Publications

Displaying 101 - 200 of 724
  • Cutler, A., & Jesse, A. (2021). Word stress in speech perception. In J. S. Pardo, L. C. Nygaard, & D. B. Pisoni (Eds.), The handbook of speech perception (2nd ed., pp. 239-265). Chichester: Wiley.
  • Cutler, A., Aslin, R. N., Gervain, J., & Nespor, M. (2021). Special issue in honor of Jacques Mehler, Cognition's founding editor [preface]. Cognition, 213: 104786. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104786.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Cross-linguistic differences in speech segmentation. MRC News, 56, 8-9.
  • Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1992). Detection of vowels and consonants with minimal acoustic variation. Speech Communication, 11, 101-108. doi:10.1016/0167-6393(92)90004-Q.

    Abstract

    Previous research has shown that, in a phoneme detection task, vowels produce longer reaction times than consonants, suggesting that they are harder to perceive. One possible explanation for this difference is based upon their respective acoustic/articulatory characteristics. Another way of accounting for the findings would be to relate them to the differential functioning of vowels and consonants in the syllabic structure of words. In this experiment, we examined the second possibility. Targets were two pairs of phonemes, each containing a vowel and a consonant with similar phonetic characteristics. Subjects heard lists of English words had to press a response key upon detecting the occurrence of a pre-specified target. This time, the phonemes which functioned as vowels in syllabic structure yielded shorter reaction times than those which functioned as consonants. This rules out an explanation for response time difference between vowels and consonants in terms of function in syllable structure. Instead, we propose that consonantal and vocalic segments differ with respect to variability of tokens, both in the acoustic realisation of targets and in the representation of targets by listeners.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Proceedings with confidence. New Scientist, (1825), 54.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Processing constraints of the native phonological repertoire on the native language. In Y. Tohkura, E. Vatikiotis-Bateson, & Y. Sagisaka (Eds.), Speech perception, production and linguistic structure (pp. 275-278). Tokyo: Ohmsha.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). Prosodic structure and word recognition. In A. D. Friederici (Ed.), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 41-70). Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Psychology and the segment. In G. Docherty, & D. Ladd (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology II: Gesture, segment, prosody (pp. 290-295). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1992). Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 218-236. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(92)90012-M.

    Abstract

    Segmentation of continuous speech into its component words is a nontrivial task for listeners. Previous work has suggested that listeners develop heuristic segmentation procedures based on experience with the structure of their language; for English, the heuristic is that strong syllables (containing full vowels) are most likely to be the initial syllables of lexical words, whereas weak syllables (containing central, or reduced, vowels) are nonword-initial, or, if word-initial, are grammatical words. This hypothesis is here tested against natural and laboratory-induced missegmentations of continuous speech. Precisely the expected pattern is found: listeners erroneously insert boundaries before strong syllables but delete them before weak syllables; boundaries inserted before strong syllables produce lexical words, while boundaries inserted before weak syllables produce grammatical words.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). The perception of speech: Psycholinguistic aspects. In W. Bright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of language: Vol. 3 (pp. 181-183). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). The production and perception of word boundaries. In Y. Tohkura, E. Vatikiotis-Bateson, & Y. Sagisaka (Eds.), Speech perception, production and linguistic structure (pp. 419-425). Tokyo: Ohsma.
  • Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Segui, J. (1992). The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 381-410.

    Abstract

    Monolingual French speakers employ a syllable-based procedure in speech segmentation; monolingual English speakers use a stress-based segmentation procedure and do not use the syllable-based procedure. In the present study French-English bilinguals participated in segmentation experiments with English and French materials. Their results as a group did not simply mimic the performance of English monolinguals with English language materials and of French monolinguals with French language materials. Instead, the bilinguals formed two groups, defined by forced choice of a dominant language. Only the French-dominant group showed syllabic segmentation and only with French language materials. The English-dominant group showed no syllabic segmentation in either language. However, the English-dominant group showed stress-based segmentation with English language materials; the French-dominant group did not. We argue that rhythmically based segmentation procedures are mutually exclusive, as a consequence of which speech segmentation by bilinguals is, in one respect at least, functionally monolingual.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Why not abolish psycholinguistics? In W. Dressler, H. Luschützky, O. Pfeiffer, & J. Rennison (Eds.), Phonologica 1988 (pp. 77-87). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Cychosz, M., Cristia, A., Bergelson, E., Casillas, M., Baudet, G., Warlaumont, A. S., Scaff, C., Yankowitz, L., & Seidl, A. (2021). Vocal development in a large‐scale crosslinguistic corpus. Developmental Science, 24(5): e13090. doi:10.1111/desc.13090.

    Abstract

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

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    supporting information audio data
  • Dai, B., McQueen, J. M., Hagoort, P., & Kösem, A. (2017). Pure linguistic interference during comprehension of competing speech signals. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141, EL249-EL254. doi:10.1121/1.4977590.

    Abstract

    Speech-in-speech perception can be challenging because the processing of competing acoustic and linguistic information leads to informational masking. Here, a method is proposed to isolate the linguistic component of informational masking while keeping the distractor's acoustic information unchanged. Participants performed a dichotic listening cocktail-party task before and after training on 4-band noise-vocoded sentences that became intelligible through the training. Distracting noise-vocoded speech interfered more with target speech comprehension after training (i.e., when intelligible) than before training (i.e., when unintelligible) at −3 dB SNR. These findings confirm that linguistic and acoustic information have distinct masking effects during speech-in‐speech comprehension
  • Dalla Bella, S., Farrugia, F., Benoit, C.-E., Begel, V., Verga, L., Harding, E., & Kotz, S. A. (2017). BAASTA: Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities. Behavior Research Methods, 49(3), 1128-1145. doi:10.3758/s13428-016-0773-6.

    Abstract

    The Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities (BAASTA) is a new tool for the systematic assessment of perceptual and sensorimotor timing skills. It spans a broad range of timing skills aimed at differentiating individual timing profiles. BAASTA consists of sensitive time perception and production tasks. Perceptual tasks include duration discrimination, anisochrony detection (with tones and music), and a version of the Beat Alignment Task. Perceptual thresholds for duration discrimination and anisochrony detection are estimated with a maximum likelihood procedure (MLP) algorithm. Production tasks use finger tapping and include unpaced and paced tapping (with tones and music), synchronization-continuation, and adaptive tapping to a sequence with a tempo change. BAASTA was tested in a proof-of-concept study with 20 non-musicians (Experiment 1). To validate the results of the MLP procedure, less widespread than standard staircase methods, three perceptual tasks of the battery (duration discrimination, anisochrony detection with tones, and with music) were further tested in a second group of non-musicians using 2 down / 1 up and 3 down / 1 up staircase paradigms (n = 24) (Experiment 2). The results show that the timing profiles provided by BAASTA allow to detect cases of timing/rhythm disorders. In addition, perceptual thresholds yielded by the MLP algorithm, although generally comparable to the results provided by standard staircase, tend to be slightly lower. In sum, BAASTA provides a comprehensive battery to test perceptual and sensorimotor timing skills, and to detect timing/rhythm deficits.
  • Decuyper, C., Brysbaert, M., Brodeur, M. B., & Meyer, A. S. (2021). Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS): Dutch names for 1400 photographs. Journal of Cognition, 4(1): 33. doi:10.5334/joc.180.

    Abstract

    We present written naming norms from 153 young adult Dutch speakers for 1397 photographs (the BOSS set; see Brodeur, Dionne-Dostie, Montreuil, & Lepage, 2010; Brodeur, Guérard, & Bouras, 2014). From the norming study, we report the preferred (modal) name, alternative names, name agreement, and average object agreement. In addition, the data base includes Zipf frequency, word prevalence and Age of Acquisition for the modal picture names collected. Furthermore, we describe a subset of 359 photographs with very good name agreement and a subset of 35 photos with two common names. These sets may be particularly valuable for designing experiments. Though the participants typed the object names, comparisons with other datasets indicate that the collected norms are valuable for spoken naming studies as well.
  • Dediu, D. (2017). From biology to language change and diversity. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Dependencies in language: On the causal ontology of linguistics systems (pp. 39-52). Berlin: Language Science Press.
  • Dediu, D., Janssen, R., & Moisik, S. R. (2017). Language is not isolated from its wider environment: Vocal tract influences on the evolution of speech and language. Language and Communication, 54, 9-20. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2016.10.002.

    Abstract

    Language is not a purely cultural phenomenon somehow isolated from its wider environment, and we may only understand its origins and evolution by seriously considering its embedding in this environment as well as its multimodal nature. By environment here we understand other aspects of culture (such as communication technology, attitudes towards language contact, etc.), of the physical environment (ultraviolet light incidence, air humidity, etc.), and of the biological infrastructure for language and speech. We are specifically concerned in this paper with the latter, in the form of the biases, constraints and affordances that the anatomy and physiology of the vocal tract create on speech and language. In a nutshell, our argument is that (a) there is an under-appreciated amount of inter-individual variation in vocal tract (VT) anatomy and physiology, (b) variation that is non-randomly distributed across populations, and that (c) results in systematic differences in phonetics and phonology between languages. Relevant differences in VT anatomy include the overall shape of the hard palate, the shape of the alveolar ridge, the relationship between the lower and upper jaw, to mention just a few, and our data offer a new way to systematically explore such differences and their potential impact on speech. These differences generate very small biases that nevertheless can be amplified by the repeated use and transmission of language, affecting language diachrony and resulting in cross-linguistic synchronic differences. Moreover, the same type of biases and processes might have played an essential role in the emergence and evolution of language, and might allow us a glimpse into the speech and language of extinct humans by, for example, reconstructing the anatomy of parts of their vocal tract from the fossil record and extrapolating the biases we find in present-day humans.
  • DeMayo, B., Kellier, D., Braginsky, M., Bergmann, C., Hendriks, C., Rowland, C. F., Frank, M., & Marchman, V. (2021). Web-CDI: A system for online administration of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Language Development Research, 10.34758/kr8e-w591. doi:10.34758/kr8e-w591.

    Abstract

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

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    data and code
  • Den Hoed, J., Devaraju, K., & Fisher, S. E. (2021). Molecular networks of the FOXP2 transcription factor in the brain. EMBO Reports, 22(8): e52803. doi:10.15252/embr.202152803.

    Abstract

    The discovery of the FOXP2 transcription factor, and its implication in a rare severe human speech and language disorder, has led to two decades of empirical studies focused on uncovering its roles in the brain using a range of in vitro and in vivo methods. Here, we discuss what we have learned about the regulation of FOXP2, its downstream effectors, and its modes of action as a transcription factor in brain development and function, providing an integrated overview of what is currently known about the critical molecular networks.
  • Den Hoed, J., De Boer, E., Voisin, N., Dingemans, A. J. M., Guex, N., Wiel, L., Nellaker, C., Amudhavalli, S. M., Banka, S., Bena, F. S., Ben-Zeev, B., Bonagura, V. R., Bruel, A.-L., Brunet, T., Brunner, H. G., Chew, H. B., Chrast, J., Cimbalistienė, L., Coon, H., The DDD study, Délot, E. C. and 77 moreDen Hoed, J., De Boer, E., Voisin, N., Dingemans, A. J. M., Guex, N., Wiel, L., Nellaker, C., Amudhavalli, S. M., Banka, S., Bena, F. S., Ben-Zeev, B., Bonagura, V. R., Bruel, A.-L., Brunet, T., Brunner, H. G., Chew, H. B., Chrast, J., Cimbalistienė, L., Coon, H., The DDD study, Délot, E. C., Démurger, F., Denommé-Pichon, A.-S., Depienne, C., Donnai, D., Dyment, D. A., Elpeleg, O., Faivre, L., Gilissen, C., Granger, L., Haber, B., Hachiya, Y., Hamzavi Abedi, Y., Hanebeck, J., Hehir-Kwa, J. Y., Horist, B., Itai, T., Jackson, A., Jewell, R., Jones, K. L., Joss, S., Kashii, H., Kato, M., Kattentidt-Mouravieva, A. A., Kok, F., Kotzaeridou, U., Krishnamurthy, V., Kučinskas, V., Kuechler, A., Lavillaureix, A., Liu, P., Manwaring, L., Matsumoto, N., Mazel, B., McWalter, K., Meiner, V., Mikati, M. A., Miyatake, S., Mizuguchi, T., Moey, L. H., Mohammed, S., Mor-Shaked, H., Mountford, H., Newbury-Ecob, R., Odent, S., Orec, L., Osmond, M., Palculict, T. B., Parker, M., Petersen, A., Pfundt, R., Preikšaitienė, E., Radtke, K., Ranza, E., Rosenfeld, J. A., Santiago-Sim, T., Schwager, C., Sinnema, M., Snijders Blok, L., Spillmann, R. C., Stegmann, A. P. A., Thiffault, I., Tran, L., Vaknin-Dembinsky, A., Vedovato-dos-Santos, J. H., Vergano, S. A., Vilain, E., Vitobello, A., Wagner, M., Waheeb, A., Willing, M., Zuccarelli, B., Kini, U., Newbury, D. F., Kleefstra, T., Reymond, A., Fisher, S. E., & Vissers, L. E. L. M. (2021). Mutation-specific pathophysiological mechanisms define different neurodevelopmental disorders associated with SATB1 dysfunction. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 108(2), 346-356. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2021.01.007.

