Noise Modulates Crosslinguistic Effects on Second-Language Auditory Word Recognition.

Purpose: This study investigates whether crosslinguistic effects on auditory word recognition are modulated by the quality of the auditory signal (clear and noisy).

Method: In an online experiment, a group of Spanish-English bilingual listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task, in their second language, English. Words and pseudowords were either presented in the clear or were embedded in white auditory noise.

Activating words without language: beta and theta oscillations reflect lexical access and control processes during verbal and non-verbal object recognition tasks.

The intention to name an object modulates neural responses during object recognition tasks. However, the nature of this modulation is still unclear. We established whether a core operation in language, i.

Real-time feedback reduces participant motion during task-based fMRI.

The potential negative impact of head movement during fMRI has long been appreciated. Although a variety of prospective and retrospective approaches have been developed to help mitigate these effects, reducing head movement in the first place remains the most appealing strategy for optimizing data quality. Real-time interventions, in which participants are provided feedback regarding their scan-to-scan motion, have recently shown promise in reducing motion during resting state fMRI.

"Neural dynamics supporting longitudinal plasticity of action naming across languages: MEG evidence from bilingual brain tumor patients".

Previous evidence suggests that distinct ventral and dorsal streams respectively underpin the semantic processing of object and action knowledge. Recently, we found that brain tumor patients with dorsal gliomas in frontoparietal hubs show a selective longitudinal compensation (post-vs. pre-surgery) during the retrieval of lexico-semantic information about actions (but not objects), indexed by power increases in beta rhythms (13-28 Hz).

When Orthographic Representations are Generated in the Absence of Orthography.

When acquiring novel spoken words, English-speaking children generate preliminary orthographic representations even before seeing the words' spellings (Wegener et al., 2018). Interestingly, these are generated even when novel words' spellings are uncertain, at least in transparent languages like Spanish (Jevtović et al.

Intrasession and Intersession Reproducibility of Artificial Scotoma pRF Mapping Results at Ultra-High Fields.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with population receptive field (pRF) mapping allows for associating positions on the visual cortex to areas on the visual field. Apart from applications in healthy subjects, this method can also be used to examine dysfunctions in patients suffering from partial visual field losses. While such objective measurement of visual deficits (scotoma) is of great importance for, e.

Adult Chinese Spanish L2ers' acquisition of phi-agreement and temporal concord: The role of morphosyntactic features and adverb/subject-verb distance.

Introduction: While phi-agreement and concord are suggested to differ in nature during the first language (L1) acquisition, the acquisition of adverb-verb TC and SV person/number agreement by Chinese Spanish second language (L2) learners has only received limited attention. The current study examined morphosyntactic processing by advanced Chinese Spanish L2 learners (L2ers), whose L1 lacks the explicit morphological marking of tense and phi-agreement.

Method: Chinese Spanish L2ers and native Spanish speakers were asked to complete a self-paced grammaticality judgment task, where the grammaticality of adverb-verb TC and SV person/number agreement as well as the adverb/subject-verb distance were manipulated.

Don't force it! Gradient speech categorization calls for continuous categorization tasks.

Research on speech categorization and phoneme recognition has relied heavily on tasks in which participants listen to stimuli from a speech continuum and are asked to either classify each stimulus (identification) or discriminate between them (discrimination). Such tasks rest on assumptions about how perception maps onto discrete responses that have not been thoroughly investigated. Here, we identify critical challenges in the link between these tasks and theories of speech categorization.

Functional underpinnings of feedback-enhanced test-potentiated encoding.

The testing effect describes the finding that retrieval practice enhances memory performance compared to restudy practice. Prior evidence demonstrates that this effect can be boosted by providing feedback after retrieval attempts (i.e.

Want to quickly adapt to distorted speech and become a better listener? Read lips, not text.

When listening to distorted speech, does one become a better listener by looking at the face of the speaker or by reading subtitles that are presented along with the speech signal? We examined this question in two experiments in which we presented participants with spectrally distorted speech (4-channel noise-vocoded speech). During short training sessions, listeners received auditorily distorted words or pseudowords that were partially disambiguated by concurrently presented lipread information or text. After each training session, listeners were tested with new degraded auditory words.

Neurodevelopmental oscillatory basis of speech processing in noise.

Humans' extraordinary ability to understand speech in noise relies on multiple processes that develop with age. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we characterize the underlying neuromaturational basis by quantifying how cortical oscillations in 144 participants (aged 5-27 years) track phrasal and syllabic structures in connected speech mixed with different types of noise. While the extraction of prosodic cues from clear speech was stable during development, its maintenance in a multi-talker background matured rapidly up to age 9 and was associated with speech comprehension.

Impaired neural entrainment to low frequency amplitude modulations in English-speaking children with dyslexia or dyslexia and DLD.

