Atypical effective connectivity from the frontal cortex to striatum in alcohol use disorder.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a profound psychiatric condition marked by disrupted connectivity among distributed brain regions, indicating impaired functional integration. Previous connectome studies utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have predominantly focused on undirected functional connectivity, while the specific alterations in directed effective connectivity (EC) associated with AUD remain unclear. To address this issue, this study utilized multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and spectral dynamic causal modeling (DCM).

Neural correlates of processing sentences and compound words in Chinese.

Sentence reading involves multiple linguistic operations including processing of lexical and compositional semantics, and determining structural and grammatical relationships among words. Previous studies on Indo-European languages have associated left anterior temporal lobe (aTL) and left interior frontal gyrus (IFG) with reading sentences compared to reading unstructured word lists. To examine whether these brain regions are also involved in reading a typologically distinct language with limited morphosyntax and lack of agreement between sentential arguments, an FMRI study was conducted to compare passive reading of Chinese sentences, unstructured word lists and disconnected character lists that are created by only changing the order of an identical set of characters.

Neural correlates of merging number words.

Complex number words (e.g., "twenty two") are formed by merging together several simple number words (e.

Feature-specific transition from positive mismatch response to mismatch negativity in early infancy: mismatch responses to vowels and initial consonants.

This study investigated how phonological saliency, deviance size, and maturation affect mismatch responses (MMRs) in early infancy. MMRs to Mandarin vowels and initial consonants were measured using a multi-deviant oddball paradigm in adults, newborns, and 6-month-olds. The vowel condition consisted of Mandarin syllable da as the standard, du as the large deviant and di as small deviant.

Neural correlates of acoustic cues of English lexical stress in Cantonese-speaking children.

The present study investigated the temporal course of neural discriminations of acoustic cues of English lexical stress (i.e., pitch, intensity and duration) in Cantonese-speaking children.

Mismatch responses to lexical tone, initial consonant, and vowel in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers.

The present study investigates how age, phonological saliency, and deviance size affect the presence of mismatch negativity (MMN) and positive mismatch response (P-MMR). This work measured the auditory mismatch responses to Mandarin lexical tones, initial consonants, and vowels in 4- to 6-year-old preschoolers using the multiple-deviant oddball paradigm. The data showed the coexistence of MMN and P-MMR in the same age group when responding to the three types of syllabic features in Mandarin.

The time course of contextual effects on visual word recognition.

Sentence comprehension depends on continuous prediction of upcoming words. However, when and how contextual information affects the bottom-up streams of visual word recognition is unknown. This study examined the effects of word frequency and contextual predictability (cloze probability of a target word embedded in the sentence) on N1, P200, and N400 components, which are related to various cognitive operations in early visual processing, perceptual decoding, and semantic processing.

Number of sense effects of Chinese disyllabic compounds in the two hemispheres.

The current study manipulated the visual field and the number of senses of the first character in Chinese disyllabic compounds to investigate how the related senses (polysemy) of the constituted character in the compounds were represented and processed in the two hemispheres. The ERP results in experiment 1 revealed crossover patterns in the left hemisphere (LH) and the right hemisphere (RH). The sense facilitation in the LH was in favor of the assumption of single-entry representation for senses.

Temporal dynamics of the consistency effect in reading Chinese: an event-related potentials study.

This study aimed to explore the temporal dynamics of the consistency effect in reading Chinese phonograms. High-consistency and low-consistency characters were used in the homophone judgment task, and the event-related potentials were recorded. The data showed that low-consistency characters elicited greater N170 amplitude in the temporal-occipital region and greater P200 amplitude in the frontal region than high-consistency characters, whereas high-consistency characters showed greater amplitude of the N400 negativity than low-consistency characters.

The temporal signatures of semantic and phonological activations for Chinese sublexical processing: an event-related potential study.

A large number of Chinese characters are made up by pairing a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The phonetic radical usually gives a phonological clue for the pronunciation of the whole character but does not contribute to its meaning. Using an event-related potential (ERP) measurement, the present study was able to trace the very intricate interplay between phonological and semantic information embedded in the phonetic radical.

Neuronal correlates of consistency and frequency effects on Chinese character naming: an event-related fMRI study.

This event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (efMRI) study aims to investigate the central representations of Chinese orthography-to-phonology transformation (OPT) by simultaneously manipulating character frequency and consistency. Bilateral inferior frontal cortices (including Broca's area and insula), the left temporoparietal region (superior parietal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus), and the left temporal-occipital junction showed greater activation, especially in low-frequency conditions, when naming inconsistent characters as compared to consistent ones. These findings suggest that these regions are involved in the sublexical conversion of orthographic input into phonological codes in naming Chinese.