Maria Economou, Femke Vanden Bempt, Shauni Van Herck, Toivo Glatz, Jan Wouters, Pol Ghesquière, Jolijn Vanderauwera, Maaike Vandermosten
{"title":"Cortical structure in pre-readers at cognitive risk for dyslexia: Baseline differences and response to intervention","authors":"Maria Economou, Femke Vanden Bempt, Shauni Van Herck, Toivo Glatz, Jan Wouters, Pol Ghesquière, Jolijn Vanderauwera, Maaike Vandermosten","doi":"10.1162/nol_a_00122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00122","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Early childhood is a critical period for structural brain development as well as an important window for the identification and remediation of reading difficulties. Recent research supports the implementation of interventions in at-risk populations as early as kindergarten or first grade, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms following such interventions remain understudied. To address this, we investigated cortical structure by means of anatomical MRI before and after a 12-week tablet-based intervention in: (1) at-risk children receiving phonics-based training (n = 29; n = 16 complete pre-post datasets), (2) at-risk children engaging with active control training (n = 24; n = 15 complete pre-post datasets) and (3) typically developing children (n = 25; n = 14 complete pre-post datasets) receiving no intervention. At baseline, we found higher surface area of the right supramarginal gyrus in at-risk children compared to typically developing peers, extending previous evidence that early anatomical differences exist in children who may later develop dyslexia. Our longitudinal analysis revealed significant post-intervention thickening of the left supramarginal gyrus, present exclusively in the intervention group but not the active control or typical control groups. Altogether, this study contributes new knowledge to our understanding of the brain morphology associated with cognitive risk for dyslexia and response to early intervention, which in turn raises new questions on how early anatomy and plasticity may shape the trajectories of long-term literacy development.","PeriodicalId":34845,"journal":{"name":"Neurobiology of Language","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135548660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Left-hemisphere cortical language regions respond equally to observed dialogue and monologue","authors":"Halie Olson, Emily Chen, Kirsten Lydic, Rebecca Saxe","doi":"10.1162/nol_a_00123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00123","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Much of the language we encounter in our everyday lives comes in the form of conversation, yet the majority of research on the neural basis of language comprehension has used input from only one speaker at a time. 20 adults were scanned while passively observing audiovisual conversations using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In a block-design task, participants watched 20-second videos of puppets speaking either to another puppet (the “dialogue” condition) or directly to the viewer (“monologue”), while the audio was either comprehensible (played forward) or incomprehensible (played backward). Individually functionally-localized left-hemisphere language regions responded more to comprehensible than incomprehensible speech but did not respond differently to dialogue than monologue. In a second task, participants watched videos (1–3 minutes each) of two puppets conversing with each other, in which one puppet was comprehensible while the other’s speech was reversed. All participants saw the same visual input but were randomly assigned which character’s speech was comprehensible. In left-hemisphere cortical language regions, the timecourse of activity was correlated only among participants who heard the same character speaking comprehensibly, despite identical visual input across all participants. For comparison, some individually-localized theory of mind regions and right hemisphere homologues of language regions responded more to dialogue than monologue in the first task, and in the second task, activity in some regions was correlated across all participants regardless of which character was speaking comprehensibly. Together, these results suggest that canonical left-hemisphere cortical language regions are not sensitive to differences between observed dialogue and monologue.","PeriodicalId":34845,"journal":{"name":"Neurobiology of Language","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135745225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carina Kauf, Greta Tuckute, Roger P. Levy, Jacob Andreas, Evelina Fedorenko
{"title":"Lexical-Semantic Content, Not Syntactic Structure, Is the Main Contributor to ANN-Brain Similarity of fMRI Responses in the Language Network","authors":"Carina Kauf, Greta Tuckute, Roger P. Levy, Jacob Andreas, Evelina Fedorenko","doi":"10.1162/nol_a_00116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00116","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Representations from artificial neural network (ANN) language models have been shown to predict human brain activity in the language network. To understand what aspects of linguistic stimuli contribute to ANN-to-brain similarity, we used an fMRI data set of responses to n = 627 naturalistic English sentences (Pereira et al., 2018) and systematically manipulated the stimuli for which ANN representations were extracted. In particular, we (i) perturbed sentences’ word order, (ii) removed different subsets of words, or (iii) replaced sentences with other sentences of varying semantic similarity. We found that the lexical-semantic content of the sentence (largely carried by content words) rather than the sentence’s syntactic form (conveyed via word order or function words) is primarily responsible for the ANN-to-brain similarity. In follow-up analyses, we found that perturbation manipulations that adversely affect brain predictivity also lead to more divergent representations in the ANN’s embedding space and decrease the