English Vowel Discrimination and Perceptual Assimilation by Japanese Listeners.

This study examined whether the discrimination accuracy of nonnative vowels could be predicted by how listeners assimilate nonnative phones into their L1. The results demonstrated that Japanese listeners discriminated between English /æ/ and /ʌ/ better than they did between /ɑ/ and /ʌ/, although they categorized all those stimuli as the Japanese /a/. Given that the acoustic distance between stimuli was controlled to be identical, this result was attributed not to the acoustic difference but to the category-goodness difference.

Developmental Language Disorder as Syntactic Prediction Impairment.

We provide evidence that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are impaired in predictive syntactic processing. In the current study, children listened passively to auditorily-presented sentences, where the critical condition included an unexpected "filled gap" in the direct object position of the relative clause verb. A filled gap is illustrated by the underlined phrase in "…", rather than the expected "", where [] denotes the gap.

Automaticity of speech processing in early bilingual adults and children.

We examine whether early acquisition of a second language (L2) leads to native-like neural processing of phonemic contrasts that are absent in the L1. Four groups (adult and child monolingual speakers of English; adult and child early bilingual speakers of English and Spanish, exposed to both languages before 5 years of age) participated in a study comparing the English /I/ - /ε/ contrast. Neural measures of automatic change detection (Mismatch Negativity, MMN) and attention (Processing Negativity, PN and Late Negativity, LN) were measured by varying whether participants tracked the stimulus stream or not.

Informative use of "not" is N400-blind.

While sentence processing is generally a highly incremental and predictive process, negation seems to present an exception to this generalization. Two-step models of negation processing claim that predicate negation is computed only after the meaning of the core proposition has been computed. Several ERP studies eliciting the N400 (an index of semantic integration or lexical expectation) have found a "negation-blind" pattern of N400 results, suggesting that the negation has not been integrated into the overall sentence meaning by the time the critical word for the N400 is encountered.

Abstractness of human speech sound representations.

We argue, based on a study of brain responses to speech sound differences in Japanese, that memory encoding of functional speech sounds-phonemes-are highly abstract. As an example, we provide evidence for a theory where the consonants/p t k b d g/ are not only made up of symbolic features but are underspecified with respect to voicing or laryngeal features, and that languages differ with respect to which feature value is underspecified. In a previous study we showed that voiced stops are underspecified in English [Hestvik, A.

Phonological memory traces do not contain phonetic information.

We use a "varying standards" oddball paradigm and compare two phonetically differing conditions to find evidence that the auditory cortex has access to discrete phonological representations when making predictions about incoming speech sounds. Brain responses were recorded with a 128-electrode EEG system as subjects passively listened to synthetic speech sounds from a /dæ/-/tæ/ continuum. Deviant stimuli were compared to a control condition to obtain a mismatch negativity (MMN) response, indicative of a "surprise" at a stimulus that deviates from the memory trace.

Processing Binding Relations in Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: This sentence processing experiment examined the abilities of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical language development (TD) to establish relations between pronouns or reflexives and their antecedents in real time.

Method: Twenty-two children with SLI and 24 age-matched children with TD (7;3-10;11 [years;months]) participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment to determine whether they selectively activated the correct referent at the pronoun or reflexive in sentences. Triplets of auditory sentences, identical except for the presence of a pronoun, a reflexive, or a noun phrase along with a picture probe were used.

Neurobiological evidence for voicing underspecification in English.

In long-term memory, the phoneme units that make up words are coded for the distinctive features and feature values that are necessary to distinguish between words in the mental lexicon. Underspecification theory says that the phonemes that have unmarked feature values are even more abstract in that the feature is omitted from the representation altogether. This makes phoneme representations in words more sparse than the fully specified phonetic representations of the same words.

ERPs reveal atypical processing of subject versus object Wh-questions in children with specific language impairment.

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show particular difficulty comprehending and producing object (Who did the bear follow?) relative to subject (Who followed the tiger?) wh-questions.

Aims: To determine if school-age children with SLI, relative to children with typical development (TD), show a more distinct unevenness, or asymmetry, in the comprehension of these questions. In addition, this study examined whether the sustained left-anterior negativity (LAN) in event-related potentials (ERP) could be used as a marker for atypical processing of these questions in children with SLI.

Perception and bias in the processing of compound versus phrasal stress: evidence from event-related brain potentials.

Previous research using picture/word matching tasks has demonstrated a tendency to incorrectly interpret phrasally stressed strings as compounds. Using event-related potentials, we sought to determine whether this pattern stems from poor perceptual sensitivity to the compound/phrasal stress distinction, or from a post-perceptual bias in behavioral response selection. A secondary aim was to gain insight into the role played by contrastive stress patterns in online sentence comprehension.

Working memory effects of gap-predictions in normal adults: an event-related potentials study.

The current study examined the relationship between verbal memory span and the latency with which a filler-gap dependency is constructed. A previous behavioral study found that low span listeners did not exhibit antecedent reactivation at gap sites in relative clauses, in comparison to high verbal memory span subjects (Roberts et al. in J Psycholinguist Res 36(2):175-188, 2007), which suggests that low span subjects are delayed at gap filling.

