Article
Neurosciences
Anne Koesem, Bohan Dai, James M. McQueen, Peter Hagoort
Summary: During listening, brain activity tracks the rhythmic structures of speech signals. The study investigates the impact of acoustics and intelligibility on neural tracking of speech envelope using magnetoencephalography. The results show that acoustics greatly influence the neural tracking response to speech envelope, while intelligibility does not have a direct effect on it.
Article
Neurosciences
Florian Destoky, Julie Bertels, Maxime Niesen, Vincent Wens, Marc Vander Ghinst, Antonin Rovai, Nicola Trotta, Marie Lallier, Xavier De Tiege, Mathieu Bourguignon
Summary: The study found altered neural basis of speech perception in children with dyslexia in different auditory conditions. These alterations are associated with reduced reading level, suggesting they are driven by reduced reading experience rather than a cause of dyslexia. Additionally, in severe dyslexia, altered lateralization of phrasal speech is related to impaired rapid automatized naming ability.
Article
Neurosciences
Oscar Woolnough, Cristian Donos, Aidan Curtis, Patrick S. Rollo, Zachary J. Roccaforte, Stanislas Dehaene, Simon Fischer-Baum, Nitin Tandon
Summary: Reading words aloud is a fundamental aspect of literacy. The study found that lexicality is encoded earliest in the mid-fusiform cortex and precentral sulcus, while word frequency is first represented in the mid-fusiform cortex and later in the inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal sulcus. Orthographic neighborhood sensitivity resides solely in the inferior parietal sulcus.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Yulia Oganian, Katsuaki Kojima, Assaf Breska, Chang Cai, Anne Findlay, Edward Chang, Srikantan S. Nagarajan
Summary: The amplitude envelope of speech plays a crucial role in comprehension. The phase of neural activity in the theta-delta bands tracks the phase of the speech amplitude envelope during listening. Two competing models, oscillatory entrainment and evoked response, have been proposed to explain this envelope tracking. MEG recordings and computational models were used to investigate this, revealing that neural phase-locking likely reflects discrete representation of transient information rather than oscillatory entrainment.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Biology
Filiz Tezcan, Hugo Weissbart, Andrea E. Martin
Summary: In this study, the researchers investigated the neural tracking of speech features during language comprehension. They found that both acoustic and phonemic features are encoded and tracked in the brain, with phonemes being tracked more strongly when language is comprehended. Additionally, the researchers discovered that the level of sentence and discourse constraint, as reflected by word entropy, impacts the encoding and tracking of both acoustic and phonemic features. These findings highlight the flexible modulation of speech features by language comprehension.
Article
Neurosciences
Felix Brohl, Anne Keitel, Christoph Kayser
Summary: This study explores how the brain utilizes visual lip movements and auditory signals during speech comprehension. The results show that both temporal and occipital cortices can restore unheard acoustic features and this restoration is predictive of lip-reading performance.
Article
Neurosciences
Christina Zhao, Patricia K. Kuhl
Summary: The study investigates the 'sensitive period' for phonetic learning and its impact on later language outcomes. The findings suggest that sensitivity to nonnative speech at 11 months of age predicts individual vocabulary growth up to 30 months of age. Additionally, whole brain time series for both native and nonnative speech contrasts can effectively predict later language skills, albeit with different underlying spatial-temporal patterns.
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Erhan Akbal, Prabal Datta Barua, Turker Tuncer, Sengul Dogan, U. Rajendra Acharya
Summary: The research introduces an automated handcrafted language classification model utilizing a novel pyramid pattern to extract features, alongside statistical features and maximum pooling. By employing a neighborhood analysis method to select informative features and a quadratic support vector machine classifier, the model achieved accurate classification of various languages.
NEURAL COMPUTING & APPLICATIONS
(2022)
Article
Neuroimaging
Yuqi You, Angeles Correas, David R. White, Laura C. Wagner, R. Joanne Jao Keehn, Burke Q. Rosen, Kalekirstos Alemu, Ralph-Axel Muller, Ksenija Marinkovic
Summary: This study used magnetoencephalography and structural MRI to investigate the brain activity patterns of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) during lexico-semantic processing. The results showed differences in brain activity between individuals with ASD and typically developing peers, indicating potential compensatory strategies and neurodevelopmental trajectories in ASD. The study also demonstrated heterogeneity in language abilities among individuals with ASD.
NEUROIMAGE-CLINICAL
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Lingxi Lu, Jingwei Sheng, Zhaowei Liu, Jia-Hong Gao
Summary: This study revealed neural representations of higher-order rhythmic structures embedded in imagined and perceived speech, supporting the view of a common mechanism between imagery and perception.