ANN’s ability to predict upcoming tokens in those stimuli. Further, results are robust as to whether the mapping model is trained on intact or perturbed stimuli and whether the ANN sentence representations are conditioned on the same linguistic context that humans saw. The critical result—that lexical-semantic content is the main contributor to the similarity between ANN representations and neural ones—aligns with the idea that the goal of the human language system is to extract meaning from linguistic strings. Finally, this work highlights the strength of systematic experimental manipulations for evaluating how close we are to accurate and generalizable models of the human language network.","PeriodicalId":34845,"journal":{"name":"Neurobiology of Language","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136102035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Neurobiology of LanguagePub Date : 2023-09-18eCollection Date: 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1162/nol_a_00114
Mackenzie Philips, Sarah M Schneck, Deborah F Levy, Stephen M Wilson
{"title":"Modality-Specificity of the Neural Correlates of Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Demand.","authors":"Mackenzie Philips, Sarah M Schneck, Deborah F Levy, Stephen M Wilson","doi":"10.1162/nol_a_00114","DOIUrl":"10.1162/nol_a_00114","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Imaging studies of language processing in clinical populations can be complicated to interpret for several reasons, one being the difficulty of matching the effortfulness of processing across individuals or tasks. To better understand how effortful linguistic processing is reflected in functional activity, we investigated the neural correlates of task difficulty in linguistic and non-linguistic contexts in the auditory modality and then compared our findings to a recent analogous experiment in the visual modality in a different cohort. Nineteen neurologically normal individuals were scanned with fMRI as they performed a linguistic task (semantic matching) and a non-linguistic task (melodic matching), each with two levels of difficulty. We found that left hemisphere frontal and temporal language regions, as well as the right inferior frontal gyrus, were modulated by linguistic demand and not by non-linguistic demand. This was broadly similar to what was previously observed in the visual modality. In contrast, the multiple demand (MD) network, a set of brain regions thought to support cognitive flexibility in many contexts, was modulated neither by linguistic demand nor by non-linguistic demand in the auditory modality. This finding was in striking contradistinction to what was previously observed in the visual modality, where the MD network was robustly modulated by both linguistic and non-linguistic demand. Our findings suggest that while the language network is modulated by linguistic demand irrespective of modality, modulation of the MD network by linguistic demand is not inherent to linguistic processing, but rather depends on specific task factors.</p>","PeriodicalId":34845,"journal":{"name":"Neurobiology of Language","volume":"4 4","pages":"516-535"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10575553/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41239385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lauren Blockmans, N. Golestani, Josué Luiz Dalboni da Rocha, J. Wouters, P. Ghesquière, Maaike Vandermosten
{"title":"Role of Family Risk and of Pre-Reading Auditory and Neurostructural Measures in Predicting Reading Outcome","authors":"Lauren Blockmans, N. Golestani, Josué Luiz Dalboni da Rocha, J. Wouters, P. Ghesquière, Maaike Vandermosten","doi":"10.1162/nol_a_00111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00111","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Some children who develop dyslexia show pre-reading auditory and speech processing difficulties. Furthermore, left auditory cortex structure might be related to family risk for dyslexia rather than to reading outcome. However, it remains unclear to what extent auditory and speech processing and auditory cortex structure mediate the relationship between family risk and reading. In the current longitudinal study, we investigated the role of family risk (measured using parental reading questionnaires) and of pre-reading auditory measures in predicting third grade word reading. We measured auditory and speech processing in 162 pre-readers varying in family risk. In 129 of them, we also acquired structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We quantified surface area and duplication patterns of the bilateral transverse temporal gyri (TTG(s)), and surface area of the bilateral planum temporale (PT). We found effects of pre-reading auditory and speech processing, surface area of the left first TTG and of bilateral PT and of left TTG duplication pattern on later reading. Higher pre-reading values on these measures were predictive of better word reading. Although we also found some evidence for an effect of family risk on auditory and speech processing, these latter measures did not mediate the strong relationship between family risk and later reading. Our study shows the importance of pre-reading auditory and speech processing and of auditory cortex anatomy for later reading. A better understanding of such interrelations during reading development will facilitate early diagnosis and intervention, which can be especially important given the continuity of family risk in the general population.","PeriodicalId":34845,"journal":{"name":"Neurobiology of Language","volume":"4 1","pages":"474-500"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45708031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Humans in Love Are Singing Birds: Socially-Mediated Brain Activity in Language Production","authors":"Clara D. Martin, I. Quiñones, M. Carreiras","doi":"10.1162/nol_a_00112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00112","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated whether and how the human speech production circuit is mediated