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Cognitive Neuropsychology The maps problem and the mapping problem: Two challenges for a cognitive neuroscience of speech and language
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, 2013
"... doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00189 The neural bases of the multiplication problem-size effect across countries ..."
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doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00189 The neural bases of the multiplication problem-size effect across countries
Lexical Preactivation in Basic Linguistic Phrases
"... ■ Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such preactivation, however, has typ-ically been studied indirectly through ..."
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■ Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such preactivation, however, has typ-ically been studied indirectly through its subsequent effect on word recognition. Here, we use magnetoencephalography to study the dynamics of prediction within serially presented adjective–noun phrases, beginning at the point at which the pre-dictive information is first available to the reader. Using corpus transitional probability to estimate the predictability of a noun, we found an increase in activity in the left middle temporal gyrus in response to the presentation of highly predictive adjectives (i.e., adjectives that license a strong noun prediction). Moreover, we found that adjective predictivity and expected noun frequency interacted, such that the response to the highly predictive adjec-tives (e.g., stainless) was modulated by the frequency of the ex-pected noun (steel). These results likely reflect preactivation of nouns in highly predictive contexts. The fact that the preactivation process was modulated by the frequency of the predicted item is argued to provide support for a frequency-sensitive lexicon. ■
Reviewed by:
, 2014
"... One view of speech perception is that acoustic signals are transformed into representations for pattern matching to determine linguistic structure. This process can be taken as a statistical pattern-matching problem, assuming realtively stable linguistic categories are characterized by neural repres ..."
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One view of speech perception is that acoustic signals are transformed into representations for pattern matching to determine linguistic structure. This process can be taken as a statistical pattern-matching problem, assuming realtively stable linguistic categories are characterized by neural representations related to auditory properties of speech that can be compared to speech input. This kind of pattern matching can be termed a passive process which implies rigidity of processing with few demands on cognitive processing. An alternative view is that speech recognition, even in early stages, is an active process in which speech analysis is attentionally guided. Note that this does not mean consciously guided but that information-contingent changes in early auditory encoding can occur as a function of context and experience. Active processing assumes that attention, plasticity, and listening goals are important in considering how listeners cope with adverse circumstances that impair hearing by masking noise in the environment or hearing loss. Although theories of speech perception have begun to incorporate some active processing, they seldom treat early speech encoding as plastic and attentionally guided. Recent research has suggested that speech perception is the product of both
Explicit authenticity and stimulus features interact to modulate BOLD response induced by emotional speech
, 2013
"... # The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Context has been found to have a profound effect on the recognition of social stimuli and correlated brain activation. The present study was designed to determine whether knowledge about emotional authentic ..."
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# The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Context has been found to have a profound effect on the recognition of social stimuli and correlated brain activation. The present study was designed to determine whether knowledge about emotional authenticity influences emotion recognition expressed through speech intonation. Participants classified emotionally expressive speech in an fMRI experimental design as sad, happy, angry, or fearful. For some trials, stimuli were cued as either authentic or play-acted in order to manipulate participant top-down be-lief about authenticity, and these labels were presented both congruently and incongruently to the emotional authenticity of the stimulus. Contrasting authentic versus play-acted stimuli during uncued trials indicated that play-acted stimuli spontaneously up-regulate activity in the auditory cortex and regions associated with emotional speech processing. In addition, a clear interaction effect of cue and stimulus authenticity showed up-regulation in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the anterior cingulate cortex, indicating that cueing had an impact on the perception of authenticity. In particular, when a cue indicating an authentic stimulus was followed by a play-acted stimulus, additional activation occurred in the temporoparietal junction, probably pointing to increased load on perspective taking in such trials. While actual authenticity has a significant impact on brain activa-tion, individual belief about stimulus authenticity can addi-tionally modulate the brain response to differences in emotionally expressive speech.
Research Article Mental Mechanisms for Topics Identification
"... permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Topics identification (TI) is the process that consists in determining the main themes present in natural language documents. The current TI modeling paradigm aims at acquiring seman ..."
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permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Topics identification (TI) is the process that consists in determining the main themes present in natural language documents. The current TI modeling paradigm aims at acquiring semantic information from statistic properties of large text datasets. We investigate the mental mechanisms responsible for the identification of topics in a single document given existing knowledge. Our main hypothesis is that topics are the result of accumulated neural activation of loosely organized information stored in long-term memory (LTM). We experimentally tested our hypothesis with a computational model that simulates LTM activation. The model assumes activation decay as an unavoidable phenomenon originating from the bioelectric nature of neural systems. Since decay should negatively affect the quality of topics, the model predicts the presence of short-term memory (STM) to keep the focus of attention on a few words, with the expected outcome of restoring quality to a baseline level. Our experiments measured topics quality of over 300 documents with various decay rates and STM capacity. Our results showed that accumulated activation of loosely organized information was an effective mental computational commodity to identify topics. It was furthermore confirmed that rapid decay is detrimental to topics quality but that limited capacity STM restores quality to a baseline level, even exceeding it slightly. 1.
Review Article Brain and Language: Evidence for Neural Multifunctionality
"... Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This review paper presents converging evidence from studies of brain damage and longitudinal studies of language in aging which supports the following thes ..."
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Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This review paper presents converging evidence from studies of brain damage and longitudinal studies of language in aging which supports the following thesis: the neural basis of language can best be understood by the concept of neural multifunctionality. In this paper the term “neural multifunctionality ” refers to incorporation of nonlinguistic functions into language models of the intact brain, reflecting a multifunctional perspective whereby a constant and dynamic interaction exists among neural networks subserving cognitive, affective, and praxic functions with neural networks specialized for lexical retrieval, sentence comprehension, and discourse processing, giving rise to language as we know it. Byway of example, we consider effects of executive system functions on aspects of semantic processing among persons with and without aphasia, as well as the interaction of executive and language functions among older adults. We conclude by indicating how this multifunctional view of brain-language relations extends to the realm of language recovery from aphasia, where evidence of the influence of nonlinguistic factors on the reshaping of neural circuitry for aphasia rehabilitation is clearly emerging. 1.
