Brain and Language最新文献

{"title":"Context-modulating effect on processing scientific metaphors: Evidence from ERPs","authors":"Xuemei Tang ,&nbsp;Man Fu ,&nbsp;Xiao Wang ,&nbsp;Yixin Yao ,&nbsp;Lexian Shen","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105582","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105582","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have demonstrated the neural specificity of cognitive processing mechanisms in scientific metaphors. This property makes semantic retrieval and extraction more difficult compared to conventional metaphors. However, the role of context in modulating the comprehension of scientific metaphors remains unclear, and there has been no analysis or categorization of abstract and difficult scientific metaphors. In this study, we used the sentence-final word paradigm to investigate the effects of different contextual conditions on the comprehension of two types of scientific metaphors. We aimed to observe (Experiment 1) whether there are any differences between the processing of the two types of scientific metaphors in the context-free condition and (Experiment 2) whether the context affects the comprehension of the two types of scientific metaphors in the contextualized condition. Additionally, we explored the modulating effects of relevant and irrelevant contexts on the two types of scientific metaphors. Both N400 and late negative component (LN) effects were found in the two experiments. The N400 analysis showed that SMF (SMF refers to scientific metaphors whose source domain and target domain have similarities in functions in present study.) evoked more negative N400 than SMS (SMS refers to scientific metaphors whose source domain and target domain have similarities in shapes in present study) in the context-free condition. The result suggests that the processing of SMF might be more difficult than that of SMS. However, in the relevant-context condition, there was no significant difference in the N400 amplitudes of the two types of scientific metaphors. In contrast, in the irrelevant-context condition, SMS elicited significantly more negative N400 than SMF. Analysis of the LN revealed no significant differences between SMS and SMF in the two experiments. The results indicate that the context might affect information extraction and retrieval, but not the late reasoning stage about scientific knowledge. Moreover, the relevant context might facilitate the comprehension of both types of scientific metaphors, whereas the irrelevant context might hinder the processing of them. More importantly, the interference seems greater for SMS.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"266 ","pages":"Article 105582"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143895548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Did you say brain or brave? event-related potentials reveal the central role of phonological prediction in false hearing","authors":"Jack W Silcox ,&nbsp;Brennan R. Payne","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105580","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105580","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In the current paper, we report the results from two event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments that examined the time-course of <em>false hearing</em> (i.e., hearing one word when a different one was presented). Target words were presented in background noise whereas the preceding context (either a semantic prime word or a constraining sentence) was not. Participants routinely experienced false hearing, reporting a predictable word when an incongruent, phonological lure was presented. We found that the N400 to falsely heard words was similar to when a predictable word was presented even though a phonological lure was presented. Additionally, the N400 response to correctly identified phonological lures was significantly delayed compared to the response to incongruent words that shared no phonological relation to predictable words, suggesting the listeners engaged in phonological prediction. Altogether, the findings from the current study provide evidence that listeners’ engagement in phonological prediction can lead to misperception.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"267 ","pages":"Article 105580"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143895677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Attention, musicality, and familiarity shape cortical speech tracking at the musical cocktail party","authors":"Jane A. Brown ,&nbsp;Gavin M. Bidelman","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105581","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105581","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The “cocktail party problem” challenges our ability to understand speech in noisy environments and often includes background music. Here, we explored the role of background music in speech-in-noise listening. Participants listened to an audiobook in familiar and unfamiliar music while tracking keywords in either speech or song lyrics. We used EEG to measure neural tracking of the audiobook. When speech was masked by music, the modeled temporal response function (TRF) peak latency at 50 ms (P1_TRF) was prolonged compared to unmasked. Additionally, P1_TRF amplitude was larger in unfamiliar background music, suggesting improved speech tracking. We observed prolonged latencies at 100 ms (N1_TRF) when speech was not the attended stimulus, though only in less musical listeners. Our results suggest early neural representations of speech are stronger with both attention and concurrent unfamiliar music, indicating familiar music is more distracting. One’s ability to perceptually filter “musical noise” at the cocktail party also depends on objective musical listening abilities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"266 ","pages":"Article 105581"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143868291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How domain-general proactive control modulates the processing of English wh-dependencies: An EEG study","authors":"Keng-Yu