Publications

Displaying 301 - 400 of 1137
  • 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.
  • 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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  • Gisselgard, J., Petersson, K. M., Baddeley, A., & Ingvar, M. (2003). The irrelevant speech effect: A PET study. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1899-1911. doi:10.1016/S0028-3932(03)00122-2.

    Abstract

    Positron emission tomography (PET) was performed in normal volunteers during a serial recall task under the influence of irrelevant speech comprising both single item repetition and multi-item sequences. An interaction approach was used to identify brain areas specifically related to the irrelevant speech effect. We interpreted activations as compensatory recruitment of complementary working memory processing, and decreased activity in terms of suppression of task relevant areas invoked by the irrelevant speech. The interaction between the distractors and working memory revealed a significant effect in the left, and to a lesser extent in the right, superior temporal region, indicating that initial phonological processing was relatively suppressed. Additional areas of decreased activity were observed in an a priori defined cortical network related to verbalworking memory, incorporating the bilateral superior temporal and inferior/middle frontal corticesn extending into Broca’s area on the left. We also observed a weak activation in the left inferior parietal cortex, a region suggested to reflect the phonological store, the subcomponent where the interference is assumed to take place. The results suggest that the irrelevant speech effect is correlated with and thus tentatively may be explained in terms of a suppression of components of the verbal working memory network as outlined. The results can be interpreted in terms of inhibitory top–down attentional mechanisms attenuating the influence of the irrelevant speech, although additional studies are clearly necessary to more fully characterize the nature of this phenomenon and its theoretical implications for existing short-term memory models
  • 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
  • Gray, R., & Jordan, F. (2000). Language trees support the express-train sequence of Austronesian expansion. Nature, 405, 1052-1055. doi:10.1038/35016575.

    Abstract

    Languages, like molecules, document evolutionary history. Darwin(1) observed that evolutionary change in languages greatly resembled the processes of biological evolution: inheritance from a common ancestor and convergent evolution operate in both. Despite many suggestions(2-4), few attempts have been made to apply the phylogenetic methods used in biology to linguistic data. Here we report a parsimony analysis of a large language data set. We use this analysis to test competing hypotheses - the "express-train''(5) and the "entangled-bank''(6,7) models - for the colonization of the Pacific by Austronesian-speaking peoples. The parsimony analysis of a matrix of 77 Austronesian languages with 5,185 lexical items produced a single most-parsimonious tree. The express-train model was converted into an ordered geographical character and mapped onto the language tree. We found that the topology of the language tree was highly compatible with the express-train model.
  • Greenfield, M. D., Honing, H., Kotz, S. A., & Ravignani, A. (Eds.). (2021). Synchrony and rhythm interaction: From the brain to behavioural ecology [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376.
  • Greenfield, M. D., Honing, H., Kotz, S. A., & Ravignani, A. (2021). Synchrony and rhythm interaction: From the brain to behavioural ecology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376: 20200324. doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0324.

    Abstract

    This theme issue assembles current studies that ask how and why precise synchronization and related forms of rhythm interaction are expressed in a wide range of behaviour. The studies cover human activity, with an emphasis on music, and social behaviour, reproduction and communication in non-human animals. In most cases, the temporally aligned rhythms have short—from several seconds down to a fraction of a second—periods and are regulated by central nervous system pacemakers, but interactions involving rhythms that are 24 h or longer and originate in biological clocks also occur. Across this spectrum of activities, species and time scales, empirical work and modelling suggest that synchrony arises from a limited number of coupled-oscillator mechanisms with which individuals mutually entrain. Phylogenetic distribution of these common mechanisms points towards convergent evolution. Studies of animal communication indicate that many synchronous interactions between the signals of neighbouring individuals are specifically favoured by selection. However, synchronous displays are often emergent properties of entrainment between signalling individuals, and in some situations, the very signallers who produce a display might not gain any benefit from the collective timing of their production.
  • Greenfield, P. M., Slobin, D., Cole, M., Gardner, H., Sylva, K., Levelt, W. J. M., Lucariello, J., Kay, A., Amsterdam, A., & Shore, B. (2017). Remembering Jerome Bruner: A series of tributes to Jerome “Jerry” Bruner, who died in 2016 at the age of 100, reflects the seminal contributions that led him to be known as a co-founder of the cognitive revolution. Observer, 30(2). Retrieved from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/remembering-jerome-bruner.

    Abstract

    Jerome Seymour “Jerry” Bruner was born on October 1, 1915, in New York City. He began his academic career as psychology professor at Harvard University; he ended it as University Professor Emeritus at New York University (NYU) Law School. What happened at both ends and in between is the subject of the richly variegated remembrances that follow. On June 5, 2016, Bruner died in his Greenwich Village loft at age 100. He leaves behind his beloved partner Eleanor Fox, who was also his distinguished colleague at NYU Law School; his son Whitley; his daughter Jenny; and three grandchildren.

    Bruner’s interdisciplinarity and internationalism are seen in the remarkable variety of disciplines and geographical locations represented in the following tributes. The reader will find developmental psychology, anthropology, computer science, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, cultural psychology, education, and law represented; geographically speaking, the writers are located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. The memories that follow are arranged in roughly chronological order according to when the writers had their first contact with Jerry Bruner.
  • Greenhill, S. J., Wu, C.-H., Hua, X., Dunn, M., Levinson, S. C., & Gray, R. D. (2017). Evolutionary dynamics of language systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(42), E8822-E8829. doi:10.1073/pnas.1700388114.

    Abstract

    Understanding how and why language subsystems differ in their evolutionary dynamics is a fundamental question for historical and comparative linguistics. One key dynamic is the rate of language change. While it is commonly thought that the rapid rate of change hampers the reconstruction of deep language relationships beyond 6,000–10,000 y, there are suggestions that grammatical structures might retain more signal over time than other subsystems, such as basic vocabulary. In this study, we use a Dirichlet process mixture model to infer the rates of change in lexical and grammatical data from 81 Austronesian languages. We show that, on average, most grammatical features actually change faster than items of basic vocabulary. The grammatical data show less schismogenesis, higher rates of homoplasy, and more bursts of contact-induced change than the basic vocabulary data. However, there is a core of grammatical and lexical features that are highly stable. These findings suggest that different subsystems of language have differing dynamics and that careful, nuanced models of language change will be needed to extract deeper signal from the noise of parallel evolution, areal readaptation, and contact.
  • De Gregorio, C., Valente, D., Raimondi, T., Torti, V., Miaretsoa, L., Friard, O., Giacoma, C., Ravignani, A., & Gamba, M. (2021). Categorical rhythms in a singing primate. Current Biology, 31, R1363-R1380. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.032.

    Abstract

    What are the origins of musical rhythm? One approach to the biology and evolution of music consists in finding common musical traits across species. These similarities allow biomusicologists to infer when and how musical traits appeared in our species1
    . A parallel approach to the biology and evolution of music focuses on finding statistical universals in human music2
    . These include rhythmic features that appear above chance across musical cultures. One such universal is the production of categorical rhythms3
    , defined as those where temporal intervals between note onsets are distributed categorically rather than uniformly2
    ,4
    ,5
    . Prominent rhythm categories include those with intervals related by small integer ratios, such as 1:1 (isochrony) and 1:2, which translates as some notes being twice as long as their adjacent ones. In humans, universals are often defined in relation to the beat, a top-down cognitive process of inferring a temporal regularity from a complex musical scene1
    . Without assuming the presence of the beat in other animals, one can still investigate its downstream products, namely rhythmic categories with small integer ratios detected in recorded signals. Here we combine the comparative and statistical universals approaches, testing the hypothesis that rhythmic categories and small integer ratios should appear in species showing coordinated group singing3
    . We find that a lemur species displays, in its coordinated songs, the isochronous and 1:2 rhythm categories seen in human music, showing that such categories are not, among mammals, unique to humans3

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  • Gretsch, P. (2003). Omission impossible?: Topic and Focus in Focal Ellipsis. In K. Schwabe, & S. Winkler (Eds.), The Interfaces: Deriving and interpreting omitted structures (pp. 341-365). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Grieco-Calub, T. M., Ward, K. M., & Brehm, L. (2017). Multitasking During Degraded Speech Recognition in School-Age Children. Trends in hearing, 21, 1-14. doi:10.1177/2331216516686786.

    Abstract

    Multitasking requires individuals to allocate their cognitive resources across different tasks. The purpose of the current study was to assess school-age children’s multitasking abilities during degraded speech recognition. Children (8 to 12 years old) completed a dual-task paradigm including a sentence recognition (primary) task containing speech that was either unpro- cessed or noise-band vocoded with 8, 6, or 4 spectral channels and a visual monitoring (secondary) task. Children’s accuracy and reaction time on the visual monitoring task was quantified during the dual-task paradigm in each condition of the primary task and compared with single-task performance. Children experienced dual-task costs in the 6- and 4-channel conditions of the primary speech recognition task with decreased accuracy on the visual monitoring task relative to baseline performance. In all conditions, children’s dual-task performance on the visual monitoring task was strongly predicted by their single-task (baseline) performance on the task. Results suggest that children’s proficiency with the secondary task contributes to the magnitude of dual-task costs while multitasking during degraded speech recognition.
  • Griffin, Z. M., & Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychological Science, 11(4), 274-279. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00255.

    Abstract

    To study the time course of sentence formulation, we monitored the eye movements of speakers as they described simple events. The similarity between speakers' initial eye movements and those of observers performing a nonverbal event-comprehension task suggested that response-relevant information was rapidly extracted from scenes, allowing speakers to select grammatical subjects based on comprehended events rather than salience. When speaking extemporaneously, speakers began fixating pictured elements less than a second before naming them within their descriptions, a finding consistent with incremental lexical encoding. Eye movements anticipated the order of mention despite changes in picture orientation, in who-did-what-to-whom, and in sentence structure. The results support Wundt's theory of sentence production.

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  • De Groot, F., Huettig, F., & Olivers, C. N. L. (2017). Language-induced visual and semantic biases in visual search are subject to task requirements. Visual Cognition, 25, 225-240. doi:10.1080/13506285.2017.1324934.