by social factors. Participants recited a poem in the MRI scanner while viewing pictures of their lover, unknown persons, or houses to simulate different social contexts. The results showed, as expected, the recruitment of the speech production circuit during recitation. However, for the first time, we demonstrated that this circuit is tightly linked to the network underlying social cognition. The socially relevant contexts (familiar and unfamiliar persons) elicited the recruitment of a widespread bilateral circuit including regions such as the amygdala, anterior cingulate, and orbitofrontal cortex, in contrast to the non-socially relevant context (houses). We also showed a neural gradient generated by the differences in the social relevance of affective and nonaffective contexts. This study opens up a novel line of research into socially mediated speech production, revealing drastic differences in brain activation when performing the same speech production task in different social contexts. Interestingly, the analogous avian anterior neural pathway in the zebra finch is also differentially activated when the bird sings facing a (potential) mate or alone. Thus, this study suggests that despite important phylogenetic differences, speech production in humans is based, as in songbirds, on a complex neural circuitry that is modulated by evolutionarily primordial aspects such as the social relevance of the addressee.","PeriodicalId":34845,"journal":{"name":"Neurobiology of Language","volume":"4 1","pages":"501-515"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44441810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Phoebe Gaston, Christian Brodbeck, C. Phillips, Ellen F. Lau
{"title":"Auditory Word Comprehension Is Less Incremental in Isolated Words","authors":"Phoebe Gaston, Christian Brodbeck, C. Phillips, Ellen F. Lau","doi":"10.1101/2021.09.09.459631","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.09.459631","url":null,"abstract":"Partial speech input is often understood to trigger rapid and automatic activation of successively higher-level representations of words, from sound to meaning. Here we show evidence from magnetoencephalography that this type of incremental processing is limited when words are heard in isolation as compared to continuous speech. This suggests a less unified and automatic word recognition process than is often assumed. We present evidence from isolated words that neural effects of phoneme probability, quantified by phoneme surprisal, are significantly stronger than (statistically null) effects of phoneme-by-phoneme lexical uncertainty, quantified by cohort entropy. In contrast, we find robust effects of both cohort entropy and phoneme surprisal during perception of connected speech, with a significant interaction between the contexts. This dissociation rules out models of word recognition in which phoneme surprisal and cohort entropy are common indicators of a uniform process, even though these closely related information- theoretic measures both arise from the probability distribution of wordforms consistent with the input. We propose that phoneme surprisal effects reflect automatic access of a lower level of representation of the auditory input (e.g., wordforms) while the occurrence of cohort entropy effects is task-sensitive, driven by a competition process or a higher-level representation that is engaged late (or not at all) during the processing of single words.","PeriodicalId":34845,"journal":{"name":"Neurobiology of Language","volume":"4 1","pages":"29 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41907652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
P. Ferré, J. Jarret, S. Brambati, Pierre Bellec, Y. Joanette
{"title":"Task-Induced Functional Connectivity of Picture Naming in Healthy Aging: The Impacts of Age and Task Complexity","authors":"P. Ferré, J. Jarret, S. Brambati, Pierre Bellec, Y. Joanette","doi":"10.1162/nol_a_00007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00007","url":null,"abstract":"The topological organization of the brain, governed by the capacity of brain regions to synchronize their activity, allows for cost-effective performance during everyday cognitive activity. Functional connectivity is an fMRI method deemed task-specific and demand-dependent. Although the brain undergoes significant changes during healthy aging, conceptual knowledge and word-production accuracy are generally preserved. The exploration of task-induced functional connectivity patterns during active picture naming may thus provide additional information about healthy functional cerebral mechanisms that are specifically adapted to the cognitive activity at hand. The goal of this study is to assess and describe age-related differences in functional connectivity during an overt picture-naming task, as well as to compare age-related differences under complex task demand, defined by lexical frequency. Results suggest both age-specific and task-specific mechanisms. In the context of preserved behavioral performance in a picture-naming task, older adults show a complex array of differences in functional connectivity architecture, including both increases and decreases. In brief, there is increased segregation and specialization of regions that are classically assigned to naming processes. Results also expand on previous word-production studies and suggest that motor regions are particularly subject to age-related differences. This study also provides the first indication that intrinsic task demand, as manipulated by lexical frequency, interacts little with the relationship between age and functional connectivity. Together, these findings confirm the value of task-induced functional connectivity analysis in revealing the brain organization that subserves task performance during healthy aging.","PeriodicalId":34845,"journal":{"name":"Neurobiology of Language","volume":"1 1","pages":"161-184"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/nol_a_00007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43920891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}