Journal of Neurolinguistics最新文献

Introduction

This study aimed to further clarify the roles of the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain in the processing of verb argument structure. Left inferior frontal brain areas have long been considered important for sentence processing, but recent research links left posterior temporal cortex to knowledge of verb argument structure.

Methods

We applied cathodal High-Definition transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to 45 participants in a between-subjects design, with 15 participants each for inferior-frontal-cortex stimulation, posterior-temporal-cortex stimulation, and sham stimulation. Set up as a training task during stimulation, participants made overt judgments on the number of participant roles associated with individual verbs.

Results

Stimulation of posterior temporal cortex did not yield results that were different from sham stimulation, speeding up task responses overall. By contrast, stimulation of inferior frontal cortex yielded differential results for intransitive versus transitive verbs, speeding up responses to intransitive verbs and increasing accuracy to transitive verbs, relative to other conditions.

Conclusion

The transitivity effect, specific to inferior frontal stimulation, suggests a role for inferior frontal cortex in access to verb-argument-structure information, possibly specific to situations of high cognitive load and in which participant roles have to be established for production, as opposed to comprehension.

Sentences with quantified expressions involve mental representations of sets of individuals for which some property holds (the reference set), as well as of sets for which the property does not hold (the complement set). Both sets can receive discourse focus with negative quantifiers, while the reference set is strongly preferred with positive quantifiers, complement set focus however being possible if contextually motivated. In an offline semantic plausibility study and two online EEG studies, we investigated whether the complement set is an available discourse entity inherently for positive quantifiers, as it is for negative quantifiers. The results show that while the default focus patterns induced by positive and negative quantifiers are robust, both complement and reference set are represented as discourse entities and this is to our knowledge the first study to show that even positive quantifiers make both reference and complement set mentally represented during discourse processing without contextual influence. We also discuss the impact the results from the two ERP studies have on the functional interpretation of two well known ERP effects: the N400 and the P600.

All speakers must monitor their speech for errors. However, few studies have investigated speech monitoring in bilinguals. We examined whether monolinguals and bilinguals differ in first (L1) and second (L2) language speech monitoring. Participants included 18 English monolinguals, 20 English-French and 21 French-English sequential bilinguals who learned their two languages one after the other, and 15 simultaneous bilinguals who learned their two languages from birth. All participants performed an English phoneme substitution task while an electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. Three event-related brain potential (ERP) components were analyzed: the stimulus-locked P200 and N200, and the response-locked error-related negativity. All groups performed the task equally well despite showing differences in ERP patterns on correct and incorrect trials. Only simultaneous bilinguals showed a larger P200 preceding incorrect compared to correct responses, suggesting a role for lexical activation processes in the production of speech errors. All language groups showed evidence of pre-articulatory, conflict-based error monitoring through the N200. Only French-English sequential bilinguals, in their L2, showed a reliable ERN effect following speech errors. Thus, speech error monitoring processes were found to be influenced by whether one is speaking in their L1 versus L2 depending on the stage of monitoring, with response conflict being more informative for post-articulatory error monitoring during L2 compared to L1 speech production.

Aphasia is one of the most common deficits occurring after stroke that remains, at least in part, even after speech therapy and medication treatment. Non-invasive direct current transcranial stimulation (tDCS) is used to improve brain function by induction of neural plasticity. This study investigated the effect of bi-hemispheric tDCS on verbal function in patients with stroke-induced Broca's aphasia.

Thirty patients with Broca's aphasia due to ischemic stroke, referred to an academic hospital in Guilan Province, Iran, in 2019-20, were studied. Patients were divided into two groups receiving seven sessions of either active or sham tDCS. The tDCS sessions began 10–20 days after stroke onset. The severity of aphasia before and after the intervention and a 3-month follow-up were assessed by the Persian version of the Western Battery-1 test (P-WAB-1). T-test, ANOVA, and Repeated Measurement were used for data analyses.

The mean P-WAB-1 score was significantly higher in the intervention group both early after tDCS (P ≤ 0.0001) and on the 3-months follow-up (P ≤ 0001). Linear regression analysis indicated that tDCS had a positive effect on verbal performance scores independent of age, sex, and lesion volume (Regression coefficient = −33.3).

Bi-hemispheric tDCS effectively improves verbal function in Broca's aphasia in the sub-acute phase of ischemic stroke.

The present stud y is an attempt to investigate the emotional responses to the eight colors (black, white, yellow, blue, red, green, orange, and violet) in terms of three emotional response systems (physiology, behavior, and psychology) on twenty volunteered young adults, both male and female in Qom –Iran. Experiments are undertaken in three different contexts measuring the participants’ reactions to colors via neuroimaging tests, color-emotion and color-word association questionnaires, and English language vocabulary tests to find out how the individuals react when exposed to different colors, especially in linguistic phase. The total results illustrated that students would benefit from colorful vocabularies over black and white ones; and the three colors blue, orange, and red over the other colors. Totally, color backgrounds and foregrounds function similarly. However, it was discovered that vocabularies were memorized in blue foreground. Recalling vocabularies in yellow and violet is better to be avoided. The findings of this research benefits students and teachers in teaching and learning vocabularies in educational settings. It also contributes to the literature on color psychology and neurology and more specifically, it provides literature on the effect of color on arousal and memory.

