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The extent to which the brain predicts upcoming information during language processing remains controversial. To shed light on this debate, the present study reanalyzed Nieuwland and colleagues' (2018) [Nieuwland, M. S., Politzer-Ahles, S., Heyselaar, E., Segaert, K., Darley, E., Kazanina, N., et al. Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension. eLife, 7, e33468, 2018] replication of DeLong and colleagues (2015) [DeLong, K. A., Urbach, T. P., & Kutas, M. Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1117–1121, 2005]. Participants (n = 356) viewed sentences containing articles and nouns of varying predictability, while their EEG was recorded. We measured ERPs preceding the critical words (namely, the semantic prediction potential), in conjunction with postword N400 patterns and individual neural metrics. ERP activity was compared with two measures of word predictability: cloze probability and lexical surprisal. In contrast to prior literature, semantic prediction potential amplitudes did not increase as cloze probability increased, suggesting that the component may not reflect prediction during natural language processing. Initial N400 results at the article provided evidence against phonological prediction in language, in line with Nieuwland and colleagues' findings. Strikingly, however, when the surprisal of the prior words in the sentence was included in the analysis, increases in article surprisal were associated with increased N400 amplitudes, consistent with prediction accounts. This relationship between surprisal and N400 amplitude was not observed when the surprisal of the two prior words was low, suggesting that expectation violations at the article may be overlooked under highly predictable conditions. Individual alpha frequency also modulated the relationship between article surprisal and the N400, emphasizing the importance of individual neural factors for prediction. The present study extends upon existing neurocognitive models of language and prediction more generally, by illuminating the flexible and subject-specific nature of predictive processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human performance applications of mindfulness-based training have demonstrated its utility in enhancing cognitive functioning. Previous studies have illustrated how these interventions can improve performance on traditional cognitive tests, however, little investigation has explored the extent to which mindfulness-based training can optimise performance in more dynamic and complex contexts. Further, from a neuroscientific perspective, the underlying mechanisms responsible for performance enhancements remain largely undescribed. With this in mind, the following study aimed to investigate how a short-term mindfulness intervention (one week) augments performance on a dynamic and complex task (target motion analyst task; TMA) in young, healthy adults (n = 40, age range = 18–38). Linear mixed effect modelling revealed that increased adherence to the web-based mindfulness-based training regime (ranging from 0–21 sessions) was associated with improved performance in the second testing session of the TMA task, controlling for baseline performance. Analyses of resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) metrics demonstrated no change across testing sessions. Investigations of additional individual factors demonstrated that enhancements associated with training adherence remained relatively consistent across varying levels of participants' resting-state EEG metrics, personality measures (i.e., trait mindfulness, neuroticism, conscientiousness), self-reported enjoyment and timing of intervention adherence. Our results thus indicate that mindfulness-based cognitive training leads to performance enhancements in distantly related tasks, irrespective of several individual differences. We also revealed nuances in the magnitude of cognitive enhancements contingent on the timing of adherence, regardless of total volume of training. Overall, our findings suggest that mindfulness-based training could be used in a myriad of settings to elicit transferable performance enhancements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The language comprehension system preferentially assumes that agents come first during incremental processing. While this might reflect a biologically fixed bias, shared with other domains and other species, the evidence is limited to languages that place agents first, and so the bias could also be learned from usage frequency. Here, we probe the bias with electroencephalography (EEG) in Äiwoo, a language that by default places patients first, but where sentence‐initial nouns are still locally ambiguous between patient or agent roles. Comprehenders transiently interpreted nonhuman nouns as patients, eliciting a negativity when disambiguation was toward the less common agent‐initial order. By contrast and against frequencies, human nouns were transiently interpreted as agents, eliciting an N400‐like negativity when the disambiguation was toward patient‐initial order. Consistent with the notion of a fixed property, the agent bias is robust against usage frequency for human referents. However, this bias can be reversed by frequency experience for nonhuman referents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective teams are essential for optimally functioning societies. However, little is known regarding the neural basis of two or more individuals engaging cooperatively in real-world tasks, such as in operational training environments. In this exploratory study, we recruited