Foreign and Regional Languages Make You Less Deontological.

Previous studies have shown that foreign languages can change people's responses to moral dilemmas, making them more likely to choose harm (e.g., to kill one individual in order to save a few lives).

How the hand has shaped sign languages.

In natural languages, biological constraints push toward cross-linguistic homogeneity while linguistic, cultural, and historical processes promote language diversification. Here, we investigated the effects of these opposing forces on the fingers and thumb configurations (handshapes) used in natural sign languages. We analyzed over 38,000 handshapes from 33 languages.

Language can shape the perception of oriented objects.

Seeing an object is a natural source for learning about the object's configuration. We show that language can also shape our knowledge about visual objects. We investigated sign language that enables deaf individuals to communicate through hand movements with as much expressive power as any other natural language.

Foreign language effect in decision-making: How foreign is it?

It has been shown that decisions and moral judgments differ when made using native languages compared to foreign languages. Cross-linguistic differences appeared in foreign languages that monolinguals typically acquired in school and used neither routinely nor extensively. We replicated these differences with two populations of proficient, native bilinguals (Italian-Venetian; Italian-Bergamasque).

Hands show where things are: The close similarity between sign and natural space.

Many of the signs produced across sign languages are iconic, in the sense that they resemble the concepts they represent. We examined whether location, one of basic sign parameters along with handshape and movement, is systematically used for purposes of iconicity. Our findings revealed a mapping of vertical sign space that is exploited in its entirety for encoding typical locations in natural space.

Direct electrical stimulation mapping of cognitive functions in the human brain.

Direct electrical stimulation (DES) is a well-established clinical tool for mapping cognitive functions while patients are undergoing awake neurosurgery or invasive long-term monitoring to identify epileptogenic tissue. Despite the proliferation of a range of invasive and noninvasive methods for mapping sensory, motor and cognitive processes in the human brain, DES remains the clinical gold standard for establishing the margins of brain tissue that can be safely removed while avoiding long-term neurological deficits. In parallel, and principally over the last two decades, DES has emerged as a powerful scientific tool for testing hypotheses of brain organization and mechanistic hypotheses of cognitive function.

The processing of inflected and derived words in writing.

We report on an English-speaking, aphasic individual (RB) with a spelling deficit more severely affecting orthographically irregular words for which phonologically plausible errors (PPEs) were produced. PPEs were observed for all word forms, with the exception of inflectional suffixes, despite the irregular sound-print mappings of many inflectional suffixes (e.g.

How modality-specific is morphology?

Writing has long been considered to be dependent on speaking. However, modality-specific dissociations between written and spoken word production imply that word production is supported by distinct neural mechanisms in writing, which can be impaired or spared regardless of the intactness of spoken word production. Rapp et al.

Can sign language make you better at hand processing?

The languages developed by deaf communities are unique for using visual signs produced by the hand. In the present study, we explored the cognitive effects of employing the hand as articulator. We focused on the arbitrariness of the form-meaning relationship-a fundamental feature of natural languages-and asked whether sign languages change the processing of arbitrary non-linguistic stimulus-response (S-R) associations involving the hand.

Identification and Remediation of Phonological and Motor Errors in Acquired Sound Production Impairment.

Purpose: This study aimed to test whether an approach to distinguishing errors arising in phonological processing from those arising in motor planning also predicts the extent to which repetition-based training can lead to improved production of difficult sound sequences.

Method: Four individuals with acquired speech production impairment who produced consonant cluster errors involving deletion were examined using a repetition task. We compared the acoustic details of productions with deletion errors in target consonant clusters to singleton consonants.

A selective morpho-phonological deficit?

We report on an English-speaking, aphasic individual (TB) who showed a striking dissociation in speaking with the different forms (allomorphs) that an inflection can take. Although very accurate in producing the consonantal inflections (-/s/, -/z/, -/d/, -/t/), TB consistently omitted syllabic inflections (-/əz/, -/əd/), therefore correctly saying "dogs" or "walked," but "bench" for benches or "skate" for skated. Results from control tests ruled out that TB's selective difficulties stemmed from problems in selecting the correct inflection for the syntactic context or problems related to phonological or articulatory mechanisms.

Why Saturday could be both green and red in synesthesia.

It has long been observed that certain words induce multiple synesthetic colors, a phenomenon that has remained largely unexplored. We report here on the distinct synesthetic colors two synesthetes experienced with closed sets of concepts (digits, weekdays, months). For example, Saturday was associated with green, like other word starting with s; however, Saturday also had its specific color (red).

Activation cascading in sign production.

In this study, we investigated how activation unfolds in sign production by examining whether signs that are not produced have their representations activated by semantics (cascading of activation). Deaf signers were tested with a picture-picture interference task. Participants were presented with pairs of overlapping pictures and named the green picture (target) while ignoring the red picture (distractor).