    Abstract

    Whereas large-scale statistical analyses can robustly identify disease-gene relationships, they do not accurately capture genotype-phenotype correlations or disease mechanisms. We use multiple lines of independent evidence to show that different variant types in a single gene, SATB1, cause clinically overlapping but distinct neurodevelopmental disorders. Clinical evaluation of 42 individuals carrying SATB1 variants identified overt genotype-phenotype relationships, associated with different pathophysiological mechanisms, established by functional assays. Missense variants in the CUT1 and CUT2 DNA-binding domains result in stronger chromatin binding, increased transcriptional repression and a severe phenotype. Contrastingly, variants predicted to result in haploinsufficiency are associated with a milder clinical presentation. A similarly mild phenotype is observed for individuals with premature protein truncating variants that escape nonsense-mediated decay and encode truncated proteins, which are transcriptionally active but mislocalized in the cell. Our results suggest that in-depth mutation-specific genotype-phenotype studies are essential to capture full disease complexity and to explain phenotypic variability.
  • Deriziotis, P., & Fisher, S. E. (2017). Speech and Language: Translating the Genome. Trends in Genetics, 33(9), 642-656. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2017.07.002.

    Abstract

    Investigation of the biological basis of human speech and language is being transformed by developments in molecular technologies, including high-throughput genotyping and next-generation sequencing of whole genomes. These advances are shedding new light on the genetic architecture underlying language-related disorders (speech apraxia, specific language impairment, developmental dyslexia) as well as that contributing to variation in relevant skills in the general population. We discuss how state-of-the-art methods are uncovering a range of genetic mechanisms, from rare mutations of large effect to common polymorphisms that increase risk in a subtle way, while converging on neurogenetic pathways that are shared between distinct disorders. We consider the future of the field, highlighting the unusual challenges and opportunities associated with studying genomics of language-related traits.
  • Devaraju, K., Miskinyte, G., Hansen, M. G., Monni, E., Tornero, D., Woods, N. B., Bengzon, J., Ahlenius, H., Lindvall, O., & Kokaia, Z. (2017). Direct conversion of human fibroblasts to functional excitatory cortical neurons integrating into human neural networks. Stem Cell Research & Therapy, 8: 207. doi:10.1186/s13287-017-0658-3.

    Abstract

    Background: Human fibroblasts can be directly converted to several subtypes of neurons, but cortical projection neurons have not been generated. Methods: Here we screened for transcription factor combinations that could potentially convert human fibroblasts to functional excitatory cortical neurons. The induced cortical (iCtx) cells were analyzed for cortical neuronal identity using immunocytochemistry, single-cell quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), electrophysiology, and their ability to integrate into human neural networks in vitro and ex vivo using electrophysiology and rabies virus tracing. Results: We show that a combination of three ranscription fact ors, BRN2, MYT1L, and FEZF2, have the ability to directly convert human fibroblasts to functional excitatory cortical neurons. The conversion efficiency was increased to about 16% by treatment with small molecules and microRNAs. The iCtx cells exhibited electrophysiological properties of functional neurons, had pyramidal-like cell morphology, and expressed key cortical projection neuronal markers. Single-cell analysis of iCtx cells revealed a complex gene expression profile, a subpopulation of them displaying a molecular signature closely resembling that of human fetal primary cortical neurons. The iCtx cells received synaptic inputs from co-cultured human fetal primary cortical neurons, contained spines, and expressed the postsyna ptic excitatory scaffold protein PSD95. When transplanted ex vivo to organotypic cultures of adult human cerebral cortex, the iCtx cells exhibited morphological and electrophysiological properties of mature neurons, integrated structurally into the cortical tissue, and received synaptic inputs from adult human neurons. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that functional excitatory cortical neurons, generated here for the first time by direct conversion of human somatic cells, have the capacity for synaptic integration into adult human cortex.
  • Díaz-Caneja, C. M., Alloza, C., Gordaliza, P. M., Fernández Pena, A., De Hoyos, L., Santonja, J., Buimer, E. E. L., Van Haren, N. E. M., Cahn, W., Arango, C., Kahn, R. S., Hulshoff Pol, H. E., Schnack, H. G., & Janssen, J. (2021). Sex differences in lifespan trajectories and variability of human sulcal and gyral morphology. Cerebral Cortex, 31(11), 5107-5120. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhab145.

    Abstract

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

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  • 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. (2017). Brain-to-brain interfaces and the role of language in distributing agency. In N. J. Enfield, & P. Kockelman (Eds.), Distributed Agency (pp. 59-66). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190457204.003.0007.

    Abstract

    Brain-to-brain interfaces, in which brains are physically connected without the intervention of language, promise new ways of collaboration and communication between humans. I examine the narrow view of language implicit in current conceptions of brain-to-brain interfaces and put forward a constructive alternative, stressing the role of language in organising joint agency. Two features of language stand out as crucial: its selectivity, which provides people with much-needed filters between public words and private worlds; and its negotiability, which provides people with systematic opportunities for calibrating understanding and expressing consent and dissent. Without these checks and balances, brain-to-brain interfaces run the risk of reducing people to the level of amoeba in a slime mold; with them, they may mature to become useful extensions of human agency
  • Dingemanse, M., & Akita, K. (2017). An inverse relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration: on the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones, with special reference to Japanese. Journal of Linguistics, 53(3), 501-532. doi:10.1017/S002222671600030X.

    Abstract

    Words and phrases may differ in the extent to which they are susceptible to prosodic foregrounding and expressive morphology: their expressiveness. They may also differ in the degree to which they are integrated in the morphosyntactic structure of the utterance: their grammatical integration. We describe an inverse relation that holds across widely varied languages, such that more expressiveness goes together with less grammatical integration, and vice versa. We review typological evidence for this inverse relation in 10 languages, then quantify and explain it using Japanese corpus data. We do this by tracking ideophones —vivid sensory words also known as mimetics or expressives— across different morphosyntactic contexts and measuring their expressiveness in terms of intonation, phonation and expressive morphology. We find that as expressiveness increases, grammatical integration decreases. Using gesture as a measure independent of the speech signal, we find that the most expressive ideophones are most likely to come together with iconic gestures. We argue that the ultimate cause is the encounter of two distinct and partly incommensurable modes of representation: the gradient, iconic, depictive system represented by ideophones and iconic gestures and the discrete, arbitrary, descriptive system represented by ordinary words. The study shows how people combine modes of representation in speech and demonstrates the value of integrating description and depiction into the scientific vision of language.

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    Open data & R code
  • Dingemanse, M. (2017). Expressiveness and system integration: On the typology of ideophones, with special reference to Siwu. STUF - Language Typology and Universals, 70(2), 363-384. doi:10.1515/stuf-2017-0018.

    Abstract

    Ideophones are often described as words that are highly expressive and morphosyntactically marginal. A study of ideophones in everyday conversations in Siwu (Kwa, eastern Ghana) reveals a landscape of variation and change that sheds light on some larger questions in the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones. The article documents a trade-off between expressiveness and morphosyntactic integration, with high expressiveness linked to low integration and vice versa. It also describes a pathway for deideophonisation and finds that frequency of use is a factor that influences the degree to which ideophones can come to be more like ordinary words. The findings have implications for processes of (de)ideophonisation, ideophone borrowing, and ideophone typology. A key point is that the internal diversity we find in naturally occurring data, far from being mere noise, is patterned variation that can help us to get a handle on the factors shaping ideophone systems within and across languages.
  • Dingemanse, M. (2017). On the margins of language: Ideophones, interjections and dependencies in linguistic theory. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Dependencies in language (pp. 195-202). Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.573781.

    Abstract

    Linguistic discovery is viewpoint-dependent, just like our ideas about what is marginal and what is central in language. In this essay I consider two supposed marginalia —ideophones and interjections— which provide some useful pointers for widening our field of view. Ideophones challenge us to take a fresh look at language and consider how it is that our communication system combines multiple modes of representation. Interjections challenge us to extend linguistic inquiry beyond sentence level, and remind us that language is social-interactive at core. Marginalia, then, are not the obscure, exotic phenomena that can be safely ignored: they represent opportunities for innovation and invite us to keep pushing the edges of linguistic inquiry.
  • Dingemanse, M., Rossi, G., & Floyd, S. (2017). Place reference in story beginnings: a cross-linguistic study of narrative and interactional affordances. Language in Society, 46(2), 129-158. doi:10.1017/S0047404516001019.

    Abstract

    People often begin stories in conversation by referring to person, time, and place. We study story beginnings in three societies and find place reference is recurrently used to (i) set the stage, foreshadowing the type of story and the kind of response due, and to (ii) make the story cohere, anchoring elements of the developing story. Recipients orient to these interactional affordances of place reference by responding in ways that attend to the relevance of place for the story and by requesting clarification when references are incongruent or noticeably absent. The findings are based on 108 story beginnings in three unrelated languages: Cha’palaa, a Barbacoan language of Ecuador; Northern Italian, a Romance language of Italy; and Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana. The commonalities suggest we have identified generic affordances of place reference, and that storytelling in conversation offers a robust sequential environment for systematic comparative research on conversational structures.
  • Donnelly, S., & Kidd, E. (2021). Onset neighborhood density slows lexical access in high vocabulary 30‐month olds. Cognitive Science, 45(9): e13022. doi:10.1111/cogs.13022.

    Abstract

    There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on previous research by testing whether phonological onset density slows lexical access in a large sample of 100 English-acquiring 30-month-olds. The children participated in a visual world looking-while-listening task, in which their attention was directed to one of two objects on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. We found moderate evidence of inhibitory effects of onset neighborhood density on lexical access and clear evidence for an interaction between onset neighborhood density and vocabulary, with larger effects of onset neighborhood density for children with larger vocabularies. Results suggest the lexicons of 30-month-olds exhibit lexical-level competition, with competition increasing with vocabulary size.
  • Donnelly, S., & Kidd, E. (2021). On the structure and source of individual differences in toddlers' comprehension of transitive sentences. Frontiers in Psychology, 12: 661022. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661022.

    Abstract

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

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  • Donnelly, S., & Kidd, E. (2021). The longitudinal relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary growth in early language development. Child Development, 92(2), 609-625. doi:10.1111/cdev.13511.

    Abstract

    Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn‐taking and vocabulary growth in English‐acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months provided several indices of the language environment, including the number of adult words children heard in their environment and their number of conversational turns. Vocabulary was measured independently via parental report. Growth curve analyses revealed a bidirectional relationship between conversational turns and vocabulary growth, controlling for the amount of words in children’s environments. The results are consistent with theoretical approaches that identify social interaction as a core component of early language acquisition.
  • Doumas, L. A. A., & Martin, A. E. (2021). A model for learning structured representations of similarity and relative magnitude from experience. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 37, 158-166. doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.01.001.

    Abstract

    How a system represents information tightly constrains the kinds of problems it can solve. Humans routinely solve problems that appear to require abstract representations of stimulus properties and relations. How we acquire such representations has central importance in an account of human cognition. We briefly describe a theory of how a system can learn invariant responses to instances of similarity and relative magnitude, and how structured, relational representations can be learned from initially unstructured inputs. Two operations, comparing distributed representations and learning from the concomitant network dynamics in time, underpin the ability to learn these representations and to respond to invariance in the environment. Comparing analog representations of absolute magnitude produces invariant signals that carry information about similarity and relative magnitude. We describe how a system can then use this information to bootstrap learning structured (i.e., symbolic) concepts of relative magnitude from experience without assuming such representations a priori.
  • Drew, P., Hakulinen, A., Heinemann, T., Niemi, J., & Rossi, G. (2021). Hendiadys in naturally occurring interactions: A cross-linguistic study of double verb constructions. Journal of Pragmatics, 182, 322-347. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.02.008.

