Journal of Neurolinguistics最新文献

Musical pitch perception is closely related to phonological awareness and reading development in alphabetic languages. However, whether such a relation also exists in tonal languages such as Chinese remains unclear. Here, we examined the musical pitch—reading relations and the possible mediating effects of phonological awareness in a sample of typically-developing Chinese children followed from Grade 3 (age 9) to Grade 5 (age 11). Phonological awareness and reading (accuracy and fluency) were assessed at both time points. Musical pitch perception was examined with a passive oddball EEG paradigm and an active identification task at age 9. Results showed that neural musical pitch sensitivity (indexed by P3a latency) predicted reading accuracy at age 11 and its two-year development. Behavioral musical pitch sensitivity predicted reading fluency at both ages through the effects of phonological awareness. Together, our results reveal the effects of musical pitch processing on reading development at both behavioral and neural levels in Chinese.

We performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study to elucidate the process involved in the transformation of the format types of action descriptions between stimuli and representations. We independently manipulated the format types of both stimuli (visual action [Vi] vs. verbal [Ve] stimulus) and internal representations (Vi vs. Ve representation) and set four types of experimental tasks. Each participant was required to generate a Vi or Ve representation after being presented with a Vi or Ve stimulus, according to each task. Increased activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Brodmann areas 44 and 45) was found in the transformation contrast: ([Vi stimulus and Ve representation] + [Ve stimulus and Vi representation]) > ([Vi stimulus and Vi representation] + [Ve stimulus and Ve representation]). This result suggests that the left IFG is involved with the transformation process and has the function of generating an internal representation in a format different from that of externally presented stimuli.

Although diverse language deficits have been widely observed in prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD), the underlying nature of such deficits and their explanation remains opaque. Consequently, both clinical applications and brain-language models are not well-defined. In this paper we report results from two experiments which test language production in a group of individuals with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) in contrast to healthy aging and healthy young. The experiments apply factorial designs informed by linguistic analysis to test two forms of complex sentences involving anaphora (relations between pronouns and their antecedents). Results show that aMCI individuals differentiate forms of anaphora depending on sentence structure, with selective impairment of sentences which involve construal with reference to context (anaphoric coreference). We argue that aMCI individuals maintain core structural knowledge while evidencing deficiency in syntax-semantics integration, thus locating the source of the deficit in the language-thought interface of the Language Faculty.

Background

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders worldwide and is characterized by problems with cognition and language, especially word-finding difficulties. The present study focuses on lexical-semantic features via five discourse variables reflecting word-finding difficulties, namely indefinite terms, lexical frequency, repetitions, semantic paraphasias, and use of pronouns. Our aim is twofold: testing whether these variables can discriminate healthy aging from AD, but also mild from moderate AD.

Method

105 participants were examined from the existing Pitt corpus (available on DementiaBank), which includes the Cookie Theft Picture Description task. 40 participants were healthy controls, 25 were mild AD participants, and 40 moderate AD participants.

Results

The moderate AD group differed significantly from healthy controls in terms of indefinite terms, repetitions, semantic paraphasias, and pronouns. For the latter variable, mild AD patients also differed significantly from healthy controls. However, none of the variables could differentiate mild from moderate AD.

Conclusion

Four out of five discourse variables could discriminate healthy aging from moderate AD, while only one could discriminate mild AD patients. This is therefore questioning current literature on connected-speech measures in AD and calling for further research on the variables that could better distinguish mild to moderate AD.

In the intense debate about the potential benefits of bilingual experience to executive functioning (EF), little research addresses the possibility that the benefits may manifest in the process of adapting to an EF task. In this study, we hypothesize that interpreters, confronted frequently with more intense interference from different languages, may adapt to the interference task more efficiently. With the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study examined whether participants with interpreting experience may adapt to the conflicting environment of a Flanker task more efficiently than non-interpreter bilinguals with the progression of the task (i.e., from the first to the second half trials). Our results showed that the interpreter group showed better conflict resolution (i.e., a lower error rate) despite being less active in early attentional processing (i.e., less negative overall N1 and N2 amplitudes). Second, both groups showed an adaptation effect in the second half trials compared with the first half, as reflected by less negative overall N2 amplitude and more positive overall P3 amplitude. More importantly, only the interpreter group showed an additional benefit in adaptation, as reflected by an earlier overall P3 peak latency in the second half trials. Taken together, the results offered some support for an interpreter advantage in the dynamics of adapting to the Flanker task, which could provide new insight into the effect of bilingual experience on non-verbal interference control.