    Abstract

    Visual attention is biased by both visual and semantic representations activated by words. We investigated to what extent language-induced visual and semantic biases are subject to task demands. Participants memorized a spoken word for a verbal recognition task, and performed a visual search task during the retention period. Crucially, while the word had to be remembered in all conditions, it was either relevant for the search (as it also indicated the target) or irrelevant (as it only served the memory test afterwards). On critical trials, displays contained objects that were visually or semantically related to the memorized word. When the word was relevant for the search, eye movement biases towards visually related objects arose earlier and more strongly than biases towards semantically related objects. When the word was irrelevant, there was still evidence for visual and semantic biases, but these biases were substantially weaker, and similar in strength and temporal dynamics, without a visual advantage. We conclude that language-induced attentional biases are subject to task requirements.
  • Guadalupe, T., Mathias, S. R., Van Erp, T. G. M., Whelan, C. D., Zwiers, M. P., Abe, Y., Abramovic, L., Agartz, I., Andreassen, O. A., Arias-Vásquez, A., Aribisala, B. S., Armstrong, N. J., Arolt, V., Artiges, E., Ayesa-Arriola, R., Baboyan, V. G., Banaschewski, T., Barker, G., Bastin, M. E., Baune, B. T. and 141 moreGuadalupe, T., Mathias, S. R., Van Erp, T. G. M., Whelan, C. D., Zwiers, M. P., Abe, Y., Abramovic, L., Agartz, I., Andreassen, O. A., Arias-Vásquez, A., Aribisala, B. S., Armstrong, N. J., Arolt, V., Artiges, E., Ayesa-Arriola, R., Baboyan, V. G., Banaschewski, T., Barker, G., Bastin, M. E., Baune, B. T., Blangero, J., Bokde, A. L., Boedhoe, P. S., Bose, A., Brem, S., Brodaty, H., Bromberg, U., Brooks, S., Büchel, C., Buitelaar, J., Calhoun, V. D., Cannon, D. M., Cattrell, A., Cheng, Y., Conrod, P. J., Conzelmann, A., Corvin, A., Crespo-Facorro, B., Crivello, F., Dannlowski, U., De Zubicaray, G. I., De Zwarte, S. M., Deary, I. J., Desrivières, S., Doan, N. T., Donohoe, G., Dørum, E. S., Ehrlich, S., Espeseth, T., Fernández, G., Flor, H., Fouche, J.-P., Frouin, V., Fukunaga, M., Gallinat, J., Garavan, H., Gill, M., Suarez, A. G., Gowland, P., Grabe, H. J., Grotegerd, D., Gruber, O., Hagenaars, S., Hashimoto, R., Hauser, T. U., Heinz, A., Hibar, D. P., Hoekstra, P. J., Hoogman, M., Howells, F. M., Hu, H., Hulshoff Pol, H. E.., Huyser, C., Ittermann, B., Jahanshad, N., Jönsson, E. G., Jurk, S., Kahn, R. S., Kelly, S., Kraemer, B., Kugel, H., Kwon, J. S., Lemaitre, H., Lesch, K.-P., Lochner, C., Luciano, M., Marquand, A. F., Martin, N. G., Martínez-Zalacaín, I., Martinot, J.-L., Mataix-Cols, D., Mather, K., McDonald, C., McMahon, K. L., Medland, S. E., Menchón, J. M., Morris, D. W., Mothersill, O., Maniega, S. M., Mwangi, B., Nakamae, T., Nakao, T., Narayanaswaamy, J. C., Nees, F., Nordvik, J. E., Onnink, A. M. H., Opel, N., Ophoff, R., Martinot, M.-L.-P., Orfanos, D. P., Pauli, P., Paus, T., Poustka, L., Reddy, J. Y., Renteria, M. E., Roiz-Santiáñez, R., Roos, A., Royle, N. A., Sachdev, P., Sánchez-Juan, P., Schmaal, L., Schumann, G., Shumskaya, E., Smolka, M. N., Soares, J. C., Soriano-Mas, C., Stein, D. J., Strike, L. T., Toro, R., Turner, J. A., Tzourio-Mazoyer, N., Uhlmann, A., Valdés Hernández, M., Van den Heuvel, O. A., Van der Meer, D., Van Haren, N. E.., Veltman, D. J., Venkatasubramanian, G., Vetter, N. C., Vuletic, D., Walitza, S., Walter, H., Walton, E., Wang, Z., Wardlaw, J., Wen, W., Westlye, L. T., Whelan, R., Wittfeld, K., Wolfers, T., Wright, M. J., Xu, J., Xu, X., Yun, J.-Y., Zhao, J., Franke, B., Thompson, P. M., Glahn, D. C., Mazoyer, B., Fisher, S. E., & Francks, C. (2017). Human subcortical asymmetries in 15,847 people worldwide reveal effects of age and sex. Brain Imaging and Behavior, 11(5), 1497-1514. doi:10.1007/s11682-016-9629-z.

    Abstract

    The two hemispheres of the human brain differ functionally and structurally. Despite over a century of research, the extent to which brain asymmetry is influenced by sex, handedness, age, and genetic factors is still controversial. Here we present the largest ever analysis of subcortical brain asymmetries, in a harmonized multi-site study using meta-analysis methods. Volumetric asymmetry of seven subcortical structures was assessed in 15,847 MRI scans from 52 datasets worldwide. There were sex differences in the asymmetry of the globus pallidus and putamen. Heritability estimates, derived from 1170 subjects belonging to 71 extended pedigrees, revealed that additive genetic factors influenced the asymmetry of these two structures and that of the hippocampus and thalamus. Handedness had no detectable effect on subcortical asymmetries, even in this unprecedented sample size, but the asymmetry of the putamen varied with age. Genetic drivers of asymmetry in the hippocampus, thalamus and basal ganglia may affect variability in human cognition, including susceptibility to psychiatric disorders.

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  • Guadalupe, T. (2017). The biology of variation in anatomical brain asymmetries. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Le Guen, O. (2003). Quand les morts reviennent, réflexion sur l'ancestralité chez les Mayas des Basses Terres. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 89(2), 171-205.

    Abstract

    When the dead come home… Remarks on ancestor worship among the Lowland Mayas. In Amerindian ethnographical literature, ancestor worship is often mentioned but evidence of its existence is lacking. This article will try to demonstrate that some Lowland Maya do worship ancestors ; it will use precise criteria taken from ethnological studies of societies where ancestor worship is common, compared to maya beliefs and practices. The All Souls’ Day, or hanal pixan, seems to be the most significant manifestation of this cult. Our approach will be comparative, through time – using colonial and ethnographical data of the twentieth century, and space – contemplating uses and beliefs of two maya groups, the Yucatec and the Lacandon Maya.
  • Guest, O., & Martin, A. E. (2021). How computational modeling can force theory building in psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(4), 789-802. doi:10.1177/1745691620970585.

    Abstract

    Psychology endeavors to develop theories of human capacities and behaviors on the basis of a variety of methodologies and dependent measures. We argue that one of the most divisive factors in psychological science is whether researchers choose to use computational modeling of theories (over and above data) during the scientific-inference process. Modeling is undervalued yet holds promise for advancing psychological science. The inherent demands of computational modeling guide us toward better science by forcing us to conceptually analyze, specify, and formalize intuitions that otherwise remain unexamined—what we dub open theory. Constraining our inference process through modeling enables us to build explanatory and predictive theories. Here, we present scientific inference in psychology as a path function in which each step shapes the next. Computational modeling can constrain these steps, thus advancing scientific inference over and above the stewardship of experimental practice (e.g., preregistration). If psychology continues to eschew computational modeling, we predict more replicability crises and persistent failure at coherent theory building. This is because without formal modeling we lack open and transparent theorizing. We also explain how to formalize, specify, and implement a computational model, emphasizing that the advantages of modeling can be achieved by anyone with benefit to all.
  • Guest, O., & Love, B. C. (2017). What the success of brain imaging implies about the neural code. eLife, 6: e21397. doi:10.7554/eLife.21397.

    Abstract

    The success of fMRI places constraints on the nature of the neural code. The fact that researchers can infer similarities between neural representations, despite fMRI’s limitations, implies that certain neural coding schemes are more likely than others. For fMRI to succeed given its low temporal and spatial resolution, the neural code must be smooth at the voxel and functional level such that similar stimuli engender similar internal representations. Through proof and simulation, we determine which coding schemes are plausible given both fMRI’s successes and its limitations in measuring neural activity. Deep neural network approaches, which have been forwarded as computational accounts of the ventral stream, are consistent with the success of fMRI, though functional smoothness breaks down in the later network layers. These results have implications for the nature of the neural code and ventral stream, as well as what can be successfully investigated with fMRI.
  • Gullberg, M. (2003). Eye movements and gestures in human face-to-face interaction. In J. Hyönä, R. Radach, & H. Deubel (Eds.), The mind's eyes: Cognitive and applied aspects of eye movements (pp. 685-703). Oxford: Elsevier.

    Abstract

    Gestures are visuospatial events, meaning carriers, and social interactional phenomena. As such they constitute a particularly favourable area for investigating visual attention in a complex everyday situation under conditions of competitive processing. This chapter discusses visual attention to spontaneous gestures in human face-to-face interaction as explored with eye-tracking. Some basic fixation patterns are described, live and video-based settings are compared, and preliminary results on the relationship between fixations and information processing are outlined.
  • Gullberg, M., & Kita, S. (2003). Das Beachten von Gesten: Eine Studie zu Blickverhalten und Integration gestisch ausgedrückter Informationen. In Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Ed.), Jahrbuch der Max Planck Gesellschaft 2003 (pp. 949-953). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
  • Gullberg, M. (2003). Gestures, referents, and anaphoric linkage in learner varieties. In C. Dimroth, & M. Starren (Eds.), Information structure, linguistic structure and the dynamics of language acquisition. (pp. 311-328). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This paper discusses how the gestural modality can contribute to our understanding of anaphoric linkage in learner varieties, focusing on gestural anaphoric linkage marking the introduction, maintenance, and shift of reference in story retellings by learners of French and Swedish. The comparison of gestural anaphoric linkage in native and non-native varieties reveals what appears to be a particular learner variety of gestural cohesion, which closely reflects the characteristics of anaphoric linkage in learners' speech. Specifically, particular forms co-occur with anaphoric gestures depending on the information organisation in discourse. The typical nominal over-marking of maintained referents or topic elements in speech is mirrored by gestural (over-)marking of the same items. The paper discusses two ways in which this finding may further the understanding of anaphoric over-explicitness of learner varieties. An addressee-based communicative perspective on anaphoric linkage highlights how over-marking in gesture and speech may be related to issues of hyper-clarity and ambiguity. An alternative speaker-based perspective is also explored in which anaphoric over-marking is seen as related to L2 speech planning.
  • Gumperz, J. J., & Levinson, S. C. (1991). Rethinking linguistic relativity. Current Anthropology, 32(5), 613-623. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743696.
  • Gussenhoven, C., & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) (pp. 91-94). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.

    Abstract

    Three groups of monolingual listeners, with Standard Chinese, Dutch and Hungarian as their native language, judged pairs of trisyllabic stimuli which differed only in their itch pattern. The segmental structure of the stimuli was made up by the experimenters and presented to subjects as being taken from a little-known language spoken on a South Pacific island. Pitch patterns consisted of a single rise-fall located on or near the second syllable. By and large, listeners selected the stimulus with the higher peak, the later eak, and the higher end rise as the one that signalled a question, regardless of language group. The result is argued to reflect innate, non-linguistic knowledge of the meaning of pitch variation, notably Ohala’s Frequency Code. A significant difference between groups is explained as due to the influence of the mother tongue.
  • Gussenhoven, C., & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) (pp. 91-94).
  • Hagoort, P., Wassenaar, M., & Brown, C. M. (2003). Syntax-related ERP-effects in Dutch. Cognitive Brain Research, 16(1), 38-50. doi:10.1016/S0926-6410(02)00208-2.