Article
Neurosciences
Yingcan Carol Wang, Ediz Sohoglu, Rebecca A. Gilbert, Richard N. Henson, Matthew H. Davis
Summary: This study tested two Bayesian mechanisms of spoken word recognition using MEG data from male and female listeners, and manipulated the prior probability of specific words using competitor priming. The results showed delayed recognition of target words following presentation of neighboring prime words, supporting the role of neural computations of prediction error in spoken word recognition.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Alexandre Chauvin, Natalie A. Phillips
Summary: This study investigates speech perception in noise in bilingual individuals. The results indicate that visual speech cues and supportive sentence context have a greater impact on speech perception in the second language, especially when background noise levels are the same.
Article
Neurosciences
Yuhan Lu, Peiqing Jin, Nai Ding, Xing Tian
Summary: This study investigates the impact of semantic relatedness on neural responses to speech, and finds that semantic relatedness plays a minor role in the construction of sentence structures. Cortical activity primarily tracks multi-word chunks constructed by syntactic rules or task-related rules.
Article
Neurosciences
Sara Guediche, Angela de Bruin, Cesar Caballero-Gaudes, Martijn Baart, Arthur G. Samuel
Summary: Spoken language comprehension is a fundamental cognitive skill, relying on prior linguistic knowledge and context. For bilinguals, the overlap of word forms across languages affects how they influence each other during auditory word recognition. Semantic information plays a crucial role in spoken word recognition.
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Julie Bertels, Maxime Niesen, Florian Destoky, Tim Coolen, Marc Vander Ghinst, Vincent Wens, Antonin Rovai, Nicola Trotta, Martijn Baart, Nicola Molinaro, Xavier De Tiege, Mathieu Bourguignon
Summary: Humans' ability to understand speech in noise develops with age through multiple processes. Using MEG, researchers studied cortical oscillations in 144 participants (aged 5-27 years) to understand how they track phrasal and syllabic structures in connected speech mixed with different types of noise. The study found that while the extraction of prosodic cues from clear speech remains stable during development, its maintenance in a multi-talker background matures rapidly up to age 9 and is associated with speech comprehension. The study also found that the extraction of subtler information provided by syllables matures at age 9, but its maintenance in noisy backgrounds progressively matures until adulthood.
DEVELOPMENTAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Rosario Tomasello, Luigi Grisoni, Isabella Boux, Daniela Sammler, Friedemann Pulvermueller
Summary: Speech prosody provides important clues about the speaker's communicative intentions. This study used high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the neurophysiological basis of intonation and speech act understanding, finding that prosodic features are reflected at the neurophysiological level. The results demonstrate that humans can rapidly detect and understand speaker intentions in linguistic interactions through neurophysiological indexes when pragmatic and lexico-semantic information are fully expressed.
Correction
Psychology, Experimental
Malte R. Henningsen-Schomers, Friedemann Pulvermueller
PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH-PSYCHOLOGISCHE FORSCHUNG
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Malte R. Henningsen-Schomers, Friedemann Pulvermuller
Summary: A neurobiologically constrained deep neural network was used to investigate the formation of conceptual categories and semantic feature extraction. The study found that concrete concepts have complete feature sharing among instances, while abstract concepts have less feature overlap between instances, which may explain the difficulty children face when learning abstract words.
PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH-PSYCHOLOGISCHE FORSCHUNG
(2022)
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Luigi Grisoni, Friedemann Pulvermueller
Summary: The recent finding of predictive brain signals preceding anticipated perceptual and linguistic stimuli raises new questions for experimental research. This study investigates the neural basis of phonological predictions and their relationship to phonological priming. The results show that expected stimuli induce a slow anticipatory activity, while incongruent pairings elicit weaker post-stimulus responses.
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Yury Shtyrov, Margarita Filippova, Ekaterina Perikova, Alexander Kirsanov, Olga Shcherbakova, Evgeni Blagovechtchenski
Summary: The study suggests that there are partially diverging neurocognitive systems involved in word acquisition through instruction-based explicit encoding (EE) and inference-driven fast mapping (FM). Learning through different mechanisms may have an impact on neural dynamics and cognitive functions related to the acquisition of novel words.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Maria Alekseeva, Andriy Myachykov, Beatriz Bermudez-Margaretto, Yury Shtyrov
Summary: During verbal communication, both linguistic and extralinguistic information play important roles. However, the neural mechanisms of processing extralinguistic information are not well understood. In this study, EEG recordings were used to investigate the neural responses to Russian pronoun-verb phrases presented in different voices. The results showed that the brain responded differently to congruent and incongruent combinations of voice and grammatical gender, suggesting the existence of a rapid automatic syntactic integration mechanism sensitive to both linguistic and extralinguistic information.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Isabella P. Boux, Konstantina Margiotoudi, Felix R. Dreyer, Rosario Tomasello, Friedemann Pulvermueller
Summary: The study found that indirect replies were less certain, less predictable, less coherent with and less semantically similar to their context question compared to direct replies. These effects were smaller when direct and indirect replies were matched for the type of speech acts for which they were used. All measured cognitive dimensions were strongly associated with each other.
