This study aims to shed light on the issue whether familiar allophonic variation is encoded in word representations. Both Italian speakers born in Trentino and speakers born in the Central-Southern regions of Italy took part in the experiment. We tested the MMN elicited by the same word encompassing two different allophones, one of which was more familiar to one group of participants than to the other, depending on their regional variety of Italian. The Trentino group showed an enhanced MMN for the word embedding the familiar variant while Central-Southern speakers showed no difference. The amplitude of the MMN for the unfamiliar word variant in Trentino speakers showed an inverse correlation with the passive exposure to the Trentino dialect. We conclude that words embedding familiar and unfamiliar allophones are differently represented in the brain of native speakers of regional language and the degree of differentiation is modulated by individual experience.
The neural representations for compositional processing have so far been mostly studied during sentence comprehension. In an fMRI study of sentence production, we investigated the brain representations for compositional processing during speaking. We used a rapid serial visual presentation sentence recall paradigm to elicit sentence production from the conceptual memory of an event.
Laboratoire Cognition Langage & Développement (LCLD), Centre de Recherche Cognition et Neurosciences (CRCN), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Av. F. Roosevelt, 50 /CP 191, 1050, Brussels, Belgium.
Lexical competition between newly acquired and already established representations of written words is considered a marker of word integration into the mental lexicon. To date, studies about the emergence of lexical competition involved mostly artificial training procedures based on overexposure and explicit instructions for memorization. Yet, in real life, novel word encounters occur mostly without explicit learning intent, through reading texts with words appearing rarely.
Unlabelled: The topographic organization of category-selective responses in human ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC) and its relationship to regions subserving language functions is remarkably uniform across individuals. This arrangement is thought to result from the clustering of neurons responding to similar inputs, constrained by intrinsic architecture and tuned by experience. We examined the malleability of this organization in individuals with unilateral resection of VOTC during childhood for the management of drug-resistant epilepsy.
Human aging affects the ability to remember new experiences, in part, because of altered neural function during memory formation. One potential contributor to age-related memory decline is diminished neural selectivity -- i.e.
Introduction: The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has accentuated the debate on the need for vaccination and called into question the need to increasingly bring this topic, which is widely disseminated in the scientific world, to school classes at all schooling phases. In this scenario, science education plays a key role in disseminating knowledge about the importance of vaccination and the impacting factors of a lack of immunization. In order to better understand this movement, it is necessary to understand the representations of individuals as a way of broadening paths to change this scenario.