Topographical gradients of semantics and phonology revealed by temporal lobe stimulation.

Word retrieval is a fundamental component of oral communication, and it is well established that this function is supported by left temporal cortex. Nevertheless, the specific temporal areas mediating word retrieval and the particular linguistic processes these regions support have not been well delineated. Toward this end, we analyzed over 1000 naming errors induced by left temporal cortical stimulation in epilepsy surgery patients.

Serial position encoding of signs.

Reduced short-term memory (STM) capacity has been reported for sign as compared to speech when items have to be recalled in a specific order. This difference has been attributed to a more precise and efficient serial position encoding in verbal STM (used for speech) than visuo-spatial STM (used for sign). We tested in the present investigation whether the reduced STM capacity with signs stems from a lack of positional encoding available in verbal STM.

Functional differences among stimulation-identified cortical naming sites in the temporal region.

To preserve postoperative language, electrical stimulation mapping is often conducted prior to surgery involving the language-dominant hemisphere. Object naming is the task most widely used to identify language cortex, and sites where stimulation elicits naming difficulty are typically spared from resection. In clinical practice, sites classified as positive undergo no further testing regarding the underlying cause of naming failure.

Perseveration during verbal fluency in traumatic brain injury reflects impairments in working memory.

Objective: Previous studies of verbal fluency have reported higher rates of perseverative responses in both Alzheimer's disease (AD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) relative to control groups. These perseverations could arise from a number of impairments-for example, failures in working memory, inhibitory control, or word retrieval-and different clinical populations may show an increase in perseveration because of different underlying deficits. The objective of the current report is to investigate the cause of perseveration in verbal fluency in individuals with TBI and compare those results to a recent study of individuals with AD.

Modality and morphology: what we write may not be what we say.

Written language is an evolutionarily recent human invention; consequently, its neural substrates cannot be determined by the genetic code. How, then, does the brain incorporate skills of this type? One possibility is that written language is dependent on evolutionarily older skills, such as spoken language; another is that dedicated substrates develop with expertise. If written language does depend on spoken language, then acquired deficits of spoken and written language should necessarily co-occur.

How verbs and non-verbal categories navigate the syntax/semantics interface: insights from cognitive neuropsychology.

We report on two individuals with acquired language impairment who made thematic role confusion errors in both comprehension and production. Their confusions were remarkably specific, affecting the roles associated with spatial prepositions ("The box is in the bag" confused with The bag is in the box) and adjectival comparatives ("The glove is darker than the hat" confused with The hat is darker than the glove) but not the roles associated with verbs (e.g.

Early Parallel Activation of Semantics and Phonology in Picture Naming: Evidence from a Multiple Linear Regression MEG Study.

The time course of brain activation during word production has become an area of increasingly intense investigation in cognitive neuroscience. The predominant view has been that semantic and phonological processes are activated sequentially, at about 150 and 200-400 ms after picture onset. Although evidence from prior studies has been interpreted as supporting this view, these studies were arguably not ideally suited to detect early brain activation of semantic and phonological processes.

Preserved meaning in the context of impaired naming in temporal lobe epilepsy.

Objective: Word-finding difficulties are a common complaint among individuals with left (domain) temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). We tested the hypothesis that these difficulties stem from a deficit in semantic processing.

Method: We tested and compared semantic processing in left and right TLE patients and healthy controls.

On the nature of sonority in spoken word production: evidence from neuropsychology.

The concept of sonority - that speech sounds can be placed along a universal sonority scale that affects syllable structure - has proved valuable in accounting for a wide spectrum of linguistic phenomena and psycholinguistic findings. Yet, despite the success of this concept in specifying principles governing sound structure, several questions remain about sonority. One issue that needs clarification concerns its locus in the processes involved in spoken language production, and specifically whether sonority affects the computation of abstract word form representations (phonology), the encoding of context-specific features (phonetics), or both of these processes.

The interface between morphology and phonology: exploring a morpho-phonological deficit in spoken production.

Morphological and phonological processes are tightly interrelated in spoken production. During processing, morphological processes must combine the phonological content of individual morphemes to produce a phonological representation that is suitable for driving phonological processing. Further, morpheme assembly frequently causes changes in a word's phonological well-formedness that must be addressed by the phonology.

Perseverations in Alzheimer's disease: memory slips?

Previous studies of verbal fluency tasks reported higher rates of repeated responses in Alzheimer's disease (AD) compared to elderly controls. The present investigation aimed at determining if perseverations are caused by word retrieval deficits or working memory deficits, both of which are commonly observed in AD. Based on current theories of lexical processing and working memory, we derived specific predictions concerning the lag between the first occurrence of a word and its repetition.