Listeners track talker-specific prosody to deal with talker-variability.

One of the challenges in speech perception is that listeners must deal with considerable segmental and suprasegmental variability in the acoustic signal due to differences between talkers. Most previous studies have focused on how listeners deal with segmental variability. In this EEG experiment, we investigated whether listeners track talker-specific usage of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress to recognize spoken words correctly.

Mediated phonological-semantic priming in spoken word production: Evidence for cascaded processing from picture-word interference.

The cognitive architecture that allows humans to retrieve words from the mental lexicon has been investigated for decades. While there is consensus regarding a two-step architecture involving lexical-conceptual and phonological word-form levels of processing, accounts of how activation spreads between them (e.g.

Development of imaging-based risk scores for prediction of intracranial haemorrhage and ischaemic stroke in patients taking antithrombotic therapy after ischaemic stroke or transient ischaemic attack: a pooled analysis of individual patient data from cohort studies.

Background: Balancing the risks of recurrent ischaemic stroke and intracranial haemorrhage is important for patients treated with antithrombotic therapy after ischaemic stroke or transient ischaemic attack. However, existing predictive models offer insufficient performance, particularly for assessing the risk of intracranial haemorrhage. We aimed to develop new risk scores incorporating clinical variables and cerebral microbleeds, an MRI biomarker of intracranial haemorrhage and ischaemic stroke risk.

ASH: an Automatic pipeline to generate realistic and individualized chronic Stroke volume conduction Head models.

Large structural brain changes, such as chronic stroke lesions, alter the current pathways throughout the patients' head and therefore have to be taken into account when performing transcranial direct current stimulation simulations.We implement, test and distribute the first MATLAB pipeline that automatically generates realistic and individualized volume conduction head models of chronic stroke patients, by combining the already existing software SimNIBS, for the mesh generation, and lesion identification with neighborhood data analysis, for the lesion identification. To highlight the impact of our pipeline, we investigated the sensitivity of the electric field distribution to the lesion location and lesion conductivity in 16 stroke patients' datasets.

Electrophysiological evidence for cross-language interference in foreign-language attrition.

Foreign language attrition (FLA) appears to be driven by interference from other, more recently-used languages (Mickan et al., 2020). Here we tracked these interference dynamics electrophysiologically to further our understanding of the underlying processes.

Antioxidant treatment ameliorates prefrontal hypomyelination and cognitive deficits in a rat model of schizophrenia.

Cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia (SZ) is thought to arise from neurodevelopmental abnormalities that include interneuron hypomyelination in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Here we report that RNA-sequencing of the medial (m)PFC of the APO-SUS rat model with SZ-relevant cognitive inflexibility revealed antioxidant metabolism as the most-enriched differentially expressed pathway. Antioxidant-related gene expression was altered throughout postnatal development and preceded hypomyelination.

How the speed of word finding depends on ventral tract integrity in primary progressive aphasia.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical neurodegenerative syndrome with word finding problems as a core clinical symptom. Many aspects of word finding have been clarified in psycholinguistics using picture naming and a picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm, which emulates naming under contextual noise. However, little is known about how word finding depends on white-matter tract integrity, in particular, the atrophy of tracts located ventrally to the Sylvian fissure.

Narrowband multivariate source separation for semi-blind discovery of experiment contrasts.

Background: Electrophysiological recordings contain mixtures of signals from distinct neural sources, impeding a straightforward interpretation of the sensor-level data. This mixing is particularly detrimental when distinct sources resonate in overlapping frequencies. Fortunately, the mixing is linear and instantaneous.

Effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left posterior superior temporal gyrus on picture-word interference.

Word-production theories argue that during language production, a concept activates multiple lexical candidates in left temporal cortex, and the intended word is selected from this set. Evidence for theories on spoken-word production comes, for example, from the picture-word interference task, where participants name pictures superimposed by congruent (e.g.

White matter hyperintensities at critical crossroads for executive function and verbal abilities in small vessel disease.

The presence of white matter lesions in patients with cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is among the main causes of cognitive decline. We investigated the relation between white matter hyperintensity (WMH) locations and executive and language abilities in 442 SVD patients without dementia with varying burden of WMH. We used Stroop Word Reading, Stroop Color Naming, Stroop Color-Word Naming, and Category Fluency as language measures with varying degrees of executive demands.

Key role for lipids in cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a psychiatric disorder with a convoluted etiology that includes cognitive symptoms, which arise from among others a dysfunctional dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). In our search for the molecular underpinnings of the cognitive deficits in SZ, we here performed RNA sequencing of gray matter from the dlPFC of SZ patients and controls. We found that the differentially expressed RNAs were enriched for mRNAs involved in the Liver X Receptor/Retinoid X Receptor (LXR/RXR) lipid metabolism pathway.

Long-term auditory processing outcomes in early implanted young adults with cochlear implants: The mismatch negativity vs. P300 response.

Objective: Long-term outcomes of early implanted, young adult cochlear implant (CI) users remain variable. We measured auditory discrimination by means of event-related potentials in this population to examine whether variability at the level of cortical auditory processing helps to explain speech abilities.

Methods: Using an auditory oddball paradigm, the P300 and Mismatch Negativity (MMN) were measured in 8 young adult CI users and 14 normal-hearing peers.