Lin ,&nbsp;Edith Kaan","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105578","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105578","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Language processing has been hypothesized to engage domain-general cognitive control processes. Studies supporting such an assumption have revealed that performing tasks that engage conflict resolution in an experiment could facilitate the disambiguation of garden-path sentences. While this modulation has typically been found between cognitive inhibition and disambiguation of garden-path sentences, it is unclear whether similar effects occur in other types of cognitive control or sentence structure. To address this, we conducted an EEG study to examine whether and how domain-general proactive control influences the processing of English wh-dependency sentences. We looked into both event-related brain potentials and time-frequency representations in the present study. During the experiment, each participant was asked to do one of the two versions of the AX-continuous performance task (AX-CPT), right after which they performed a sentence reading task containing English wh-dependency sentences. Participants were grouped based on the version of the AX-CPT they performed and different versions of the AX-CPT varied in the demand on proactive control. Seventy functionally monolingual and neurologically healthy native English speakers without any reading disorder participated in the study. Our results confirmed that the AX-CPT successfully induced different levels of proactive control across groups. Importantly, we found evidence for a modulatory effect between domain-general proactive control and language-specific processing under our experimental manipulations. This finding suggests that domain-general proactive control and language-specific processing may share overlapping neural mechanisms, and that changes in proactive control levels can influence language-specific processing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"266 ","pages":"Article 105578"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143854403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The modulation of cognitive load on speech normalization: A neurophysiological perspective","authors":"Kaile Zhang,&nbsp;Gang Peng","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105579","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105579","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Extrinsic normalization, wherein listeners utilize context cues to adapt to speech variability, is essential for maintaining perceptual constancy. In daily communication, distractions are ubiquitous, raising questions about the influence of cognitive load on this process, particularly at the cortical level. This study investigates how cognitive load modulates extrinsic normalization using electroencephalography (EEG). Native Cantonese speakers were asked to perceive Cantonese tones from multiple speakers with context cues in both single- and dual-task conditions. The secondary task did not hinder listeners’ normalization process at the behavioral level. However, EEG data revealed significant modulations of extrinsic normalization under cognitive load. Extrinsic normalization elicited P2, N400, and LFN, suggesting that extrinsic normalization encompasses multiple perceptual adjustments at stages of phonological processing, lexical retrieval, and decision-making. Cognitive load influenced extrinsic normalization at all these stages, as evidenced by smaller P2, larger N400, and larger LFN, highlighting the active and controlled nature of this process.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"266 ","pages":"Article 105579"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143829245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Native prosodic structures constrain L2 word recognition: Evidence from Bengali-English bilinguals","authors":"Isabella Fritz,&nbsp;Aditi Lahiri","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105553","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105553","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Bilingual word recognition is assumed to be modulated by a word’s segmental and meaning similarity across languages, labelled <em>cognate</em> in psycholinguistics, usually conflating borrowed and inherited words. We conducted an ERP fragment priming study with Bengali-English bilinguals. English words <em>borrowed</em> into Bengali (<em>doctor,</em> Bengali: [ˈɖaktar]) were compared with those which were not (<em>river</em>). The stimuli varied in fine metrical details, one-foot (<em>dóctor</em>) or two-feet (<em>éxpèrt)</em> whilst stress placement was kept constant<em>.</em> Crucially, two-feet English words are always one-foot in Bengali [ˈeksparʈ]. Behavioural results (RTs) showed that although loan status did not affect priming, mismatch in feet significantly reduced the effect. In the ERP data, only one-foot words elicited significant priming effects. Furthermore, different ERP components were modulated depending on loan type. Thus, loan status alone is not sufficient to understand L2 word processing; the influence of the native metrical structure (preference for a single foot) constrains processing of all words.