forty individuals paired as twenty dyads and recorded dual-EEG at rest and during realistic training scenarios of increasing complexity using virtual simulation systems. We estimated markers of intrinsic brain activity (i.e., individual alpha frequency and aperiodic activity), as well as task-related theta and alpha oscillations. Using nonlinear modelling and a logistic regression machine learning model, we found that resting-state EEG predicts performance and can also reliably differentiate between members within a dyad. Task-related theta and alpha activity during easy training tasks predicted later performance on complex training to a greater extent than prior behaviour. These findings complement laboratory-based research on both oscillatory and aperiodic activity in higher-order cognition and provide evidence that theta and alpha activity play a critical role in complex task performance in team environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory formation involves the synchronous firing of neurons in task-relevant networks, with recent models postulating that a decrease in low-frequency oscillatory activity underlies successful memory encoding and retrieval. However, to date, this relationship has been investigated primarily with face and image stimuli; considerably less is known about the oscillatory correlates of complex rule learning, as in language. Furthermore, recent work has shown that nonoscillatory (1/ƒ) activity is functionally relevant to cognition, yet its interaction with oscillatory activity during complex rule learning remains unknown. Using spectral decomposition and power-law exponent estimation of human EEG data (17 women, 18 men), we show for the first time that 1/ƒ and oscillatory activity jointly influence the learning of word order rules of a miniature artificial language system. Flexible word-order rules were associated with a steeper 1/ƒ slope, whereas fixed word-order rules were associated with a shallower slope. We also show that increased theta and alpha power predicts fixed relative to flexible word-order rule learning and behavioral performance. Together, these results suggest that 1/ƒ activity plays an important role in higher-order cognition, including language processing, and that grammar learning is modulated by different word-order permutations, which manifest in distinct oscillatory profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language processing requires memory retrieval to integrate current input with previous context and making predictions about upcoming input. We propose that prediction and retrieval are two sides of the same coin, i.e. functionally the same, as they both activate memory representations. Under this assumption, memory retrieval and prediction should interact: Retrieval interference can only occur at a word that triggers retrieval and a fully predicted word would not do that. The present study investigated the proposed interaction with event-related potentials (ERPs) during the processing of sentence pairs in German. Predictability was measured via cloze probability. Memory retrieval was manipulated via the position of a distractor inducing proactive or retroactive similarity-based interference. Linear mixed model analyses provided evidence for the hypothesised interaction in a broadly distributed negativity, which we discuss in relation to the interference ERP literature. Our finding supports the proposal that memory retrieval and prediction are functionally the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predictive coding provides a compelling, unified theory of neural information processing, including for language. However, there is insufficient understanding of how predictive models adapt to changing contextual and environmental demands and the extent to which such adaptive processes differ between individuals. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to track prediction error responses during a naturalistic language processing paradigm. In Experiment 1, 45 native speakers of English listened to a series of short passages. Via a speaker manipulation, we introduced changing intra-experimental adjective order probabilities for two-adjective noun phrases embedded within the passages and investigated whether prediction error responses adapt to reflect these intra-experimental predictive contingencies. To this end, we calculated a novel measure of speaker-based, intra-experimental surprisal (“speaker-based surprisal”) as defined on a trial-by-trial basis and by clustering together adjectives with a similar meaning. N400 amplitude at the position of the critical second adjective was used as an outcome measure of prediction error. Results showed that N400 responses attuned to speaker-based surprisal over the course of the experiment, thus indicating that listeners rapidly adapt their predictive models to reflect local environmental contingencies (here: the probability of one type of adjective following another when uttered by a particular speaker). Strikingly, this occurs in spite of the wealth of prior linguistic experience that participants bring to the laboratory. Model adaptation effects were strongest for participants with a steep aperiodic (1/f) slope in resting EEG and low individual alpha frequency (IAF), with idea density (ID) showing a more complex pattern. These results were replicated in a separate sample of 40 participants in Experiment 2, which employed a highly similar design to Experiment 1. Overall, our results suggest that individuals with a steep aperiodic slope adapt their predictive models most strongly to context-specific probabilistic information. Steep aperiodic