Humans seem to be inherently driven to engage in wordplay. An example is the creation of palindromes – sentences that read the same backward and forward. This activity can be framed as a curiosity-driven behaviour, in which individuals seek for information that serves no direct purpose and in the absence of external rewards. In this fMRI case study, an experienced palindrome creator was scanned while he generated palindromes with different levels of difficulty. Palindrome creation was alternated with resting periods and with a working memory task, both serving as control conditions. Relative to resting, palindrome creation recruited frontal domain-specific language networks and fronto-parietal domain-general networks. The comparison with the working memory task evidenced partial overlap with the multiple-demand cortex, which participates in solving a variety of cognitively challenging tasks. Intriguingly, greater difficulty during palindrome creation differentially activated the right frontopolar cortex (BA 10), a region that was also linked to palindrome resolution. The latter is consistent with exploratory behaviour – in this case, with seeking new but interdependent linguistic segments within a complex internal model (i.e., a palindromic structure)– and bears resemblance with brain substrates sustaining hard logical reasoning, altogether pointing to a commonplace for curiosity in discovering new and complex relations.

This study examined how the morphological typology of second language (L2) learners' first language (L1) affected neural processing of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge. We used functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine adult L2 learners’ processing of English Subject-Verb number agreement (e.g., duck swims, ducks swim) during a picture-sentence matching task. Two English learner groups with contrasting L1s, Spanish (with rich inflectional morphology, n = 16) and Mandarin (with a lexical morphology, n = 18), were compared to native English speakers (n = 19). Both L2-learner groups demonstrated comparable accuracy on the picture-sentence matching task. However, neural results revealed L1 influence on L2 morphosyntactic processing. Mandarin-speaking English L2 learners showed greater neural activity in the left middle temporal gyrus (L-MTG) for singular (e.g., the duck swims) versus plural sentences (e.g., the ducks swim). Mandarin relies on semantic, rather than inflectional, information to infer number and L-MTG is involved in lexical-semantic processing, suggesting L1 influence on L2 inflectional processing. Spanish-speaking English L2 learners showed greater neural activity in areas including the right MTG and prefrontal cortex for the plural versus singular sentences whereas native English speakers showed greater activity for singular versus plural sentences. The plural form is morphologically marked in Spanish and greater neural activation for the plural rather than singular form suggests L1 influence. Importantly, cross-linguistic influences were only observed at the neural level, revealing that different neural activation patterns underpin similar behavioral results. Both L2-learner groups showed different patterns of neural activation corresponding to the specific linguistic features of their L1, indicating that L2 processing is affected by L1 characteristics in linguistically principled ways. This study advances our understanding of how morphosyntactically-distinct languages are organized and processed in adult L2 learners.

Developmental stuttering is a fluency disorder that adversely affect many aspects of a person's life. Recent transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) studies have shown promise to improve fluency in people who stutter. To date, bihemispheric tDCS has not been investigated in this population. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the effects of single-session bihemispheric and unihemispheric cathodal tDCS on fluency in adults who stutter. We predicted that bihemispheric tDCS with anodal stimulation to the left IFG and cathodal stimulation to the right IFG would improve fluency better than the sham and cathodal tDCS to the right IFG. Seventeen adults who stutter completed this single-blind, crossover, sham-controlled tDCS experiment. All participants received 20 min of tDCS alongside metronome-timed speech during intervention sessions. Three tDCS interventions were administered: bihemispheric tDCS with anodal stimulation to the left IFG and cathodal stimulation to the right IFG, unihemispheric tDCS with cathodal stimulation to the right IFG, and sham stimulation. Speech fluency during reading and conversation was assessed before, immediately after, and one week after each intervention session. There was no significant fluency improvement in conversation for any tDCS interventions. Reading fluency improved following both bihemispheric and cathodal tDCS interventions. tDCS montages were not significantly different in their effects on fluency.

In visual masking, the visibility of a fleetingly presented visual target is disrupted by the presentation of an additional image, the mask, shortly before or after the target. Rapid stream stimulation (RSS) is a masking paradigm that is frequently used in character processing. Although neuroimaging studies have examined lexicality in terms of RSS, the mechanism underlying character masking has not been investigated. To resolve this issue, we investigated the neural basis of masking effects in lexicality using a two-way factorial design in a 3T-fMRI with masking (mask condition: masked versus unmasked) and target stimulus (character likeness: real-, pseudo-, non-characters) as factors. We found that brain activity in the left middle occipital gyrus (MOG) and lingual gyrus was strongest in the unmasked condition in RSS. Analysis of psychophysiological interactions revealed diverse patterns of functional connectivity in the two conditions, with stronger functional connectivity of the left MOG to the left fusiform gyrus and the right posterior cingulate cortex, suggesting the involvement of lexical processing of familiar characters. Together, these findings of activation and connectivity patterns indicated that masking in RSS reduced the visibility of characters by suppressing activity in the occipital cortex and reduced connectivity in both orthographical and attention networks.

Linguistic measures in spontaneous speech have shown promise in the early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD), but it remains unknown which specific linguistic variables show sensitivity and how language decline relates to primary memory deficits. We hypothesized that a set of fine-grained linguistic variables relating specifically to forms of syntactic complexity involved in referencing objects and events as part of episodes would show sensitivity. We tested this in speech samples obtained from a picture description task, maximally isolating language deficits from the confound of episodic memory (EM) demands. 105 participants were split into Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Mild-to-Moderate AD, and healthy controls (HC). Results showed that groups did not differ on generic linguistic variables such as number or length of utterances. However, AD relative to HC produced fewer embedded adjunct clauses, indefinite noun phrases, and Aspect marking, with moderate-to-large effect sizes. MCI compared to HC produced fewer adjunct clauses as well as fewer adverbial adjuncts. Together, these results confirm language impairment in AD and MCI at the level of specific linguistic variables relating to structures required for endowing narrative with specificity and episodic richness, independently of EM demands.