    Abstract

    Double verb constructions known as hendiadys have been studied primarily in literary texts and corpora of written language. Much less is known about their properties and usage in spoken language, where expressions such as ‘come and see’, ‘go and tell’, ‘sit and talk’ are particularly common, and where we can find an even richer diversity of other constructions. In this study, we investigate hendiadys in corpora of naturally occurring social interactions in four languages, Danish, English (US and UK), Finnish and Italian, with the objective of exploring whether hendiadys is used systematically in recurrent interactional and sequential circumstances, from which it is possible to identify the pragmatic function(s) that hendiadys may serve. Examining hendiadys in conversation also offers us a special window into its grammatical properties, for example when a speaker self-corrects from a non-hendiadic to a hendiadic expression, exposing the boundary between related grammatical forms and demonstrating the distinctiveness of hendiadys in context. More broadly, we demonstrate that hendiadys is systematically associated with talk about complainable matters, in environments characterised by a conflict, dissonance, or friction that is ongoing in the interaction or that is being reported by one participant to another. We also find that the utterance in which hendiadys is used is typically in a subsequent and possibly terminal position in the sequence, summarising or concluding it. Another key finding is that the complainable or conflictual element in these interactions is expressed primarily by the first conjunct of the hendiadic construction. Whilst the first conjunct is semantically subsidiary to the second, it is pragmatically the most important one. This analysis leads us to revisit a long-established asymmetry between the verbal components of hendiadys, and to bring to light the synergy of grammar and pragmatics in language usage.
  • Drijvers, L., Jensen, O., & Spaak, E. (2021). Rapid invisible frequency tagging reveals nonlinear integration of auditory and visual information. Human Brain Mapping, 42(4), 1138-1152. doi:10.1002/hbm.25282.

    Abstract

    During communication in real-life settings, the brain integrates information from auditory and visual modalities to form a unified percept of our environment. In the current magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we used rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) to generate steady-state evoked fields and investigated the integration of audiovisual information in a semantic context. We presented participants with videos of an actress uttering action verbs (auditory; tagged at 61 Hz) accompanied by a gesture (visual; tagged at 68 Hz, using a projector with a 1440 Hz refresh rate). Integration ease was manipulated by auditory factors (clear/degraded speech) and visual factors (congruent/incongruent gesture). We identified MEG spectral peaks at the individual (61/68 Hz) tagging frequencies. We furthermore observed a peak at the intermodulation frequency of the auditory and visually tagged signals (fvisual – fauditory = 7 Hz), specifically when integration was easiest (i.e., when speech was clear and accompanied by a congruent gesture). This intermodulation peak is a signature of nonlinear audiovisual integration, and was strongest in left inferior frontal gyrus and left temporal regions; areas known to be involved in speech-gesture integration. The enhanced power at the intermodulation frequency thus reflects the ease of integration and demonstrates that speech-gesture information interacts in higher-order language areas. Furthermore, we provide a proof-of-principle of the use of RIFT to study the integration of audiovisual stimuli, in relation to, for instance, semantic context.
  • Drijvers, L., & Ozyurek, A. (2017). Visual context enhanced: The joint contribution of iconic gestures and visible speech to degraded speech comprehension. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60, 212-222. doi:10.1044/2016_JSLHR-H-16-0101.

    Abstract

    Purpose This study investigated whether and to what extent iconic co-speech gestures contribute to information from visible speech to enhance degraded speech comprehension at different levels of noise-vocoding. Previous studies of the contributions of these 2 visual articulators to speech comprehension have only been performed separately.

    Method Twenty participants watched videos of an actress uttering an action verb and completed a free-recall task. The videos were presented in 3 speech conditions (2-band noise-vocoding, 6-band noise-vocoding, clear), 3 multimodal conditions (speech + lips blurred, speech + visible speech, speech + visible speech + gesture), and 2 visual-only conditions (visible speech, visible speech + gesture).

    Results Accuracy levels were higher when both visual articulators were present compared with 1 or none. The enhancement effects of (a) visible speech, (b) gestural information on top of visible speech, and (c) both visible speech and iconic gestures were larger in 6-band than 2-band noise-vocoding or visual-only conditions. Gestural enhancement in 2-band noise-vocoding did not differ from gestural enhancement in visual-only conditions.
  • Drozdova, P., Van Hout, R., & Scharenborg, O. (2017). L2 voice recognition: The role of speaker-, listener-, and stimulus-related factors. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 142(5), 3058-3068. doi:10.1121/1.5010169.

    Abstract

    Previous studies examined various factors influencing voice recognition and learning with mixed results. The present study investigates the separate and combined contribution of these various speaker-, stimulus-, and listener-related factors to voice recognition. Dutch listeners, with arguably incomplete phonological and lexical knowledge in the target language, English, learned to recognize the voice of four native English speakers, speaking in English, during four-day training. Training was successful and listeners' accuracy was shown to be influenced by the acoustic characteristics of speakers and the sound composition of the words used in the training, but not by lexical frequency of the words, nor the lexical knowledge of the listeners or their phonological aptitude. Although not conclusive, listeners with a lower working memory capacity seemed to be slower in learning voices than listeners with a higher working memory capacity. The results reveal that speaker-related, listener-related, and stimulus-related factors accumulate in voice recognition, while lexical information turns out not to play a role in successful voice learning and recognition. This implies that voice recognition operates at the prelexical processing level.
  • Duprez, J., Stokkermans, M., Drijvers, L., & Cohen, M. X. (2021). Synchronization between keyboard typing and neural oscillations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 33(5), 887-901. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01692.

    Abstract

    Rhythmic neural activity synchronizes with certain rhythmic behaviors, such as breathing, sniffing, saccades, and speech. The extent to which neural oscillations synchronize with higher-level and more complex behaviors is largely unknown. Here we investigated electrophysiological synchronization with keyboard typing, which is an omnipresent behavior daily engaged by an uncountably large number of people. Keyboard typing is rhythmic with frequency characteristics roughly the same as neural oscillatory dynamics associated with cognitive control, notably through midfrontal theta (4 -7 Hz) oscillations. We tested the hypothesis that synchronization occurs between typing and midfrontal theta, and breaks down when errors are committed. Thirty healthy participants typed words and sentences on a keyboard without visual feedback, while EEG was recorded. Typing rhythmicity was investigated by inter-keystroke interval analyses and by a kernel density estimation method. We used a multivariate spatial filtering technique to investigate frequency-specific synchronization between typing and neuronal oscillations. Our results demonstrate theta rhythmicity in typing (around 6.5 Hz) through the two different behavioral analyses. Synchronization between typing and neuronal oscillations occurred at frequencies ranging from 4 to 15 Hz, but to a larger extent for lower frequencies. However, peak synchronization frequency was idiosyncratic across subjects, therefore not specific to theta nor to midfrontal regions, and correlated somewhat with peak typing frequency. Errors and trials associated with stronger cognitive control were not associated with changes in synchronization at any frequency. As a whole, this study shows that brain-behavior synchronization does occur during keyboard typing but is not specific to midfrontal theta.
  • Durrant, S., Jessop, A., Chang, F., Bidgood, A., Peter, M. S., Pine, J. M., & Rowland, C. F. (2021). Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development? Language and Cognition, 13(1), 66-98. doi:10.1017/langcog.2020.26.

    Abstract

    By the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whether these differences influence vocabulary development. As part of the longitudinal Language 0–5 Project, 78 10-month-old infants were tested on their ability to interpret three dynamic motion events, involving (a) caused-motion, (b) chasing behaviour, and (c) goal-directed movement. Planned analyses found that infants showed evidence of understanding the first two event types, but not the third. Looking behaviour in each task was not meaningfully related to vocabulary development, nor were there any correlations between the tasks. The results of additional exploratory analyses and simulations suggested that the infants’ understanding of each event may not be predictive of their vocabulary development, and that looking times in these tasks may not be reliably capturing any meaningful individual differences in their knowledge. This raises questions about how to convert experimental group designs to individual differences measures, and how to interpret infant looking time behaviour.
  • Eekhof, L. S., Kuijpers, M. M., Faber, M., Gao, X., Mak, M., Van den Hoven, E., & Willems, R. M. (2021). Lost in a story, detached from the words. Discourse Processes, 58(7), 595-616. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2020.1857619.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    Analysis scripts and data
  • Eekhof, L. S., Van Krieken, K., Sanders, J., & Willems, R. M. (2021). Reading minds, reading stories: Social-cognitive abilities affect the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint. Frontiers in Psychology, 12: 698986. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.698986.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

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  • Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., Senft, B., & Senft, G. (1998). Trobriander (Ost-Neuguinea, Trobriand Inseln, Kaile'una) Fadenspiele 'ninikula'. In Ethnologie - Humanethologische Begleitpublikationen von I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt und Mitarbeitern. Sammelband I, 1985-1987. Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film.
  • Eising, E., Shyti, R., 'T hoen, P. A. C., Vijfhuizen, L. S., Huisman, S. M. H., Broos, L. A. M., Mahfourz, A., Reinders, M. J. T., Ferrrari, M. D., Tolner, E. A., De Vries, B., & Van den Maagdenberg, A. M. J. M. (2017). Cortical spreading depression causes unique dysregulation of inflammatory pathways in a transgenic mouse model of migraine. Molecular Biology, 54(4), 2986-2996. doi:10.1007/s12035-015-9681-5.

    Abstract

    Familial hemiplegic migraine type 1 (FHM1) is a
    rare monogenic subtype of migraine with aura caused by mutations
    in CACNA1A that encodes the α1A subunit of voltagegated
    CaV2.1 calcium channels. Transgenic knock-in mice
    that carry the human FHM1 R192Q missense mutation
    (‘FHM1 R192Q mice’) exhibit an increased susceptibility to
    cortical spreading depression (CSD), the mechanism underlying
    migraine aura. Here, we analysed gene expression profiles
    from isolated cortical tissue of FHM1 R192Q mice 24 h after
    experimentally induced CSD in order to identify molecular
    pathways affected by CSD. Gene expression profiles were
    generated using deep serial analysis of gene expression sequencing.
    Our data reveal a signature of inflammatory signalling
    upon CSD in the cortex of both mutant and wild-type
    mice. However, only in the brains of FHM1 R192Q mice
    specific genes are up-regulated in response to CSD that are
    implicated in interferon-related inflammatory signalling. Our
    findings show that CSD modulates inflammatory processes in
    both wild-type and mutant brains, but that an additional
    unique inflammatory signature becomes expressed after
    CSD in a relevant mouse model of migraine.
  • Eising, E., Pelzer, N., Vijfhuizen, L. S., De Vries, B., Ferrari, M. D., 'T Hoen, P. A. C., Terwindt, G. M., & Van den Maagdenberg, A. M. J. M. (2017). Identifying a gene expression signature of cluster headache in blood. Scientific Reports, 7: 40218. doi:10.1038/srep40218.

    Abstract

    Cluster headache is a relatively rare headache disorder, typically characterized by multiple daily, short-lasting attacks of excruciating, unilateral (peri-)orbital or temporal pain associated with autonomic symptoms and restlessness. To better understand the pathophysiology of cluster headache, we used RNA sequencing to identify differentially expressed genes and pathways in whole blood of patients with episodic (n = 19) or chronic (n = 20) cluster headache in comparison with headache-free controls (n = 20). Gene expression data were analysed by gene and by module of co-expressed genes with particular attention to previously implicated disease pathways including hypocretin dysregulation. Only moderate gene expression differences were identified and no associations were found with previously reported pathogenic mechanisms. At the level of functional gene sets, associations were observed for genes involved in several brain-related mechanisms such as GABA receptor function and voltage-gated channels. In addition, genes and modules of co-expressed genes showed a role for intracellular signalling cascades, mitochondria and inflammation. Although larger study samples may be required to identify the full range of involved pathways, these results indicate a role for mitochondria, intracellular signalling and inflammation in cluster headache

    Additional information

    Eising_etal_2017sup.pdf
  • Enfield, N. J. (2017). Language in the Mainland Southeast Asia Area. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 677-702). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781107279872.026.
  • Erard, M. (2017). Write yourself invisible. New Scientist, 236(3153), 36-39.
  • Ernestus, M., Dikmans, M., & Giezenaar, G. (2017). Advanced second language learners experience difficulties processing reduced word pronunciation variants. Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(1), 1-20. doi:10.1075/dujal.6.1.01ern.