slope is thought to reflect low neural noise, which in turn may be associated with higher neural gain control and better cognitive control. Individuals with a steep aperiodic slope may thus be able to more effectively and dynamically reconfigure their prediction-related neural networks to meet current task demands. We conclude that predictive mechanisms in language are highly malleable and dynamic, reflecting both the affordances of the present environment as well as intrinsic information processing capabilities of the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capacity to regulate one's attention in accordance with fluctuating task demands and environmental contexts is an essential feature of adaptive behavior. Although the electrophysiological correlates of attentional processing have been extensively studied in the laboratory, relatively little is known about the way they unfold under more variable, ecologically-valid conditions. Accordingly, this study employed a 'real-world' EEG design to investigate how attentional processing varies under increasing cognitive, motor, and environmental demands. Forty-four participants were exposed to an auditory oddball task while (1) sitting in a quiet room inside the lab, (2) walking around a sports field, and (3) wayfinding across a university campus. In each condition, participants were instructed to either count or ignore oddball stimuli. While behavioral performance was similar across the lab and field conditions, oddball count accuracy was significantly reduced in the campus condition. Moreover, event-related potential components (mismatch negativity and P3) elicited in both 'real-world' settings differed significantly from those obtained under laboratory conditions. These findings demonstrate the impact of environmental factors on attentional processing during simultaneously-performed motor and cognitive tasks, highlighting the value of incorporating dynamic and unpredictable contexts within naturalistic designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigms are used extensively to characterise (neuro)cognitive bases of language learning. However, despite their effectiveness in characterising the capacity to learn complex structured sequences, AGL paradigms lack ecological validity and typically do not account for cross-linguistic differences in sentence comprehension. Here, we describe a new modified miniature language paradigm – Mini Pinyin – that mimics natural language as it is based on an existing language (Mandarin Chinese) and includes both structure and meaning. Mini Pinyin contains a number of cross-linguistic elements, including varying word orders and classifier-noun rules. To evaluate the effectiveness of Mini Pinyin, 76 (mean age = 24.9; 26 female) monolingual native English speakers completed a learning phase followed by a sentence acceptability judgement task. Generalised mixed effects modelling revealed that participants attained a moderate degree of accuracy on the judgement task, with performance scores ranging from 25% to 100% accuracy depending on the word order of the sentence. Further, sentences compatible with the canonical English word order were learned more efficiently than non-canonical word orders. We controlled for inter-individual differences in statistical learning ability, which accounted for ~20% of the variance in performance on the sentence judgement task. We provide stimuli and statistical analysis scripts as open-source resources and discuss how future research can utilise this paradigm to study the neurobiological basis of language learning. Mini Pinyin affords a convenient tool for improving the future of language learning research by building on the parameters of traditional AGL or existing miniature language paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning to speak is a challenge for the brain, and the challenge varies between and within languages. Yet, little is known about how neural processes react to these variable challenges beyond the planning of individual words. Here, we examine how fundamental differences in syntax shape the time course of sentence planning. Most languages treat alike (i.e., align with each other) the 2 uses of a word like "gardener" in "the gardener crouched" and in "the gardener planted trees." A minority keeps these formally distinct by adding special marking in 1 case, and some languages display both aligned and nonaligned expressions. Exploiting such a contrast in Hindi, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking to suggest that this difference is associated with distinct patterns of neural processing and gaze behavior during early planning stages, preceding phonological word form preparation. Planning sentences with aligned expressions induces larger synchronization in the theta frequency band, suggesting higher working memory engagement, and more visual attention to agents than planning nonaligned sentences, suggesting delayed commitment to the relational details of the event. Furthermore, plain, unmarked expressions are associated with larger desynchronization in the alpha band than expressions with special markers, suggesting more engagement in information processing to keep overlapping structures distinct during planning. Our findings contrast with the observation that the form of aligned expressions is simpler, and they suggest that the global preference for alignment is driven not by its neurophysiological effect on sentence planning but by other sources, possibly by aspects of production flexibility and fluency or by sentence comprehension. This challenges current theories on how production and comprehension may