Neural synchronization to amplitude-modulated noise at three frequencies (2 Hz, 5 Hz, 8 Hz) thought to be important for syllable perception was investigated in English-speaking school-aged children. The theoretically-important delta-band (∼2Hz, stressed syllable level) was included along with two syllable-level rates. The auditory steady state response (ASSR) was recorded using EEG in 36 7-to-12-year-old children.

Tactile expectancy modulates occipital alpha oscillations in early blindness.

Alpha oscillatory activity is thought to contribute to visual expectancy through the engagement of task-relevant occipital regions. In early blindness, occipital alpha oscillations are systematically reduced, suggesting that occipital alpha depends on visual experience. However, it remains possible that alpha activity could serve expectancy in non-visual modalities in blind people, especially considering that previous research has shown the recruitment of the occipital cortex for non-visual processing.

Cortical tracking of lexical speech units in a multi-talker background is immature in school-aged children.

Children have more difficulty perceiving speech in noise than adults. Whether this difficulty relates to an immature processing of prosodic or linguistic elements of the attended speech is still unclear. To address the impact of noise on linguistic processing per se, we assessed how babble noise impacts the cortical tracking of intelligible speech devoid of prosody in school-aged children and adults.

Body into Narrative: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Signatures of Action Text Processing After Ecological Motor Training.

Embodied cognition research indicates that sensorimotor training can influence action concept processing. Yet, most studies employ isolated (pseudo)randomized stimuli and require repetitive single-effector responses, thus lacking ecological validity. Moreover, the neural signatures of these effects remain poorly understood.

One-to-One or One ? Linking Sound-to-Letter Mappings to Speech Sound Perception and Production in Early Readers.

Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds.

Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a speech perception and a production task.

Dissociable rhythmic mechanisms enhance memory for conscious and nonconscious perceptual contents.

Understanding the neural mechanisms of conscious and unconscious experience is a major goal of fundamental and translational neuroscience. Here, we target the early visual cortex with a protocol of noninvasive, high-resolution alternating current stimulation while participants performed a delayed target-probe discrimination task and reveal dissociable mechanisms of mnemonic processing for conscious and unconscious perceptual contents. Entraining β-rhythms in bilateral visual areas preferentially enhanced short-term memory for seen information, whereas α-entrainment in the same region preferentially enhanced short-term memory for unseen information.

Local Temporal Regularities in Child-Directed Speech in Spanish.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language.

Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also read aloud (CDS vs. adult-directed speech [ADS]).

Cross-modal and cross-language activation in bilinguals reveals lexical competition even when words or signs are unheard or unseen.

We exploit the phenomenon of cross-modal, cross-language activation to examine the dynamics of language processing. Previous within-language work showed that seeing a sign coactivates phonologically related signs, just as hearing a spoken word coactivates phonologically related words. In this study, we conducted a series of eye-tracking experiments using the visual world paradigm to investigate the time course of cross-language coactivation in hearing bimodal bilinguals (Spanish-Spanish Sign Language) and unimodal bilinguals (Spanish/Basque).

Information-seeking across auditory scenes by an echolocating dolphin.

Dolphins gain information through echolocation, a publicly accessible sensory system in which dolphins produce clicks and process returning echoes, thereby both investigating and contributing to auditory scenes. How their knowledge of these scenes contributes to their echoic information-seeking is unclear. Here, we investigate their top-down cognitive processes in an echoic matching-to-sample task in which targets and auditory scenes vary in their decipherability and shift from being completely unfamiliar to familiar.

An ERP investigation of accented isolated single word processing.

Previous studies show that there are differences in native and non-native speech processing (Lev-Ari, 2018). However, less is known about the differences between processing native and dialectal accents. Is dialectal processing more similar to foreign or native speech? To address this, two theories have been proposed.

Reproducible protocol to obtain and measure first-order relay human thalamic white-matter tracts.

The "primary" or "first-order relay" nuclei of the thalamus feed the cerebral cortex with information about ongoing activity in the environment or the subcortical motor systems. Because of the small size of these nuclei and the high specificity of their input and output pathways, new imaging protocols are required to investigate thalamocortical interactions in human perception, cognition and language. The goal of the present study was twofold: I) to develop a reconstruction protocol based on in vivo diffusion MRI to extract and measure the axonal fiber tracts that originate or terminate specifically in individual first-order relay nuclei; and, II) to test the reliability of this reconstruction protocol.

Mental Representation of Word Family Structure: The Case of German Infinitives, Conversion Nouns and Other Morphologically Related Forms.

This study investigates how two non-finite forms, infinitives and conversion nouns, are represented in the mind of L1 and L2 speakers and what is their relationship to other members of the corresponding word family. German native speakers and proficient German learners with Czech as L1 participated in four overt priming experiments involving a grammatical judgement task. We investigated the relationship between infinitives (Experiment 1) and conversion nouns (Experiment 2) and formally identical verbal or noun forms.