Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-01-10DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2026.105706
Fares Komboz , Andrea Antal , Roberto Goya-Maldonado , Dorothee Mielke , Veit Rohde , Nicole E. Neef , Tammam Abboud
{"title":"Condition-and-perturb frontoparietal network disruption enhances preoperative nTMS mapping in patients with language-eloquent tumors: A proof-of-concept pilot study","authors":"Fares Komboz , Andrea Antal , Roberto Goya-Maldonado , Dorothee Mielke , Veit Rohde , Nicole E. Neef , Tammam Abboud","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2026.105706","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2026.105706","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Background</h3><div>The use of preoperative neuronavigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (nTMS) is becoming increasingly common in patients undergoing eloquent brain tumor surgery. Yet the optimal stimulation paradigms for language mapping still lack specificity and need to be refined. In the frontoparietal network, a protocol of dual-site TMS, termed the condition-and-perturb approach (CAP), was shown to effectively sensitize the semantic network in healthy subjects.</div></div><div><h3>Objective/Hypothesis</h3><div>This study aims to evaluate the added value of the CAP to preoperative language mapping in non-aphasic patients with language-eloquent brain tumors involving the anterior inferior frontal (aIFG) or angular (AG) gyrus.</div></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><div>Patients underwent peritumoral online nTMS involving the affected node (AG or aIFG) with or without prior offline neuronavigated repetitive TMS (nrTMS, 1 Hz, 15 min) of the ipsilateral healthy node (aIFG or AG).</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>Eight patients underwent the full protocol. Offline nrTMS decreased error threshold of online language mapping in all patients in comparison to sham nrTMS in those patients. Four peritumoral language hotspots [2–5] could be isolated in each patient. Compared to direct cortical stimulation, nTMS language mapping with CAP achieved a sensitivity of 84.2%, a specificity of 98.3%, a PPV of 84.2% and an NPV of 98.3%. This means that nearly all CAP-nTMS hotspots induced language disturbances when stimulated intraoperatively with DCS.</div></div><div><h3>Conclusions</h3><div>This pilot study suggests that the CAP could be a possible solution to the specificity concerns of preoperative TMS mapping, as prior frontoparietal network disruption might enhance the precision of language mapping around semantically eloquent brain tumors.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"274 ","pages":"Article 105706"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145927317","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-01-08DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105705
Li Hai Tan , Yihong Yin , Sha Tao , Xiaona Que , Fanlu Jia , Qi Dong , Yang Yang
{"title":"Resolving the mystery of Chinese developmental dyslexia: in search of predictors and early markers","authors":"Li Hai Tan , Yihong Yin , Sha Tao , Xiaona Que , Fanlu Jia , Qi Dong , Yang Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105705","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105705","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Developmental dyslexia is a specific learning disability for which early identification and intervention are crucial. In alphabetic languages, phonological awareness and letter naming are well-established early markers of reading disorders. For developmental dyslexia in Chinese, a language that differs from alphabetic languages in multiple aspects, little is known about its early markers. Here, we report findings from a 2.5-year longitudinal behavioral study and a functional neuroimaging study designed to identify the neural underpinnings of predictors of Chinese reading disability. In Experiment 1, 237 Chinese children were assessed at age 5 on phonological awareness, morphological awareness, phonological memory (measured by digit span) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Their reading performance was measured two and a half years later using a nationally standardized Chinese reading assessment. Forty children were identified as dyslexic and fifty-six as typical readers. For the two groups of children, we found that phonological memory and RAN were unique and reliable predictors of reading disorders, explaining significant variance after controlling for other factors. The analyses with all 237 participants showed the same pattern. In Experiment 2, we conducted a brain-wide association study in skilled readers to examine whether these two predictors were associated with activation in reading-related regions. We found that phonological memory and RAN were strongly associated with regions supporting Chinese reading. This research has demonstrated that phonological memory and RAN are early cognitive markers of Chinese dyslexia and, for the first time, has tried to pave the way for effective early intervention strategies for Chinese reading difficulties.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"274 ","pages":"Article 105705"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145927424","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-01-07DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2026.105707