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"264 ","pages":"Article 105553"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143768519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Semantic overreliance as a suboptimal compensation for syntactic impairments in children with Developmental Language Disorder","authors":"Jueyao Lin ,&nbsp;Xiaocong Chen ,&nbsp;Xunan Huang ,&nbsp;Patrick Chun Man Wong ,&nbsp;Angel Wing Shan Chan ,&nbsp;Michael T. Ullman ,&nbsp;Caicai Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105571","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105571","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The neurocognitive dynamics of semantic-syntactic interplay are not well understood in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). This study examined the N400, P600 and their interplay in Cantonese-speaking children with DLD and age-matched typically developing (TD) children, by manipulating semantic and syntactic violations in Chinese classifier-noun agreement. Behaviorally, children with DLD demonstrated overall lower accuracy in grammaticality judgment. The N400 and P600 analyses respectively confirmed robust semantic processing but attenuated syntactic processing in the DLD group. Crucially, the N400-P600 interplay analyses revealed that TD children prioritized syntactic processing over semantic processing for outright syntactic violations, as indicated by less N400-P600 dependence and robust P600 dominance, whereas children with DLD relied on semantic processing and showed reduced P600 dominance. These results underscore a challenge to prioritize syntactic processing and (suboptimal) compensatory reliance on semantic processing in children with DLD, compatible with the predictions of the Procedural circuit Deficit Hypothesis.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"266 ","pages":"Article 105571"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143726066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Neural correlates of processing case in adults and children","authors":"Arrate Isasi-Isasmendi ,&nbsp;Caroline Andrews ,&nbsp;Eva Huber ,&nbsp;Martin Meyer ,&nbsp;Balthasar Bickel ,&nbsp;Sebastian Sauppe","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105548","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105548","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Sentence-initial arguments with role-specific case markers (e.g., accusatives) have been reported to be processed slower than arguments with default case markers (e.g., nominatives), both in adults and children. However, the evidence for this comes from studies that conflate word order and case, comparing initial arguments with default case and fronted (scrambled) arguments with role-specific case. Here, we disentangle these effects by studying the parsing of Basque sentences, where both role-specific (ergative) and default (absolutive) case can occur sentence-initially in canonical word order. Two EEG experiments explore how adults and six-year-old children process ergative and absolutive markers in sentence-initial position. We find that the ergative case elicits a power synchronization in theta compared to the absolutive case in both adults and children, an effect we attribute to retrieving more specific relational information from memory. In contrast, processing ergative case markers leads to a beta power desynchronization in adults but a synchronization in children. This suggests that six-year-old children are still developing top-down processing mechanisms for the parsing and integration of case marking information.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 105548"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143681216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Verbal short-term memory in developmental dyslexia: The role of the temporoparietal area","authors":"S. Lukic ,&nbsp;T. Qi ,&nbsp;C. Watson Pereira ,&nbsp;M.L. Mandelli ,&nbsp;R. Bogley ,&nbsp;M. Shabash ,&nbsp;E. Caverzasi ,&nbsp;V. Borghesani ,&nbsp;N. Dronkers ,&nbsp;M.L. Gorno-Tempini","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105570","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105570","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Developmental dyslexia (DD) is characterized by difficulties in reading but includes a general verbal short-term memory (vSTM) dysfunction. However, the behavioral and brain basis of vSTM deficits within DD are unknown.</div><div>81 children with DD and 17 typically developing (TD) children completed MRI and a verbal repetition task in which length (6 and 9-syllable phrases) and meaningfulness of phrases varied (more or less meaningful phrases). A battery of reading, phonological, and vSTM tests was administered to all children with DD.</div><div>Children with DD had impaired repetition compared to TD, especially when repeating long and non-meaningful phrases. Lower repetition was associated with greater cortical thickness in the left temporoparietal area in DD. The findings enhance our understanding of one of the neurocognitive mechanisms of DD, suggesting that the repetition deficit may be related to the phonological short-term store and the auditory dorsal stream.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 105570"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143681215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revealing human brain syntactic processing: Insights from voxel-wise models and network representation","authors":"Zongqing Tu ,&nbsp;Liyun Dai ,&nbsp;Baogang Zhang ,&nbsp;Sihan Chen ,&nbsp;Yuanyuan Yang ,&nbsp;Deqi Meng ,&nbsp;Yizhou Gong ,&nbsp;Jiancheng Sun","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105569","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105569","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Syntax serves as the framework that organizes words and is crucial for the human brain to comprehend language. However, the details of how the brain processes syntax remain poorly understood. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data obtained from subjects listening to narratives, we developed voxel-wise models of syntax at the word-pair level from a data-driven perspective. Our findings suggest that the intensity of activation varies across brain regions when processing the same syntactic structure. In addition, using syntactic structures, we constructed syntactic networks for each voxel. The syntactic network provides a knowledge representation of syntax in the brain and further validates the differences in various brain regions during syntactic processing. Accordingly, our study highlights the intricate nature of the syntactic processing system of the brain and provides new insights into how the brain processes logical structures in language.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"265 ","pages":"Article 105569"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143637332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}