Same same but different: The graded influence of vowel quality and prosodic prominence on letter detection.

This study investigates the impact of phonetic realisation and prosodic prominence on visual letter identification, focusing on the letter  in German bisyllabic words. Building upon previous research, a computerised letter search task was conducted with 78 skilled adult readers. Words featuring different phonetic realisations of  (/eː, ɛ, e, l̩, n̩, ɐ/) in stressed and unstressed first and second syllables were systematically included.

Efficacy of reading strategies on text-level reading comprehension in people with post-stroke chronic aphasia: A repeated measures study.

Background: People with aphasia (PWA) frequently experience difficulties in understanding longer written content such as paragraphs or books. Reading strategies are a promising approach to treat text-level reading comprehension deficits in PWA. Nevertheless, empirical evidence for their efficacy remains rare.

Prosody affects visual perception in polysyllabic words: Evidence from a letter search task.

Previous research has shown that phonology influences the visual perception of a word's letters. However, the influence of prosody, including word stress, on grapheme perception in polysyllabic words is poorly investigated. The present study addresses this issue with a letter search task.

Comprehensive Assessment of Reading in Aphasia (CARA) reading questionnaire-German version.

Background: Reading comprehension is frequently impaired in persons with aphasia (PWA). For goal-setting and outcome measurement, speech and language therapists (SLTs) need to determine an individual's perspective of their reading difficulties and everyday reading activities. The Comprehensive Assessment of Reading in Aphasia (CARA) reading questionnaire provides a person-centred tool to find out the individual perception of reading functions, reading-related emotions and reading activities in PWA.

The plural counts: Inconsistent grammatical number hinders numerical development in preschoolers - A cross-linguistic study.

The role of grammar in numerical development, and particularly the role of grammatical number inflection, has already been well-documented in toddlerhood. It is unclear, however, whether the influence of grammatical language structure further extends to more complex later stages of numerical development. Here, we addressed this question by exploiting differences between Polish, which has a complex grammatical number paradigm, leading to a partially inconsistent mapping between numerical quantities and grammatical number, and German, which has a comparatively easy verbal paradigm: 151 Polish-speaking and 123 German-speaking kindergarten children were tested using a symbolic numerical comparison task.

Why do He and She Disagree: The Role of Binary Morphological Features in Grammatical Gender Agreement in German.

In many languages, grammatical gender is an inherent property of nouns and, as such, forms a basis for agreement relations between nouns and their dependent elements (e.g., adjectives, determiners).

Neural processing of nouns and verbs in spontaneous speech of patients with schizophrenia.

Previous fMRI-studies investigating the production of nouns and verbs in healthy participants reported predominantly activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for both classes of words with increased neural responses for verbs. To date, comparable imaging data for spontaneous speech in patients with schizophrenia is missing. These results are novel and may contribute to understand the neural basis of noun and verb production in a "natural" environment.

German normative data with naming latencies for 283 action pictures and 600 action verbs.

Timed picture naming is a common psycholinguistic paradigm. In this task, participants are asked to label visually depicted objects or actions. Naming performance can be influenced by several picture and verb characteristics which demands fully characterized normative data.

Efficacy of a strategy-based intervention on text-level reading comprehension in persons with aphasia: a study protocol for a repeated measures study.

Introduction: At least 68% of persons with aphasia (PWA) experience reading difficulties. Even though strategy-based interventions are a promising treatment approach for text level reading comprehension deficits in PWA, empirical evidence for their efficacy remains rare. The primary objective of this study is the analysis of the efficacy of a strategy-based intervention on text-level reading comprehension and on reading activities in PWA.

Language analysis of spontaneous descriptions of restless legs syndrome: Gender differences?

Patients with restless legs syndrome (RLS) use various terms when describing their symptoms. Whether gender might influence this has not been investigated so far. The aim of this study was to evaluate possible gender differences in spontaneous descriptions of RLS symptoms.

Corrigendum: A Mental Odd-Even Continuum Account: Some Numbers May Be "More Odd" Than Others and Some Numbers May Be "More Even" Than Others.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.

Predictors of Penetration-Aspiration in Parkinson's Disease Patients With Dysphagia: A Retrospective Analysis.

Objective: Penetration-aspiration is considered the most severe sign of dysphagia, with aspiration pneumonia as one of its consequences. More than half of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients suffer from dysphagia, and aspiration pneumonia is among the primary causes of mortality in PD patients. However, the identification of predictors of penetration-aspiration in PD patients remains an understudied topic.

A Mental Odd-Even Continuum Account: Some Numbers May Be "More Odd" Than Others and Some Numbers May Be "More Even" Than Others.

Numerical categories such as parity, i.e., being odd or even, have frequently been shown to influence how particular numbers are processed.