    Abstract

    In two studies subjects were required to read Dutch sentences that in some cases contained a syntactic violation, in other cases a semantic violation. All syntactic violations were word category violations. The design excluded differential contributions of expectancy to influence the syntactic violation effects. The syntactic violations elicited an Anterior Negativity between 300 and 500 ms. This negativity was bilateral and had a frontal distribution. Over posterior sites the same violations elicited a P600/SPS starting at about 600 ms. The semantic violations elicited an N400 effect. The topographic distribution of the AN was more frontal than the distribution of the classical N400 effect, indicating that the underlying generators of the AN and the N400 are, at least to a certain extent, non-overlapping. Experiment 2 partly replicated the design of Experiment 1, but with differences in rate of presentation and in the distribution of items over subjects, and without semantic violations. The word category violations resulted in the same effects as were observed in Experiment 1, showing that they were independent of some of the specific parameters of Experiment 1. The discussion presents a tentative account of the functional differences in the triggering conditions of the AN and the P600/SPS.
  • Hagoort, P., Wassenaar, M., & Brown, C. M. (2003). Real-time semantic compensation in patients with agrammatic comprehension: Electrophysiological evidence for multiple-route plasticity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100(7), 4340-4345. doi:10.1073/pnas.0230613100.

    Abstract

    To understand spoken language requires that the brain provides rapid access to different kinds of knowledge, including the sounds and meanings of words, and syntax. Syntax specifies constraints on combining words in a grammatically well formed manner. Agrammatic patients are deficient in their ability to use these constraints, due to a lesion in the perisylvian area of the languagedominant hemisphere. We report a study on real-time auditory sentence processing in agrammatic comprehenders, examining
    their ability to accommodate damage to the language system. We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in agrammatic comprehenders, nonagrammatic aphasics, and age-matched controls. When listening to sentences with grammatical violations, the agrammatic aphasics did not show the same syntax-related ERP effect as the two other subject groups. Instead, the waveforms of the agrammatic aphasics were dominated by a meaning-related ERP effect, presumably reflecting their attempts to achieve understanding by the use of semantic constraints. These data demonstrate that although agrammatic aphasics are impaired in their ability to exploit syntactic information in real time, they can reduce the consequences of a syntactic deficit by exploiting a semantic route. They thus provide evidence for the compensation of a syntactic deficit by a stronger reliance on another route in mapping
    sound onto meaning. This is a form of plasticity that we refer to as multiple-route plasticity.
  • Hagoort, P. (2017). It is the facts, stupid. In J. Brockman, F. Van der Wa, & H. Corver (Eds.), Wetenschappelijke parels: het belangrijkste wetenschappelijke nieuws volgens 193 'briljante geesten'. Amsterdam: Maven Press.
  • Hagoort, P. (2000). De toekomstige eeuw der cognitieve neurowetenschap [inaugural lecture]. Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen.

    Abstract

    Rede uitgesproken op 12 mei 2000 bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de neuropsychologie aan de Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen KUN.
  • Hagoort, P. (2017). Don't forget neurobiology: An experimental approach to linguistic representation. Commentary on Branigan and Pickering "An experimental approach to linguistic representation". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40: e292. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17000401.

    Abstract

    Acceptability judgments are no longer acceptable as the holy grail for testing the nature of linguistic representations. Experimental and quantitative methods should be used to test theoretical claims in psycholinguistics. These methods should include not only behavior, but also the more recent possibilities to probe the neural codes for language-relevant representation
  • Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (2000). ERP effects of listening to speech compared to reading: the P600/SPS to syntactic violations in spoken sentences and rapid serial visual presentation. Neuropsychologia, 38, 1531-1549.

    Abstract

    In this study, event-related brain potential ffects of speech processing are obtained and compared to similar effects in sentence reading. In two experiments sentences were presented that contained three different types of grammatical violations. In one experiment sentences were presented word by word at a rate of four words per second. The grammatical violations elicited a Syntactic Positive Shift (P600/SPS), 500 ms after the onset of the word that rendered the sentence ungrammatical. The P600/SPS consisted of two phases, an early phase with a relatively equal anterior-posterior distribution and a later phase with a strong posterior distribution. We interpret the first phase as an indication of structural integration complexity, and the second phase as an indication of failing parsing operations and/or an attempt at reanalysis. In the second experiment the same syntactic violations were presented in sentences spoken at a normal rate and with normal intonation. These violations elicited a P600/SPS with the same onset as was observed for the reading of these sentences. In addition two of the three violations showed a preceding frontal negativity, most clearly over the left hemisphere.
  • Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (2000). ERP effects of listening to speech: semantic ERP effects. Neuropsychologia, 38, 1518-1530.

    Abstract

    In this study, event-related brain potential effects of speech processing are obtained and compared to similar effects insentence reading. In two experiments spoken sentences were presented with semantic violations in sentence-signal or mid-sentence positions. For these violations N400 effects were obtained that were very similar to N400 effects obtained in reading. However, the N400 effects in speech were preceded by an earlier negativity (N250). This negativity is not commonly observed with written input. The early effect is explained as a manifestation of a mismatch between the word forms expected on the basis of the context, and the actual cohort of activated word candidates that is generated on the basis of the speech signal.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). De verloving tussen neurowetenschap en psychologie. In K. Hilberdink (Ed.), Interdisciplinariteit in de geesteswetenschappen (pp. 73-81). Amsterdam: KNAW.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). Die einzigartige, grösstenteils aber unbewusste Fähigkeit der Menschen zu sprachlicher Kommunikation. In G. Kaiser (Ed.), Jahrbuch 2002-2003 / Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen (pp. 33-46). Düsseldorf: Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). Functional brain imaging. In W. J. Frawley (Ed.), International encyclopedia of linguistics (pp. 142-145). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). How the brain solves the binding problem for language: A neurocomputational model of syntactic processing. NeuroImage, 20(suppl. 1), S18-S29. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.09.013.

    Abstract

    Syntax is one of the components in the architecture of language processing that allows the listener/reader to bind single-word information into a unified interpretation of multiword utterances. This paper discusses ERP effects that have been observed in relation to syntactic processing. The fact that these effects differ from the semantic N400 indicates that the brain honors the distinction between semantic and syntactic binding operations. Two models of syntactic processing attempt to account for syntax-related ERP effects. One type of model is serial, with a first phase that is purely syntactic in nature (syntax-first model). The other type of model is parallel and assumes that information immediately guides the interpretation process once it becomes available. This is referred to as the immediacy model. ERP evidence is presented in support of the latter model. Next, an explicit computational model is proposed to explain the ERP data. This Unification Model assumes that syntactic frames are stored in memory and retrieved on the basis of the spoken or written word form input. The syntactic frames associated with the individual lexical items are unified by a dynamic binding process into a structural representation that spans the whole utterance. On the basis of a meta-analysis of imaging studies on syntax, it is argued that the left posterior inferior frontal cortex is involved in binding syntactic frames together, whereas the left superior temporal cortex is involved in retrieval of the syntactic frames stored in memory. Lesion data that support the involvement of this left frontotemporal network in syntactic processing are discussed.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). Interplay between syntax and semantics during sentence comprehension: ERP effects of combining syntactic and semantic violations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(6), 883-899. doi:10.1162/089892903322370807.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the effects of combined semantic and syntactic violations in relation to the effects of single semantic and single syntactic violations on language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) effects (N400 and P600/ SPS). Syntactic violations consisted of a mismatch in grammatical gender or number features of the definite article and the noun in sentence-internal or sentence-final noun phrases (NPs). Semantic violations consisted of semantically implausible adjective–noun combinations in the same NPs. Combined syntactic and semantic violations were a summation of these two respective violation types. ERPs were recorded while subjects read the sentences with the different types of violations and the correct control sentences. ERP effects were computed relative to ERPs elicited by the sentence-internal or sentence-final nouns. The size of the N400 effect to the semantic violation was increased by an additional syntactic violation (the syntactic boost). In contrast, the size of the P600/ SPS to the syntactic violation was not affected by an additional semantic violation. This suggests that in the absence of syntactic ambiguity, the assignment of syntactic structure is independent of semantic context. However, semantic integration is influenced by syntactic processing. In the sentence-final position, additional global processing consequences were obtained as a result of earlier violations in the sentence. The resulting increase in the N400 amplitude to sentence-final words was independent of the nature of the violation. A speeded anomaly detection task revealed that it takes substantially longer to detect semantic than syntactic anomalies. These results are discussed in relation to the latency and processing characteristics of the N400 and P600/SPS effects. Overall, the results reveal an asymmetry in the interplay between syntax and semantics during on-line sentence comprehension.
  • Hagoort, P. (2017). The core and beyond in the language-ready brain. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 81, 194-204. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.01.048.

    Abstract

    In this paper a general cognitive architecture of spoken language processing is specified. This is followed by an account of how this cognitive architecture is instantiated in the human brain. Both the spatial aspects of the networks for language are discussed, as well as the temporal dynamics and the underlying neurophysiology. A distinction is proposed between networks for coding/decoding linguistic information and additional networks for getting from coded meaning to speaker meaning, i.e. for making the inferences that enable the listener to understand the intentions of the speaker
  • Hagoort, P. (2017). The neural basis for primary and acquired language skills. In E. Segers, & P. Van den Broek (Eds.), Developmental Perspectives in Written Language and Literacy: In honor of Ludo Verhoeven (pp. 17-28). Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/z.206.02hag.

    Abstract

    Reading is a cultural invention that needs to recruit cortical infrastructure that was not designed for it (cultural recycling of cortical maps). In the case of reading both visual cortex and networks for speech processing are recruited. Here I discuss current views on the neurobiological underpinnings of spoken language that deviate in a number of ways from the classical Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model. More areas than Broca’s and Wernicke’s region are involved in language. Moreover, a division along the axis of language production and language comprehension does not seem to be warranted. Instead, for central aspects of language processing neural infrastructure is shared between production and comprehension. Arguments are presented in favor of a dynamic network view, in which the functionality of a region is co-determined by the network of regions in which it is embedded at particular moments in time. Finally, core regions of language processing need to interact with other networks (e.g. the attentional networks and the ToM network) to establish full functionality of language and communication. The consequences of this architecture for reading are discussed.
  • Hagoort, P. (2000). What we shall know only tomorrow. Brain and Language, 71, 89-92. doi:10.1006/brln.1999.2221.
  • Hahn, L. E., Benders, T., Fikkert, P., & Snijders, T. M. (2021). Infants’ implicit rhyme perception in child songs and its relationship with vocabulary. Frontiers in Psychology, 12: 680882. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.680882.

