{"title":"Pragmatic inferences: Neuroimaging of ad-hoc implicatures","authors":"Shiri Hornick , Einat Shetreet","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101090","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101090","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span><span><span>During conversation, comprehenders often make pragmatic inferences, or implicatures<span>. Our study concerns ad-hoc implicatures, which are quantity-based implicatures. For example, the sentence “I walked Lassie”, where the addressee knows that the speaker has 2 dogs, signals to the addressee that the speaker wanted to convey an enriched meaning (i.e., she walked Lassie, but not the other dog). On some accounts, it is assumed that these implicatures are derived similarly to the well-studied scalar implicatures. Yet, ad-hoc implicatures received little attention. In the current study, we used fMRI to further uncover the mechanisms that support pragmatic inferences, and specifically ad-hoc implicatures. In our judgment task, we first presented a context picture with several objects, then the target sentence (sans picture) which referred to either the subset (implicature condition) or the whole set of objects (no-implicature condition), and finally asked participants to judge whether a final picture matched the target sentence. Comparing the implicature and no-implicature conditions, we observed activations in the rostrolateral </span></span>prefrontal cortex, which we linked to inference generation, and in the right </span>inferior parietal lobule, which we linked to </span>theory of mind<span> or attention shift. We also performed an ROI analysis, examining activations related to ad-hoc implicatures in regions previously linked to scalar implicatures and to other types of context-based implicatures, showing overlaps and dissimilarities in both cases. Thus, our results are not completely in line with theories that argue for one type of processing in the derivation of pragmatic inferences.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54648506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kim Ouwehand , Jacqueline de Nooijer , Tamara van Gog , Fred Paas
{"title":"Action-speech and gesture-speech integration in younger and older adults: An event-related potential study","authors":"Kim Ouwehand , Jacqueline de Nooijer , Tamara van Gog , Fred Paas","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101100","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101100","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In daily communication, speech is enriched with co-speech gestures, providing a visual context for the linguistic message. It has been shown that older adults are less sensitive to incongruencies between context (e.g., a sentence) and target (e.g., a final sentence word). This is evidenced by a smaller and delayed N400 (in)congruency effect that reflects the difference between the N400 component in response to congruent versus incongruent targets. The present study investigated whether the effect of age on the N400 effect in sentence-final word integration would also arise for verb-gesture/action integration. Assuming that gestures have a tight connection to language these would provide a higher contextual constraint for the action phrase than the literal actions (i.e., an action performed on an object can be understood in isolation, without the action phrase). EEG was recorded from a sample of younger and older participants, while they watched audio-visual stimuli of a human actor performing an action or pantomime gesture while hearing a congruent or incongruent action phrase. Results showed that the N400 (in)congruency effect was less widespread in the older than the younger adults. It seemed that older adults, but not younger adults were less sensitive to the gestural than the action (object) information when processing an action phrase.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0911604422000446/pdfft?md5=747dcd5b690ceb547585dfa07586bb73&pid=1-s2.0-S0911604422000446-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41767781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hemispheric dominance of metaphor processing for Chinese-English bilinguals: DVF and ERPs evidence","authors":"Xichu Zhu , Hongjun Chen , Susannah C.S.A. Otieno , Fengyu Cong , Paavo H.T. Leppänen","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101081","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101081","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>This study investigated whether metaphors are predominantly processed in the right or left hemisphere when using Chinese and English metaphors in Chinese bilingual speakers. The role of familiarity in processing of metaphorical and literal expressions in both the first and second language was studied with brain-event-related potentials using a divided-visual-field paradigm. The participants were asked to perform plausibility judgments for Chinese (L1) and English (L2) familiar and unfamiliar metaphorical and literal sentences. The results obtained using parameter-free cluster permutation statistics suggest a different pattern of brain responses for metaphor processing in L1 and L2, and that both metaphoricity and familiarity have an effect on the brain response pattern of both Chinese and English metaphor processing. However, the brain responses were distributed bilaterally across hemispheres, suggesting no clear evidence for lateralization of processing of metaphorical meanings. This is inconsistent with the Graded Salience Hypothesis and Fine-Coarse Semantic Coding Theory, which posited a </span>right hemisphere<span> advantage of non-salient and coarse semantic processing.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54648428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding of the Gricean maxims in children with autism spectrum disorder: Implications for pragmatic language development","authors":"Kosuke Asada , Shoji Itakura , Mako Okanda , Yusuke Moriguchi , Kaori Yokawa , Shinichiro Kumagaya , Kaoru Konishi , Yukuo Konishi","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101085","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101085","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulties in communication with others, which may derive from limitations in their understanding of pragmatic language. In this study, we used the Conversational Violations Test (CVT) with children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children in order to examine their sensitivity to violations of the Gricean maxims: be relevant (maxim of Relation), be truthful (maxim of Quality), be informative (Quantity I), avoid redundancy (Quantity II), and be polite (maxim of Politeness). These maxims have an important role in communication. We found that TD children performed better than children with ASD on the CVT. We also found that children with ASD had higher total CVT scores with increasing chronological age. We discuss the developmental trajectories of pragmatic language understanding in children with ASD.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54648479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Antúnez , P.J. López-Pérez , J. Dampuré , H.A. Barber
