pair analysis of our schizophrenia dataset (241 sibling pairs), we found linkage to schizophrenia for paternal sharing with LOD=4.72, P=0.0000016, within 3 cM of the peak linkage to relative hand skill. Maternal linkage across the region was weak or non-significant. These similar paternal-specific linkages suggest that the causative genetic effects on 2p12-q11 are related. The linkages may be due to a single maternally imprinted influence on lateralized brain development that contains common functional polymorphisms.
  • Frank, S. L., Koppen, M., Noordman, L. G. M., & Vonk, W. (2003). Modeling knowledge-based inferences in story comprehension. Cognitive Science, 27(6), 875-910. doi:10.1016/j.cogsci.2003.07.002.

    Abstract

    A computational model of inference during story comprehension is presented, in which story situations are represented distributively as points in a high-dimensional “situation-state space.” This state space organizes itself on the basis of a constructed microworld description. From the same description, causal/temporal world knowledge is extracted. The distributed representation of story situations is more flexible than Golden and Rumelhart’s [Discourse Proc 16 (1993) 203] localist representation. A story taking place in the microworld corresponds to a trajectory through situation-state space. During the inference process, world knowledge is applied to the story trajectory. This results in an adjusted trajectory, reflecting the inference of propositions that are likely to be the case. Although inferences do not result from a search for coherence, they do cause story coherence to increase. The results of simulations correspond to empirical data concerning inference, reading time, and depth of processing. An extension of the model for simulating story retention shows how coherence is preserved during retention without controlling the retention process. Simulation results correspond to empirical data concerning story recall and intrusion.
  • Frank, S. L., & Yang, J. (2018). Lexical representation explains cortical entrainment during speech comprehension. PLoS One, 13(5): e0197304. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0197304.

    Abstract

    Results from a recent neuroimaging study on spoken sentence comprehension have been interpreted as evidence for cortical entrainment to hierarchical syntactic structure. We present a simple computational model that predicts the power spectra from this study, even
    though the model's linguistic knowledge is restricted to the lexical level, and word-level representations are not combined into higher-level units (phrases or sentences). Hence, the
    cortical entrainment results can also be explained from the lexical properties of the stimuli, without recourse to hierarchical syntax.
  • Frank, S. L., & Fitz, H. (2016). Reservoir computing and the Sooner-is-Better bottleneck [Commentary on Christiansen & Slater]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39: e73. doi:10.1017/S0140525X15000783.

    Abstract

    Prior language input is not lost but integrated with the current input. This principle is demonstrated by “reservoir computing”: Untrained recurrent neural networks project input sequences onto a random point in high-dimensional state space. Earlier inputs can be retrieved from this projection, albeit less reliably so as more input is received. The bottleneck is therefore not “Now-or-Never” but “Sooner-is-Better.
  • Franke, B., Stein, J. L., Ripke, S., Anttila, V., Hibar, D. P., Van Hulzen, K. J. E., Arias-Vasquez, A., Smoller, J. W., Nichols, T. E., Neale, M. C., McIntosh, A. M., Lee, P., McMahon, F. J., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Mattheisen, M., Andreassen, O. A., Gruber, O., Sachdev, P. S., Roiz-Santiañez, R., Saykin, A. J. and 17 moreFranke, B., Stein, J. L., Ripke, S., Anttila, V., Hibar, D. P., Van Hulzen, K. J. E., Arias-Vasquez, A., Smoller, J. W., Nichols, T. E., Neale, M. C., McIntosh, A. M., Lee, P., McMahon, F. J., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Mattheisen, M., Andreassen, O. A., Gruber, O., Sachdev, P. S., Roiz-Santiañez, R., Saykin, A. J., Ehrlich, S., Mather, K. A., Turner, J. A., Schwarz, E., Thalamuthu, A., Yao, Y., Ho, Y. Y. W., Martin, N. G., Wright, M. J., Guadalupe, T., Fisher, S. E., Francks, C., Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, ENIGMA Consortium, O’Donovan, M. C., Thompson, P. M., Neale, B. M., Medland, S. E., & Sullivan, P. F. (2016). Genetic influences on schizophrenia and subcortical brain volumes: large-scale proof of concept. Nature Neuroscience, 19, 420-431. doi:10.1038/nn.4228.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    Franke_etal_2016_supp1.pdf
  • Franken, M. K., Acheson, D. J., McQueen, J. M., Hagoort, P., & Eisner, F. (2018). Opposing and following responses in sensorimotor speech control: Why responses go both ways. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25(4), 1458-1467. doi:10.3758/s13423-018-1494-x.

    Abstract

    When talking, speakers continuously monitor and use the auditory feedback of their own voice to control and inform speech production processes. When speakers are provided with auditory feedback that is perturbed in real time, most of them compensate for this by opposing the feedback perturbation. But some speakers follow the perturbation. In the current study, we investigated whether the state of the speech production system at perturbation onset may determine what type of response (opposing or following) is given. The results suggest that whether a perturbation-related response is opposing or following depends on ongoing fluctuations of the production system: It initially responds by doing the opposite of what it was doing. This effect and the non-trivial proportion of following responses suggest that current production models are inadequate: They need to account for why responses to unexpected sensory feedback depend on the production-system’s state at the time of perturbation.

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