A data-driven method to identify frequency boundaries in multichannel electrophysiology data.

Background: Electrophysiological recordings of the brain often exhibit neural oscillations, defined as narrowband bumps that deviate from the background power spectrum. These narrowband dynamics are grouped into frequency ranges, and the study of how activities in these ranges are related to cognition and disease is a major part of the neuroscience corpus. Frequency ranges are nearly always defined according to integer boundaries, such as 4-8 Hz for the theta band and 8-12 Hz for the alpha band.

Low-cost and versatile electrodes for extracellular chronic recordings in rodents.

Electrophysiological data are used to investigate fundamental properties of brain function, its relation to cognition, and its dysfunction in diseases. The development of reliable and open-source systems for electrophysiological data acquisition is decreasing the total cost of constructing and operating an electrophysiology laboratory, and facilitates low-cost methods to extract and analyze the data (Siegle et al., 2017).

Multiple Midfrontal Thetas Revealed by Source Separation of Simultaneous MEG and EEG.

Theta-band (∼6 Hz) rhythmic activity within and over the medial PFC ("midfrontal theta") has been identified as a distinctive signature of "response conflict," the competition between multiple actions when only one action is goal-relevant. Midfrontal theta is traditionally conceptualized and analyzed under the assumption that it is a unitary signature of conflict that can be uniquely identified at one electrode (typically FCz). Here we recorded simultaneous MEG and EEG (total of 328 sensors) in 9 human subjects (7 female) and applied a feature-guided multivariate source-separation decomposition to determine whether conflict-related midfrontal theta is a unitary or multidimensional feature of the data.

Lexical-semantic and executive deficits revealed by computational modelling: A drift diffusion model perspective.

Flexible language use requires coordinated functioning of two systems: conceptual representations and control. The interaction between the two systems can be observed when people are asked to match a word to a picture. Participants are slower and less accurate for related word-picture pairs (word: banana, picture: apple) relative to unrelated pairs (word: banjo, picture: apple).

Onset and Severity of Early Disruptive Behavioral Disorders in Treatment-Seeking Substance Use Disorder Patients with and without Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

Aims: This study addressed the age of onset of conduct disorder (CD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) in treatment-seeking substance use disorder (SUD) patients with and without adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and its association with early onset of SUD.

Methods: We examined data from the 2nd International ADHD in Substance Use Disorders Prevalence Study, including 400 adults in SUD treatment from Puerto Rico, Hungary, and Australia. ADHD, SUD, and CD/ODD were assessed with the Conners Adult ADHD Diagnostic Interview for DSM-IV, the MINI International Neuropsychiatric Interview, and the K-SADS, respectively.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Increases Nicotine Addiction Severity in Adults Seeking Treatment for Substance Use Disorders: The Role of Personality Disorders.

Aims: To examine the role of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and impulsive personality disorders in nicotine addiction severity among treatment-seeking substance use disorder (SUD) patients.

Methods: In a cross-sectional study, we examined data from the second International ADHD in Substance Use Disorders Prevalence Study (IASP-2) on 402 adults in SUD treatment from Puerto Rico, Hungary, and Australia using diagnostic interviews for ADHD, antisocial (ASP) and borderline (BPD) personality disorders, and the self-report Fagerström Test of Nicotine Dependence (FTND). We compared SUD patients with and without ADHD on nicotine addiction severity.

Across-session consistency of context-driven language processing: A magnetoencephalography study.

Changes in brain organization following damage are commonly observed, but they remain poorly understood. These changes are often studied with imaging techniques that overlook the temporal granularity at which language processes occur. By contrast, electrophysiological measures provide excellent temporal resolution.

Interneuron hypomyelination is associated with cognitive inflexibility in a rat model of schizophrenia.

Impaired cognitive functioning is a core feature of schizophrenia, and is hypothesized to be due to myelination as well as interneuron defects during adolescent prefrontal cortex (PFC) development. Here we report that in the apomorphine-susceptible (APO-SUS) rat model, which has schizophrenia-like features, a myelination defect occurred specifically in parvalbumin interneurons. The adult rats displayed medial PFC (mPFC)-dependent cognitive inflexibility, and a reduced number of mature oligodendrocytes and myelinated parvalbumin inhibitory axons in the mPFC.

The role of domain-general inhibition in inflectional encoding: Producing the past tense.

According to a prominent account of inflectional encoding (Pinker, 1999; Pinker & Ullman, 2002b), regular forms are encoded by a rule-governed combination of stems and affixes, whereas irregular forms are retrieved from memory while inhibiting rule application. Sahin, Pinker, and Halgren (2006) suggested that this concerns a domain-general mechanism. Previous research on domain-general inhibition has shown that when switching between tasks, languages, or phrase types, an asymmetrical switch cost is obtained, which has been attributed to overcoming previous inhibition of the predominant response.

Transient perturbation of the left temporal cortex evokes plasticity-related reconfiguration of the lexical network.

While much progress has been made in how brain organization supports language function, the language network's ability to adapt to immediate disturbances by means of reorganization remains unclear. The aim of this study was to examine acute reorganizational changes in brain activity related to conceptual and lexical retrieval in unimpaired language production following transient disruption of the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG). In a randomized single-blind within-subject experiment, we recorded the electroencephalogram from 16 healthy participants during a context-driven picture-naming task.