    Abstract

    Words are often pronounced with fewer segments in casual conversations than in formal speech. Previous research has shown that foreign language learners and beginning second language learners experience problems processing reduced speech. We examined whether this also holds for advanced second language learners. We designed a dictation task in Dutch consisting of sentences spliced from casual conversations and an unreduced counterpart of this task, with the same sentences carefully articulated by the same speaker. Advanced second language learners of Dutch produced substantially more transcription errors for the reduced than for the unreduced sentences. These errors made the sentences incomprehensible or led to non-intended meanings. The learners often did not rely on the semantic and syntactic information in the sentence or on the subsegmental cues to overcome the reductions. Hence, advanced second language learners also appear to suffer from the reduced pronunciation variants of words that are abundant in everyday conversations
  • Ernestus, M., Kouwenhoven, H., & Van Mulken, M. (2017). The direct and indirect effects of the phonotactic constraints in the listener's native language on the comprehension of reduced and unreduced word pronunciation variants in a foreign language. Journal of Phonetics, 62, 50-64. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2017.02.003.

    Abstract

    This study investigates how the comprehension of casual speech in foreign languages is affected by the phonotactic constraints in the listener’s native language. Non-native listeners of English with different native languages heard short English phrases produced by native speakers of English or Spanish and they indicated whether these phrases included can or can’t. Native Mandarin listeners especially tended to interpret can’t as can. We interpret this result as a direct effect of the ban on word-final /nt/ in Mandarin. Both the native Mandarin and the native Spanish listeners did not take full advantage of the subsegmental information in the speech signal cueing reduced can’t. This finding is probably an indirect effect of the phonotactic constraints in their native languages: these listeners have difficulties interpreting the subsegmental cues because these cues do not occur or have different functions in their native languages. Dutch resembles English in the phonotactic constraints relevant to the comprehension of can’t, and native Dutch listeners showed similar patterns in their comprehension of native and non-native English to native English listeners. This result supports our conclusion that the major patterns in the comprehension results are driven by the phonotactic constraints in the listeners’ native languages.
  • Eryilmaz, K., & Little, H. (2017). Using Leap Motion to investigate the emergence of structure in speech and language. Behavior Research Methods, 49(5), 1748-1768. doi:10.3758/s13428-016-0818-x.

    Abstract

    In evolutionary linguistics, experiments using artificial signal spaces are being used to investigate the emergence of speech structure. These signal spaces need to be continuous, non-discretised spaces from which discrete units and patterns can emerge. They need to be dissimilar from - but comparable with - the vocal-tract, in order to minimise interference from pre-existing linguistic knowledge, while informing us about language. This is a hard balance to strike. This article outlines a new approach which uses the Leap Motion, an infra-red controller which can convert manual movement in 3d space into sound. The signal space using this approach is more flexible than signal spaces in previous attempts. Further, output data using this approach is simpler to arrange and analyse. The experimental interface was built using free, and mostly open source libraries in Python. We provide our source code for other researchers as open source.
  • Esteve-Gibert, N., Prieto, P., & Liszkowski, U. (2017). Twelve-month-olds understand social intentions based on prosody and gesture shape. Infancy, 22, 108-129. doi:10.1111/infa.12146.

    Abstract

    Infants infer social and pragmatic intentions underlying attention-directing gestures, but the basis on which infants make these inferences is not well understood. Previous studies suggest that infants rely on information from preceding shared action contexts and joint perceptual scenes. Here, we tested whether 12-month-olds use information from act-accompanying cues, in particular prosody and hand shape, to guide their pragmatic understanding. In Experiment 1, caregivers directed infants’ attention to an object to request it, share interest in it, or inform them about a hidden aspect. Caregivers used distinct prosodic and gestural patterns to express each pragmatic intention. Experiment 2 was identical except that experimenters provided identical lexical information across conditions and used three sets of trained prosodic and gestural patterns. In all conditions, the joint perceptual scenes and preceding shared action contexts were identical. In both experiments, infants reacted appropriately to the adults’ intentions by attending to the object mostly in the sharing interest condition, offering the object mostly in the imperative condition, and searching for the referent mostly in the informing condition. Infants’ ability to comprehend pragmatic intentions based on prosody and gesture shape expands infants’ communicative understanding from common activities to novel situations for which shared background knowledge is missing.
  • Evans, N., Levinson, S. C., & Sterelny, K. (2021). Kinship revisited. Biological theory, 16, 123-126. doi:10.1007/s13752-021-00384-9.
  • Eviatar, Z., & Huettig, F. (2021). The literate mind. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 5, 81-84. doi:10.1007/s41809-021-00086-5.
  • Eysenck, M. W., & Van Berkum, J. J. A. (1992). Trait anxiety, defensiveness, and the structure of worry. Personality and Individual Differences, 13(12), 1285-1290. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science//journal/01918869.

    Abstract

    A principal components analysis of the ten scales of the Worry Questionnaire revealed the existence of major worry factors or domains of social evaluation and physical threat, and these factors were confirmed in a subsequent item analysis. Those high in trait anxiety had much higher scores on the Worry Questionnaire than those low in trait anxiety, especially on those scales relating to social evaluation. Scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale were negatively related to worry frequency. However, groups of low-anxious and repressed individucores did not differ in worry. It was concluded that worry, especals formed on the basis of their trait anxiety and social desirability sially in the social evaluation domain, is of fundamental importance to trait anxiety.
  • Favier, S., & Huettig, F. (2021). Are there core and peripheral syntactic structures? Experimental evidence from Dutch native speakers with varying literacy levels. Lingua, 251: 102991. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102991.

    Abstract

    Some theorists posit the existence of a ‘core’ grammar that virtually all native speakers acquire, and a ‘peripheral’ grammar that many do not. We investigated the viability of such a categorical distinction in the Dutch language. We first consulted linguists’ intuitions as to the ‘core’ or ‘peripheral’ status of a wide range of grammatical structures. We then tested a selection of core- and peripheral-rated structures on naïve participants with varying levels of literacy experience, using grammaticality judgment as a proxy for receptive knowledge. Overall, participants demonstrated better knowledge of ‘core’ structures than ‘peripheral’ structures, but the considerable variability within these categories was strongly suggestive of a continuum rather than a categorical distinction between them. We also hypothesised that individual differences in the knowledge of core and peripheral structures would reflect participants’ literacy experience. This was supported only by a small trend in our data. The results fit best with the notion that more frequent syntactic structures are mastered by more people than infrequent ones and challenge the received sense of a categorical core-periphery distinction.
  • Favier, S., Meyer, A. S., & Huettig, F. (2021). Literacy can enhance syntactic prediction in spoken language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(10), 2167-2174. doi:10.1037/xge0001042.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

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  • Favier, S., & Huettig, F. (2021). Long-term written language experience affects grammaticality judgments and usage but not priming of spoken sentences. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(8), 1378-1395. doi:10.1177/17470218211005228.

    Abstract

    ‘Book language’ offers a richer linguistic experience than typical conversational speech in terms of its syntactic properties. Here, we investigated the role of long-term syntactic experience on syntactic knowledge and processing. In a pre-registered study with 161 adult native Dutch speakers with varying levels of literacy, we assessed the contribution of individual differences in written language experience to offline and online syntactic processes. Offline syntactic knowledge was assessed as accuracy in an auditory grammaticality judgment task in which we tested violations of four Dutch grammatical norms. Online syntactic processing was indexed by syntactic priming of the Dutch dative alternation, using a comprehension-to-production priming paradigm with auditory presentation. Controlling for the contribution of non-verbal IQ, verbal working memory, and processing speed, we observed a robust effect of literacy experience on the detection of grammatical norm violations in spoken sentences, suggesting that exposure to the syntactic complexity and diversity of written language has specific benefits for general (modality-independent) syntactic knowledge. We replicated previous results by finding robust comprehension-to-production structural priming, both with and without lexical overlap between prime and target. Although literacy experience affected the usage of syntactic alternates in our large sample, it did not modulate their priming. We conclude that amount of experience with written language increases explicit awareness of grammatical norm violations and changes the usage of (PO vs. DO) dative spoken sentences but has no detectable effect on their implicit syntactic priming in proficient language users. These findings constrain theories about the effect of long-term experience on syntactic processing.
  • Felker, E. R., Broersma, M., & Ernestus, M. (2021). The role of corrective feedback and lexical guidance in perceptual learning of a novel L2 accent in dialogue. Applied Psycholinguistics, 42, 1029-1055. doi:10.1017/S0142716421000205.

    Abstract

    Perceptual learning of novel accents is a critical skill for second-language speech perception, but little is known about the mechanisms that facilitate perceptual learning in communicative contexts. To study perceptual learning in an interactive dialogue setting while maintaining experimental control of the phonetic input, we employed an innovative experimental method incorporating prerecorded speech into a naturalistic conversation. Using both computer-based and face-to-face dialogue settings, we investigated the effect of two types of learning mechanisms in interaction: explicit corrective feedback and implicit lexical guidance. Dutch participants played an information-gap game featuring minimal pairs with an accented English speaker whose /ε/ pronunciations were shifted to /ɪ/. Evidence for the vowel shift came either from corrective feedback about participants’ perceptual mistakes or from onscreen lexical information that constrained their interpretation of the interlocutor’s words. Corrective feedback explicitly contrasting the minimal pairs was more effective than generic feedback. Additionally, both receiving lexical guidance and exhibiting more uptake for the vowel shift improved listeners’ subsequent online processing of accented words. Comparable learning effects were found in both the computer-based and face-to-face interactions, showing that our results can be generalized to a more naturalistic learning context than traditional computer-based perception training programs.
  • Fernandes, T., Arunkumar, M., & Huettig, F. (2021). The role of the written script in shaping mirror-image discrimination: Evidence from illiterate, Tamil literate, and Tamil-Latin-alphabet bi-literate adults. Cognition, 206: 104493. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104493.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    supplementary material
  • Ferrari, A., & Noppeney, U. (2021). Attention controls multisensory perception via two distinct mechanisms at different levels of the cortical hierarchy. PLoS Biology, 19(11): e3001465. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3001465.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    supporting information
  • Filippi, P., Congdon, J. V., Hoang, J., Bowling, D. L., Reber, S. A., Pasukonis, A., Hoeschele, M., Ocklenburg, S., De Boer, B., Sturdy, C. B., Newen, A., & Güntürkün, O. (2017). Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: Evidence for acoustic universals. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284: 20170990. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.0990.

    Abstract

    Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocalizations. Studies suggest that acoustic attributes of aroused vocalizations are shared across many mammalian species, and that humans can use these attributes to infer emotional content. But do these acoustic attributes extend to non-mammalian vertebrates? In this study, we asked human participants to judge the emotional content of vocalizations of nine vertebrate species representing three different biological classes—Amphibia, Reptilia (non-aves and aves) and Mammalia. We found that humans are able to identify higher levels of arousal in vocalizations across all species. This result was consistent across different language groups (English, German and Mandarin native speakers), suggesting that this ability is biologically rooted in humans. Our findings indicate that humans use multiple acoustic parameters to infer relative arousal in vocalizations for each species, but mainly rely on fundamental frequency and spectral centre of gravity to identify higher arousal vocalizations across species. These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are shared among vertebrates and could represent a homologous signalling system.
  • Filippi, P., Gogoleva, S. S., Volodina, E. V., Volodin, I. A., & De Boer, B. (2017). Humans identify negative (but not positive) arousal in silver fox vocalizations: Implications for the adaptive value of interspecific eavesdropping. Current Zoology, 63(4), 445-456. doi:10.1093/cz/zox035.

    Abstract

    The ability to identify emotional arousal in heterospecific vocalizations may facilitate behaviors that increase survival opportunities. Crucially, this ability may orient inter-species interactions, particularly between humans and other species. Research shows that humans identify emotional arousal in vocalizations across multiple species, such as cats, dogs, and piglets. However, no previous study has addressed humans' ability to identify emotional arousal in silver foxes. Here, we adopted low-and high-arousal calls emitted by three strains of silver fox-Tame, Aggressive, and Unselected-in response to human approach. Tame and Aggressive foxes are genetically selected for friendly and attacking behaviors toward humans, respectively. Unselected foxes show aggressive and fearful behaviors toward humans. These three strains show similar levels of emotional arousal, but different levels of emotional valence in relation to humans. This emotional information is reflected in the acoustic features of the calls. Our data suggest that humans can identify high-arousal calls of Aggressive and Unselected foxes, but not of Tame foxes. Further analyses revealed that, although within each strain different acoustic parameters affect human accuracy in identifying high-arousal calls, spectral center of gravity, harmonic-to-noise ratio, and F0 best predict humans' ability to discriminate high-arousal calls across all strains. Furthermore, we identified in spectral center of gravity and F0 the best predictors for humans' absolute ratings of arousal in each call. Implications for research on the adaptive value of inter-specific eavesdropping are discussed.