Clément François , Laura Ferreri , Pablo Ripollés , Alfredo Garcia-Alix , Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells , Laura Bosch
{"title":"Evidence for a role of memory in novel word-learning after perinatal stroke","authors":"Clément François , Laura Ferreri , Pablo Ripollés , Alfredo Garcia-Alix , Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells , Laura Bosch","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2026.105707","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2026.105707","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Children with left perinatal arterial ischemic stroke (PAIS) often exhibit language deficits. However, evaluations of learning abilities are scarce. We compared word-referent associative learning and recall performance using a fast-mapping paradigm in a group of 3.5-year-old children with PAIS and in age-matched controls. The task involved a referent selection phase followed by immediate and delayed recall trials of the novel word-object associations. While no between-group differences were observed in the referent selection and immediate recall, children with PAIS showed lower performance in delayed recall of the newly learned associations. These results suggest that word learning difficulties after PAIS may arise due to a memory retention failure rather than to the process of referent selection through disambiguation involved in the fast mapping task. We discuss these findings in relation to the neural bases of infant language acquisition and their implications for clinical practice, particularly in terms of improving lexical acquisition and retention in children with PAIS.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"274 ","pages":"Article 105707"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145927425","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2025-12-31DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105702
Ran Tao , Kaile Zhang , Yan Feng , Yi Weng , Gang Peng
{"title":"Suprasegmental aspects of phonetic feature representation in human cortex: An fMRI investigation of Cantonese lexical tones","authors":"Ran Tao , Kaile Zhang , Yan Feng , Yi Weng , Gang Peng","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105702","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105702","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigated the neural basis of lexical tone representation in Cantonese, a complex tone language that contrasts pitch height and slope to convey lexical meaning. We used sparse-sampling fMRI to measure brain activity from native Cantonese speakers performing three tasks involving tonal syllables: passive listening, silent repetition, and word identification. Behavioral performance with high identification rates confirmed effective stimulus processing. Group-level activation and multivariate pattern analyses revealed a distributed bilateral network encompassing the bilateral precentral gyri (PrCG), right superior frontal gyrus (RSFG), bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG), left inferior parietal sulcus (LIPS), and bilateral lingual gyri (BiLG), which reliably encoded tone categories. Using dissimilarity matrices constructed from tonal features and neural activation patterns, representational similarity analysis (RSA) showed bilateral STG encoding pitch height and LIPS processing pitch slope. The frontal regions, LIPS, and BiLG contribute to holistic tone processing. This contrasts with the temporal-parietal network identified in previous Mandarin studies, suggesting that Cantonese tones invoke a bilateral and more extended brain network. The inter-subject RSA results revealed significant brain-behavioral correlations in the frontal and parietal regions, suggesting that these regions are closely associated with tone categorization performance. Other regions showed non-significant correlations, indicating their involvement in tone processing but not directly predicting behavioral performance. Together, these findings enhance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying tone perception in complex tonal languages and highlight the intricate role of bilateral cortical networks supporting the representation of complex suprasegmental phonetic features.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"274 ","pages":"Article 105702"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145886498","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-03-01Epub Date: 2026-01-05DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105704
Jie Chen , Yinan Wei , Ningxin Zhao , Manli Zhang , Jia Zhang , Guosheng Ding , George K. Georgiou , Xiangzhi Meng , Xiujie Yang
