“Words and emotions in sentence context”: a commentary on Hinojosa, Moreno and Ferré (2019)

Published online: 25 Jul 2019This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Gobierno de España (MINECO), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER) [grant RTI2018-096311-B-I00, “Severo Ochoa” programme SEV-2015-490 for Centres of Excellence in R&D], and by the Eusko Jaurlaritza Basque government [grant PI_2016_1_0014]. Further support derived from the AThEME project funded by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme, the ERC- 2011-ADG-295362 from the European Research Council

I’m Doing Better on My Own: Social Inhibition in Vocabulary Learning in Adults

Published: 05 June 2019Vocabulary learning is better achieved by children facing a teacher than when presented to the same teacher through video (so-called “video deficit” effect), which has significant implications for toddlers’ education. Since millions of adults also learn new vocabulary when acquiring a second language (L2), it is important to explore whether adults suffer from “video deficit” effects, as children do. In the present study, we report two experiments in which Spanish native late learners of English were involved in a vocabulary learning task. In Experiment 1, participants had to learn English (L2) labels associated to real objects. In Experiment 2, participants had to learn English (L2) and Spanish (L1) labels associated to novel objects. In both experiments, vocabulary learning was divided into three conditions: In the NoFace condition, participants were presented with the objects and their auditory labels, through video. In the Video condition, a teacher was showing the objects and uttering their names, through video. The Live condition was equivalent, except that the teacher was facing the participants in the room. Each condition was followed by a recall test. Better learning in Video compared to NoFace condition revealed that adults benefit from the teacher’s display with direct gaze, confirming the fundamental role of face display with direct gaze in social communication in adults. Interestingly, adults learned better through Video than in the Live condition. Those results were obtained in L2 vocabulary learning in both Experiments 1 and 2, and also generalized to native language in Experiment 2. We argue that adults suffer from social inhibition, meaning that they perform worse when in the presence of another person during task performance. In sum, we show that video-mediated teaching might not be detrimental for adults learning new vocabulary lists, as it is the case for young children. These results might have important implications for pedagogical programs targeting adults’ second language vocabulary learning, since proper acquisition of vocabulary list can be achieved through video including a teacher’s display.This research was funded by a grant from the FP7/2007–2013 Cooperation grant agreement 613465-AThEME, an ERC grant from the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG-295362), grants from the Spanish Government (PSI2014-54500, PSI2015-65694, and PSI2017-82941-P), and from the Basque Government (PI_2015_1_25 and PIBA18_29)

Perceptual facilitation of word recognition through motor activation during sentence comprehension

Published online 29 July 2018Despite the growing literature on anticipatory language processing, the brain dynamics of this high-level predictive process are still unclear. In the present MEG study, we analyzed pre- and post-stimulus oscillatory activity time-locked to the reading of a target word. We experimentally contrasted the processing of the same target word following two highly constraining sentence contexts, in which the constraint was driven either by the semantic content or by the lexical association between words. Previous research suggests the presence of sensory facilitation for expected words in the latter condition but not in the former. We observed a dissociation between beta (∼20 Hz) and gamma (>50 Hz) band activity in pre- and post-stimulus time intervals respectively. Both the beta and gamma effects were evident in occipital brain regions, and only the pre-stimulus beta effect additionally involved left pre-articulatory motor regions. Lexically constrained (vs. semantically constrained) words elicited reduced beta power around 400 msec before the target word in motor regions and a functionally related gamma enhancement in occipital regions around 200 msec post-target. The present findings highlight the role of the motor network in word-form prediction and support proposals claiming that low-level perceptual representations can be pre-activated during language prediction.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER) (grant PSI2015-65694-P, “Severo Ochoa” programme SEV-2015-490 for Centres of Excellence in R&D), and by the Basque government (grant PI_2016_1_0014). Further support derived from the AThEME project funded by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme, the ERC- 2011-ADG-295362 from the European Research Council

Synchronising internal and external information: a commentary on Meyer, Sun & Martin (2020)

Published online: 19 Mar 2020AKG was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska- Curie grant agreement No 798971. NM was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (grant RTI2018-096311-B-I00), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER). The authors acknowledge financial support from the “Severo Ochoa” Programme for Center/Unit of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-490) and by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018–2021 programme

