Recent study has suggested semantic memory deterioration may be the earliest cognitive changes in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Few previous researchers have investigated specific changes in the semantic structures in the memory of patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). This study examined the clustering performance in semantic fluency among 160 participants in various MCI subgroups (aMCI

The dissociation between nouns and verbs has been reported in behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies. It is still unclear whether the spatial and temporal differences between nouns and verbs arise from semantic differences or morpho-syntactic differences associated with the two word classes. Regarding the semantic accounts, it is also unknown whether the word class effect should

This study explored how language proficiency influences the Stroop effect and the reverse-Stroop effect. The result indicated that both the Stroop effect and the reverse-Stroop effect in the dominant language context were greater than the effects in the non-dominant language context, respectively. However, language proficiency influenced the two effects with different mechanisms. The influence of language

Research has shown that older adults have increased difficulty comprehending foreign-accented speech. As these studies have only used behavioral measures, we exploited the fine-grained temporal resolution of EEG/ERPs to examine neural signatures of foreign- and native-accented sentence comprehension in older adults. Older adults, all normal-hearing monolingual English speakers, listened to foreign

The present study investigated brain activity elicited by character transposition processing of two-character Chinese words using event-related potentials (ERPs) with a two-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The behavioral results showed higher accuracy with canonical and transposed words than pseudowords in the short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, 249 ms) condition, but not in the

In this study, the representation of sensation experiences was manipulated to investigate the effect of cognition on the embodiment process. Participants used two computer mouse devices (one heavy and one light) to categorize currency words in terms of value. The default “weight-importance” association (Experiment 1) and a manipulated “weight-encumbrance” association (Experiment 2) were applied to

For successful language production in a target language, bilingual individuals with aphasia must inhibit interference from the non-target language. It is currently unknown if successful inhibition of a non-target language involves general cognitive control (domain-general cognitive control) or whether it is control specific to linguistic mechanisms (domain-specific language control) during language

In the present study, two experiments were carried out to investigate how the time course of spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese was modulated by prime modality with the unimodal auditory priming and cross-modal priming designs respectively. Spoken word primes were used in the first experiment, and written primes in the second. The phonological relation between primes and targets was manipulated

Many language functions are traditionally assigned to cortical brain areas, leaving the contributions of subcortical structures to language processing largely unspecified. The present study examines a potential role of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in lexical processing, specifically, reading aloud of words (e.g., ‘fate’) and pseudowords (e.g., ‘fape’). We recorded local field potentials simultaneously

In recent years, there has been much interest in understanding the functional architecture of the brain networks in skilled and poor readers with resting-state methodology. To date, the evidence points to minimal connectivity differences between skilled and impaired readers, even when their behavioural performances are markedly different, leading to claims that more domain general networks (e.g., attention)

Unitization is described as the process whereby two or more previously separate items or stimulus components are integrated into a single unit, either through perceiving or conceiving of a structure (e.g., semantic meaning) that would connect the disparate units. It is generally believed that semantic association within unitized representations is stable once established. However, the opposing view

Previous research diverges regarding the role of bilingualism in enhancing executive functions and also whether bilingualism affects the whole executive function system or specific components of it. The present study investigated the effects of bilingualism on the executive functions (inhibitory control and monitoring processes) of bilinguals who had acquired their L2 through formal instruction and

Results are mixed regarding the question of whether listening to speech activates automatic speech specific neural processes, or whether such activity is due to general cognitive mechanisms such as attention and memory. We suggest that analyzing the dynamics of mu rhythms over the course of a trial using event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs) is useful for disentangling the competing hypotheses

Pronouns constitute a heterogeneous class of linguistic elements, allowing for expression of referential relationships. Pronouns have an important place in daily communication which speakers and listeners rely heavily on for. Aphasia literature has evidenced that pronoun processing is impaired in people with aphasia (PWA), although explanations underpinning pronoun impairments are mixed. To address

We know that linguistic ability tends to diminish in aging. The question we addressed was whether it is selectively affected, and if so, whether aging affects sentence processing in the same way it affects other cognitive abilities. To this end, we conducted a fine-grained investigation into a critical aspect of sentences – the number of negations they contain. We studied the processing costs of multiple

