The Multilingual Picture Database.

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research.

Retrospective confidence judgments: Meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies.

Confidence in our retrieved memories, that is, retrospective confidence, is a metamemory process we perform daily. There is an abundance of applied research focusing on the metamemory judgments and very diverse studies including a wide range of clinical populations. However, the neural correlates that support its functioning are not well defined impeding the implementation of noninvasive neuromodulatory clinical interventions.

Breaking down the cocktail party: Attentional modulation of cerebral audiovisual speech processing.

Recent studies utilizing electrophysiological speech envelope reconstruction have sparked renewed interest in the cocktail party effect by showing that auditory neurons entrain to selectively attended speech. Yet, the neural networks of attention to speech in naturalistic audiovisual settings with multiple sound sources remain poorly understood. We collected functional brain imaging data while participants viewed audiovisual video clips of lifelike dialogues with concurrent distracting speech in the background.

Modulation of Brain Activity by Selective Attention to Audiovisual Dialogues.

In real-life noisy situations, we can selectively attend to conversations in the presence of irrelevant voices, but neurocognitive mechanisms in such natural listening situations remain largely unexplored. Previous research has shown distributed activity in the mid superior temporal gyrus (STG) and sulcus (STS) while listening to speech and human voices, in the posterior STS and fusiform gyrus when combining auditory, visual and linguistic information, as well as in left-hemisphere temporal and frontal cortical areas during comprehension. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated how selective attention modulates neural responses to naturalistic audiovisual dialogues.

Quick reorganization of memory traces for morphologically complex words in young children.

Formation of neural mechanisms for morphosyntactic processing in young children is still poorly understood. Here, we addressed neural processing and rapid online acquisition of familiar and unfamiliar combinations of morphemes. Three different types of morphologically complex words - derived, inflected, and novel (pseudostem + real suffix) - were presented in a passive listening setting to 16 typically developing 3-4-year old children (as part of a longitudinal Helsinki SLI follow-up study).