Agreement attraction in Serbian: decomposing markedness

Published online 18 July 2016Asymmetric number attraction effects have been typically explained via a privative markedness account: plural nouns are more marked than singular ones and thus stronger attractors. However, this account does not explain results from tripartite systems, in which a third number value is available, like paucal. Here we tested whether attraction effects can be driven by specific markedness sub-components, such as frequency/naturalness of use, using Serbian, in which participles can agree with masculine subjects in singular, plural and paucal. We first conducted a naturalness judgment task, finding the following naturalness/frequency pattern: singular,plural<paucal. In a subsequent forced-choice task, we presented participants with preambles containing a singular, a plural or a paucal headnoun (the castle[Sg] /two castles[Pauc] /the castles[Pl]) modified by singular/plural/paucal attractors (with the window[Sg] /with two windows[Pauc] /with the windows[Pl]). Three options were provided to complete the sentence (resembles[Sg] /resemble[Pauc] /resemble[Pl] gothic architecture).Both accuracy and reaction times (RTs) were collected. Accuracy data reflected the naturalness/frequency pattern, with paucal being the strongest attractor, and plural and singular attracting equally. However, reaction times showed a difference between singular and plural, suggesting co-influence of both frequency/naturalness and morphological markedness. We emphasize the necessity of re-defining markedness and testing attraction through different markedness sub-components (i.e. frequency/naturalness) to explain attraction cross-linguistically.This research was partially funded by the P1_2014_1_38 (B.R and S.M) and PRE_2015_1_0320 (B.R.) grants from the Basque Government, the PSI2012-32350 and PSI2015-65694-P grants from the Spanish Government (N.M.), the Gipuzkoa Fellowship Program (S.M.) and by the grant Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2015-0490

Finding identity in the midst of ambiguity: case and number disambiguation in Basque

Published online: 02 Mar 2020Restrictive contextual information has been found to bias syntactic disambiguation, when only one alternative leads to a meaningful interpretation. The current study tests whether disambiguation can be influenced by nonrestrictive cues – when several alternatives are equally plausible. We first evaluated if modifier number biased the disambiguation of number- and case-ambiguous nouns in Basque. In a noun phrase comprehension paradigm, ambiguous noun number judgments were biased by preceding modifier number. Then, using a preamble completion paradigm, we examined whether headnoun disambiguation and thus sentence completion was also biased by modifier number. Our results suggest that nonrestrictive information (singular and plural number) can affect disambiguation. We also report task differences in the overall interpretation of ambiguous Basque nouns, as well modifier-induced agreement errors. We suggest that the parser uses any available context information when there is ambiguity, including preceding modifier markings.This research was partially funded by the following grants: PRE_2015_1_0320, PRE_2016_2_0070, PRE_2017_2_0079, PRE_2018_2_0074 (B.R.), as well as PI_2016_1_0014 (N.M.) by Eusko Jaurlaritza, PSI2015-65694-P and RTI2018-096311-B-I00 (N.M), as well as RYC-2017-22015 and FFI2016-76432- P_LAMPT (S.M.), funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER), as well as the Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa grant SEV-2015- 0490

Theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling in auditory cortex is modulated by language proficiency

First published: 27 February 2023The coordination between the theta phase (3–7 Hz) and gamma power (25–35 Hz) oscillations (namely theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling, PAC) in the auditory cortex has been proposed as an essential neural mechanism involved in speech processing. However, it has not been established how this mechanism is related to the efficiency with which a listener processes speech. Speech processing in a non-native language offers a useful opportunity to evaluate if theta-gamma PAC is modulated by the challenges imposed by the reception of speech input in a non-native language. The present study investigates how auditory theta-gamma PAC (recorded with magnetoencephalography) is modulated in both native and non-native speech reception. Participants were Spanish native (L1) speakers studying Basque (L2) at three different levels: beginner (Grade 1), intermediate (Grade 2), and advanced (Grade 3). We found that during L2 speech processing (i) theta-gamma PAC was more highly coordinated for intelligible compared to unintelligible speech; (ii) this coupling was modulated by proficiency in Basque being lower for beginners, higher for intermediate, and highest for advanced speakers (no difference observed in Spanish); (iii) gamma power did not differ between languages and groups. These findings highlight how the coordinated theta-gamma oscillatory activity is tightly related to speech comprehension: the stronger this coordination is, the more the comprehension system will proficiently parse the incoming speech input.This research is supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2022-2025 program, the Spanish State Research Agency through BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation CEX2020- 001010-S, the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (IJC2020-042886-I to M.L.; PID2021-122918OB-I00 to M.C; RTI2018-096311-B-I00 and PCI2022-135031-2 to N.M.;) and the IKUR #neural2speech projec