Syntactic structural assignment in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with specific language impairment.

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing nonadjacent (hierarchical) relations among elements of a sentence. The authors also tested whether additional working memory demands in constructions containing reflexives affected the extent to which children with SLI incorrectly structure sentences as indicated by their picture-pointing comprehension responses.

Expression and functional activity of chemokine receptors in glatiramer acetate-specific T cells isolated from multiple sclerosis patient receiving the drug glatiramer acetate.

The purpose of the current study is to examine the surface expression of chemokine receptors and the chemotaxis toward the respective chemokines of glatiramer acetate (GA)-specific CD4(+) T cells isolated from the blood and the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of a multiple sclerosis (MS) patient. Four clones were selected, two isolated from the peripheral blood and two from the CSF. CCR4 and CXCR3 were expressed on all four clones.

Relative clause gap-filling in children with specific language impairment.

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have been observed to have production and perception difficulties with sentences containing long-distance dependencies, but it is unclear whether this is due to impairment in grammatical knowledge or in processing mechanisms. The current study addressed this issue by examining automatic on-line gap-filling in relative clauses, as well as off-line comprehension of the same stimulus sentences. As predicted by both knowledge impairment and processing impairment models, SLI children showed lack of immediate gap-filling after the relative clause verb, in comparison to a control group of typically developing children.

The double-edged sword of autoimmunity: lessons from multiple sclerosis.

The relationship between immune responses to self-antigens and autoimmune disease is unclear. In contrast to its animal model experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), which is driven by T cell responses to myelin antigens, the target antigen of the intrathecal immune response in multiple sclerosis (MS) has not been identified. Although the immune response in MS contributes significantly to tissue destruction, the action of immunocompetent cells within the central nervous system (CNS) may also hold therapeutic potential.

Linguistic and auditory temporal processing in children with specific language impairment.

Background: Several studies suggest the association of specific language impairment (SLI) to deficits in auditory processing. It has been evidenced that children with SLI present deficit in brief stimuli discrimination. Such deficit would lead to difficulties in developing phonological abilities necessary to map phonemes and to effectively and automatically code and decode words and sentences.

The idiotype connection: linking infection and multiple sclerosis.

B cells present idiotopes (Id) from their B cell receptor to Id-specific CD4(+) T cells. Chronic Id-driven T-B cell collaboration can cause autoimmune disease in mice. We propose that Id-driven T-B cell collaboration mediates the development of multiple sclerosis by perpetuating immune responses initiated against infectious agents.

Protective and detrimental immunity: lessons from stiff person syndrome and multiple sclerosis.

Background: The immune system may attack the brain and cause inflammatory disorders like multiple sclerosis (MS). On the other hand, the immune system may protect and support neurons.

Methods: There are two obstacles to study this paradox in humans.

Idiotope-specific CD4(+) T cells induce apoptosis of human oligodendrocytes.

CD4(+) T cells specific for immunologic non-self determinants on self-IgG, idiotopes (Id), can be raised from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). To test if Id-specific CD4(+) T cells have the potential to destroy oligodendrocytes (ODCs), we analyzed their ability to induce apoptosis of human ODC cell lines. Id-specific CD4(+) T cells stimulated with either Id-bearing B cells, Id-peptide presented by other antigen presenting cells, or by anti-CD3/anti-CD28 in the absence of accessory cells induced DNA fragmentation and killed ODCs.

Cerebrospinal fluid T cell responses against glutamic acid decarboxylase 65 in patients with stiff person syndrome.

Most patients with stiff person syndrome (SPS) display intrathecal synthesis of oligoclonal and high-avidity IgG against the 65 kDa isoform of glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD65 IgG), but little is known about the mechanisms driving this immune response. We hypothesized that GAD65-specific T cells accumulating in the central nervous system drive the intrathecal GAD65 IgG production. Accordingly, we were able to clone HLA-DR or DP restricted GAD65-specific T cells from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of all three patients with, but not in one patient without substantial intrathecal production of GAD65 IgG.

GAD65 IgG autoantibodies in stiff person syndrome: clonality, avidity and persistence.

Background And Purpose: Persistent intrathecal production of IgG autoantibodies against glutamic acid decarboxylase 65 (GAD65 IgG) and oligoclonal IgG of undetermined specificity has been reported in stiff person syndrome (SPS).

Methods: To chart the avidity and clonal patterns of GAD65 IgG, we performed scatchard plot of binding characteristics and isoelectric focusing-immunoblot of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and serum from five SPS patients.

Results: Oligoclonal GAD65 IgG bands, predominantly restricted to the IgG1 subclass, were detected in CSF and serum in all patients.

Multiple sclerosis: glatiramer acetate induces anti-inflammatory T cells in the cerebrospinal fluid.

Glatiramer acetate (GA) is believed to induce GA-reactive T cells that secrete anti-inflammatory cytokines at the site of inflammation in multiple sclerosis (MS). However, GA-reactive T cells have not been established from the intrathecal compartment of MS patients, and intrathecal T cells may differ from T cells in blood. Here, we compared the phenotype of GA-reactive T cells from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood of five MS patients treated with GA for 3-36 months, and in three of these patients also before treatment.