{"title":"Orthographic knowledge and morphological awareness in kindergarten predict children’s reading fluency in fifth grade through dorsal and ventral pathways","authors":"Jie Chen , Yinan Wei , Ningxin Zhao , Manli Zhang , Jia Zhang , Guosheng Ding , George K. Georgiou , Xiangzhi Meng , Xiujie Yang","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105704","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105704","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examined the neural mechanisms underlying how early orthographic and morphological awareness support the development of reading fluency in Chinese. We followed Mandarin-speaking Chinese children from kindergarten (<em>M</em><sub>age</sub> = 5.74 years) to Grade 5 (<em>M</em><sub>age</sub> = 11.07 years). Results of hierarchical regression analysis showed first that after controlling for age, gender, nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, and rapid automatized naming (RAN), orthographic knowledge and morphological awareness in kindergarten explained 4.6–7.0 % of unique variance in reading fluency in Grade 5. Next, results of mediation analysis showed that the functional connectivity between the left precentral gyrus and the right supramarginal gyrus mediated the association of orthographic knowledge (Time 1) and reading fluency (Time 2), and that the functional connectivity between the left fusiform gyrus and the left middle temporal gyrus mediated the relationship between morphological awareness (Time 1) and reading fluency (Time 2). These findings suggest that, over time, the dorsal and ventral pathways are crucial in how early orthographic and morphological awareness predict reading fluency later on.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"274 ","pages":"Article 105704"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145913997","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-02-01Epub Date: 2025-12-19DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105685
Yasuaki Shinohara , Valerie L. Shafer
{"title":"Neural indices of phonological and acoustic–phonetic perception","authors":"Yasuaki Shinohara , Valerie L. Shafer","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105685","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105685","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Neural discriminative responses index acoustic–phonetic and phonological differences. This study examined how contextual complexity modulates neural discrimination of speech sounds. The neural discrimination of Japanese /ma/ and /na/ was examined in a single-standard versus multi-standard oddball paradigm. In each paradigm, there were within-phoneme and cross-phoneme conditions. The results demonstrated that the single-standard cross-phoneme condition (single-standard [ma] vs. deviant [na]) elicited the largest mismatch negativity (MMN), followed by the single-standard within-phoneme condition (single-standard [na] vs. deviant [na]), and then the multi-standard cross-phoneme condition (multi-standard [ma] vs. deviant [na]). The multi-standard cross-phoneme condition elicited a late discriminative negativity (LDN) unlike the single-standard cross-phoneme condition. The later timing of the effect in the multi-standard condition suggests that task influences processing at the level of the MMN and LDN. Future studies are needed to further determine how the magnitude of varying factors, such as speech voice, influences phonological processing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"273 ","pages":"Article 105685"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145790659","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-02-01Epub Date: 2025-12-04DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105676
Xueping Hu , Yiming Yang , Lijun Wang , Na Hu , Zhenzhen Xu , Yanqing Wang , Lili Ming , Antao Chen
{"title":"The influence of language familiarity on voice discrimination: Divergent and shared neural mechanisms","authors":"Xueping Hu , Yiming Yang , Lijun Wang , Na Hu , Zhenzhen Xu , Yanqing Wang , Lili Ming , Antao Chen","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105676","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105676","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Language familiarity significantly modulates speaker discrimination, with listeners demonstrating superior performance for familiar versus unfamiliar languages. To address the confound of speech content acoustics in prior research, this fMRI study investigated the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this effect using identical speech content across three languages of varying listener proficiency. Behaviorally, familiar language discrimination elicited faster responses and higher accuracy. Neurally, bilateral insula and anterior cingulate cortex activation during different-speaker trials intensified as language familiarity decreased. The left rostrolateral prefrontal cortex was specifically engaged for unfamiliar voice discrimination and sensitive to speaker identity. Conjunction and representational similarity analyses across languages revealed engagement of voice-selective, cognitive control, and semantic processing regions, with high cross-language neural representational similarity specifically localized to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus. These findings provide the evidence under speech-content-matched conditions demonstrating that speaker discrimination relies on both acoustic voice processing regions and cognitive control networks implementing top-down modulation, the intensity of which is inversely proportional to language familiarity level.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"273 ","pages":"Article 105676"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145685403","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-02-01Epub Date: 2025-12-29DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105701
Luisa Cacciante , Mariagrazia Ranzini