Theta oscillations mediate preactivation of highly expected word initial phonemes

Published: 22 June 2018Prediction has been proposed to be a fundamental neurocognitive mechanism. However, its role in language comprehension is currently under debate. In this magnetoencephalography study we aimed to find evidence of word-form phonological pre-activation and to characterize the oscillatory mechanisms supporting this. Participants were presented firstly with a picture of an object, and then, after a delay (fixed or variable), they heard the corresponding word. Target words could contain a phoneme substitution, and participants’ task was to detect mispronunciations. Word-initial phonemes were either fricatives or plosives, generating two experimental conditions (expect-fricative and expect-plosive). In the pre-word interval, significant differences (α = 0.05) emerged between conditions both for fixed and variable delays. Source reconstruction of this effect showed a brain-wide network involving several frequency bands, including bilateral superior temporal areas commonly associated with phonological processing, in a theta range. These results show that phonological representations supported by the theta band may be active before word onset, even under temporal uncertainty. However, in the evoked response just prior to the word, differences between conditions were apparent under variable- but not fixed-delays. This suggests that additional top-down mechanisms sensitive to phonological form may be recruited when there is uncertainty in the signal.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER) (grant PSI2016– 77175-P to Mathieu Bourguignon, grant PSI2015–65694-P to Nicola Molinaro, Severo Ochoa programme SEV-2015–490 for Centres of Excellence in R&D), and by the Basque government (grant PI_2016_1_0014 to Nicola Molinaro). Further support derived from the AThEME project funded by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme, the ERC- 2011-ADG-295362 from the European Research Council. Finally, Mathieu Bourguignon was supported by the program Attract of Innoviris (grant 2015-BB2B-10) and by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action of the European Commission (grant 743562)

Maintenance cost in the processing of subject-verb dependencies

Published Jun 2022Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject–verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or phoneme-monitoring tasks. In the current study, we used eye tracking during reading to test whether maintaining a long-distance SV dependency results in a processing cost on an intervening adverbial clause. In Experiment 1, we studied this question in Spanish and found that both go-past reading times and regressions out of an adverbial clause to the previous regions were significantly increased when the clause interrupts a SV dependency compared to when the same clause doesn’t interrupt this dependency. We then replicated these findings in English (Experiment 2), observing significantly increased go-past reading times on a clause interrupting a SV dependency. The current study provides the first eye-tracking data showing a maintenance cost in the processing of SV dependencies cross-linguistically. Sentence comprehension models should account for the maintenance cost generated by SV dependency processing, and future research should focus on the nature of the maintained representation.This research was partially funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Agencia Estatal de Investigación & Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional Grants PSI2015-65694-P, and RTI2018-096311-B-I00 to Nicola Molinaro, and RYC-2017–22015 and FFI2016-76432-P_LAMPT to Simona Mancini; by Eusko Jaurlaritza Grants PI_2016_1_0014 to Nicola Molinaro, PRE_2018_2_0074 and EP_2018_1_0042 to Bojana Ristic; and by Agencia Estatal de Investigación’s Severo Ochoa excellence program Grant SEV2015– 0490 to the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language

Early dissociation of numbers and letters in the human brain

Published online 7 May 2020Numbers and letters are culturally created symbols which are learned through repeated training. This experience leads to a functional specialization of the perceptual system of our brain. Recent evidence suggests a neural dissociation between these two symbols. While previous literature has shown that letters elicit a left lateralized neural response, new studies suggest that numbers elicit preferentially a bilateral or right lateralized response. However, the time course of the neural patterns that characterize this dissociation is still underspecified. In the present study, we investigated with magnetoencephalography (MEG) the spatio-temporal dynamics of the neural response generated by numbers, letters and perceptually matched false fonts presented visually. Twenty-five healthy adults were recorded while participants performed a dot detection task. By including two experiments, we were able to study the effects of single characters as well as those of strings of characters. The signal analysis was focused on the event related fields (ERF) of the MEG signal in the sensors and in the source space. The main results of our study showed an early (<200 msec) preferential dissociation between single numbers and single letters on occipito-temporal sensors. When comparing strings of numbers and pseudowords, they differed also over prefrontal regions of the brain. These data offer a new example of acquired category-specific responses in the human brain.The research was partially supported by Basque Government (BERC 2018-2021 program), BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation SEV-2015-0490, and Grant RTI2018-093547-B-I00 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovaci on y Universidades and the Agencia Estatal de Investigaci on