    Abstract

    Rhyme perception is an important predictor for future literacy. Assessing rhyme
    abilities, however, commonly requires children to make explicit rhyme judgements on
    single words. Here we explored whether infants already implicitly process rhymes in
    natural rhyming contexts (child songs) and whether this response correlates with later
    vocabulary size. In a passive listening ERP study, 10.5 month-old Dutch infants were
    exposed to rhyming and non-rhyming child songs. Two types of rhyme effects were
    analysed: (1) ERPs elicited by the first rhyme occurring in each song (rhyme sensitivity)
    and (2) ERPs elicited by rhymes repeating after the first rhyme in each song (rhyme
    repetition). Only for the latter a tentative negativity for rhymes from 0 to 200 ms
    after the onset of the rhyme word was found. This rhyme repetition effect correlated
    with productive vocabulary at 18 months-old, but not with any other vocabulary
    measure (perception at 10.5 or 18 months-old). While awaiting future replication, the
    study indicates precursors of phonological awareness already during infancy and with
    ecologically valid linguistic stimuli.
  • Hao, X., Huang, Y., Song, Y., Kong, X., & Liu, J. (2017). Experience with the Cardinal Coordinate System Contributes to the Precision of Cognitive Maps. Frontiers in Psychology, 8: 1166. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01166.

    Abstract

    The coordinate system has been proposed as a fundamental and cross-culturally used spatial representation, through which people code location and direction information in the environment. Here we provided direct evidence demonstrating that daily experience with the cardinal coordinate system (i.e., east, west, north, and south) contributed to the representation of cognitive maps. Behaviorally, we found that individuals who relied more on the cardinal coordinate system for daily navigation made smaller errors in an indoor pointing task, suggesting that the cardinal coordinate system is an important element of cognitive maps. Neurally, the extent to which individuals relied on the cardinal coordinate system was positively correlated with the gray matter volume of the entorhinal cortex, suggesting that the entorhinal cortex may serve as the neuroanatomical basis of coordinate-based navigation (the entorhinal coordinate area, ECA). Further analyses on the resting-state functional connectivity revealed that the intrinsic interaction between the ECA and two hippocampal sub-regions, the subiculum and cornu ammonis, might be linked with the representation precision of cognitive maps. In sum, our study reveals an association between daily experience with the cardinal coordinate system and cognitive maps, and suggests that the ECA works in collaboration with hippocampal sub-regions to represent cognitive maps.
  • Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2000). Complexity of linear order computation in Performance Grammar, TAG and HPSG. In Proceedings of Fifth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+5) (pp. 101-106).

    Abstract

    This paper investigates the time and space complexity of word order computation in the psycholinguistically motivated grammar formalism of Performance Grammar (PG). In PG, the first stage of syntax assembly yields an unordered tree ('mobile') consisting of a hierarchy of lexical frames (lexically anchored elementary trees). Associated with each lexica l frame is a linearizer—a Finite-State Automaton that locally computes the left-to-right order of the branches of the frame. Linearization takes place after the promotion component may have raised certain constituents (e.g. Wh- or focused phrases) into the domain of lexical frames higher up in the syntactic mobile. We show that the worst-case time and space complexity of analyzing input strings of length n is O(n5) and O(n4), respectively. This result compares favorably with the time complexity of word-order computations in Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). A comparison with Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) reveals that PG yields a more declarative linearization method, provided that the FSA is rewritten as an equivalent regular expression.
  • Harmon, Z., & Kapatsinski, V. (2021). A theory of repetition and retrieval in language production. Psychological Review, 128, 1112-1144. doi:10.1037/rev0000305.

    Abstract

    Repetition appears to be part of error correction and action preparation in all domains that involve producing an action sequence. The present work contends that the ubiquity of repetition is due to its role in resolving a problem inherent to planning and retrieval of action sequences: the Problem of Retrieval. Repetitions occur when the production to perform next is not activated enough to be executed. Repetitions are helpful in this situation because the repeated action sequence activates the likely continuation. We model a corpus of natural speech using a recurrent network, with words as units of production. We show that repeated material makes upcoming words more predictable, especially when more than one word is repeated. Speakers are argued to produce multiword repetitions by using backward associations to reactivate recently produced words. The existence of multiword repetitions means that speakers must decide where to reinitiate execution from. We show that production restarts from words that have seldom occurred in a predictive preceding-word context and have often occurred utterance-initially. These results are explained by competition between preceding-context and top-down cues over the course of language learning. The proposed theory improves on structural accounts of repetition disfluencies, and integrates repetition disfluencies in language production with repetitions observed in other domains of skilled action.
  • Harmon, Z., Barak, L., Shafto, P., Edwards, J., & Feldman, N. H. (2021). Making heads or tails of it: A competition–compensation account of morphological deficits in language impairment. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 1872-1878). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the base form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which children with DLD have difficulty processing novel inflected verbs in their input. This leads the inflected form to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved by the production of a more accessible alternative with high semantic overlap with the inflected form: in English, the bare form. We test our account computationally by training a nonparametric Bayesian model that infers the productivity of the inflectional suffix (-ed). We systematically vary the number of novel types of inflected verbs in the input to simulate the input as processed by children with and without DLD. Modeling results are consistent with our hypothesis, suggesting that children’s inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes could stem from inferences they make on the basis of impoverished data.
  • Harmon, Z., & Kapatsinski, V. (2017). Putting old tools to novel uses: The role of form accessibility in semantic extension. Cognitive Psychology, 98, 22-44. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.08.002.

    Abstract

    An increase in frequency of a form has been argued to result in semantic extension (Bybee, 2003; Zipf, 1949). Yet, research on the acquisition of lexical semantics suggests that a form that frequently co-occurs with a meaning gets restricted to that meaning (Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007). The current work reconciles these positions by showing that – through its effect on form accessibility – frequency causes semantic extension in production, while at the same time causing entrenchment in comprehension. Repeatedly experiencing a form paired with a specific meaning makes one more likely to re-use the form to express related meanings, while also increasing one’s confidence that the form is never used to express those meanings. Recurrent pathways of semantic change are argued to result from a tug of war between the production-side pressure to reuse easily accessible forms and the comprehension-side confidence that one has seen all possible uses of a frequent form.
  • Hartung, F., Wang, Y., Mak, M., Willems, R. M., & Chatterjee, A. (2021). Aesthetic appraisals of literary style and emotional intensity in narrative engagement are neurally dissociable. Communications Biology, 4: 1401. doi:10.1038/s42003-021-02926-0.

    Abstract

    Humans are deeply affected by stories, yet it is unclear how. In this study, we explored two aspects of aesthetic experiences during narrative engagement - literariness and narrative fluctuations in appraised emotional intensity. Independent ratings of literariness and emotional intensity of two literary stories were used to predict blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal changes in 52 listeners from an existing fMRI dataset. Literariness was associated with increased activation in brain areas linked to semantic integration (left angular gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and precuneus), and decreased activation in bilateral middle temporal cortices, associated with semantic representations and word memory. Emotional intensity correlated with decreased activation in a bilateral frontoparietal network that is often associated with controlled attention. Our results confirm a neural dissociation in processing literary form and emotional content in stories and generate new questions about the function of and interaction between attention, social cognition, and semantic systems during literary engagement and aesthetic experiences.
  • Hartung, F. (2017). Getting under your skin: The role of perspective and simulation of experience in narrative comprehension. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Hartung, F., Hagoort, P., & Willems, R. M. (2017). Readers select a comprehension mode independent of pronoun: Evidence from fMRI during narrative comprehension. Brain and Language, 170, 29-38. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2017.03.007.

    Abstract

    Perspective is a crucial feature for communicating about events. Yet it is unclear how linguistically encoded perspective relates to cognitive perspective taking. Here, we tested the effect of perspective taking with short literary stories. Participants listened to stories with 1st or 3rd person pronouns referring to the protagonist, while undergoing fMRI. When comparing action events with 1st and 3rd person pronouns, we found no evidence for a neural dissociation depending on the pronoun. A split sample approach based on the self-reported experience of perspective taking revealed 3 comprehension preferences. One group showed a strong 1st person preference, another a strong 3rd person preference, while a third group engaged in 1st and 3rd person perspective taking simultaneously. Comparing brain activations of the groups revealed different neural networks. Our results suggest that comprehension is perspective dependent, but not on the perspective suggested by the text, but on the reader’s (situational) preference
  • Hartung, F., Withers, P., Hagoort, P., & Willems, R. M. (2017). When fiction is just as real as fact: No differences in reading behavior between stories believed to be based on true or fictional events. Frontiers in Psychology, 8: 1618. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01618.

    Abstract

    Experiments have shown that compared to fictional texts, readers read factual texts faster and have better memory for described situations. Reading fictional texts on the other hand seems to improve memory for exact wordings and expressions. Most of these studies used a ‘newspaper’ versus ‘literature’ comparison. In the present study, we investigated the effect of reader’s expectation to whether information is true or fictional with a subtler manipulation by labelling short stories as either based on true or fictional events. In addition, we tested whether narrative perspective or individual preference in perspective taking affects reading true or fictional stories differently. In an online experiment, participants (final N=1742) read one story which was introduced as based on true events or as fictional (factor fictionality). The story could be narrated in either 1st or 3rd person perspective (factor perspective). We measured immersion in and appreciation of the story, perspective taking, as well as memory for events. We found no evidence that knowing a story is fictional or based on true events influences reading behavior or experiential aspects of reading. We suggest that it is not whether a story is true or fictional, but rather expectations towards certain reading situations (e.g. reading newspaper or literature) which affect behavior by activating appropriate reading goals. Results further confirm that narrative perspective partially influences perspective taking and experiential aspects of reading
  • Haun, D. B. M. (2003). What's so special about spatial cognition. De Psychonoom, 18, 3-4.
  • Haun, D. B. M., & Waller, D. (2003). Alignment task. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 39-48). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Haun, D. B. M. (2003). Path integration. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 33-38). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877644.
  • Haun, D. B. M. (2003). Spatial updating. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 49-56). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Hayano, K. (2003). Self-presentation as a face-threatening act: A comparative study of self-oriented topic introduction in English and Japanese. Veritas, 24, 45-58.
  • Healthy Brain Study Consortium, Aarts, E., Akkerman, A., Altgassen, M., Bartels, R., Beckers, D., Bevelander, K., Bijleveld, E., Blaney Davidson, E., Boleij, A., Bralten, J., Cillessen, T., Claassen, J., Cools, R., Cornelissen, I., Dresler, M., Eijsvogels, T., Faber, M., Fernández, G., Figner, B., Fritsche, M. and 67 moreHealthy Brain Study Consortium, Aarts, E., Akkerman, A., Altgassen, M., Bartels, R., Beckers, D., Bevelander, K., Bijleveld, E., Blaney Davidson, E., Boleij, A., Bralten, J., Cillessen, T., Claassen, J., Cools, R., Cornelissen, I., Dresler, M., Eijsvogels, T., Faber, M., Fernández, G., Figner, B., Fritsche, M., Füllbrunn, S., Gayet, S., Van Gelder, M. M. H. J., Van Gerven, M., Geurts, S., Greven, C. U., Groefsema, M., Haak, K., Hagoort, P., Hartman, Y., Van der Heijden, B., Hermans, E., Heuvelmans, V., Hintz, F., Den Hollander, J., Hulsman, A. M., Idesis, S., Jaeger, M., Janse, E., Janzing, J., Kessels, R. P. C., Karremans, J. C., De Kleijn, W., Klein, M., Klumpers, F., Kohn, N., Korzilius, H., Krahmer, B., De Lange, F., Van Leeuwen, J., Liu, H., Luijten, M., Manders, P., Manevska, K., Marques, J. P., Matthews, J., McQueen, J. M., Medendorp, P., Melis, R., Meyer, A. S., Oosterman, J., Overbeek, L., Peelen, M., Popma, J., Postma, G., Roelofs, K., Van Rossenberg, Y. G. T., Schaap, G., Scheepers, P., Selen, L., Starren, M., Swinkels, D. W., Tendolkar, I., Thijssen, D., Timmerman, H., Tutunji, R., Tuladhar, A., Veling, H., Verhagen, M., Verkroost, J., Vink, J., Vriezekolk, V., Vrijsen, J., Vyrastekova, J., Van der Wal, S., Willems, R. M., & Willemsen, A. (2021). Protocol of the Healthy Brain Study: An accessible resource for understanding the human brain and how it dynamically and individually operates in its bio-social context. PLoS One, 16(12): e0260952. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0260952.