{"title":"Promoting the integration of language, cognition and gesture for individuals with neurological disorders rehabilitation: A point of view and directions for future research","authors":"Luisa Cacciante , Mariagrazia Ranzini","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105701","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105701","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The cost of neurological disorders for our societies is increasing and calls for innovative and effective treatments. A large body of neuroscientific findings indicates that action and cognition are largely intermingled in the brain. Consistent research comes from studies on the link between gestures and language, for instance, showing that co-speech gestures play a role in lexical retrieval. Consequently, a perspective which integrates gestures and language in rehabilitation appears promising for the treatment of many language-related disorders occurring following neurodegenerative disease or cerebrovascular disease. Here we discuss how interventions for language disorders which integrate gestures appear to be promising, despite the fact that such interventions are still limited, and their efficacy has not been systematically tested yet. Specifically, we discuss findings illustrating how gesture-based treatments can be effective for the recovery of language disorders, and how language-based treatments can favor the positive outcome of motor rehabilitation. Beyond language, we highlight the importance of considering gestures in other important aspects of human cognition. This is the case of numerical cognition, where gestures play an important role in learning and expressing magnitude information (e.g., finger counting). We finally discuss the importance of promoting innovative rehabilitation protocols together with a comprehensive knowledge of individual differences in the brain mechanisms at play during recovery. Effective rehabilitation and recovery should be a major challenge for researchers and clinicians: integrating gestures might finally result in more ecological rehabilitation interventions and better translation of benefits to daily life activities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"273 ","pages":"Article 105701"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145866567","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-02-01Epub Date: 2025-12-10DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105688
Jeroen J. Stekelenburg, Martijn Baart, Jean Vroomen
{"title":"A behavioral and electrophysiological investigation of the effect of horizontal head viewing angle on audiovisual speech integration","authors":"Jeroen J. Stekelenburg, Martijn Baart, Jean Vroomen","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105688","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105688","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We investigated how horizontal viewing angle of a speaking face influences audiovisual (AV) speech integration at the behavioral and neural level. In Experiment 1, seventeen participants identified consonant–vowel syllables (/faː/, /feː/, /foː/, /paː/, /peː/, /poː/, /taː/, /teː/, /toː/) presented in audiovisual, visual-only, and auditory-only conditions across four head orientations (frontal, oblique, profile, side-back at 0°, 45°, 90°, and 100°, respectively), in quiet and white-noise (–14 dB SNR) masking conditions. Audiovisual gain by lip read information (AV minus A-only accuracy) declined with increasing head rotations for speech-in-noise, but only for /p/, while accuracy in the visual-only condition followed a similar trend. Experiment 2 measured electrophysiology (EEG) in twenty-eight participants for four syllables (/faː/, /foː/, /paː/, /poː/) in quiet examining N1/P2 event-related potential (ERP) components for audiovisual, auditory-only, and visual-only stimulus presentations. Peak-amplitude and cluster-based analyses revealed that the well-documented N1 suppression by visual speech information (AV – V < A) was maximal at oblique (45°) head rotations, and significantly reduced at profile and side-back angles, whereas P2 suppression remained constant across all angles. N1 and P2 latencies were consistently shorter for AV – V than A-only conditions for all angles. These results demonstrate a dissociation between temporal (N1 amplitude suppression) and phonetic (P2 amplitude suppression) integrative mechanisms: temporal prediction degraded with profile/side-back head orientations, whereas audiovisual phonetic integration was not affected by the viewing angle of the head. Our findings indicate that head rotation reduces, but does not eliminate, audiovisual speech integration.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"273 ","pages":"Article 105688"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145737580","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}
Brain and LanguagePub Date : 2026-02-01Epub Date: 2025-12-15DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105686
Li Sheng , Anita Mei-Yin Wong
{"title":"Editorial: Developmental Language Disorder in Chinese","authors":"Li Sheng , Anita Mei-Yin Wong","doi":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105686","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105686","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55330,"journal":{"name":"Brain and Language","volume":"273 ","pages":"Article 105686"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145770043","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}