{"title":"Frequency-based foveal load modulates semantic parafoveal-on-foveal effects","authors":"M. Antúnez , P.J. López-Pérez , J. Dampuré , H.A. Barber","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101071","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101071","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>During reading, we can process words allocated to the parafoveal visual region. Our ability to extract parafoveal information is determined by the availability of attentional resources, and by how these are distributed among words in the visual field. According to the foveal load hypothesis, a greater difficulty in processing the foveal word would result in less attentional resources being allocated to the parafoveal word, thereby hindering its processing. However, contradictory results have raised questions about which foveal load manipulations may affect the processing of parafoveal words at different levels. We explored whether the semantic processing of parafoveal words can be modulated by variations in a frequency-based foveal load. When participants read word triads, modulations in the N400 component indicated that, while parafoveal words were semantically processed when foveal load was low, their meaning could not be accessed if the foveal word was more difficult to process. Therefore, a frequency-based foveal load modulates semantic parafoveal processing and a semantic preview manipulation may be a suitable baseline to test the foveal load hypothesis.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S091160442200015X/pdfft?md5=46ee206588818d87e83210b0b8f404c3&pid=1-s2.0-S091160442200015X-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49193243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jane Aristia, Alicia Fasquel, Laurent Ott, Angèle Brunellière
{"title":"Understanding same subject-verb agreement differently: ERP evidence for flexibility in processing representations involved in French subject-verb agreement","authors":"Jane Aristia, Alicia Fasquel, Laurent Ott, Angèle Brunellière","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101067","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101067","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In an ever-changing environment such as a situation with a variety of linguistic information, individuals have to adapt by selecting the most relevant and appropriate information. In event-related potential studies that manipulated the syntactic agreement between a subject and a verb, it was shown that morphosyntactic features (e.g., number or person feature) are used to compute syntactic dependencies. Furthermore, statistical language information seemed to play a role in the production of subject-verb agreement. We thus investigated flexibility in the processing of morphosyntactic features and co-occurrence frequency between a subject and its verbal inflection. Pronoun primes and verbal targets were presented auditorily and the flexibility of the representations in French subject-verb agreement was studied by manipulating the task to be performed on the target. In Experiment 1, the task was a lexical decision task to induce the use of co-occurrence frequency between a subject and its verbal inflection; in Experiment 2, the task was a grammatical categorization task to amplify the use of morphosyntactic features. Results showed that statistical information affected the processing of the verb earlier than the use of morphosyntactic features, whose violation produced the classic biphasic reaction with negativity followed by positivity. Our findings suggest that there is flexibility in the use of both statistical and abstract morphosyntactic feature representations, although the flexibility of the use of features depends more on task strategies.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54648393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Diana Nakamura Pereira, Wellington da Cruz Souza, Ariella Fornachari Ribeiro Belan, Marina von Zuben de Arruda Camargo, Orestes Vicente Forlenza, Marcia Radanovic
{"title":"Sentence processing in mild cognitive impairment","authors":"Diana Nakamura Pereira, Wellington da Cruz Souza, Ariella Fornachari Ribeiro Belan, Marina von Zuben de Arruda Camargo, Orestes Vicente Forlenza, Marcia Radanovic","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101070","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101070","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span><span>Difficulties in sentence processing have been reported in patients with </span>Mild Cognitive Impairment<span> (MCI), which may be due to impairment in primary syntactic abilities or short-term memory. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between overt sentence production (SP) and comprehension (SC) with short-term memory performance in MCI. Cognitively healthy elderly (n = 34), amnestic MCI (aMCI,n = 22), non-amnestic MCI (naMCI,n = 45), and Alzheimer's disease (AD,n = 18) patients were asked to complete tests of constrained SP and oral SC. We tested the association between performance in SP and SC with memory tasks and performed a qualitative analysis of the frequency and type of errors in SC. Our results showed that there were no intergroup differences in SC and SP performances. SC scores were associated with delayed recall for words in the naMCI group (p = 0.003), and immediate (p = 0.001) and delayed recall for shapes (p = 0.031) in AD. There were no predictors for NAT scores in any group</span></span><strong>.</strong> In conclusion, the three groups performed similarly in SC and SP tasks. Short-term memory was not associated with performance in the SP task. There was an association between performance in the SC task and verbal memory in naMCI and non-verbal memory in AD; the latter may reflect visuospatial processing demands embedded in the SC task.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54648416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dolores Villalobos , Javier Povedano-Montero , Santiago Fernández , Francisco López-Muñoz , Javier Pacios , David del Río
