Journal of Neurolinguistics最新文献

Background

Although historically considered a motor disorder, cervical dystonia (CD) may present with subtle cognitive impairments. Basal ganglia dysfunction in other neurological conditions can lead to language impairments. Language in people with CD (pwCD) remains unexplored.

Objectives

The study aimed to explore phonological, grammatical, and semantic language abilities in pwCD compared to healthy controls.

Methods

19 pwCD and 20 control participants completed the Object and Colour subtests of the Rapid Automized Naming Task (RAN), the Test for Reception of Grammar-2 (TROG-2), and a lexical decision task with a masked priming paradigm that compared reaction times to words varying according to two factors-hand relatedness (hand-related, non-hand-related) and word category (verb, noun).

Results

Compared to controls, pwCD were less accurate at grammatical comprehension on the TROG-2 (p < 0.05, n² = 0.15). There were no significant differences between pwCD and controls in phonological retrieval, as measured by the RAN. PwCD demonstrated an overall reduced priming effect for all words, however, there is some evidence in our data that this may be more pronounced for hand-related words.

Conclusion

Language deficits should be considered an area of future research in pwCD. These findings support the role of the motor system in language.

Although the ability to acquire a second language (L2) and attain fluency in that language is beneficial for a growing number of people, it is significantly more difficult to acquire such skills in adulthood. While traditional in-person and computer training programs can aid in this process, learning is often slow and retention is quite poor. A method for driving long-lasting neural plasticity during language learning would be valuable for those who need or want to achieve fluency in a second language later in life. However, little is known about the effect of neuromodulation methods on language learning. In the current study, we investigated the effect of non-invasive transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) on vocabulary word-learning in healthy young adults. Importantly, we approached this research question by investigating two key parameters of taVNS, stimulation frequency (Experiment 1) and current intensity (Experiment 2). Typically developing young adults completed a 1-h training session in which they learned 30 concrete, Palauan nouns while receiving real or sham stimulation to the left posterior tragus (Experiment 1) or stimulation at various intensities (Experiment 2). Participants completed a Palau-to-English translation test immediately after training and seven days later to quantify learning and retention. The results largely revealed that high frequency stimulation above sensory threshold improved retention of learned words. These results suggest that taVNS may improve retention of vocabulary words in a second language and that stimulation frequency may impact efficacy.

As a high-demanding mental activity with both cognitive and emotional factors, verbal-humor processing consumes more attentional resources than non-humor processing, which has been demonstrated by behavioral studies, but little has been examined at a real-time scale. Based on the three-stage model (incongruity detection, incongruity resolution, and mirth), the current study used event-related potential (ERP) and event-related oscillation (ERO) to explore the attentional resource consumption of verbal-humor processing by employing a dual-task paradigm in which sentence comprehension (humorous, positive, neutral) was the primary task and arithmetical calculation (simple, difficult) was the secondary task.

Participants’ (N=38) behavioral performance and ERP/ERO measures in two tasks were analyzed. ERP results of verbal-humor processing revealed significantly larger LAN, LLAN, and LPP activation, which indexed three stages. ERO results showed significant beta power changes in the detection stage and theta changes in the resolution and mirth stages. The behavioral data indicated that the Reaction Times (RTs) of the arithmetical task following verbal-humor processing were longer than those following non-humorous positive and neutral ones. The ERP results of arithmetical calculation found that the calculations following verbal-humor processing elicited significantly greater P2, P3b, and positive slow wave amplitudes than those following the other two processings, which reflected more resource allocation in the calculation to compensate for the resource preemption of verbal-humor processing. In addition, the calculation following positive sentence exhibited a greater ERP amplitude in the relatively early P2 time intervals than that following the neutral sentences. Collectively, the behavioral, ERP, and ERO results concurrently confirmed that verbal-humor processing consumed more attentional resources compared with non-humorous counterparts, and moreover, the comparison of ERP following humorous and positive sentences suggested that the processing of the cognitive factor consumes more attentional resources than the emotional factor although both factors play a role in the process.

This study investigated how reflexives and object pronouns in Turkish are processed in aphasia as compared to a group of unimpaired controls. We aimed to understand (i) the moment-by-moment time course of processing reflexive forms, and (ii) and overt/null object pronouns in Turkish people with aphasia (PWA). We administered two eye-movement-monitoring during-listening experiments exploring resolution of reflexive variables (Experiment 1) and object pronouns (Experiment 2) in 6 PW A and their controls (n = 26). Our findings showed that interpretation of reflexive anaphors in Turkish is variable, and PWA are employing a non-local interpretation of reflexive anaphors to tackle down referential ambiguity in the absence of an ability to integrate contextual cues. Furthermore, PWA inappropriately considered inaccessible local antecedents for object pronouns, and they encountered limitations processing discourse antecedents. We argue that anaphoric processing profiles in aphasia face strong limitations by variable interpretability of pronominal reference and PWA's inability to integrate contextual cues to disambiguate the intended antecedents.

Both behavioral and neurophysiological evidence shows that lexical-semantic organization emerges by two years in monolingual children. Research in bilingual children is more scarce, and there is only a limited amount of neurophysiological evidence of the effect of language dominance on lexical-semantic activation. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated whether bilingual French-Spanish and French-English learning 24- to 30-month-olds activate semantic relations between words similarly in their both languages, and whether the priming effects are similar in children learning two different language pairs. Participants were presented with related and unrelated dominant and non-dominant language word pairs in a within-language lexical-semantic priming paradigm. The amplitudes of N400 were modulated by trial type, language dominance and language group. A language-independent priming effect - more pronounced N400 amplitudes for unrelated than for related target words - was found in the group of toddlers learning French and Spanish. In the group of toddlers learning French and English, a priming effect was observed only in their non-dominant language. Our results propose that the language pair may contribute to lexical-semantic facilitation in priming tasks during early childhood.

