Breaking Down the Bilingual Cost in Speech Production.

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large-scale picture-naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost.

Functional specificity in the motor system: Evidence from coupled fMRI and kinematic recordings during letter and digit writing.

A few intriguing neuropsychologial studies report dissociations where agraphic patients are severely impaired for writing letters whereas they write digits nearly normally. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with graphic tablet recordings, we tested the hypothesis that the motor patterns for writing letters are coded in specific regions of the cortex. We found a set of three regions that were more strongly activated when participants wrote letters than when they wrote digits and whose response was not explained by low-level kinematic features of the graphic movements.

Removal of muscle artifacts from EEG recordings of spoken language production.

Research on the neural basis of language processing has often avoided investigating spoken language production by fear of the electromyographic (EMG) artifacts that articulation induces on the electro-encephalogram (EEG) signal. Indeed, such articulation artifacts are typically much larger than the brain signal of interest. Recently, a Blind Source Separation technique based on Canonical Correlation Analysis was proposed to separate tonic muscle artifacts from continuous EEG recordings in epilepsy.