    Additional information

    zox035_Supp.zip
  • Filippi, P., Ocklenburg, S., Bowling, D. L., Heege, L., Güntürkün, O., Newen, A., & de Boer, B. (2017). More than words (and faces): evidence for a Stroop effect of prosody in emotion word processing. Cognition & Emotion, 31(5), 879-891. doi:10.1080/02699931.2016.1177489.

    Abstract

    Humans typically combine linguistic and nonlinguistic information to comprehend emotions. We adopted an emotion identification Stroop task to investigate how different channels interact in emotion communication. In experiment 1, synonyms of “happy” and “sad” were spoken with happy and sad prosody. Participants had more difficulty ignoring prosody than ignoring verbal content. In experiment 2, synonyms of “happy” and “sad” were spoken with happy and sad prosody, while happy or sad faces were displayed. Accuracy was lower when two channels expressed an emotion that was incongruent with the channel participants had to focus on, compared with the cross-channel congruence condition. When participants were required to focus on verbal content, accuracy was significantly lower also when prosody was incongruent with verbal content and face. This suggests that prosody biases emotional verbal content processing, even when conflicting with verbal content and face simultaneously. Implications for multimodal communication and language evolution studies are discussed.
  • Filippi, P., Laaha, S., & Fitch, W. T. (2017). Utterance-final position and pitch marking aid word learning in school-age children. Royal Society Open Science, 4: 161035. doi:10.1098/rsos.161035.

    Abstract

    We investigated the effects of word order and prosody on word learning in school-age children. Third graders viewed photographs belonging to one of three semantic categories while hearing four-word nonsense utterances containing a target word. In the control condition, all words had the same pitch and, across trials, the position of the target word was varied systematically within each utterance. The only cue to word–meaning mapping was the co-occurrence of target words and referents. This cue was present in all conditions. In the Utterance-final condition, the target word always occurred in utterance-final position, and at the same fundamental frequency as all the other words of the utterance. In the Pitch peak condition, the position of the target word was varied systematically within each utterance across trials, and produced with pitch contrasts typical of infant-directed speech (IDS). In the Pitch peak + Utterance-final condition, the target word always occurred in utterance-final position, and was marked with a pitch contrast typical of IDS. Word learning occurred in all conditions except the control condition. Moreover, learning performance was significantly higher than that observed with simple co-occurrence (control condition) only for the Pitch peak + Utterance-final condition. We conclude that, for school-age children, the combination of words' utterance-final alignment and pitch enhancement boosts word learning.
  • Fink, B., Bläsing, B., Ravignani, A., & Shackelford, T. K. (2021). Evolution and functions of human dance. Evolution and Human Behavior, 42(4), 351-360. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2021.01.003.

    Abstract

    Dance is ubiquitous among humans and has received attention from several disciplines. Ethnographic documentation suggests that dance has a signaling function in social interaction. It can influence mate preferences and facilitate social bonds. Research has provided insights into the proximate mechanisms of dance, individually or when dancing with partners or in groups. Here, we review dance research from an evolutionary perspective. We propose that human dance evolved from ordinary (non-communicative) movements to communicate socially relevant information accurately. The need for accurate social signaling may have accompanied increases in group size and population density. Because of its complexity in production and display, dance may have evolved as a vehicle for expressing social and cultural information. Mating-related qualities and motives may have been the predominant information derived from individual dance movements, whereas group dance offers the opportunity for the exchange of socially relevant content, for coordinating actions among group members, for signaling coalitional strength, and for stabilizing group structures. We conclude that, despite the cultural diversity in dance movements and contexts, the primary communicative functions of dance may be the same across societies.
  • Fisher, N., Hadley, L., Corps, R. E., & Pickering, M. (2021). The effects of dual-task interference in predicting turn-ends in speech and music. Brain Research, 1768: 147571. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147571.

    Abstract

    Determining when a partner’s spoken or musical turn will end requires well-honed predictive abilities. Evidence suggests that our motor systems are activated during perception of both speech and music, and it has been argued that motor simulation is used to predict turn-ends across domains. Here we used a dual-task interference paradigm to investigate whether motor simulation of our partner’s action underlies our ability to make accurate turn-end predictions in speech and in music. Furthermore, we explored how specific this simulation is to the action being predicted. We conducted two experiments, one investigating speech turn-ends, and one investigating music turn-ends. In each, 34 proficient pianists predicted turn-endings while (1) passively listening, (2) producing an effector-specific motor activity (mouth/hand movement), or (3) producing a task- and effector-specific motor activity (mouthing words/fingering a piano melody). In the speech experiment, any movement during speech perception disrupted predictions of spoken turn-ends, whether the movement was task-specific or not. In the music experiment, only task-specific movement (i.e., fingering a piano melody) disrupted predictions of musical turn-ends. These findings support the use of motor simulation to make turn-end predictions in both speech and music but suggest that the specificity of this simulation may differ between domains.
  • 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.
  • Fisher, S. E. (2017). Evolution of language: Lessons from the genome. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(1), 34-40. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1112-8.

    Abstract

    The post-genomic era is an exciting time for researchers interested in the biology of speech and language. Substantive advances in molecular methodologies have opened up entire vistas of investigation that were not previously possible, or in some cases even imagined. Speculations concerning the origins of human cognitive traits are being transformed into empirically addressable questions, generating specific hypotheses that can be explicitly tested using data collected from both the natural world and experimental settings. In this article, I discuss a number of promising lines of research in this area. For example, the field has begun to identify genes implicated in speech and language skills, including not just disorders but also the normal range of abilities. Such genes provide powerful entry points for gaining insights into neural bases and evolutionary origins, using sophisticated experimental tools from molecular neuroscience and developmental neurobiology. At the same time, sequencing of ancient hominin genomes is giving us an unprecedented view of the molecular genetic changes that have occurred during the evolution of our species. Synthesis of data from these complementary sources offers an opportunity to robustly evaluate alternative accounts of language evolution. Of course, this endeavour remains challenging on many fronts, as I also highlight in the article. Nonetheless, such an integrated approach holds great potential for untangling the complexities of the capacities that make us human.
  • Fisher, V. J. (2017). Dance as Embodied Analogy: Designing an Empirical Research Study. In M. Van Delft, J. Voets, Z. Gündüz, H. Koolen, & L. Wijers (Eds.), Danswetenschap in Nederland. Utrecht: Vereniging voor Dansonderzoek (VDO).
  • Fisher, V. J. (2021). Embodied songs: Insights into the nature of cross-modal meaning-making within sign language informed, embodied interpretations of vocal music. Frontiers in Psychology, 12: 624689. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.624689.

    Abstract

    Embodied song practices involve the transformation of songs from the acoustic modality into an embodied-visual form, to increase meaningful access for d/Deaf audiences. This goes beyond the translation of lyrics, by combining poetic sign language with other bodily movements to embody the para-linguistic expressive and musical features that enhance the message of a song. To date, the limited research into this phenomenon has focussed on linguistic features and interactions with rhythm. The relationship between bodily actions and music has not been probed beyond an assumed implication of conformance. However, as the primary objective is to communicate equivalent meanings, the ways that the acoustic and embodied-visual signals relate to each other should reveal something about underlying conceptual agreement. This paper draws together a range of pertinent theories from within a grounded cognition framework including semiotics, analogy mapping and cross-modal correspondences. These theories are applied to embodiment strategies used by prominent d/Deaf and hearing Dutch practitioners, to unpack the relationship between acoustic songs, their embodied representations, and their broader conceptual and affective meanings. This leads to the proposition that meaning primarily arises through shared patterns of internal relations across a range of amodal and cross-modal features with an emphasis on dynamic qualities. These analogous patterns can inform metaphorical interpretations and trigger shared emotional responses. This exploratory survey offers insights into the nature of cross-modal and embodied meaning-making, as a jumping-off point for further research.
  • Fisher, V. J. (2017). Unfurling the wings of flight: Clarifying ‘the what’ and ‘the why’ of mental imagery use in dance. Research in Dance Education, 18(3), 252-272. doi:10.1080/14647893.2017.1369508.

    Abstract

    This article provides clarification regarding ‘the what’ and ‘the why’ of mental imagery use in dance. It proposes that mental images are invoked across sensory modalities and often combine internal and external perspectives. The content of images ranges from ‘direct’ body oriented simulations along a continuum employing analogous mapping through ‘semi-direct’ literal similarities to abstract metaphors. The reasons for employing imagery are diverse and often overlapping, affecting physical, affective (psychological) and cognitive domains. This paper argues that when dance uses imagery, it is mapping aspects of the world to the body via analogy. Such mapping informs and changes our understanding of both our bodies and the world. In this way, mental imagery use in dance is fundamentally a process of embodied cognition
  • Fitz, H., & Chang, F. (2017). Meaningful questions: The acquisition of auxiliary inversion in a connectionist model of sentence production. Cognition, 166, 225-250. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.008.

    Abstract

    Nativist theories have argued that language involves syntactic principles which are unlearnable from the input children receive. A paradigm case of these innate principles is the structure dependence of auxiliary inversion in complex polar questions (Chomsky, 1968, 1975, 1980). Computational approaches have focused on the properties of the input in explaining how children acquire these questions. In contrast, we argue that messages are structured in a way that supports structure dependence in syntax. We demonstrate this approach within a connectionist model of sentence production (Chang, 2009) which learned to generate a range of complex polar questions from a structured message without positive exemplars in the input. The model also generated different types of error in development that were similar in magnitude to those in children (e.g., auxiliary doubling, Ambridge, Rowland, & Pine, 2008; Crain & Nakayama, 1987). Through model comparisons we trace how meaning constraints and linguistic experience interact during the acquisition of auxiliary inversion. Our results suggest that auxiliary inversion rules in English can be acquired without innate syntactic principles, as long as it is assumed that speakers who ask complex questions express messages that are structured into multiple propositions
  • Floyd, S. (2017). Requesting as a means for negotiating distributed agency. In N. J. Enfield, & P. Kockelman (Eds.), Distributed Agency (pp. 67-78). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Frances, C., Navarra-Barindelli, E., & Martin, C. D. (2021). Inhibitory and facilitatory effects of phonological and orthographic similarity on L2 word recognition across modalities in bilinguals. Scientific Reports, 11: 12812. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-92259-z.

    Abstract

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

    Additional information

    supplementary information
  • Frances, C., Navarra-Barindelli, E., & Martin, C. D. (2021). Inhibitory and facilitatory effects of phonological and orthographic similarity on L2 word recognition across modalities in bilinguals. Scientific Reports, 11: 12812. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-92259-z.

    Abstract

    Language perception studies on bilinguals often show that words that share form and meaning across
    languages (cognates) are easier to process than words that share only meaning. This facilitatory
    phenomenon is known as the cognate effect. Most previous studies have shown this effect visually,
    whereas the auditory modality as well as the interplay between type of similarity and modality
    remain largely unexplored. In this study, highly proficient late Spanish–English bilinguals carried out
    a lexical decision task in their second language, both visually and auditorily. Words had high or low
    phonological and orthographic similarity, fully crossed. We also included orthographically identical
    words (perfect cognates). Our results suggest that similarity in the same modality (i.e., orthographic
    similarity in the visual modality and phonological similarity in the auditory modality) leads to
    improved signal detection, whereas similarity across modalities hinders it. We provide support for
    the idea that perfect cognates are a special category within cognates. Results suggest a need for a
    conceptual and practical separation between types of similarity in cognate studies. The theoretical
    implication is that the representations of items are active in both modalities of the non‑target
    language during language processing, which needs to be incorporated to our current processing
    models.
  • Francisco, A. A., Groen, M. A., Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2017). Beyond the usual cognitive suspects: The importance of speechreading and audiovisual temporal sensitivity in reading ability. Learning and Individual Differences, 54, 60-72. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2017.01.003.

    Abstract

    The aim of this study was to clarify whether audiovisual processing accounted for variance in reading and reading-related abilities, beyond the effect of a set of measures typically associated with individual differences in both reading and audiovisual processing. Testing adults with and without a diagnosis of dyslexia, we showed that—across all participants, and after accounting for variance in cognitive abilities—audiovisual temporal sensitivity contributed uniquely to variance in reading errors. This is consistent with previous studies demonstrating an audiovisual deficit in dyslexia. Additionally, we showed that speechreading (identification of speech based on visual cues from the talking face alone) was a unique contributor to variance in phonological awareness in dyslexic readers only: those who scored higher on speechreading, scored lower on phonological awareness. This suggests a greater reliance on visual speech as a compensatory mechanism when processing auditory speech is problematic. A secondary aim of this study was to better understand the nature of dyslexia. The finding that a sub-group of dyslexic readers scored low on phonological awareness and high on speechreading is consistent with a hybrid perspective of dyslexia: There are multiple possible pathways to reading impairment, which may translate into multiple profiles of dyslexia.
  • Francisco, A. A., Jesse, A., Groen, M. A., & McQueen, J. M. (2017). A general audiovisual temporal processing deficit in adult readers with dyslexia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60, 144-158. doi:10.1044/2016_JSLHR-H-15-0375.