    Abstract

    The endeavor to understand the human brain has seen more progress in the last few decades than in the previous two millennia. Still, our understanding of how the human brain relates to behavior in the real world and how this link is modulated by biological, social, and environmental factors is limited. To address this, we designed the Healthy Brain Study (HBS), an interdisciplinary, longitudinal, cohort study based on multidimensional, dynamic assessments in both the laboratory and the real world. Here, we describe the rationale and design of the currently ongoing HBS. The HBS is examining a population-based sample of 1,000 healthy participants (age 30-39) who are thoroughly studied across an entire year. Data are collected through cognitive, affective, behavioral, and physiological testing, neuroimaging, bio-sampling, questionnaires, ecological momentary assessment, and real-world assessments using wearable devices. These data will become an accessible resource for the scientific community enabling the next step in understanding the human brain and how it dynamically and individually operates in its bio-social context. An access procedure to the collected data and bio-samples is in place and published on https://www.healthybrainstudy.nl/en/data-and-methods.

    https://www.trialregister.nl/trial/7955

    Additional information

    supplementary material
  • Heidlmayr, K., Ferragne, E., & Isel, F. (2021). Neuroplasticity in the phonological system: The PMN and the N400 as markers for the perception of non-native phonemic contrasts by late second language learners. Neuropsychologia, 156: 107831. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107831.

    Abstract

    Second language (L2) learners frequently encounter persistent difficulty in perceiving certain non-native sound contrasts, i.e., a phenomenon called “phonological deafness”. However, if extensive L2 experience leads to neuroplastic changes in the phonological system, then the capacity to discriminate non-native phonemic contrasts should progressively improve. Such perceptual changes should be attested by modifications at the neurophysiological level. We designed an EEG experiment in which the listeners’ perceptual capacities to discriminate second language phonemic contrasts influence the processing of lexical-semantic violations. Semantic congruency of critical words in a sentence context was driven by a phonemic contrast that was unique to the L2, English (e.g.,/ɪ/-/i:/, ship – sheep). Twenty-eight young adult native speakers of French with intermediate proficiency in English listened to sentences that contained either a semantically congruent or incongruent critical word (e.g., The anchor of the ship/*sheep was let down) while EEG was recorded. Three ERP effects were found to relate to increasing L2 proficiency: (1) a left frontal auditory N100 effect, (2) a smaller fronto-central phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) effect and (3) a semantic N400 effect. No effect of proficiency was found on oscillatory markers. The current findings suggest that neuronal plasticity in the human brain allows for the late acquisition of even hard-wired linguistic features such as the discrimination of phonemic contrasts in a second language. This is the first time that behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for the critical role of neural plasticity underlying L2 phonological processing and its interdependence with semantic processing has been provided. Our data strongly support the idea that pieces of information from different levels of linguistic processing (e.g., phonological, semantic) strongly interact and influence each other during online language processing.

    Additional information

    supplementary material
  • Hellwig, B. (2003). The grammatical coding of postural semantics in Goemai (a West Chadic language of Nigeria). PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.58463.
  • Hellwig, B., Defina, R., Kidd, E., Allen, S. E. M., Davidson, L., & Kelly, B. F. (2021). Child language documentation: The sketch acquisition project. In G. Haig, S. Schnell, & F. Seifart (Eds.), Doing corpus-based typology with spoken language data: State of the art (pp. 29-58). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press.

    Abstract

    This paper reports on an on-going project designed to collect comparable corpus data on child language and child-directed language in under-researched languages. Despite a long history of cross-linguistic research, there is a severe empirical bias within language acquisition research: Data is available for less than 2% of the world's languages, heavily skewed towards the larger and better-described languages. As a result, theories of language development tend to be grounded in a non-representative sample, and we know little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages from different families, regions, or sociocultural contexts. It is very likely that the reasons are to be found in the forbidding methodological challenges of constructing child language corpora under fieldwork conditions with their strict requirements on participant selection, sampling intervals, and amounts of data. There is thus an urgent need for proposals that facilitate and encourage language acquisition research across a wide variety of languages. Adopting a language documentation perspective, we illustrate an approach that combines the construction of manageable corpora of natural interaction with and between children with a sketch description of the corpus data – resulting in a set of comparable corpora and comparable sketches that form the basis for cross-linguistic comparisons.
  • Hendricks, A. E., Bochukova, E. G., Marenne, G., Keogh, J. M., Atanassova, N., Bounds, R., Wheeler, E., Mistry, V., Henning, E., Körner, A., Muddyman, D., McCarthy, S., Hinney, A., Hebebrand, J., Scott, R. A., Langenberg, C., Wareham, N. J., Surendran, P., Howson, J. M., Butterworth, A. S. and 14 moreHendricks, A. E., Bochukova, E. G., Marenne, G., Keogh, J. M., Atanassova, N., Bounds, R., Wheeler, E., Mistry, V., Henning, E., Körner, A., Muddyman, D., McCarthy, S., Hinney, A., Hebebrand, J., Scott, R. A., Langenberg, C., Wareham, N. J., Surendran, P., Howson, J. M., Butterworth, A. S., Danesh, J., Børge G, N., Nielse, S. F., Afzal, S., Papadia, S., Ashford, S., Garg, S., Palomino, R. I., Kwasniewska, A., Tachmazidou, I., O’Rahilly, S., Zeggini, E., Barroso, I., & Farooqi, I. S. (2017). Rare Variant Analysis of Human and Rodent Obesity Genes in Individuals with Severe Childhood Obesity. Scientific Reports, 7: 4394. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-03054-8.

    Abstract

    Obesity is a genetically heterogeneous disorder. Using targeted and whole-exome sequencing, we studied 32 human and 87 rodent obesity genes in 2,548 severely obese children and 1,117 controls. We identified 52 variants contributing to obesity in 2% of cases including multiple novel variants in GNAS, which were sometimes found with accelerated growth rather than short stature as described previously. Nominally significant associations were found for rare functional variants in BBS1, BBS9, GNAS, MKKS, CLOCK and ANGPTL6. The p.S284X variant in ANGPTL6 drives the association signal (rs201622589, MAF~0.1%, odds ratio = 10.13, p-value = 0.042) and results in complete loss of secretion in cells. Further analysis including additional case-control studies and population controls (N = 260,642) did not support association of this variant with obesity (odds ratio = 2.34, p-value = 2.59 × 10−3), highlighting the challenges of testing rare variant associations and the need for very large sample sizes. Further validation in cohorts with severe obesity and engineering the variants in model organisms will be needed to explore whether human variants in ANGPTL6 and other genes that lead to obesity when deleted in mice, do contribute to obesity. Such studies may yield druggable targets for weight loss therapies.
  • Henry, M. J., Cook, P. F., de Reus, K., Nityananda, V., Rouse, A. A., & Kotz, S. A. (2021). An ecological approach to measuring synchronization abilities across the animal kingdom. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376: 20200336. doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0336.

    Abstract

    In this perspective paper, we focus on the study of synchronization abilities across the animal kingdom. We propose an ecological approach to studying nonhuman animal synchronization that begins from observations about when, how and why an animal might synchronize spontaneously with natural environmental rhythms. We discuss what we consider to be the most important, but thus far largely understudied, temporal, physical, perceptual and motivational constraints that must be taken into account when designing experiments to test synchronization in nonhuman animals. First and foremost, different species are likely to be sensitive to and therefore capable of synchronizing at different timescales. We also argue that it is fruitful to consider the latent flexibility of animal synchronization. Finally, we discuss the importance of an animal's motivational state for showcasing synchronization abilities. We demonstrate that the likelihood that an animal can successfully synchronize with an environmental rhythm is context-dependent and suggest that the list of species capable of synchronization is likely to grow when tested with ecologically honest, species-tuned experiments.
  • Hersh, T. A., Gero, S., Rendell, L., & Whitehead, H. (2021). Using identity calls to detect structure in acoustic datasets. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 12(9), 1668-1678. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13644.

    Abstract

    Acoustic analyses can be powerful tools for illuminating structure within and between populations, especially for cryptic or difficult to access taxa. Acoustic repertoires are often compared using aggregate similarity measures across all calls of a particular type, but specific group identity calls may more clearly delineate structure in some taxa.
    2. We present a new method—the identity call method—that estimates the number of acoustically distinct subdivisions in a set of repertoires and identifies call types that characterize those subdivisions. The method uses contaminated mixture models to identify call types, assigning each call a probability of belonging to each type. Repertoires are hierarchically clustered based on similarities in call type usage, producing a dendrogram with ‘identity clades’ of repertoires and the
    ‘identity calls’ that best characterize each clade. We validated this approach using acoustic data from sperm whales, grey-breasted wood-wrens and Australian field crickets, and ran a suite of tests to assess parameter sensitivity.
    3. For all taxa, the method detected diagnostic signals (identity calls) and structure (identity clades; sperm whale subpopulations, wren subspecies and cricket species) that were consistent with past research. Some datasets were more sensitive to parameter variation than others, which may reflect real uncertainty or biological variability in the taxa examined. We recommend that users perform comparative analyses of different parameter combinations to determine which portions of the dendrogram warrant careful versus confident interpretation.
    4. The presence of group-characteristic identity calls does not necessarily mean animals perceive them as such. Fine-scale experiments like playbacks are a key next step to understand call perception and function. This method can help inform such studies by identifying calls that may be salient to animals and are good candidates for investigation or playback stimuli. For cryptic or difficult to access taxa with group-specific calls, the identity call method can aid managers in quantifying behavioural diversity and/or identifying putative structure within and between
    populations, given that acoustic data can be inexpensive and minimally invasive to collect.
  • Hervais-Adelman, A., Moser-Mercer, B., Murray, M. M., & Golestani, N. (2017). Cortical thickness increases after simultaneous interpretation training. Neuropsychologia, 98, 212-219. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.01.008.