Abstract We used event-related brain potentials to identify the neurophysiological responses of Arabic speakers to processing full and deflected agreement in plural noun-adjective constructions in (written) Standard Arabic. Under full agreement, an adjective fully agrees in number and gender with a preceding plural noun; but this happens only when this noun is human. However, under deflected agreement

Abstract This paper reports two experiments using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to investigate whether word-level lexical stress involves the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) using a grammar classification task designed to elicit a typicality effect. Experiment 1 used text presented stimuli and, although was not able to elicit a typicality effect, found response times were significantly

Abstract Previous behavioral studies have suggested that word concreteness affects the similarity of semantic representations between native and second languages. However, it is unclear whether and how word concreteness influences the cross-language similarity in neural representations. In the present study, we quantified the neural pattern similarity between native and second languages by using representational

Abstract Objective Studies have demonstrated that damage to Broca's area causes problems in phonological processing, but leaves semantic processing mostly preserved. The current investigation explored whether problems in phonological processing caused by injury to Broca's area extends to numbers. Method Patient LXM presented with an injury to the left anterior fronto-temporal cortex (including Broca's

Recent studies have demonstrated variation in language processing for monolingual and bilingual speakers alike, suggesting that only by considering individual differences will an accurate picture of the consequences of language experience be adequately understood. This approach can be illustrated in ERP research that has shown that sentence contexts that traditionally elicit a P600 component in response

Abstract The Principle A of the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1986) prescribes that a reflexive should refer to a local antecedent within the local syntactic domain containing the reflexive. However, the Chinese (simple) reflexive ziji (自己, standing for oneself) can refer not only to a local but also to a long-distance antecedent in sentences, leaving room for a long - distance/local anaphoric ambiguity

Abstract Subcortical aphasia results from damage to subcortical regions, but the exact underlying mechanism is unclear. We investigated the influence of arcuate fasciculus (AF) damage on the severity of subcortical aphasia after stroke using brain diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). We enrolled subjects from the “Stroke Outcome Prediction (STOP)” database: 41 patients with first-ever, left hemispheric

Abstract The influence of senses and their combinations has already proven invaluable to language comprehension studies; however, it is not clear to what extent they may add to the functional characteristics of the biphasic, language-related electrophysiological markers. Therefore, to integrate information from different sensory modalities and investigate how sense combinations modulate the N400 and

Grammatical gender processing is a classic topic in the neurolinguistic literature. However, most of the studies consider major standard languages, such as English, Dutch, Spanish or Italian. This is a limitation, since these languages display relatively simple systems that are fairly stable and do not allow to address language variation and change. Here we investigated gender agreement in a dialect

Difficulty reading single words represents a common sequel of acquired neurological injury and common component in aphasic breakdown. Investigation of reading disturbances in Serbian speakers with aphasia has been hampered by lack of any standardised clinical test. We report the development of the Serbian Word Reading Test (SWRT). This first clinical single word assessment for the Serbian language

We report on a time-frequency analysis of electroencephalographic activity as native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) resolve anaphoric reference at the recursive edge of embedded clauses in multi-clausal filler-gap dependencies. The fillers in these wh-dependencies involve lexically selected noun complements (Comp): quelle décision à propos de lui/à son sujet ‘which decision about him’

The study investigated the effect of unintentional learning of semantically unrelated word pairs on event-related brain potentials. Two experiments were conducted, in whose acquisition phase participants listened to five pairs of semantically unrelated words, each pair being repeated twenty times. In the test phase of Experiment 1, these “old” pairs were presented mixed with “new” pairs containing

Reference to the time of an event can be encoded through various devices in language. While the neural processing of time reference in tense languages has been explored through tense inflection, relatively little is known about such processing through aspect in a tenseless language. The current study investigated how Mandarin speakers process perfective aspect markers -le and -guo, which are usually

Aphemia with pure word dumbness is a relatively rare clinical syndrome caused by injury to the Broca area of the dominant hemisphere. Patients with this syndrome have significant difficulties in oral expression, whereas other language functions, such as written expression and comprehension, are normal. In this study, a patient without no evidence of structural brain lesions presented with aphemia with

Abstract The present study examined how healthy aging and aphasia influence the capacity for readers to generate structural predictions during online reading, and how animacy cues influence this process. Non-brain-damaged younger (n = 24) and older (n = 12) adults (Experiment 1) and individuals with aphasia (IWA; n = 11; Experiment 2) read subject relative and object relative sentences in an eye-tracking