    Abstract

    Purpose: Because reading is an audiovisual process, reading impairment may reflect an audiovisual processing deficit. The aim of the present study was to test the existence and scope of such a deficit in adult readers with dyslexia. Method: We tested 39 typical readers and 51 adult readers with dyslexia on their sensitivity to the simultaneity of audiovisual speech and nonspeech stimuli, their time window of audiovisual integration for speech (using incongruent /aCa/ syllables), and their audiovisual perception of phonetic categories. Results: Adult readers with dyslexia showed less sensitivity to audiovisual simultaneity than typical readers for both speech and nonspeech events. We found no differences between readers with dyslexia and typical readers in the temporal window of integration for audiovisual speech or in the audiovisual perception of phonetic categories. Conclusions: The results suggest an audiovisual temporal deficit in dyslexia that is not specific to speech-related events. But the differences found for audiovisual temporal sensitivity did not translate into a deficit in audiovisual speech perception. Hence, there seems to be a hiatus between simultaneity judgment and perception, suggesting a multisensory system that uses different mechanisms across tasks. Alternatively, it is possible that the audiovisual deficit in dyslexia is only observable when explicit judgments about audiovisual simultaneity are required
  • Frank, M. C., Bergelson, E., Bergmann, C., Cristia, A., Floccia, C., Gervain, J., Hamlin, J. K., Hannon, E. E., Kline, M., Levelt, C., Lew-Williams, C., Nazzi, T., Panneton, R., Rabagliati, H., Soderstrom, M., Sullivan, J., Waxman, S., & Yurovsky, D. (2017). A collaborative approach to infant research: Promoting reproducibility, best practices, and theory-building. Infancy, 22(4), 421-435. doi:10.1111/infa.12182.

    Abstract

    The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline-specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large-scale, multi-laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less-biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best-practices blueprints for future infancy research.
  • Frank, S. L., & Willems, R. M. (2017). Word predictability and semantic similarity show distinct patterns of brain activity during language comprehension. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 32(9), 1192-1203. doi:10.1080/23273798.2017.1323109.

    Abstract

    We investigate the effects of two types of relationship between the words of a sentence or text – predictability and semantic similarity – by reanalysing electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from studies in which participants comprehend naturalistic stimuli. Each content word's predictability given previous words is quantified by a probabilistic language model, and semantic similarity to previous words is quantified by a distributional semantics model. Brain activity time-locked to each word is regressed on the two model-derived measures. Results show that predictability and semantic similarity have near identical N400 effects but are dissociated in the fMRI data, with word predictability related to activity in, among others, the visual word-form area, and semantic similarity related to activity in areas associated with the semantic network. This indicates that both predictability and similarity play a role during natural language comprehension and modulate distinct cortical regions.
  • Franken, M. K., Acheson, D. J., McQueen, J. M., Eisner, F., & Hagoort, P. (2017). Individual variability as a window on production-perception interactions in speech motor control. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 142(4), 2007-2018. doi:10.1121/1.5006899.

    Abstract

    An important part of understanding speech motor control consists of capturing the
    interaction between speech production and speech perception. This study tests a
    prediction of theoretical frameworks that have tried to account for these interactions: if
    speech production targets are specified in auditory terms, individuals with better
    auditory acuity should have more precise speech targets, evidenced by decreased
    within-phoneme variability and increased between-phoneme distance. A study was
    carried out consisting of perception and production tasks in counterbalanced order.
    Auditory acuity was assessed using an adaptive speech discrimination task, while
    production variability was determined using a pseudo-word reading task. Analyses of
    the production data were carried out to quantify average within-phoneme variability as
    well as average between-phoneme contrasts. Results show that individuals not only
    vary in their production and perceptual abilities, but that better discriminators have
    more distinctive vowel production targets (that is, targets with less within-phoneme
    variability and greater between-phoneme distances), confirming the initial hypothesis.
    This association between speech production and perception did not depend on local
    phoneme density in vowel space. This study suggests that better auditory acuity leads
    to more precise speech production targets, which may be a consequence of auditory
    feedback affecting speech production over time.
  • Frega, M., van Gestel, S. H. C., Linda, K., Van der Raadt, J., Keller, J., Van Rhijn, J. R., Schubert, D., Albers, C. A., & Kasri, N. N. (2017). Rapid neuronal differentiation of induced pluripotent stem cells for measuring network activity on micro-electrode arrays. Journal of Visualized Experiments, e45900. doi:10.3791/54900.

    Abstract

    Neurons derived from human induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (hiPSCs) provide a promising new tool for studying neurological disorders. In the past decade, many protocols for differentiating hiPSCs into neurons have been developed. However, these protocols are often slow with high variability, low reproducibility, and low efficiency. In addition, the neurons obtained with these protocols are often immature and lack adequate functional activity both at the single-cell and network levels unless the neurons are cultured for several months. Partially due to these limitations, the functional properties of hiPSC-derived neuronal networks are still not well characterized. Here, we adapt a recently published protocol that describes production of human neurons from hiPSCs by forced expression of the transcription factor neurogenin-212. This protocol is rapid (yielding mature neurons within 3 weeks) and efficient, with nearly 100% conversion efficiency of transduced cells (>95% of DAPI-positive cells are MAP2 positive). Furthermore, the protocol yields a homogeneous population of excitatory neurons that would allow the investigation of cell-type specific contributions to neurological disorders. We modified the original protocol by generating stably transduced hiPSC cells, giving us explicit control over the total number of neurons. These cells are then used to generate hiPSC-derived neuronal networks on micro-electrode arrays. In this way, the spontaneous electrophysiological activity of hiPSC-derived neuronal networks can be measured and characterized, while retaining interexperimental consistency in terms of cell density. The presented protocol is broadly applicable, especially for mechanistic and pharmacological studies on human neuronal networks.

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    video component of this article
  • Friedrich, P., Forkel, S. J., Amiez, C., Balsters, J. H., Coulon, O., Fan, L., Goulas, A., Hadj-Bouziane, F., Hecht, E. E., Heuer, K., Jiang, T., Latzman, R. D., Liu, X., Loh, K. K., Patil, K. R., Lopez-Persem, A., Procyk, E., Sallet, J., Toro, R., Vickery, S. Friedrich, P., Forkel, S. J., Amiez, C., Balsters, J. H., Coulon, O., Fan, L., Goulas, A., Hadj-Bouziane, F., Hecht, E. E., Heuer, K., Jiang, T., Latzman, R. D., Liu, X., Loh, K. K., Patil, K. R., Lopez-Persem, A., Procyk, E., Sallet, J., Toro, R., Vickery, S., Weis, S., Wilson, C., Xu, T., Zerbi, V., Eickoff, S. B., Margulies, D., Mars, R., & Thiebaut de Schotten, M. (2021). Imaging evolution of the primate brain: The next frontier? NeuroImage, 228: 117685. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117685.

    Abstract

    Evolution, as we currently understand it, strikes a delicate balance between animals' ancestral history and adaptations to their current niche. Similarities between species are generally considered inherited from a common ancestor whereas observed differences are considered as more recent evolution. Hence comparing species can provide insights into the evolutionary history. Comparative neuroimaging has recently emerged as a novel subdiscipline, which uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify similarities and differences in brain structure and function across species. Whereas invasive histological and molecular techniques are superior in spatial resolution, they are laborious, post-mortem, and oftentimes limited to specific species. Neuroimaging, by comparison, has the advantages of being applicable across species and allows for fast, whole-brain, repeatable, and multi-modal measurements of the structure and function in living brains and post-mortem tissue. In this review, we summarise the current state of the art in comparative anatomy and function of the brain and gather together the main scientific questions to be explored in the future of the fascinating new field of brain evolution derived from comparative neuroimaging.
  • Frost, R. L. A., Monaghan, P., & Tatsumi, T. (2017). Domain-general mechanisms for speech segmentation: The role of duration information in language learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(3), 466-476. doi:10.1037/xhp0000325.

    Abstract

    Speech segmentation is supported by multiple sources of information that may either inform language processing specifically, or serve learning more broadly. The Iambic/Trochaic Law (ITL), where increased duration indicates the end of a group and increased emphasis indicates the beginning of a group, has been proposed as a domain-general mechanism that also applies to language. However, language background has been suggested to modulate use of the ITL, meaning that these perceptual grouping preferences may instead be a consequence of language exposure. To distinguish between these accounts, we exposed native-English and native-Japanese listeners to sequences of speech (Experiment 1) and nonspeech stimuli (Experiment 2), and examined segmentation using a 2AFC task. Duration was manipulated over 3 conditions: sequences contained either an initial-item duration increase, or a final-item duration increase, or items of uniform duration. In Experiment 1, language background did not affect the use of duration as a cue for segmenting speech in a structured artificial language. In Experiment 2, the same results were found for grouping structured sequences of visual shapes. The results are consistent with proposals that duration information draws upon a domain-general mechanism that can apply to the special case of language acquisition
  • Frost, R. L. A., & Casillas, M. (2021). Investigating statistical learning of nonadjacent dependencies: Running statistical learning tasks in non-WEIRD populations. In SAGE Research Methods Cases. doi:10.4135/9781529759181.

    Abstract

    Language acquisition is complex. However, one thing that has been suggested to help learning is the way that information is distributed throughout language; co-occurrences among particular items (e.g., syllables and words) have been shown to help learners discover the words that a language contains and figure out how those words are used. Humans’ ability to draw on this information—“statistical learning”—has been demonstrated across a broad range of studies. However, evidence from non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies is critically lacking, which limits theorizing on the universality of this skill. We extended work on statistical language learning to a new, non-WEIRD linguistic population: speakers of Yélî Dnye, who live on a remote island off mainland Papua New Guinea (Rossel Island). We performed a replication of an existing statistical learning study, training adults on an artificial language with statistically defined words, then examining what they had learnt using a two-alternative forced-choice test. Crucially, we implemented several key amendments to the original study to ensure the replication was suitable for remote field-site testing with speakers of Yélî Dnye. We made critical changes to the stimuli and materials (to test speakers of Yélî Dnye, rather than English), the instructions (we re-worked these significantly, and added practice tasks to optimize participants’ understanding), and the study format (shifting from a lab-based to a portable tablet-based setup). We discuss the requirement for acute sensitivity to linguistic, cultural, and environmental factors when adapting studies to test new populations.

  • Frost, R. L. A., & Monaghan, P. (2017). Sleep-driven computations in speech processing. PLoS One, 12(1): e0169538. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0169538.

    Abstract

    Acquiring language requires segmenting speech into individual words, and abstracting over those words to discover grammatical structure. However, these tasks can be conflicting—on the one hand requiring memorisation of precise sequences that occur in speech, and on the other requiring a flexible reconstruction of these sequences to determine the grammar. Here, we examine whether speech segmentation and generalisation of grammar can occur simultaneously—with the conflicting requirements for these tasks being over-come by sleep-related consolidation. After exposure to an artificial language comprising words containing non-adjacent dependencies, participants underwent periods of consolidation involving either sleep or wake. Participants who slept before testing demonstrated a sustained boost to word learning and a short-term improvement to grammatical generalisation of the non-adjacencies, with improvements after sleep outweighing gains seen after an equal period of wake. Thus, we propose that sleep may facilitate processing for these conflicting tasks in language acquisition, but with enhanced benefits for speech segmentation.

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    Data available
  • Garcia, R., Garrido Rodriguez, G., & Kidd, E. (2021). Developmental effects in the online use of morphosyntactic cues in sentence processing: Evidence from Tagalog. Cognition, 216: 104859. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104859.