The Role of Sensory Perception, Emotionality and Lifeworld in Auditory Word Processing: Evidence from Congenital Blindness and Synesthesia.

Although it has been established that human beings process concrete and abstract words differently, it is still a matter of debate what factors contribute to this difference. Since concrete concepts are closely tied to sensory perception, perceptual experience seems to play an important role in their processing. The present study investigated the processing of nouns during an auditory lexical decision task.

Intensive speech and language therapy in patients with chronic aphasia after stroke: a randomised, open-label, blinded-endpoint, controlled trial in a health-care setting.

Background: Treatment guidelines for aphasia recommend intensive speech and language therapy for chronic (≥6 months) aphasia after stroke, but large-scale, class 1 randomised controlled trials on treatment effectiveness are scarce. We aimed to examine whether 3 weeks of intensive speech and language therapy under routine clinical conditions improved verbal communication in daily-life situations in people with chronic aphasia after stroke.

Methods: In this multicentre, parallel group, superiority, open-label, blinded-endpoint, randomised controlled trial, patients aged 70 years or younger with aphasia after stroke lasting for 6 months or more were recruited from 19 inpatient or outpatient rehabilitation centres in Germany.

Mental representations of vowel features asymmetrically modulate activity in superior temporal sulcus.

Research in auditory neuroscience illustrated the importance of superior temporal sulcus (STS) for speech sound processing. However, evidence for abstract processing beyond the level of phonetics in STS has remained elusive. In this study, we follow an underspecification approach according to which the phonological representation of vowels is based on the presence vs.

Bono Bo and Fla Mingo: Reflections of Speech Prosody in German Second Graders' Writing to Dictation.

Written German is characterized by an underrepresentation of prosody. During writing acquisition, children have to tackle the question which prosodic features are realized by what means - if any. We examined traces of speech prosody in German children's writing to dictation.

Behavioural evidence for sex differences in the overlap between subtraction and multiplication.

The present study aims to identify factors that may influence the dissociability of number magnitude processing and arithmetic fact retrieval at the behavioural level. To that end, we assessed both subtraction and multiplication performance in a within-subject approach and evaluated the interdependence of unit-decade integration measures on the one hand as well as sex differences in the interdependence of performance measures on the other hand. We found that subtraction items requiring borrowing (e.

Patterns of linguistic and numerical performance in aphasia.

Background: Empirical research on the relationship between linguistic and numerical processing revealed inconsistent results for different levels of cognitive processing (e.g., lexical, semantic) as well as different stimulus materials (e.

Grammatical number elicits SNARC and MARC effects as a function of task demands.

Despite the robustness of the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) and linguistic markedness of response codes (MARC) effect, the mechanisms that underlie these effects are still under debate. In this paper, we investigate the extraction of quantity information from German number words and nouns inflected for singular and plural using two alternative forced choice paradigms. These paradigms are applied to different tasks to investigate how access to quantity representation is modulated by task demands.

The direction of word stress processing in German: evidence from a working memory paradigm.

There are contradicting assumptions and findings on the direction of word stress processing in German. To resolve this question, we asked participants to read tri-syllabic non-words and stress ambiguous words aloud. Additionally, they also performed a working memory (WM) task (2-back task).

Processing word prosody-behavioral and neuroimaging evidence for heterogeneous performance in a language with variable stress.

In the present behavioral and fMRI study, we investigated for the first time interindividual variability in word stress processing in a language with variable stress position (German) in order to identify behavioral predictors and neural correlates underlying these differences. It has been argued that speakers of languages with variable stress should perform relatively well in tasks tapping into the representation and processing of word stress, given that this is a relevant feature of their language. Nevertheless, in previous studies on word stress processing large degrees of interindividual variability have been observed but were ignored or left unexplained.

Functional lateralization of lexical stress representation: a systematic review of patient data.

According to the functional lateralization hypothesis (FLH) the lateralization of speech prosody depends both on its function (linguistic = left, emotional = right) and on the size of the units it operates on (small = left, large = right). In consequence, according to the FLH, lexical stress should be processed by the left (language-dominant) hemisphere, given its linguistic function and small unit size. We performed an exhaustive search for case studies of patients with acquired dysprosody due to unilateral brain damage.

Influence of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right angular gyrus on brain activity during rest.

Although numerous studies examined resting-state networks (RSN) in the human brain, so far little is known about how activity within RSN might be modulated by non-invasive brain stimulation applied over parietal cortex. Investigating changes in RSN in response to parietal cortex stimulation might tell us more about how non-invasive techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) modulate intrinsic brain activity, and further elaborate our understanding of how the resting brain responds to external stimulation. Here we examined how activity within the canonical RSN changed in response to anodal tDCS applied over the right angular gyrus (AG).