Abstract It is unclear whether word stress in a language is stored as part of the word or whether it is generated by a rule. We test the generativist hypothesis of lexical storage stating that only unpredictable stress is stored in long-term memory against the contrasting usage-based approach assuming that all phonetic information regardless of its (un)predictability is stored in the mental lexicon

Abstract This study assessed the usefulness of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study word production in the brain. As a test case, we focused on the semantic interference effect (SIE), which has been demonstrated in many behavioral studies and has also been studied using neuroimaging techniques. Experiment 1 examined whether fNIRS can identify neural correlates of the SIE in a cross-modal

Abstract In the past 20 years, the field of bilingualism has made a substantial effort to better understand the set of cognitive mechanisms that allow bilinguals to functionally manage and use their languages. Among the mechanisms that have been identified, cognitive control has been posited to be key for proficient bilingual language processing and use. However, the role of cognitive control in developing

Abstract The current study employed electrophysiological measures to investigate semantic processing within a local classifier-noun phrase in Chinese. Toward this aim, semantic congruence between classifiers and nouns was manipulated, resulting in four conditions: (i) a strong-constraint/high-cloze plausible (SP) condition, (ii) a weak-constraint/low-cloze plausible (WP) condition, (iii) a strong-

Abstract In this study we examined the neural control mechanisms that are at play when habitual code-switchers read code-switches embedded in a sentence context. The goal was also to understand if and to what extent the putative control network that is engaged during the comprehension of code-switched sentences is modulated by the linguistic regularity of those switches. Towards that goal, we tested

Abstract Despite extensive behavioral research on complex word recognition, the neural mechanisms involved in the production of inflections in agglutinative languages, such as Finnish, are still poorly understood. Finnish inflected nouns typically involve morphophonological alternations of the stem (i.e. consonant gradation; CG), which is less common in other languages. Behavioral research on recognition

Abstract Most models of word production converge on the assumption that selecting a specific word to name is a competitive process. Monolingual speakers experience lexical competition in their spoken language (i.e., within-language competition), but bilingual speakers who constantly juggle two sets of lexical items face within- and between-language competition. It has been argued that one of the reasons

Abstract Although bilingual children and elderly have been observed to outperform monolinguals in typical executive control tasks, this bilingual advantage is not consistently found in the young adult population. Proponents of the bilingual executive control advantage argue the reason for this is that task demands in the typical tasks used are not high enough, since young adults perform at ceiling

Abstract Gerstmann's syndrome is a syndrome caused by lesions of the dominant parietal lobe. It has historically been a subject of dispute as it is often accompanied by other neuropsychological deficits such as aphasia. Novel neuropsychological tests and neuroimaging techniques have lately changed the perspective allowing to decode a conjunction of symptoms like Gerstmann's. In our case, we present

Abstract A major challenge in computing the lateralization index (LI) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is the change in the index value according to the threshold applied and the task employed. To address this problem, we previously developed a threshold-free index called AveLI. AveLI is the average of the sub-LIs that are computed at all positive intensity values as the threshold. Thus

Age of acquisition and proficiency have been identified as possible determinants in the neural localization of second language representation and in the nature of control mechanisms. However, the relationship is not yet clear between age of acquisition and proficiency on the one hand, and language switching and executive functions on the other. In the present study, we used anatomical and functional

Cognitive state analysis or reading the brain was always an exciting field for researchers. Analysis of the human brain while a person is engaged in doing a particular task is an essential topic in the recent development of neuro-imaging studies. The introduction of new non-invasive methods like PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is used to analyze the

Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) is a non-invasive, well-tolerated and inexpensive technique to stimulate the norepinephrinergic and other pathways in the brain. These pathways serve brain areas implicated in memory, emotion and cognitive control. We investigated the effect of tVNS on the ability of healthy adults to recall the order of words in a word list. Healthy young adults were tested

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effect of congruent emotional context on the processing of subsequent emotional words during discourse comprehension. We used two-sentence discourses as materials and constructed three types of discourse: one where both sentences conveyed a negative emotion (Negative-Negative), one where the first sentence conveyed a neutral emotion and the second