    Abstract

    Children must necessarily process their input in order to learn it, yet the architecture of the developing parsing system and how it interfaces with acquisition is unclear. In the current paper we report experimental and corpus data investigating adult and children's use of morphosyntactic cues for making incremental online predictions of thematic roles in Tagalog, a verb-initial symmetrical voice language of the Philippines. In Study 1, Tagalog-speaking adults completed a visual world eye-tracking experiment in which they viewed pictures of causative actions that were described by transitive sentences manipulated for voice and word order. The pattern of results showed that adults process agent and patient voice differently, predicting the upcoming noun in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, consistent with the observation of a patient voice preference in adult sentence production. In Study 2, our analysis of a corpus of child-directed speech showed that children heard more patient voice- than agent voice-marked verbs. In Study 3, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children completed a similar eye-tracking task as used in Study 1. The overall pattern of results suggested that, like the adults in Study 1, children process agent and patient voice differently in a manner that reflects the input distributions, with children developing towards the adult state across early childhood. The results are most consistent with theoretical accounts that identify a key role for input distributions in acquisition and language processing

    Additional information

    1-s2.0-S001002772100278X-mmc1.docx
  • Gaspard III, J. C., Bauer, G. B., Mann, D. A., Boerner, K., Denum, L., Frances, C., & Reep, R. L. (2017). Detection of hydrodynamic stimuli by the postcranial body of Florida manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostris) A Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology. Journal of Comparative Physiology, 203, 111-120. doi:10.1007/s00359-016-1142-8.

    Abstract

    Manatees live in shallow, frequently turbid
    waters. The sensory means by which they navigate in these
    conditions are unknown. Poor visual acuity, lack of echo-
    location, and modest chemosensation suggest that other
    modalities play an important role. Rich innervation of sen-
    sory hairs that cover the entire body and enlarged soma-
    tosensory areas of the brain suggest that tactile senses are
    good candidates. Previous tests of detection of underwater
    vibratory stimuli indicated that they use passive movement
    of the hairs to detect particle displacements in the vicinity
    of a micron or less for frequencies from 10 to 150 Hz. In
    the current study, hydrodynamic stimuli were created by
    a sinusoidally oscillating sphere that generated a dipole
    field at frequencies from 5 to 150 Hz. Go/no-go tests of
    manatee postcranial mechanoreception of hydrodynamic
    stimuli indicated excellent sensitivity but about an order of
    magnitude less than the facial region. When the vibrissae
    were trimmed, detection thresholds were elevated, suggest-
    ing that the vibrissae were an important means by which
    detection occurred. Manatees were also highly accurate in two-choice directional discrimination: greater than 90%
    correct at all frequencies tested. We hypothesize that mana-
    tees utilize vibrissae as a three-dimensional array to detect
    and localize low-frequency hydrodynamic stimuli
  • Gau, R., Noble, S., Heuer, K., Bottenhorn, K. L., Bilgin, I. P., Yang, Y.-F., Huntenburg, J. M., Bayer, J. M., Bethlehem, R. A., Rhoads, S. A., Vogelbacher, C., Borghesani, V., Levitis, E., Wang, H.-T., Van Den Bossche, S., Kobeleva, X., Legarreta, J. H., Guay, S., Atay, S. M., Varoquaux, G. P. Gau, R., Noble, S., Heuer, K., Bottenhorn, K. L., Bilgin, I. P., Yang, Y.-F., Huntenburg, J. M., Bayer, J. M., Bethlehem, R. A., Rhoads, S. A., Vogelbacher, C., Borghesani, V., Levitis, E., Wang, H.-T., Van Den Bossche, S., Kobeleva, X., Legarreta, J. H., Guay, S., Atay, S. M., Varoquaux, G. P., Huijser, D. C., Sandström, M. S., Herholz, P., Nastase, S. A., Badhwar, A., Dumas, G., Schwab, S., Moia, S., Dayan, M., Bassil, Y., Brooks, P. P., Mancini, M., Shine, J. M., O’Connor, D., Xie, X., Poggiali, D., Friedrich, P., Heinsfeld, A. S., Riedl, L., Toro, R., Caballero-Gaudes, C., Eklund, A., Garner, K. G., Nolan, C. R., Demeter, D. V., Barrios, F. A., Merchant, J. S., McDevitt, E. A., Oostenveld, R., Craddock, R. C., Rokem, A., Doyle, A., Ghosh, S. S., Nikolaidis, A., Stanley, O. W., Uruñuela, E., Anousheh, N., Arnatkeviciute, A., Auzias, G., Bachar, D., Bannier, E., Basanisi, R., Basavaraj, A., Bedini, M., Bellec, P., Benn, R. A., Berluti, K., Bollmann, S., Bollmann, S., Bradley, C., Brown, J., Buchweitz, A., Callahan, P., Chan, M. Y., Chandio, B. Q., Cheng, T., Chopra, S., Chung, A. W., Close, T. G., Combrisson, E., Cona, G., Constable, R. T., Cury, C., Dadi, K., Damasceno, P. F., Das, S., De Vico Fallani, F., DeStasio, K., Dickie, E. W., Dorfschmidt, L., Duff, E. P., DuPre, E., Dziura, S., Esper, N. B., Esteban, O., Fadnavis, S., Flandin, G., Flannery, J. E., Flournoy, J., Forkel, S. J., Franco, A. R., Ganesan, S., Gao, S., García Alanis, J. C., Garyfallidis, E., Glatard, T., Glerean, E., Gonzalez-Castillo, J., Gould van Praag, C. D., Greene, A. S., Gupta, G., Hahn, C. A., Halchenko, Y. O., Handwerker, D., Hartmann, T. S., Hayot-Sasson, V., Heunis, S., Hoffstaedter, F., Hohmann, D. M., Horien, C., Ioanas, H.-I., Iordan, A., Jiang, C., Joseph, M., Kai, J., Karakuzu, A., Kennedy, D. N., Keshavan, A., Khan, A. R., Kiar, G., Klink, P. C., Koppelmans, V., Koudoro, S., Laird, A. R., Langs, G., Laws, M., Licandro, R., Liew, S.-L., Lipic, T., Litinas, K., Lurie, D. J., Lussier, D., Madan, C. R., Mais, L.-T., Mansour L, S., Manzano-Patron, J., Maoutsa, D., Marcon, M., Margulies, D. S., Marinato, G., Marinazzo, D., Markiewicz, C. J., Maumet, C., Meneguzzi, F., Meunier, D., Milham, M. P., Mills, K. L., Momi, D., Moreau, C. A., Motala, A., Moxon-Emre, I., Nichols, T. E., Nielson, D. M., Nilsonne, G., Novello, L., O’Brien, C., Olafson, E., Oliver, L. D., Onofrey, J. A., Orchard, E. R., Oudyk, K., Park, P. J., Parsapoor, M., Pasquini, L., Peltier, S., Pernet, C. R., Pienaar, R., Pinheiro-Chagas, P., Poline, J.-B., Qiu, A., Quendera, T., Rice, L. C., Rocha-Hidalgo, J., Rutherford, S., Scharinger, M., Scheinost, D., Shariq, D., Shaw, T. B., Siless, V., Simmonite, M., Sirmpilatze, N., Spence, H., Sprenger, J., Stajduhar, A., Szinte, M., Takerkart, S., Tam, A., Tejavibulya, L., Thiebaut de Schotten, M., Thome, I., Tomaz da Silva, L., Traut, N., Uddin, L. Q., Vallesi, A., VanMeter, J. W., Vijayakumar, N., di Oleggio Castello, M. V., Vohryzek, J., Vukojević, J., Whitaker, K. J., Whitmore, L., Wideman, S., Witt, S. T., Xie, H., Xu, T., Yan, C.-G., Yeh, F.-C., Yeo, B. T., & Zuo, X.-N. (2021). Brainhack: Developing a culture of open, inclusive, community-driven neuroscience. Neuron, 109(11), 1769-1775. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2021.04.001.

    Abstract

    Social factors play a crucial role in the advancement of science. New findings are discussed and theories emerge through social interactions, which usually take place within local research groups and at academic events such as conferences, seminars, or workshops. This system tends to amplify the voices of a select subset of the community—especially more established researchers—thus limiting opportunities for the larger community to contribute and connect. Brainhack (https://brainhack.org/) events (or Brainhacks for short) complement these formats in neuroscience with decentralized 2- to 5-day gatherings, in which participants from diverse backgrounds and career stages collaborate and learn from each other in an informal setting. The Brainhack format was introduced in a previous publication (Cameron Craddock et al., 2016; Figures 1A and 1B). It is inspired by the hackathon model (see glossary in Table 1), which originated in software development and has gained traction in science as a way to bring people together for collaborative work and educational courses. Unlike many hackathons, Brainhacks welcome participants from all disciplines and with any level of experience—from those who have never written a line of code to software developers and expert neuroscientists. Brainhacks additionally replace the sometimes-competitive context of traditional hackathons with a purely collaborative one and also feature informal dissemination of ongoing research through unconferences.

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  • Geipel, I., Lattenkamp, E. Z., Dixon, M. M., Wiegrebe, L., & Page, R. A. (2021). Hearing sensitivity: An underlying mechanism for niche differentiation in gleaning bats. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118: e2024943118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2024943118.

    Abstract

    Tropical ecosystems are known for high species diversity. Adaptations permitting niche differentiation enable species to coexist. Historically, research focused primarily on morphological and behavioral adaptations for foraging, roosting, and other basic ecological factors. Another important factor, however, is differences in sensory capabilities. So far, studies mainly have focused on the output of behavioral strategies of predators and their prey preference. Understanding the coexistence of different foraging strategies, however, requires understanding underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. In this study, we investigate hearing in bats and how it shapes bat species coexistence. We present the hearing thresholds and echolocation calls of 12 different gleaning bats from the ecologically diverse Phyllostomid family. We measured their auditory brainstem responses to assess their hearing sensitivity. The audiograms of these species had similar overall shapes but differed substantially for frequencies below 9 kHz and in the frequency range of their echolocation calls. Our results suggest that differences among bats in hearing abilities contribute to the diversity in foraging strategies of gleaning bats. We argue that differences in auditory sensitivity could be important mechanisms shaping diversity in sensory niches and coexistence of species.
  • Ghatan, P. H., Hsieh, J. C., Petersson, K. M., Stone-Elander, S., & Ingvar, M. (1998). Coexistence of attention-based facilitation and inhibition in the human cortex. NeuroImage, 7, 23-29.

    Abstract

    A key function of attention is to select an appropriate subset of available information by facilitation of attended processes and/or inhibition of irrelevant processing. Functional imaging studies, using positron emission tomography, have during different experimental tasks revealed decreased neuronal activity in areas that process input from unattended sensory modalities. It has been hypothesized that these decreases reflect a selective inhibitory modulation of nonrelevant cortical processing. In this study we addressed this question using a continuous arithmetical task with and without concomitant disturbing auditory input (task-irrelevant speech). During the arithmetical task, irrelevant speech did not affect task-performance but yielded decreased activity in the auditory and midcingulate cortices and increased activity in the left posterior parietal cortex. This pattern of modulation is consistent with a top down inhibitory modulation of a nonattended input to the auditory cortex and a coexisting, attention-based facilitation of taskrelevant processing in higher order cortices. These findings suggest that task-related decreases in cortical activity may be of functional importance in the understanding of both attentional mechanisms and taskrelated information processing.
  • Gialluisi, A., Andlauer, T. F. M., Mirza-Schreiber, N., Moll, K., Becker, J., Hoffmann, P., Ludwig, K. U., Czamara, D., St Pourcain, B., Honbolygó, F., Tóth, D., Csépe, V., Huguet, H., Chaix, Y., Iannuzzi, S., Demonet, J.-F., Morris, A. P., Hulslander, J., Willcutt, E. G., DeFries, J. C. and 29 moreGialluisi, A., Andlauer, T. F. M., Mirza-Schreiber, N., Moll, K., Becker, J., Hoffmann, P., Ludwig, K. U., Czamara, D., St Pourcain, B., Honbolygó, F., Tóth, D., Csépe, V., Huguet, H., Chaix, Y., Iannuzzi, S., Demonet, J.-F., Morris, A. P., Hulslander, J., Willcutt, E. G., DeFries, J. C., Olson, R. K., Smith, S. D., Pennington, B. F., Vaessen, A., Maurer, U., Lyytinen, H., Peyrard-Janvid, M., Leppänen, P. H. T., Brandeis, D., Bonte, M., Stein, J. F., Talcott, J. B., Fauchereau, F., Wilcke, A., Kirsten, H., Müller, B., Francks, C., Bourgeron, T., Monaco, A. P., Ramus, F., Landerl, K., Kere, J., Scerri, T. S., Paracchini, S., Fisher, S. E., Schumacher, J., Nöthen, M. M., Müller-Myhsok, B., & Schulte-Körne, G. (2021). Genome-wide association study reveals new insights into the heritability and genetic correlates of developmental dyslexia. Molecular Psychiatry, 26, 3004-3017. doi:10.1038/s41380-020-00898-x.