    Abstract

    Simultaneous interpretation is a complex cognitive task that not only demands multilingual language processing, but also requires application of extreme levels of domain-general cognitive control. We used MRI to longitudinally measure cortical thickness in simultaneous interpretation trainees before and after a Master's program in conference interpreting. We compared them to multilingual control participants scanned at the same interval of time. Increases in cortical thickness were specific to trainee interpreters. Increases were observed in regions involved in lower-level, phonetic processing (left posterior superior temporal gyrus, anterior supramarginal gyrus and planum temporale), in the higher-level formulation of propositional speech (right angular gyrus) and in the conversion of items from working memory into a sequence (right dorsal premotor cortex), and finally, in domain-general executive control and attention (right parietal lobule). Findings are consistent with the linguistic requirements of simultaneous interpretation and also with the more general cognitive demands on attentional control for expert performance in simultaneous interpreting. Our findings may also reflect beneficial, potentially protective effects of simultaneous interpretation training, which has previously been shown to confer enhanced skills in certain executive and attentional domains over and above those conferred by bilingualism.
  • Heyselaar, E., Peeters, D., & Hagoort, P. (2021). Do we predict upcoming speech content in naturalistic environments? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36(4), 440-461. doi:10.1080/23273798.2020.1859568.

    Abstract

    The ability to predict upcoming actions is a hallmark of cognition. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour observed in controlled lab environments generalises to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (anticipatory eye movements) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the paradigm by means of immersing participants in naturalistic scenes (Experiment 1), increasing the number of distractor objects (Experiment 2), modifying the proportion of predictable noun-referents (Experiment 3), and manipulating the location of referents relative to the joint attentional space (Experiment 4). Robust anticipatory eye movements were observed for Experiments 1–3. The anticipatory effect disappeared, however, in Experiment 4. Our findings suggest that predictive processing occurs in everyday communication if the referents are situated in the joint attentional space. Methodologically, our study confirms that ecological validity and experimental control may go hand-in-hand in the study of human predictive behaviour.
  • Heyselaar, E., Hagoort, P., & Segaert, K. (2017). How social opinion influences syntactic processing – An investigation using virtual reality. PLoS One, 12(4): e0174405. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0174405.
  • Heyselaar, E., Hagoort, P., & Segaert, K. (2017). In dialogue with an avatar, language behavior is identical to dialogue with a human partner. Behavior Research Methods, 49(1), 46-60. doi:10.3758/s13428-015-0688-7.

    Abstract

    The use of virtual reality (VR) as a methodological tool is becoming increasingly popular in behavioral research as its flexibility allows for a wide range of applications. This new method has not been as widely accepted in the field of psycholinguistics, however, possibly due to the assumption that language processing during human-computer interactions does not accurately reflect human-human interactions. Yet at the same time there is a growing need to study human-human language interactions in a tightly controlled context, which has not been possible using existing methods. VR, however, offers experimental control over parameters that cannot be (as finely) controlled in the real world. As such, in this study we aim to show that human-computer language interaction is comparable to human-human language interaction in virtual reality. In the current study we compare participants’ language behavior in a syntactic priming task with human versus computer partners: we used a human partner, a human-like avatar with human-like facial expressions and verbal behavior, and a computer-like avatar which had this humanness removed. As predicted, our study shows comparable priming effects between the human and human-like avatar suggesting that participants attributed human-like agency to the human-like avatar. Indeed, when interacting with the computer-like avatar, the priming effect was significantly decreased. This suggests that when interacting with a human-like avatar, sentence processing is comparable to interacting with a human partner. Our study therefore shows that VR is a valid platform for conducting language research and studying dialogue interactions in an ecologically valid manner.
  • Heyselaar, E. (2017). Influences on the magnitude of syntactic priming. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Heyselaar, E., Segaert, K., Walvoort, S. J., Kessels, R. P., & Hagoort, P. (2017). The role of nondeclarative memory in the skill for language: Evidence from syntactic priming in patients with amnesia. Neuropsychologia, 101, 97-105. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.04.033.

    Abstract

    Syntactic priming, the phenomenon in which participants adopt the linguistic behaviour of their partner, is widely used in psycholinguistics to investigate syntactic operations. Although the phenomenon of syntactic priming is well documented, the memory system that supports the retention of this syntactic information long enough to influence future utterances, is not as widely investigated. We aim to shed light on this issue by assessing patients with Korsakoff's amnesia on an active-passive syntactic priming task and compare their performance to controls matched in age, education, and premorbid intelligence. Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome display deficits in all subdomains of declarative memory, yet their nondeclarative memory remains intact, making them an ideal patient group to determine which memory system supports syntactic priming. In line with the hypothesis that syntactic priming relies on nondeclarative memory, the patient group shows strong priming tendencies (12.6% passive structure repetition). Our healthy control group did not show a priming tendency, presumably due to cognitive interference between declarative and nondeclarative memory. We discuss the results in relation to amnesia, aging, and compensatory mechanisms.
  • Hibar, D. P., Adams, H. H. H., Jahanshad, N., Chauhan, G., Stein, J. L., Hofer, E., Rentería, M. E., Bis, J. C., Arias-Vasquez, A., Ikram, M. K., Desrivieres, S., Vernooij, M. W., Abramovic, L., Alhusaini, S., Amin, N., Andersson, M., Arfanakis, K., Aribisala, B. S., Armstrong, N. J., Athanasiu, L. and 312 moreHibar, D. P., Adams, H. H. H., Jahanshad, N., Chauhan, G., Stein, J. L., Hofer, E., Rentería, M. E., Bis, J. C., Arias-Vasquez, A., Ikram, M. K., Desrivieres, S., Vernooij, M. W., Abramovic, L., Alhusaini, S., Amin, N., Andersson, M., Arfanakis, K., Aribisala, B. S., Armstrong, N. J., Athanasiu, L., Axelsson, T., Beecham, A. H., Beiser, A., Bernard, M., Blanton, S. H., Bohlken, M. M., Boks, M. P., Bralten, J., Brickman, A. M., Carmichael, O., Chakravarty, M. M., Chen, Q., Ching, C. R. K., Chouraki, V., Cuellar-Partida, G., Crivello, F., den Brabander, A., Doan, N. T., Ehrlich, S., Giddaluru, S., Goldman, A. L., Gottesman, R. F., Grimm, O., Griswold, M. E., Guadalupe, T., Gutman, B. A., Hass, J., Haukvik, U. K., Hoehn, D., Holmes, A. J., Hoogman, M., Janowitz, D., Jia, T., Jørgensen, K. N., Mirza-Schreiber, N., Kasperaviciute, D., Kim, S., Klein, M., Krämer, B., Lee, P. H., Liewald, D. C. M., Lopez, L. M., Luciano, M., Macare, C., Marquand, A. F., Matarin, M., Mather, K. A., Mattheisen, M., McKay, D. R., Milaneschi, Y., Maniega, S. M., Nho, K., Nugent, A. C., Nyquist, P., Olde Loohuis, L. M., Oosterlaan, J., Papmeyer, M., Pirpamer, L., Pütz, B., Ramasamy, A., Richards, J. S., Risacher, S., Roiz-Santiañez, R., Rommelse, N., Ropele, S., Rose, E., Royle, N. A., Rundek, T., Sämann, P. G., Saremi, A., Satizabal, C. L., Schmaal, L., Schork, A. J., Shen, L., Shin, J., Shumskaya, E., Smith, A. V., Sprooten, E., Strike, L. T., Teumer, A., Tordesillas-Gutierrez, D., Toro, R., Trabzuni, D., Trompet, S., Vaidya, D., Van der Grond, J., Van der Lee, S. J., Van der Meer, D., Van Donkelaar, M. M. J., Van Eijk, K. R., van Erp, T. G. M., Van Rooij, D., Walton, E., Westlye, L. T., Whelan, C. D., Windham, B. G., Winkler, A. M., Wittfeld, K. M., Woldehawariat, G., Wolf, C., Wolfers, T., Yanek, L. R., Yang, J., Zijdenbos, A., Zwiers, M. P., Agartz, I., Almasy, L., Ames, D., Amouyel, P., Andreassen, O. A., Arepalli, S., Assareh, A. A., Barral, S., Bastin, M. E., Becker, D. M., Becker, J. T., Bennett, D. A., Blangero, J., Van Bokhoven, H., Boomsma, D. I., Brodaty, H., Brouwer, R. M., Brunner, H. G., Buckner, R. L., Buitelaar, J. K., Bulayeva, K. B., Cahn, W., Calhoun, V. D., Cannon, D. M., Cavalleri, G. L., Cheng, C.-Y., Cichon, S., Cookson, M. R., Corvin, A., Crespo-Facorro, B., Curran, J. E., Czisch, M., Dale, A. M., Davies, G. E., De Craen, A. J. M., De Geus, E. J. C., De Jager, P. L., De Zubicaray, G. i., Deary, I. J., Debette, S., DeCarli, C., Delanty, N., Depondt, C., DeStefano, A., Dillman, A., Djurovic, S., Donohoe, G., Drevets, W. C., Duggirala, R., Dyer, T. D., Enzinger, C., Erk, S., Espeseth, T., Fedko, I. O., Fernández, G., Ferrucci, L., Fisher, S. E., Fleischman, D. A., Ford, I., Fornage, M., Foroud, T. M., Fox, P. T., Francks, C., Fukunaga, M., Gibbs, J. R., Glahn, D. C., Gollub, R. L., Göring, H. H. H., Green, R. C., Gruber, O., Gudnason, V., Guelfi, S., Haberg, A. K., Hansell, N. K., Hardy, J., Hartman, C. A., Hashimoto, R., Hegenscheid, K., Heinz, A., Le Hellard, S., Hernandez, D. G., Heslenfeld, D. J., Ho, B.-C., Hoekstra, P. J., Hoffmann, W., Hofman, A., Holsboer, F., Homuth, G., Hosten, N., Hottenga, J.-J., Huentelman, M., Pol, H. E. H., Ikeda, M., Jack Jr., C. R., Jenkinson, M., Johnson, R., Jonsson, E. G., Jukema, J. W., Kahn, R. S., Kanai, R., Kloszewska, I., Knopman, D. S., Kochunov, P., Kwok, J. B., Lawrie, S. M., Lemaître, H., Liu, X., Longo, D. L., Lopez, O. L., Lovestone, S., Martinez, O., Martinot, J.-L., Mattay, V. S., McDonald, C., Mcintosh, A. M., McMahon, F., McMahon, K. L., Mecocci, P., Melle, I., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Mohnke, S., Montgomery, G. W., Morris, D. W., Mosley, T. H., Mühleisen, T. W., Müller-Myhsok, B., Nalls, M. A., Nauck, M., Nichols, T. E., Niessen, W. J., Nöthen, M. M., Nyberg, L., Ohi, K., Olvera, R. L., Ophoff, R. A., Pandolfo, M., Paus, T., Pausova, Z., Penninx, B. W. J. H., Pike, G. B., Potkin, S. G., Psaty, B. M., Reppermund, S., Rietschel, M., Roffman, J. L., Romanczuk-Seiferth, N., Rotter, J. I., Ryten, M., Sacco, R. L., Sachdev, P. S., Saykin, A. J., Schmidt, R., Schmidt, H., Schofield, P. R., Sigursson, S., Simmons, A., Singleton, A., Sisodiya, S. M., Smith, C., Smoller, J. W., Soininen, H., Steen, V. M., Stott, D. J., Sussmann, J. E., Thalamuthu, A., Toga, A. W., Traynor, B. J., Troncoso, J., Tsolaki, M., Tzourio, C., Uitterlinden, A. G., Hernández, M. C. V., Van der Brug, M., Van der Lugt, A., Van der Wee, N. J. A., Van Haren, N. E. M., Van Tol, M.-J., Vardarajan, B. N., Vellas, B., Veltman, D. J., Völzke, H., Walter, H., Wardlaw, J. M., Wassink, T. H., Weale, M. e., Weinberger, D. R., Weiner, M., Wen, W., Westman, E., White, T., Wong, T. Y., Wright, C. B., Zielke, R. H., Zonderman, A. B., Martin, N. G., Van Duijn, C. M., Wright, M. J., Longstreth, W. W. T., Schumann, G., Grabe, H. J., Franke, B., Launer, L. J., Medland, S. E., Seshadri, S., Thompson, P. M., & Ikram, A. (2017). Novel genetic loci associated with hippocampal volume. Nature Communications, 8: 13624. doi:10.1038/ncomms13624.