LANGUAGE COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Anatomy & Morphology
Tatiana Bolgina, Vidya Somashekarappa, Stefano F. Cappa, Zoya Cherkasova, Matteo Feurra, Svetlana Malyutina, Anna Sapuntsova, Yury Shtyrov, Olga Dragoy
Summary: fMRI language mapping studies have shown that the right hemisphere also plays an important role in language in healthy individuals. However, it is still unclear whether the activity patterns in the right hemisphere are critical for language, which is crucial for clinical preoperative language mapping. The results of this study suggest that the left hemisphere has a critical contribution to verb production regardless of individual language lateralization patterns observed with fMRI. Additionally, the study highlights that action naming rather than object naming is the preferred task for mapping language in the frontal lobe.
BRAIN STRUCTURE & FUNCTION
(2022)
Article
Clinical Neurology
Oskar Hougaard Jefsen, Yury Shtyrov, Kit Melissa Larsen, Martin J. Dietz
Summary: This study explored the evidence of 40-Hz ASSR deficits in patients with bipolar disorder, and found consistent reductions in 40-Hz ASSR evoked power and inter-trial phase coherence compared with healthy controls. Further large-scale studies are needed to link 40-Hz ASSR deficits to clinical features and developmental trajectories.
CLINICAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Clinical Neurology
Dimitri Bredikhin, Olga Agranovich, Maxim Ulanov, Maria Koriakina, Anna N. Shestakova, Dzerassa Kadieva, Grigory Kopytin, Evgenia Ermolovich, Beatriz Bermudez-Margaretto, Yury Shtyrov, Iiro P. Jaaskelainen, Evgeny Blagovechtchenski
Summary: The study found altered processing of hand-related verbs in OBPP/amyoplasia children with hand-related disabilities, while there were no significant differences in processing leg-related verbs or pseudowords. The results contribute to the growing evidence supporting the theory of embodied cognition, which suggests that various domains of cognition are influenced by bodily interactions with the environment.
CLINICAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGY
(2023)
Review
Neurosciences
Maxim Ulanov, Yury Shtyrov
Summary: Stroke is a leading cause of disabilities, with motor and language impairments being common. Existing treatments for chronic stroke are often modest in their effectiveness, and little is known about the neural dynamics and biomarkers of functional recovery. This review focuses on studies of motor and language recovery in chronic stroke and discusses the role of oscillatory processes in the beta band as potential biomarkers. The review also highlights the limitations of current research and suggests directions for future investigation.
FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Biology
Malte R. Henningsen-Schomers, Max Garagnani, Friedemann Pulvermueller
Summary: A neurobiologically constrained model was used to simulate the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts in the human brain. The study found that the presence of verbal labels improved the learning of categories, especially for abstract concepts.
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Maria Alekseeva, Andriy Myachykov, Yury Shtyrov
Summary: Knowledge of language is important, but linguistic theories often do not consider the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying language function. This article discusses the controversial concept of null constituent and the hypothetical zero morpheme, and advocates for neurobiological research to better understand these constructs in linguistic communication.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Mads Jensen, Rasha Hyder, Britta U. Westner, Andreas Hojlund, Yury Shtyrov
Summary: Language is crucial for human cognition and well-being, and while many cognitive abilities decline with age, the effects of aging on language comprehension are not fully understood. In this study, we used magnetoencephalography to examine brain responses to linguistic stimuli in younger and older participants. Our findings indicate age-related changes in the brain's processing of spoken language.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Beatriz Martin-Luengo, Alicia Nunez Vorobiova, Matteo Feurra, Andriy Myachykov, Yury Shtyrov
Summary: The neocortical structures of the left frontal lobe, especially the middle frontal gyrus, are associated with the processing of punishing and unpleasant outcomes in decision tasks. In this study, the role of the left middle frontal gyrus in communicative decisions was assessed using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). The results showed that inhibiting the function of the left middle frontal gyrus led to more rational decisions in formal communication contexts, where there is a perception of pressure or possible negative outcomes. However, this inhibition had no effect on decision-making processes in informal social contexts.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)