Although metaphoric language is one of the most common expressions of creativity in everyday life, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying conventional and novel metaphor processing are not fully understood. In particular, the role of attention in metaphor comprehension is lacking. The first aim of this study was to investigate the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component produced by conventional metaphor and novel metaphor evaluation. The second aim of this study was to explore the associations between attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control) and the N400 amplitudes produced by conventional and novel metaphor evaluation. The participants performed a metaphor evaluation task, in which novel and conventional metaphors were presented, while ERPs were recorded. They were required to evaluate how novel is each sentence. In addition, a short version of the attention network test was administered to investigate three attention networks, alerting, orienting, and executive control. The behavioral results of the metaphor evaluation task showed that novel metaphors were rated slower and as more novel than conventional metaphors. The ERP parameters indicated that the N400 peaked earlier for conventional metaphors compared to the novel metaphors. In addition, novel metaphors produced larger amplitudes over the LH compared to those evoked by the conventional metaphors. Moreover, while conventional metaphor evaluation was not associated with the attentional networks, novel metaphor evaluation was associated with the executive control network. The findings suggest that novel metaphor evaluation is associated with different cognitive demands compared to conventional metaphor evaluation, and each of the metaphors differently interacts with attention.

Previous research suggests that executive control ability may contribute to second language (L2) metaphor comprehension, and this relationship may be modulated by metaphor familiarity. However, so far most studies have been done with behavioral experiments. Using the event-related potential (ERP) and standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography analysis (sLORETA), this study adopted the semantic priming paradigm to examine the role of executive control ability in L2 metaphor comprehension with different degrees of familiarity. The Stroop task was used to measure executive control ability and differentiate the two groups of participants who were presented with three types of word-pair expressions: familiar metaphoric expressions, unfamiliar metaphoric expressions and literal expressions. They were then asked to perform a semantic judgment task. Results revealed more negative amplitudes of N400 and P600 components in participants of low executive control compared with those of high executive control. Metaphor familiarity modulated N400 of both groups of high and low executive control, whereas it only affected P600 of participants of low executive control. sLORETA analysis of both N400 and P600 revealed stronger activation for the low versus high executive control group in the right superior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus during low familiar metaphor comprehension. These results suggest that executive control plays a role in L2 metaphor comprehension, while it is modulated by metaphor familiarity.

This study examines the neurocognitive mechanisms supporting the processing of sentences involving compositional nontransparent meaning, investigating if the neural correlates are modulated by clausal and extra-clausal prior context. We probe through sentences like “The player jumped for 5 s.“, which engenders an iterative meaning (multiple jumping actions) that is morphosyntactically-unsupported yet obtained at the compositional level ([verb + adverbial]). We hypothesize that the non-transparent meaning is computed by comprehenders’ contextual evaluation, which would be more effortful without guiding cues yet could be facilitated by the presence of biasing information in context. This predicts that the comprehension of nontransparent sentences is contextually modulated, eliciting greater cost than their transparent counterparts—particularly when they are processed in a neutral context than in an iterative-biasing context. The reported fMRI experiment showed that computing nontransparent meaning preferentially recruited the left inferior frontal gyrus (L.IFG), the left middle temporal regions, and the right IFG, in contrast to the transparent counterpart. Crucially, the left frontal activation subserving nontransparent sentences was attenuated in a biasing context, as compared to a neutral context. The context effect was corroborated by the results of iterativity judgments that showed differential iterative vs. non-iterative interpretations for the nontransparent sentences as cued by the clausal and extra-clausal context. While the influence of clausal context has been demonstrated, this study provides novel evidence showing that compositional meaning computation is modulated by prior context in addition. The findings reveal a left-lateralized frontal-temporal network for compositional nontransparent meaning that is subject to contextual modulation beyond morphosyntactic computation.

This event-related potential (ERP) study aimed to examine at which point in the stream of four cognitive processes of word reading impairment occurs in dyslexic adults. Fourteen French native dyslexic speakers and eighteen matched controls performed a delayed phonological lexical decision task that consisted in deciding whether visual stimuli sounded like French words. Three hundred stimuli equally distributed among five experimental conditions (60 concrete French words, 60 pseudo-homophones, 60 pseudowords, 60 consonant and 60 symbol strings) were presented. Critically, two language processes involving phonological information, namely grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (N320) and memory retrieval of phonological information (Late Positive Complex) were impaired in dyslexics compared to controls. Moreover, lexical access (N400) was significantly modulated by six predictive variables assumed to be reliable markers of dyslexia. In contrast, and unexpectedly, the early processes of visual expertise for print (N170) appeared to operate in the same way in the two groups of participants. The locus of dyslexia is probably to be found primarily in some aspects of phonological processing during word reading. These findings support a clinical neurophysiology model postulating that at least two phonological processes during reading might be impaired in dyslexics, namely grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and memory retrieval of phonological information.

The aim of this study was to investigate the time course differences in brain processing between handwritten and printed Chinese characters. Behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) data were collected from twenty participants as they performed a lexical decision task in which Chinese handwritten and printed characters served as stimuli. The findings indicated that N1 reflects orthographic regularity during the early processing stage; N400 and the late positive component (LPC) data revealed that reading handwritten words evoke greater ERP amplitudes during the late processing stage. Although handwritten characters evoke greater ERP amplitudes, this did not result in more efficient behavioural outcomes. Therefore, it appears that the greater ERP amplitudes observed in the handwriting task corresponded to deeper meaning comprehension, which is also more challenging for semantic integration.