    Abstract

    The hippocampal formation is a brain structure integrally involved in episodic memory, spatial navigation, cognition and stress responsiveness. Structural abnormalities in hippocampal volume and shape are found in several common neuropsychiatric disorders. To identify the genetic underpinnings of hippocampal structure here we perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 33,536 individuals and discover six independent loci significantly associated with hippocampal volume, four of them novel. Of the novel loci, three lie within genes (ASTN2, DPP4 and MAST4) and one is found 200 kb upstream of SHH. A hippocampal subfield analysis shows that a locus within the MSRB3 gene shows evidence of a localized effect along the dentate gyrus, subiculum, CA1 and fissure. Further, we show that genetic variants associated with decreased hippocampal volume are also associated with increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease (rg=−0.155). Our findings suggest novel biological pathways through which human genetic variation influences hippocampal volume and risk for neuropsychiatric illness.

    Additional information

    ncomms13624-s1.pdf ncomms13624-s2.xlsx
  • Hintz, F., Meyer, A. S., & Huettig, F. (2017). Predictors of verb-mediated anticipatory eye movements in the visual world. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(9), 1352-1374. doi:10.1037/xlm0000388.

    Abstract

    Many studies have demonstrated that listeners use information extracted from verbs to guide anticipatory eye movements to objects in the visual context that satisfy the selection restrictions of the verb. An important question is what underlies such verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze. Based on empirical and theoretical suggestions, we investigated the influence of five potential predictors of this behavior: functional associations and general associations between verb and target object, as well as the listeners’ production fluency, receptive vocabulary knowledge, and non-verbal intelligence. In three eye-tracking experiments, participants looked at sets of four objects and listened to sentences where the final word was predictable or not predictable (e.g., “The man peels/draws an apple”). On predictable trials only the target object, but not the distractors, were functionally and associatively related to the verb. In Experiments 1 and 2, objects were presented before the verb was heard. In Experiment 3, participants were given a short preview of the display after the verb was heard. Functional associations and receptive vocabulary were found to be important predictors of verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze independent of the amount of contextual visual input. General word associations did not and non-verbal intelligence was only a very weak predictor of anticipatory eye movements. Participants’ production fluency correlated positively with the likelihood of anticipatory eye movements when participants were given the long but not the short visual display preview. These findings fit best with a pluralistic approach to predictive language processing in which multiple mechanisms, mediating factors, and situational context dynamically interact. 
  • Hintz, F., Voeten, C. C., McQueen, J. M., & Scharenborg, O. (2021). The effects of onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in noise. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 133-139). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Using the visual-word paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of word onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise. In two experiments, Dutch non-native listeners heard English target words, preceded by carrier sentences that were noise-free (Experiment 1) or contained intermittent noise (Experiment 2). Target words were either onset- or offset-masked or not masked at all. Results showed that onset masking delayed target word recognition more than offset masking did, suggesting that – similar to natives – non-native listeners strongly rely on word onset information during word recognition in noise.

    Additional information

    Link to Preprint on BioRxiv
  • Hirschmann, J., Schoffelen, J.-M., Schnitzler, A., & Van Gerven, M. A. J. (2017). Parkinsonian rest tremor can be detected accurately based on neuronal oscillations recorded from the subthalamic nucleus. Clinical Neurophysiology, 128, 2029-2036. doi:10.1016/j.clinph.2017.07.419.

    Abstract

    Objective: To investigate the possibility of tremor detection based on deep brain activity.
    Methods: We re-analyzed recordings of local field potentials (LFPs) from the subthalamic nucleus in 10
    PD patients (12 body sides) with spontaneously fluctuating rest tremor. Power in several frequency bands
    was estimated and used as input to Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) which classified short data segments
    as either tremor-free rest or rest tremor. HMMs were compared to direct threshold application to individual
    power features.
    Results: Applying a threshold directly to band-limited power was insufficient for tremor detection (mean
    area under the curve [AUC] of receiver operating characteristic: 0.64, STD: 0.19). Multi-feature HMMs, in
    contrast, allowed for accurate detection (mean AUC: 0.82, STD: 0.15), using four power features obtained
    from a single contact pair. Within-patient training yielded better accuracy than across-patient training
    (0.84 vs. 0.78, p = 0.03), yet tremor could often be detected accurately with either approach. High frequency
    oscillations (>200 Hz) were the best performing individual feature.
    Conclusions: LFP-based markers of tremor are robust enough to allow for accurate tremor detection in
    short data segments, provided that appropriate statistical models are used.
    Significance: LFP-based markers of tremor could be useful control signals for closed-loop deep brain
    stimulation.
  • Hoedemaker, R. S., & Gordon, P. C. (2017). The onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid recognition of visual words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(5), 881-902. doi:10.1037/xhp0000377.

    Abstract

    In 2 experiments, we assessed the effects of response latency and task-induced goals on the onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid processing of visual words as revealed by ocular response
    tasks. In Experiment 1 (ocular lexical decision task), participants performed a lexical decision task using eye movement responses on a sequence of 4 words. In Experiment 2, the same words were encoded for an episodic recognition memory task that did not require a metalinguistic judgment. For both tasks, survival analyses showed that the earliest observable effect (divergence point [DP]) of semantic priming on target-word reading times occurred at approximately 260 ms, and ex-Gaussian distribution fits revealed that the magnitude of the priming effect increased as a function of response time. Together, these
    distributional effects of semantic priming suggest that the influence of the prime increases when target processing is more effortful. This effect does not require that the task include a metalinguistic judgment;
    manipulation of the task goals across experiments affected the overall response speed but not the location of the DP or the overall distributional pattern of the priming effect. These results are more readily explained as the result of a retrospective, rather than a prospective, priming mechanism and are consistent with compound-cue models of semantic priming.
  • Hoedemaker, R. S., Ernst, J., Meyer, A. S., & Belke, E. (2017). Language production in a shared task: Cumulative semantic interference from self- and other-produced context words. Acta Psychologica, 172, 55-63. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.11.007.

    Abstract

    This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this paradigm, naming latencies have been found to increase for successive presentations of exemplars from the same category, a phenomenon known as Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI). As expected, the joint-naming task showed a within-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies increased as a function of the number of category exemplars named previously by the participant (self-produced items). Crucially, we also observed an across-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies slowed as a function of the number of category members named by the participant's task partner (other-produced items). The magnitude of the across-speaker CSI effect did not vary as a function of whether or not the listening participant could see the pictures their partner was naming. The observation of across-speaker CSI suggests that the effect originates at the conceptual level of the language system, as proposed by Belke's (2013) Conceptual Accumulation account. Whereas self-produced and other-produced words both resulted in a CSI effect on naming latencies, post-experiment free recall rates were higher for self-produced than other-produced items. Together, these results suggest that both speaking and listening result in implicit learning at the conceptual level of the language system but that these effects are independent of explicit learning as indicated by item recall.
  • Hoeksema, N., Verga, L., Mengede, J., Van Roessel, C., Villanueva, S., Salazar-Casals, A., Rubio-Garcia, A., Curcic-Blake, B., Vernes, S. C., & Ravignani, A. (2021). Neuroanatomy of the grey seal brain: Bringing pinnipeds into the neurobiological study of vocal learning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376: 20200252. doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0252.

    Abstract

    Comparative studies of vocal learning and vocal non-learning animals can increase our understanding of the neurobiology and evolution of vocal learning and human speech. Mammalian vocal learning is understudied: most research has either focused on vocal learning in songbirds or its absence in non-human primates. Here we focus on a highly promising model species for the neurobiology of vocal learning: grey seals. We provide a neuroanatomical atlas (based on dissected brain slices and magnetic resonance images), a labelled MRI template, a 3D model with volumetric measurements of brain regions, and histological cortical stainings. Four main features of the grey seal brain stand out. (1) It is relatively big and highly convoluted. (2) It hosts a relatively large temporal lobe and cerebellum, structures which could support developed timing abilities and acoustic processing. (3) The cortex is similar to humans in thickness and shows the expected six-layered mammalian structure. (4) Expression of FoxP2 - a gene involved in vocal learning and spoken language - is present in deeper layers of the cortex. Our results could facilitate future studies targeting the neural and genetic underpinnings of mammalian vocal learning, thus bridging the research gap from songbirds to humans and non-human primates.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.
  • Hoey, E. (2017). [Review of the book Temporality in Interaction]. Studies in Language, 41(1), 232-238. doi:10.1075/sl.41.1.08hoe.
  • Hoey, E. (2017). Lapse organization in interaction. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Hoey, E. (2017). Sequence recompletion: A practice for managing lapses in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 109, 47-63. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2016.12.008.

