116 research outputs found

    Controlled processing during sequencing

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    Longstanding evidence has identified a role for the frontal cortex in sequencing within both linguistic and non-linguistic domains. More recently, neuropsychological studies have suggested a specific role for the left premotor-prefrontal junction (BA 44/6) in selection between competing alternatives during sequencing. In this study, we used neuroimaging with healthy adults to confirm and extend knowledge about the neural correlates of sequencing. Participants reproduced visually presented sequences of syllables and words using manual button presses. Items in the sequence were presented either consecutively or concurrently. Concurrent presentation is known to trigger the planning of multiple responses, which might compete with one another. Therefore, we hypothesized that regions involved in controlled processing would show greater recruitment during the concurrent than the consecutive condition. Whole-brain analysis showed concurrent > consecutive activation in sensory, motor and somatosensory cortices and notably also in rostral-dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Region of interest analyses showed increased activation within left BA 44/6 and correlation between this region’s activation and behavioral response times. Functional connectivity analysis revealed increased connectivity between left BA 44/6 and the posterior lobe of the cerebellum during the concurrent than the consecutive condition. These results corroborate recent evidence and demonstrate the involvement of BA 44/6 and other control regions when ordering co-activated representations

    Variation in How Cognitive Control Modulates Sentence Processing

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    Prior research suggests that cognitive control can assist the comprehension of sentences that create conflict between interpretations, at least under some circumstances. However, the mixed pattern of results suggests that cognitive control may not always be necessary for accurate comprehension. We tested whether cognitive control recruitment for language processing is systematically variable, depending on the type of sentential ambiguity or conflict, individual differences in cognitive control, and task demands. Participants completed two sessions in a web-based experiment. The first session tested conflict modulation using interleaved Stroop and sentence comprehension trials. Critical sentences contained syntax-semantics or phrase-attachment conflict. In the second session, participants completed three cognitive control and three working memory tasks. Exploratory factor analysis was used to index individual differences in a cognitive control factor and a working memory factor. At the group level, there were no significant conflict modulation effects for either syntax-semantics or phrase-attachment conflict. At the individual differences level, the cognitive control factor correlated with offline comprehension accuracy but not online processing measures for both types of conflict. Together, the results suggest that the role of cognitive control in sentence processing may vary according to task demands. When overt decisions are required, individual differences in cognitive control may matter such that better cognitive control results in better language comprehension performance. The results add to the mixed evidence on conflict modulation and raise questions about the situations under which cognitive control influences online processing

    Relative contributions of lesion location and lesion size to predictions of varied language deficits in post-stroke aphasia

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    Despite the widespread use of lesion-symptom mapping (LSM) techniques to study associations between location of brain damage and language deficits, the prediction of language deficits from lesion location remains a substantial challenge. The present study examined several factors which may impact lesion-symptom prediction by (1) testing the relative predictive advantage of general language deficit scores compared to composite scores that capture specific deficit types, (2) isolating the relative contribution of lesion location compared to lesion size, and (3) comparing standard voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) with a multivariate method (sparse canonical correlation analysis, SCCAN). Analyses were conducted on data from 128 participants who completed a detailed battery of psycholinguistic tests and underwent structural neuroimaging (MRI or CT) to determine lesion location. For both VLSM and SCCAN, overall aphasia severity (Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia Quotient) and object naming deficits were primarily predicted by lesion size, whereas deficits in Speech Production and Speech Recognition were better predicted by a combination of lesion size and location. The implementation of both VLSM and SCCAN raises important considerations regarding controlling for lesion size in lesion-symptom mapping analyses. These findings suggest that lesion-symptom prediction is more accurate for deficits within neurally-localized cognitive systems when both lesion size and location are considered compared to broad functional deficits, which can be predicted by overall lesion size alone. Keywords: Aphasia, Lesion-symptom prediction, Sparse canonical correlation analysis, Lesion siz

    Проблеми правового забезпечення процедури державного нагородження в Україні

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    Досліджується деякі проблемні аспекти процедури державного нагородження, зокрема, порядок представлення до нагородження, порядок подання документів особи, що представляється до нагороди, звертається увага на розмежування повноважень Президента України і Комісії державних нагород та геральдики при Президентові України при ухваленні остаточного рішення щодо нагородження.Исследуются некоторые проблемные аспекты процедуры государственного награждения, в частности, порядок представления к награждению, обращается вни­мание на порядок представления документов лица, которое представляется к награде, а также разграничения полномочий Президента Украины и Комиссии государственных наград и геральдики при Президенте Украины при принятии окончательного реше­ния относительно награждения.Some problem aspects of the state rewarding procedure, in particular, the order of presentation to the rewarding, the main attention is paid to the order of presentation of the person»s documents, who is represented to the award, and also the differentiating of powers of the President of Ukraine and the Commission of the State Awards and Heraldry by the President of Ukraine by making final decision concerning rewarding, are probed in the article

    Syntactic priming in comprehension:Parallelism effects with and without coordination

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    Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this paral-lelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordina-tion, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three eye-tracking experiments that test for parallelism effects both in coordinated noun phrases and in subordinate clauses. The first experiment repli-cated previous findings, showing that the second conjunct of a coordinated noun phrase was read more quickly when it had the same structure as the first conjunct, compared with when it did not. Experiment 2 examined parallelism effects in noun phrases that were not linked by coordination. Again, a reading time advantage was found when the second noun phrase had the same structure as the first. Experi-ment 3 compared parallelism effects in coordinated and non-coordinated syntactic environments. The parallelism effect was replicated for both environments, and was statistically equivalent whether or not coordination was involved. This demon-strated that parallelism effects can be found outside the environment of coordina-tion, suggesting a general syntactic priming mechanism as the underlying explana-tion

    Abstract sentence representations in 3-year-olds: Evidence from language production and comprehension

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    We use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35-42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12 children who received no priming (0). Priming was comparable to that reported for older children and adults. Comprehension of reversible passives with animate participants before and after priming was above chance but did not improve as a result of priming. Young 3-year-olds represent sentences abstractly, have syntactic representations for noun, verb, "surface subject", and "surface object", have semantic representations for "agent" and "patient", and flexibly map the relation between syntax and semantics. Taken together with research on syntactic categories in 2-year-olds, our results provide empirical support for continuity in language acquisition

    Aligning Developmental and Processing Accounts of Implicit and Statistical Learning

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    A long‐standing question in child language research concerns how children achieve mature syntactic knowledge in the face of a complex linguistic environment. A widely accepted view is that this process involves extracting distributional regularities from the environment in a manner that is incidental and happens, for the most part, without the learner's awareness. In this way, the debate speaks to two associated but separate literatures in language acquisition: statistical learning and implicit learning. Both fields have explored this issue in some depth but, at present, neither the results from the infant studies used by the statistical learning literature nor the artificial grammar learning tasks studies from the implicit learning literature can be used to fully explain how children's syntax becomes adult‐like. In this work, we consider an alternative explanation—that children use error‐based learning to become mature syntax users. We discuss this proposal in the light of the behavioral findings from structural priming studies and the computational findings from Chang, Dell, and Bock's (2006) dual‐path model, which incorporates properties from both statistical and implicit learning, and offers an explanation for syntax learning and structural priming using a common error‐based learning mechanism. We then turn our attention to future directions for the field, here suggesting how structural priming might inform the statistical learning and implicit learning literature on the nature of the learning mechanism
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