Event-related potentials reveal that bilinguals are more efficient in resolving conflict than monolinguals.

In the current study, we evaluated behavioral and electrophysiological evidence to determine whether bilinguals differ from monolinguals in the efficiency of response inhibition. Bilinguals and matched monolingual controls performed the flanker task while behavioral and electrophysiological measures were collected. Participants were slower and less accurate in responding to incongruent trials, but the magnitude of the behavioral effect of congruence was not modulated by participant group.

An endocannabinoid-regulated basolateral amygdala-nucleus accumbens circuit modulates sociability.

Deficits in social interaction (SI) are a core symptom of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs); however, treatments for social deficits are notably lacking. Elucidating brain circuits and neuromodulatory signaling systems that regulate sociability could facilitate a deeper understanding of ASD pathophysiology and reveal novel treatments for ASDs. Here we found that in vivo optogenetic activation of the basolateral amygdala-nucleus accumbens (BLA-NAc) glutamatergic circuit reduced SI and increased social avoidance in mice.

An event-related potential study of visual rhyming effects in native and non-native English speakers.

English monolinguals and highly proficient, but first language (L1)-dominant, Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals made rhyme judgments of visually presented English word pairs while behavioral and EEG measures were being recorded. Two types of conditions were considered: rhyming and nonrhyming pairs that were orthographically dissimilar (e.g.

Effects of children's working memory capacity and processing speed on their sentence imitation performance.

Background: More limited working memory capacity and slower processing for language and cognitive tasks are characteristics of many children with language difficulties. Individual differences in processing speed have not consistently been found to predict language ability or severity of language impairment. There are conflicting views on whether working memory and processing speed are integrated or separable abilities.

When bilinguals choose a single word to speak: Electrophysiological evidence for inhibition of the native language.

Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures are reported for a study in which relatively proficient Chinese-English bilinguals named identical pictures in each of their two languages. Production occurred only in Chinese (the first language, L1) or only in English (the second language, L2) in a given block with the order counterbalanced across participants. The repetition of pictures across blocks was expected to produce facilitation in the form of faster responses and more positive ERPs.

On the time course of accessing meaning in a second language: an electrophysiological and behavioral investigation of translation recognition.

In 2 experiments, relatively proficient Chinese-English bilinguals decided whether Chinese words were the correct translations of English words. Critical trials were those on which incorrect translations were related in lexical form or meaning to the correct translation. In Experiment 1, behavioral interference was revealed for both distractor types, but event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a different time course for the 2 conditions.

Investigating sentence processing and language segmentation in explaining children's performance on a sentence-span task.

Background: Children with poor language abilities tend to perform poorly on verbal working memory tasks. This result has been interpreted as evidence that limitations in working memory capacity may interfere with the development of a mature linguistic system. However, it is possible that language abilities, such as the efficiency of sentence processing and the ability to segment language, directly influence performance on common working memory tasks.

Local and global inhibition in bilingual word production: fMRI evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals.

The current study examined the neural correlates associated with local and global inhibitory processes used by bilinguals to resolve interference between competing responses. Two groups of participants completed both blocked and mixed picture naming tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). One group first named a set of pictures in L1, and then named the same pictures in L2.

Language selection in bilingual speech: evidence for inhibitory processes.

Although bilinguals rarely make random errors of language when they speak, research on spoken production provides compelling evidence to suggest that both languages are active when only one language is spoken (e.g., [Poulisse, N.

The effects of prime visibility on ERP measures of masked priming.

In two experiments, the effect of the duration (40, 80 and 120 ms) of pattern masked prime words on subsequent target word processing was measured using event-related potentials. In Experiment 1, target words were either repetitions of the prior masked prime (car-CAR) or were another unrelated word (job-CAR). In Experiment 2, primes and targets were either semantically related (cap-HAT) or were unrelated (car-HAT).

Imaging phonology without print: assessing the neural correlates of phonemic awareness using fMRI.

Acquisition of phonological processing skills, such as the ability to segment words into corresponding speech sounds, is critical to the development of efficient reading. Prior neuroimaging studies of phonological processing have often relied on auditory stimuli or print-mediated tasks that may be problematic for various theoretical and empirical reasons. For the current study, we developed a task to evaluate phonological processing that used visual stimuli but did not require interpretation of orthographic forms.

Event-related potential indices of masked repetition priming.

Two experiments sought to identify event-related potential (ERP) correlates of masked repetition priming of words in lists and to verify that such effects are not due to brief prime durations. In Experiment 1, prime stimuli were masked and their durations were individually titrated for each participant. Targets that were immediate or delayed repetitions of masked primes resulted in attenuation of the N400, with little or no enhancement of a late positive component (LPC).

Speed of processing of the visual-orthographic and auditory-phonological systems in adult dyslexics: the contribution of "asynchrony" to word recognition deficits.

This study investigated whether "asynchrony" in speed of processing (SOP) between the visual-orthographic and auditory-phonological modalities contributes to word recognition deficits among adult dyslexics. Male university students with a history of diagnosed dyslexia were compared to age-matched normal readers on a variety of experimental measures while event-related potentials and reaction time data were collected. Measures were designed to evaluate auditory and visual processing for non-linguistic (tones and shapes) and linguistic (phonemes and graphemes) low-level stimuli as well as higher-level orthographic and phonological processing (in a lexical decision task).