{"title":"Scientific research on verbal fluency tests: A bibliometric analysis","authors":"Dolores Villalobos , Javier Povedano-Montero , Santiago Fernández , Francisco López-Muñoz , Javier Pacios , David del Río","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101082","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101082","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>Verbal fluency tests are easy and quick to use in neuropsychological assessments. The aim of this study is to explore their relevance through a bibliometric analysis. We performed a search in the Web of Science, involving documents published between 1960 and 2021. We used bibliometric indicators to explore articles distribution, doubling time, and annual growth. We calculated the participation index of the different countries and institutions. Through bibliometric mapping, we explored the co-occurrence networks for the most frequently used terms in verbal fluency research. 1718 articles were found, distributed in two different periods (1960–1995 and 1995 to 2021), the second one containing more than 88% of the documents. Price's law shows an exponential growing. Literature on verbal fluency has grown at a rate of 6,7% per year, doubling its size every 10.7 years. Bradford's law shows a high concentration of articles published in a small core of specialized journals. Finally, the map network visualization shows a change in the most important topic related to verbal fluency during the most recent period analysed. Verbal fluency task has undergone an exponential growth. Its easy application, its sensitivity to different </span>brain dysfunction<span>, the possibility of implementation with neuroimaging studies, and the potential analysis of more complex components (clustering or switching) might have played a key role in its growing interest.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"54648441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Vass Verkhodanova , Matt Coler , Roel Jonkers , Sanne Timmermans , Natasha Maurits , Bauke de Jong , Wander Lowie
{"title":"A cross-linguistic perspective to classification of healthiness of speech in Parkinson's disease","authors":"Vass Verkhodanova , Matt Coler , Roel Jonkers , Sanne Timmermans , Natasha Maurits , Bauke de Jong , Wander Lowie","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101068","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101068","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>People with Parkinson's disease often experience communication problems. The current cross-linguistic study investigates how listeners' perceptual judgements of speech healthiness are related to the acoustic changes appearing in the speech of people with Parkinson's disease. Accordingly, we report on an online experiment targeting perceived healthiness of speech. We studied the relations between healthiness perceptual judgements and a set of acoustic characteristics of speech in a cross-sectional design. We recruited 169 participants, who performed a classification task judging speech recordings of Dutch speakers with Parkinson's disease and of Dutch control speakers as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’. The groups of listeners differed in their training and expertise in speech language therapy as well as in their native languages. Such group separation allowed us to investigate the acoustic correlates of speech healthiness without influence of the content of the recordings.</p><p>We used a Random Forest method to predict listeners' responses. Our findings demonstrate that, independently of expertise and language background, when classifying speech as healthy or unhealthy listeners are more sensitive to speech rate, presence of phonation deficiency reflected by maximum phonation time measurement, and centralization of the vowels. The results indicate that both specifics of the expertise and language background may lead to listeners relying more on the features from either prosody or phonation domains. Our findings demonstrate that more global perceptual judgements of different listeners classifying speech of people with Parkinson's disease may be predicted with sufficient reliability from conventional acoustic features. This suggests universality of acoustic change in speech of people with Parkinson's disease. Therefore, we concluded that certain aspects of phonation and prosody serve as prominent markers of speech healthiness for listeners independent of their first language or expertise. Our findings have outcomes for the clinical practice and real-life implications for subjective perception of speech of people with Parkinson's disease, while information about particular acoustic changes that trigger listeners to classify speech as ‘unhealthy’ can provide specific therapeutic targets in addition to the existing dysarthria treatment in people with Parkinson's disease.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0911604422000124/pdfft?md5=95aa185dd54d07a2e48594c2c4509b47&pid=1-s2.0-S0911604422000124-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41525611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neuromodulation of verb-transitivity judgments","authors":"Dirk B. den Ouden, Michael W. Zhu","doi":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101088","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jneuroling.2022.101088","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Introduction</h3><p>This study aimed to further clarify the roles of the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain in the processing of verb argument structure. Left inferior frontal brain areas have long been considered important for sentence processing, but recent research links left posterior temporal cortex to knowledge of verb argument structure.</p></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><p>We applied cathodal High-Definition transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to 45 participants in a between-subjects design, with 15 participants each for inferior-frontal-cortex stimulation, posterior-temporal-cortex stimulation, and sham stimulation. Set up as a training task during stimulation, participants made overt judgments on the number of participant roles associated with individual verbs.</p></div><div><h3>Results</h3><p>Stimulation of posterior temporal cortex did not yield results that were different from sham stimulation, speeding up task responses overall. By contrast, stimulation of inferior frontal cortex yielded differential results for intransitive versus transitive verbs, speeding up responses to intransitive verbs and increasing accuracy to transitive verbs, relative to other conditions.</p></div><div><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>The transitivity effect, specific to inferior frontal stimulation, suggests a role for inferior frontal cortex in access to verb-argument-structure information, possibly specific to situations of high cognitive load and in which participant roles have to be established for production, as opposed to comprehension.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neurolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41888360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}