    Abstract

    Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a learning disorder affecting the ability to read, with a heritability of 40–60%. A notable part of this heritability remains unexplained, and large genetic studies are warranted to identify new susceptibility genes and clarify the genetic bases of dyslexia. We carried out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on 2274 dyslexia cases and 6272 controls, testing associations at the single variant, gene, and pathway level, and estimating heritability using single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data. We also calculated polygenic scores (PGSs) based on large-scale GWAS data for different neuropsychiatric disorders and cortical brain measures, educational attainment, and fluid intelligence, testing them for association with dyslexia status in our sample. We observed statistically significant (p  < 2.8 × 10−6) enrichment of associations at the gene level, for LOC388780 (20p13; uncharacterized gene), and for VEPH1 (3q25), a gene implicated in brain development. We estimated an SNP-based heritability of 20–25% for DD, and observed significant associations of dyslexia risk with PGSs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (at pT = 0.05 in the training GWAS: OR = 1.23[1.16; 1.30] per standard deviation increase; p  = 8 × 10−13), bipolar disorder (1.53[1.44; 1.63]; p = 1 × 10−43), schizophrenia (1.36[1.28; 1.45]; p = 4 × 10−22), psychiatric cross-disorder susceptibility (1.23[1.16; 1.30]; p = 3 × 10−12), cortical thickness of the transverse temporal gyrus (0.90[0.86; 0.96]; p = 5 × 10−4), educational attainment (0.86[0.82; 0.91]; p = 2 × 10−7), and intelligence (0.72[0.68; 0.76]; p = 9 × 10−29). This study suggests an important contribution of common genetic variants to dyslexia risk, and novel genomic overlaps with psychiatric conditions like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and cross-disorder susceptibility. Moreover, it revealed the presence of shared genetic foundations with a neural correlate previously implicated in dyslexia by neuroimaging evidence.
  • Gialluisi, A., Guadalupe, T., Francks, C., & Fisher, S. E. (2017). Neuroimaging genetic analyses of novel candidate genes associated with reading and language. Brain and Language, 172, 9-15. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2016.07.002.

    Abstract

    Neuroimaging measures provide useful endophenotypes for tracing genetic effects on reading and language. A recent Genome-Wide Association Scan Meta-Analysis (GWASMA) of reading and language skills (N = 1862) identified strongest associations with the genes CCDC136/FLNC and RBFOX2. Here, we follow up the top findings from this GWASMA, through neuroimaging genetics in an independent sample of 1275 healthy adults. To minimize multiple-testing, we used a multivariate approach, focusing on cortical regions consistently implicated in prior literature on developmental dyslexia and language impairment. Specifically, we investigated grey matter surface area and thickness of five regions selected a priori: middle temporal gyrus (MTG); pars opercularis and pars triangularis in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG-PO and IFG-PT); postcentral parietal gyrus (PPG) and superior temporal gyrus (STG). First, we analysed the top associated polymorphisms from the reading/language GWASMA: rs59197085 (CCDC136/FLNC) and rs5995177 (RBFOX2). There was significant multivariate association of rs5995177 with cortical thickness, driven by effects on left PPG, right MTG, right IFG (both PO and PT), and STG bilaterally. The minor allele, previously associated with reduced reading-language performance, showed negative effects on grey matter thickness. Next, we performed exploratory gene-wide analysis of CCDC136/FLNC and RBFOX2; no other associations surpassed significance thresholds. RBFOX2 encodes an important neuronal regulator of alternative splicing. Thus, the prior reported association of rs5995177 with reading/language performance could potentially be mediated by reduced thickness in associated cortical regions. In future, this hypothesis could be tested using sufficiently large samples containing both neuroimaging data and quantitative reading/language scores from the same individuals.

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  • Goodhew, S. C., & Kidd, E. (2017). Language use statistics and prototypical grapheme colours predict synaesthetes' and non-synaesthetes' word-colour associations. Acta Psychologica, 173, 73-86. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.12.008.

    Abstract

    Synaesthesia is the neuropsychological phenomenon in which individuals experience unusual sensory associations, such as experiencing particular colours in response to particular words. While it was once thought the particular pairings between stimuli were arbitrary and idiosyncratic to particular synaesthetes, there is now growing evidence for a systematic psycholinguistic basis to the associations. Here we sought to assess the explanatory value of quantifiable lexical association measures (via latent semantic analysis; LSA) in the pairings observed between words and colours in synaesthesia. To test this, we had synaesthetes report the particular colours they experienced in response to given concept words, and found that language association between the concept and colour words provided highly reliable predictors of the reported pairings. These results provide convergent evidence for a psycholinguistic basis to synaesthesia, but in a novel way, showing that exposure to particular patterns of associations in language can predict the formation of particular synaesthetic lexical-colour associations. Consistent with previous research, the prototypical synaesthetic colour for the first letter of the word also played a role in shaping the colour for the whole word, and this effect also interacted with language association, such that the effect of the colour for the first letter was stronger as the association between the concept word and the colour word in language increased. Moreover, when a group of non-synaesthetes were asked what colours they associated with the concept words, they produced very similar reports to the synaesthetes that were predicted by both language association and prototypical synaesthetic colour for the first letter of the word. This points to a shared linguistic experience generating the associations for both groups.
  • Gordon, R. L., Ravignani, A., Hyland Bruno, J., Robinson, C. M., Scartozzi, A., Embalabala, R., Niarchou, M., 23andMe Research Team, Cox, N. J., & Creanza, N. (2021). Linking the genomic signatures of human beat synchronization and learned song in birds. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376: 20200329. doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0329.

    Abstract

    The development of rhythmicity is foundational to communicative and social behaviours in humans and many other species, and mechanisms of synchrony could be conserved across species. The goal of the current paper is to explore evolutionary hypotheses linking vocal learning and beat synchronization through genomic approaches, testing the prediction that genetic underpinnings of birdsong also contribute to the aetiology of human interactions with musical beat structure. We combined state-of-the-art-genomic datasets that account for underlying polygenicity of these traits: birdsong genome-wide transcriptomics linked to singing in zebra finches, and a human genome-wide association study of beat synchronization. Results of competitive gene set analysis revealed that the genetic architecture of human beat synchronization is significantly enriched for birdsong genes expressed in songbird Area X (a key nucleus for vocal learning, and homologous to human basal ganglia). These findings complement ethological and neural evidence of the relationship between vocal learning and beat synchronization, supporting a framework of some degree of common genomic substrates underlying rhythm-related behaviours in two clades, humans and songbirds (the largest evolutionary radiation of vocal learners). Future cross-species approaches investigating the genetic underpinnings of beat synchronization in a broad evolutionary context are discussed.

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  • Goriot, C., Unsworth, S., Van Hout, R. W. N. M., Broersma, M., & McQueen, J. M. (2021). Differences in phonological awareness performance: Are there positive or negative effects of bilingual experience? Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 11(3), 425-460. doi:10.1075/lab.18082.gor.

    Abstract

    Children who have knowledge of two languages may show better phonological awareness than their monolingual peers (e.g. Bruck & Genesee, 1995). It remains unclear how much bilingual experience is needed for such advantages to appear, and whether differences in language or cognitive skills alter the relation between bilingualism and phonological awareness. These questions were investigated in this cross-sectional study. Participants (n = 294; 4–7 year-olds, in the first three grades of primary school) were Dutch-speaking pupils attending mainstream monolingual Dutch primary schools or early-English schools providing English lessons from grade 1, and simultaneous Dutch-English bilinguals. We investigated phonological awareness (rhyming, phoneme blending, onset phoneme identification, and phoneme deletion) and its relation to age, Dutch vocabulary, English vocabulary, working memory and short-term memory, and the balance between Dutch and English vocabulary. Small significant (α < .05) effects of bilingualism were found on onset phoneme identification and phoneme deletion, but post-hoc comparisons revealed no robust pairwise differences between the groups. Furthermore, effects of bilingualism sometimes disappeared when differences in language or memory skills were taken into account. Learning two languages simultaneously is not beneficial to – and importantly, also not detrimental to – phonological awareness.

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  • Goriot, C., Van Hout, R., Broersma, M., Lobo, V., McQueen, J. M., & Unsworth, S. (2021). Using the peabody picture vocabulary test in L2 children and adolescents: Effects of L1. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 24(4), 546-568. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1494131.

    Abstract

    This study investigated to what extent the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test
    (PPVT-4) is a reliable tool for measuring vocabulary knowledge of English as
    a second language (L2), and to what extent L1 characteristics affect test
    outcomes. The PPVT-4 was administered to Dutch pupils in six different
    age groups (4-15 years old) who were or were not following an English
    educational programme at school. Our first finding was that the PPVT-4
    was not a reliable measure for pupils who were correct on maximally 24
    items, but it was reliable for pupils who performed better. Second, both
    primary-school and secondary-school pupils performed better on items
    for which the phonological similarity between the English word and its
    Dutch translation was higher. Third, young unexperienced L2 learners’
    scores were predicted by Dutch lexical frequency, while older more
    experienced pupils’ scores were predicted by English frequency. These
    findings indicate that the PPVT may be inappropriate for use with L2
    learners with limited L2 proficiency. Furthermore, comparisons of PPVT
    scores across learners with different L1s are confounded by effects of L1
    frequency and L1-L2 similarity. The PPVT-4 is however a suitable measure
    to compare more proficient L2 learners who have the same L1.
  • Goudbeek, M., Smits, R., Cutler, A., & Swingley, D. (2017). Auditory and phonetic category formation. In H. Cohen, & C. Lefebvre (Eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (2nd revised ed.) (pp. 687-708). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  • De Graaf, T. A., Duecker, F., Stankevich, Y., Ten Oever, S., & Sack, A. T. (2017). Seeing in the dark: Phosphene thresholds with eyes open versus closed in the absence of visual inputs. Brain Stimulation, 10(4), 828-835. doi:10.1016/j.brs.2017.04.127.

    Abstract

    Background: Voluntarily opening or closing our eyes results in fundamentally different input patterns and expectancies. Yet it remains unclear how our brains and visual systems adapt to these ocular states.
    Objective/Hypothesis: We here used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to probe the excitability of the human visual system with eyes open or closed, in the complete absence of visual inputs.
    Methods: Combining Bayesian staircase procedures with computer control of TMS pulse intensity allowed interleaved determination of phosphene thresholds (PT) in both conditions. We measured parieto-occipital EEG baseline activity in several stages to track oscillatory power in the alpha (8-12 Hz) frequency-band, which has previously been shown to be inversely related to phosphene perception.
    Results: Since closing the eyes generally increases alpha power, one might have expected a decrease in excitability (higher PT). While we confirmed a rise in alpha power with eyes closed, visual excitability was actually increased (PT was lower) with eyes closed.
    Conclusions: This suggests that, aside from oscillatory alpha power, additional neuronal mechanisms influence the excitability of early visual cortex. One of these may involve a more internally oriented mode of brain operation, engaged by closing the eyes. In this state, visual cortex may be more susceptible to top-down inputs, to facilitate for example multisensory integration or imagery/working memory, although alternative explanations remain possible. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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  • Grabot, L., Kösem, A., Azizi, L., & Van Wassenhove, V. (2017). Prestimulus Alpha Oscillations and the Temporal Sequencing of Audio-visual Events. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 29(9), 1566-1582. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01145.

    Abstract

    Perceiving the temporal order of sensory events typically depends on participants' attentional state, thus likely on the endogenous fluctuations of brain activity. Using magnetoencephalography, we sought to determine whether spontaneous brain oscillations could disambiguate the perceived order of auditory and visual events presented in close temporal proximity, that is, at the individual's perceptual order threshold (Point of Subjective Simultaneity [PSS]). Two neural responses were found to index an individual's temporal order perception when contrasting brain activity as a function of perceived order (i.e., perceiving the sound first vs. perceiving the visual event first) given the same physical audiovisual sequence. First, average differences in prestimulus auditory alpha power indicated perceiving the correct ordering of audiovisual events irrespective of which sensory modality came first: a relatively low alpha power indicated perceiving auditory or visual first as a function of the actual sequence order. Additionally, the relative changes in the amplitude of the auditory (but not visual) evoked responses were correlated with participant's correct performance. Crucially, the sign of the magnitude difference in prestimulus alpha power and evoked responses between perceived audiovisual orders correlated with an individual's PSS. Taken together, our results suggest that spontaneous oscillatory activity cannot disambiguate subjective temporal order without prior knowledge of the individual's bias toward perceiving one or the other sensory modality first. Altogether, our results suggest that, under high perceptual uncertainty, the magnitude of prestimulus alpha (de)synchronization indicates the amount of compensation needed to overcome an individual's prior in the serial ordering and temporal sequencing of information

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