The ability to segment spoken words is vitally important for language learners since it is crucial for their language development and well predicts their future language skills. The possible influence of cognitive inhibition on this ability was proposed in theory. However, there is no direct evidence supporting the role and underlying mechanism of cognitive inhibition in spoken word segmentation (SWS)

Word category information (WCI) is proposed to be fundamental for syntactic learning and processing. However, it remains largely unclear how left-hemispheric key regions for language, including BA 44 in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and superior temporal gyrus (STG), interact with their right-hemispheric homologues to support the WCI-based syntactic learning. To address this question, this study

Previous research suggests differences in speech patterns between speakers with foreign accent syndrome (FAS) associated with a neurological (neurogenic FAS) versus a psychological aetiology (functional FAS). Differentiating sub-types holds important clinical implications, affecting the nature of follow-up assessment and treatment. To date, there exist no systematic comparisons between these sub-groups

The embodiment theory of linguistic meaning posits that comprehension reuses the sensory-motor systems and their neural networks. The present study aims to verify the embodiment theory by investigating the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of processing disgust-related words in Mandarin. These words were chosen because disgust is a basic emotion (e.g., it recruits neural resources in the insula) that has

Our previous work defended that the motor theory is modulated by task load, claiming that motoric participation in phonological processing plays a changing and complementary role with the “auditory part” of the phonological processing system from perception to production: the LIFG being increasingly relevant and the LSTG, decreasingly relevant. We previously targeted the LIFG with tDCS and observed

It is well established that access to the bilingual lexicon is non-selective: even in an entirely monolingual context, elements of the non-target language are active. Research has also shown that activation of the non-target language is greater at higher proficiency levels, suggesting that it may be proficiency that drives cross-language lexical activation. At the same time, the potential role of age

Abstract The present article examines the proposal that typology is a major factor guiding transfer selectivity in L3/Ln acquisition. We tested first exposure in L3/Ln using two artificial languages (ALs) lexically based in English and Spanish, focusing on gender agreement between determiners and nouns, and between nouns and adjectives. 50 L1 Spanish-L2 English speakers took part in the experiment

Abstract Although seemingly easy, speech production is a complex action involving several processes and brain regions and is often studied through the use of picture naming paradigms. Several brain regions have been identified as being involved in speech production and lexical retrieval, including several areas of the left lateral, ventral, and medial temporal cortex, and of the left lateral and medial

Abstract Both word and face recognition processes are related to the fusiform gyrus which is located in the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain. Although both processes present several similarities, there are also remarkable differences between word and face recognition processes. These differences include a vast range of approaches and result from different groups of participants. However, how

Abstract Second language (L2) learning modulates functional and anatomical neuroplasticity, as amply demonstrated by previous studies (see Li, Legault, & Litcofsky, 2014, for review). This study, combining resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), task-based fMRI, and structural MRI (sMRI), examined L2 learning-induced cross-modality neural changes in Chinese-English bilinguals

Abstract The experience of speaking two languages, particularly the age of second language acquisition (L2AoA), has been robustly associated with differences in metrics indicative of white matter structure. However, bilingual language experience is complex, described not only by acquisition but also functional language usage and proficiency. We examined whether the onset age of the second most proficient

Abstract Many ERP studies have highlighted processing difficulty for animacy violation in language, more so than non-violated sentences. However, all of these findings were for non-figurative language, and studies have rarely looked at the figurative language, such as metaphors involving animacy violation, which could be integrated to make novel and acceptable meaning. The present study aimed at assessing

Abstract Language can influence cognition in domains as varied as temporal processing, spatial categorization, and color perception (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; Winawer et al., 2007). Here, we provide converging behavioral and neural evidence that bilingual experience can change semantic associations. In Experiment 1, Spanish- and English-speaking bilinguals rated semantically

Abstract In the present study, we explored the underlying mechanisms of lexical retrieval in two languages when modulated by phonological context. To do so, we investigated the performance of bilingual patients with aphasia and healthy bilingual individuals on a blocked cyclic naming task as a measure of lexical activation and phonological encoding within their two languages. Highly proficient Catalan-Spanish

Abstract The present study aimed to explore the bilingual disadvantage in the course of speech production by comparing the naming performance and the temporal dynamics of object naming in three groups of participants: monolinguals, L1 bilinguals and L2 bilinguals. To determine the origin of the bilingual disadvantage, whether lexical or post-lexical, we manipulated the lexical frequency of the picture