    Abstract

    Conversational interaction occasionally lapses as topics become exhausted or as participants are left with no obvious thing to talk about next. In this article I look at episodes of ordinary conversation to examine how participants resolve issues of speakership and sequentiality in lapse environments. In particular, I examine one recurrent phenomenon—sequence recompletion—whereby participants bring to completion a sequence of talk that was already treated as complete. Using conversation analysis, I describe four methods for sequence recompletion: turn-exiting, action redoings, delayed replies, and post-sequence transitions. With this practice, participants use verbal and vocal resources to locally manage their participation framework when ending one course of action and potentially starting up a new one
  • Hoey, E., Hömke, P., Löfgren, E., Neumann, T., Schuerman, W. L., & Kendrick, K. H. (2021). Using expletive insertion to pursue and sanction in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(1), 3-25. doi:10.1111/josl.12439.

    Abstract

    This article uses conversation analysis to examine constructions like who the fuck is that—sequence‐initiating actions into which an expletive like the fuck has been inserted. We describe how this turn‐constructional practice fits into and constitutes a recurrent sequence of escalating actions. In this sequence, it is used to pursue an adequate response after an inadequate one was given, and sanction the recipient for that inadequate response. Our analysis contributes to sociolinguistic studies of swearing by offering an account of swearing as a resource for social action.
  • Holler, J., Alday, P. M., Decuyper, C., Geiger, M., Kendrick, K. H., & Meyer, A. S. (2021). Competition reduces response times in multiparty conversation. Frontiers in Psychology, 12: 693124. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.693124.

    Abstract

    Natural conversations are characterized by short transition times between turns. This holds in particular for multi-party conversations. The short turn transitions in everyday conversations contrast sharply with the much longer speech onset latencies observed in laboratory studies where speakers respond to spoken utterances. There are many factors that facilitate speech production in conversational compared to laboratory settings. Here we highlight one of them, the impact of competition for turns. In multi-party conversations, speakers often compete for turns. In quantitative corpus analyses of multi-party conversation, the fastest response determines the recorded turn transition time. In contrast, in dyadic conversations such competition for turns is much less likely to arise, and in laboratory experiments with individual participants it does not arise at all. Therefore, all responses tend to be recorded. Thus, competition for turns may reduce the recorded mean turn transition times in multi-party conversations for a simple statistical reason: slow responses are not included in the means. We report two studies illustrating this point. We first report the results of simulations showing how much the response times in a laboratory experiment would be reduced if, for each trial, instead of recording all responses, only the fastest responses of several participants responding independently on the trial were recorded. We then present results from a quantitative corpus analysis comparing turn transition times in dyadic and triadic conversations. There was no significant group size effect in question-response transition times, where the present speaker often selects the next one, thus reducing competition between speakers. But, as predicted, triads showed shorter turn transition times than dyads for the remaining turn transitions, where competition for the floor was more likely to arise. Together, these data show that turn transition times in conversation should be interpreted in the context of group size, turn transition type, and social setting.
  • Holler, J., & Beattie, G. (2003). How iconic gestures and speech interact in the representation of meaning: are both aspects really integral to the process? Semiotica, 146, 81-116.
  • Holler, J., & Bavelas, J. (2017). Multi-modal communication of common ground: A review of social functions. In R. B. Church, M. W. Alibali, & S. D. Kelly (Eds.), Why gesture? How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating (pp. 213-240). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Until recently, the literature on common ground depicted its influence as a purely verbal phenomenon. We review current research on how common ground influences gesture. With informative exceptions, most experiments found that speakers used fewer gestures as well as fewer words in common ground contexts; i.e., the gesture/word ratio did not change. Common ground often led to more poorly articulated gestures, which parallels its effect on words. These findings support the principle of recipient design as well as more specific social functions such as grounding, the given-new contract, and Grice’s maxims. However, conceptual pacts or linking old with new information may maintain the original form. All together, these findings implicate gesture-speech ensembles rather than isolated effects on gestures alone.
  • Holler, J., & Beattie, G. (2003). Pragmatic aspects of representational gestures: Do speakers use them to clarify verbal ambiguity for the listener? Gesture, 3, 127-154.
  • Hömke, P., Holler, J., & Levinson, S. C. (2017). Eye blinking as addressee feedback in face-to-face conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50, 54-70. doi:10.1080/08351813.2017.1262143.

    Abstract

    Does blinking function as a type of feedback in conversation? To address this question, we built a corpus of Dutch conversations, identified short and long addressee blinks during extended turns, and measured their occurrence relative to the end of turn constructional units (TCUs), the location
    where feedback typically occurs. Addressee blinks were indeed timed to the
    end of TCUs. Also, long blinks were more likely than short blinks to occur
    during mutual gaze, with nods or continuers, and their occurrence was
    restricted to sequential contexts in which signaling understanding was
    particularly relevant, suggesting a special signaling capacity of long blinks.
  • Horan Skilton, A., & Peeters, D. (2021). Cross-linguistic differences in demonstrative systems: Comparing spatial and non-spatial influences on demonstrative use in Ticuna and Dutch. Journal of Pragmatics, 180, 248-265. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.05.001.

    Abstract

    In all spoken languages, speakers use demonstratives – words like this and that – to refer to entities in their immediate environment. But which factors determine whether they use one demonstrative (this) or another (that)? Here we report the results of an experiment examining the effects of referent visibility, referent distance, and addressee location on the production of demonstratives by speakers of Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru), an Amazonian language with four demonstratives, and speakers of Dutch (Indo-European; Netherlands, Belgium), which has two demonstratives. We found that Ticuna speakers’ use of demonstratives displayed effects of addressee location and referent distance, but not referent visibility. By contrast, under comparable conditions, Dutch speakers displayed sensitivity only to referent distance. Interestingly, we also observed that Ticuna speakers consistently used demonstratives in all referential utterances in our experimental paradigm, while Dutch speakers strongly preferred to use definite articles. Taken together, these findings shed light on the significant diversity found in demonstrative systems across languages. Additionally, they invite researchers studying exophoric demonstratives to broaden their horizons by cross-linguistically investigating the factors involved in speakers’ choice of demonstratives over other types of referring expressions, especially articles.
  • Hörpel, S. G., Baier, L., Peremans, H., Reijniers, J., Wiegrebe, L., & Firzlaff, U. (2021). Communication breakdown: Limits of spectro-temporal resolution for the perception of bat communication calls. Scientific Reports, 11: 13708. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-92842-4.

    Abstract

    During vocal communication, the spectro‑temporal structure of vocalizations conveys important
    contextual information. Bats excel in the use of sounds for echolocation by meticulous encoding of
    signals in the temporal domain. We therefore hypothesized that for social communication as well,
    bats would excel at detecting minute distortions in the spectro‑temporal structure of calls. To test
    this hypothesis, we systematically introduced spectro‑temporal distortion to communication calls of
    Phyllostomus discolor bats. We broke down each call into windows of the same length and randomized
    the phase spectrum inside each window. The overall degree of spectro‑temporal distortion in
    communication calls increased with window length. Modelling the bat auditory periphery revealed
    that cochlear mechanisms allow discrimination of fast spectro‑temporal envelopes. We evaluated
    model predictions with experimental psychophysical and neurophysiological data. We first assessed
    bats’ performance in discriminating original versions of calls from increasingly distorted versions of
    the same calls. We further examined cortical responses to determine additional specializations for
    call discrimination at the cortical level. Psychophysical and cortical responses concurred with model
    predictions, revealing discrimination thresholds in the range of 8–15 ms randomization‑window
    length. Our data suggest that specialized cortical areas are not necessary to impart psychophysical
    resilience to temporal distortion in communication calls.

    Additional information

    supplementary information
  • Houston, D. M., Jusczyk, P. W., Kuijpers, C., Coolen, R., & Cutler, A. (2000). Cross-language word segmentation by 9-month-olds. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 504-509.

    Abstract

    Dutch-learning and English-learning 9-month-olds were tested, using the Headturn Preference Procedure, for their ability to segment Dutch words with strong/weak stress patterns from fluent Dutch speech. This prosodic pattern is highly typical for words of both languages. The infants were familiarized with pairs of words and then tested on four passages, two that included the familiarized words and two that did not. Both the Dutch- and the English-learning infants gave evidence of segmenting the targets from the passages, to an equivalent degree. Thus, English-learning infants are able to extract words from fluent speech in a language that is phonetically different from English. We discuss the possibility that this cross-language segmentation ability is aided by the similarity of the typical rhythmic structure of Dutch and English words.
  • Huettig, F., Mishra, R. K., & Padakannaya, P. (2017). Editorial. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 1( 1), 1. doi:10.1007/s41809-017-0006-2.
  • Huisman, J. L. A., van Hout, R., & Majid, A. (2021). Patterns of semantic variation differ across body parts: evidence from the Japonic languages. Cognitive Linguistics, 32, 455-486. doi:10.1515/cog-2020-0079.

    Abstract

    The human body is central to myriad metaphors, so studying the conceptualisation of the body itself is critical if we are to understand its broader use. One essential but understudied issue is whether languages differ in which body parts they single out for naming. This paper takes a multi-method approach to investigate body part nomenclature within a single language family. Using both a naming task (Study 1) and colouring-in task (Study 2) to collect data from six Japonic languages, we found that lexical similarity for body part terminology was notably differentiated within Japonic, and similar variation was evident in semantics too. Novel application of cluster analysis on naming data revealed a relatively flat hierarchical structure for parts of the face, whereas parts of the body were organised with deeper hierarchical structure. The colouring data revealed that bounded parts show more stability across languages than unbounded parts. Overall, the data reveal there is not a single universal conceptualisation of the body as is often assumed, and that in-depth, multi-method explorations of under-studied languages are urgently required.
  • Huisman, J. L. A. (2021). Variation in form and meaning across the Japonic language family: With a focus on the Ryukyuan languages. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Huizeling, E., Wang, H., Holland, C., & Kessler, K. (2021). Changes in theta and alpha oscillatory signatures of attentional control in older and middle age. European Journal of Neuroscience, 54(1), 4314-4337. doi:10.1111/ejn.15259.

    Abstract

    Recent behavioural research has reported age-related changes in the costs of refocusing attention from a temporal (rapid serial visual presentation) to a spatial (visual search) task. Using magnetoencephalography, we have now compared the neural signatures of attention refocusing between three age groups (19–30, 40–49 and 60+ years) and found differences in task-related modulation and cortical localisation of alpha and theta oscillations. Efficient, faster refocusing in the youngest group compared to both middle age and older groups was reflected in parietal theta effects that were significantly reduced in the older groups. Residual parietal theta activity in older individuals was beneficial to attentional refocusing and could reflect preserved attention mechanisms. Slowed refocusing of attention, especially when a target required consolidation, in the older and middle-aged adults was accompanied by a posterior theta deficit and increased recruitment of frontal (middle-aged and older groups) and temporal (older group only) areas, demonstrating a posterior to anterior processing shift. Theta but not alpha modulation correlated with task performance, suggesting that older adults' stronger and more widely distributed alpha power modulation could reflect decreased neural precision or dedifferentiation but requires further investigation. Our results demonstrate that older adults present with different alpha and theta oscillatory signatures during attentional control, reflecting cognitive decline and, potentially, also different cognitive strategies in an attempt to compensate for decline.

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