A comprehensive neural model of language must accommodate four components: representations, operations, structures and encoding. Recent intracranial research has begun to map out the feature space associated with syntactic processes, but the field lacks a unified framework that can direct invasive neural analyses. This article proposes a neurocomputational architecture for syntax, termed ROSE (Representation, Operation, Structure, Encoding). Under ROSE, the basic data structures of syntax are atomic features, types of mental representations (R), and are coded at the single-unit and ensemble level. Operations (O) transforming these units into manipulable objects accessible to subsequent structure-building levels are coded via high frequency broadband γ activity. Low frequency synchronization and cross-frequency coupling code for recursive structural inferences (S). Distinct forms of low frequency coupling encode these structures onto distinct workspaces (E). Causally connecting R to O is spike-phase/LFP coupling; connecting O to S is phase-amplitude coupling; connecting S to E are frontotemporal traveling oscillations. ROSE is reliant on neurophysiologically plausible mechanisms and provides an anatomically precise and falsifiable grounding for natural language syntax.

A puzzling finding in the speech production literature is the facilitation of categorically related distractors in a superordinate level naming task. The context is in this case response congruent, because application of the task instruction to the context would lead to the correct response. This study investigates the time-course of response congruence effects in speech production using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants overtly named target words that were overlaid on context pictures with either their superordinate category level name or their associated function, while their response times and ERPs were recorded. Behavioural results replicate the facilitating effect of response congruence. The ERP results showed that the N2 was larger for a response incongruent than congruent context, and this effect correlated with the behavioural pattern of results. This key finding suggests that response incongruence is associated with a conflict-monitoring response which drives the behavioural effect. Further, N400 amplitude was not modulated by response congruence, showing that its effect appears confined to the conceptualisation phase. Finally, P3 modulations mirrored those in RTs, but unlike the N2 effect, they did not correlate with RTs. This suggests that, although the facilitating effect of response congruence is confined to the conceptualisation phase of speech production, response incongruent representations may remain active during later processing stages, or that this late effect of response congruence reflects conflict resolve. Implications for models of speech production are discussed.

Adjectives (e.g., hungry) are an important part of language, but have been little studied in individuals with impaired language. Adjectives are used in two different ways in English: attributively, to modify a noun (the hungry dog); or predicatively, after a verb (the dog is hungry). Attributive adjectives have a more complex grammatical structure than predicative adjectives, and may therefore be particularly prone to disruption in individuals with grammatical impairments. We investigated adjective production in three subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA: agrammatic, semantic, logopenic), as well as in agrammatic stroke aphasia and a group of healthy control participants. Participants produced narratives based on picture books, and we coded every adjective they produced for its syntactic structure. Compared to healthy controls, the two agrammatic groups, but not the other two patient groups, produced significantly fewer attributive adjectives per sentence. All four patient groups were similar to controls for their rate of predicative adjective production. In addition, we found a significant correlation in the agrammatic PPA participants between their rate of producing attributive adjectives and impaired production of sentences with complex syntactic structure (subject cleft sentences like It was the boy that chased the girl); no such correlation was found for predicative adjectives. Irrespective of structure, we examined the lexical characteristics of the adjectives that were produced, including length, frequency, semantic diversity and neighborhood density. Overall, the lexical characteristics of the produced adjectives were largely consistent with the language profile of each group. In sum, the results suggest that attributive adjectives present a particular challenge for individuals with agrammatic language production, and add a new dimension to the description of agrammatism. Our results further suggest that attributive adjectives may be a fruitful target for improved treatment and recovery of agrammatic language.

Over the past decades, focus has been on developing methods that allow tapping into aspects of cognition that are not directly observable. This includes linguistic knowledge and skills which develop largely without awareness and may therefore be difficult or impossible to articulate. Building on the relation between language cognition and the nervous system, we examine whether Heart Rate Variability (HRV), a cardiovascular measure that indexes Autonomic Nervous System activity, can be used to assess implicit language knowledge. We test the potential of HRV to detect whether individuals possess grammatical knowledge and explore how sensitive the cardiovascular response is.

41 healthy, British English-speaking adults listened to 40 English speech samples, half of which contained grammatical errors. Thought Technology's 5-channel ProComp 5 encoder tracked heart rate via a BVP-Flex/Pro sensor attached to the middle finger of the non-dominant hand, at a rate of 2048 samples per second. A Generalised Additive Mixed Effects Model confirmed a cardiovascular response to grammatical violations: there is a statistically significant reduction in HRV as indexed by NN50 in response to stimuli that contain errors. The cardiovascular response reflects the extent of the linguistic violations, and NN50 decreases linearly with an increase in the number of errors, up to a certain level, after which HRV remains constant.

This observation brings into focus a new dimension of the intricate relationship between physiology and cognition. Being able to use a highly portable and non-intrusive technique with language stimuli also creates exciting possibilities for assessing the language knowledge of individuals from a range of populations in their natural environment and in authentic communicative situations.