affect the evolution and distribution of syntactic variants in the world's languages. Little is known about the neural processes involved in planning to speak. This study uses eye-tracking and EEG to show that speakers prepare sentence structures in different ways and rely on alpha and theta oscillations differently when planning sentences with and without agent case marking, challenging theories on how production and comprehension affect language evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When viewed cross-sectionally, aging seems to negatively affect speech comprehension. However, aging is a heterogeneous process, and variability among older adults is typically large. In this study, we investigated language comprehension as a function of individual differences in older adults. Specifically, we tested whether hearing thresholds, working memory, inhibition, and individual alpha frequency would predict event-related potential amplitudes in response to classic psycholinguistic manipulations at the sentence level. Twenty-nine healthy older adults (age range 61–76 years) listened to English sentences containing reduced relative clauses and object-relative clauses while their electroencephalogram was recorded. We found that hearing thresholds and working memory predicted P600 amplitudes early during reduced relative clause processing, while individual alpha frequency predicted P600 amplitudes at a later point in time. The results suggest that participants with better hearing and larger working memory capacity simultaneously activated both the preferred and the dispreferred interpretation of reduced relative clauses, while participants with worse hearing and smaller working memory capacity only activated the preferred interpretation. They also suggest that participants with a higher individual alpha frequency had a higher likelihood of successfully reanalysing the sentence toward the reduced relative clause reading than participants with a lower individual alpha frequency. By contrast, we found no relationship between object-relative clause processing and working memory or hearing thresholds. Taken together, the results support the view that older adults employ different strategies during auditory sentence processing dependent on their hearing and cognitive abilities and that there is no single ability that uniformly predicts sentence processing outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic reversal anomalies (SRAs)—sentences where an implausibility is created by reversing participant roles—have attracted much attention in the literature on the electrophysiology of language. In spite of being syntactically well formed but semantically implausible, these sentences unexpectedly elicited a monophasic P600 effect in English and Dutch rather than an N400 effect. Subsequent research revealed variability in the presence/absence of an N400 effect to SRAs depending on the language examined and the choice of verb type in English. However, most previous studies employed the same presentation modality (visual) and task (acceptability judgement). Here, we conducted two experiments and three statistical analyses to investigate the influence of stimulus modality, task demand and statistical choices on event‐related potential (ERP) response patterns to SRAs in English. We reproduced a previous study's procedure and analysis (N. Bourguignon et al. (2012) Brain and Language, 122, 179–189) and further introduced between‐subjects factors of task type and modality, using mixed‐effects modelling to analyse the data. We observed an N400 effect to typical English SRAs (agent subject verbs, e.g. "the fries will eat the boys"), which contrasts existing literature and was not predicted by existing theories that account for SRA processing. Task demand modulated the ERPs elicited by SRAs, while auditory presentation led to increased comprehension accuracy and a more broadly distributed ERP. Finally, the statistical methods used influenced the presence/absence of ERP effects. Our results suggest a sensitivity of language‐related ERP patterns to methodological parameters, and we conclude that future experiments should take this into careful consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand a sentence, it is crucial to understand who is doing what. The interplay of morphological case marking, argument serialization, and animacy provides linguistic cues for the processing system to rapidly identify the thematic roles of the arguments. The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates on-line brain responses during argument identification in Zurich German, a High Alemannic dialect, and in Fering, a North Frisian variety, which both exhibit reduced case systems as compared to Standard German. Like Standard German, Zurich German and Fering are Continental West Germanic varieties, and indeed argument processing in sentences with an object-before-subject order engenders a qualitatively similar ERP pattern of a scrambling negativity followed by a P600 in all tested varieties. However, the P600 component—a late positive ERP response, which has been linked to the categorization of task-relevant stimuli—is selectively affected by the most prominent cue for argument identification in each variety, which is case marking in Standard German, but animacy in Zurich German and Fering. Thus, even closely related varieties may employ different processing strategies based on the language-specific availability of syntactic and semantic cues for argument identification.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main characteristics of human languages is that they are subject to fundamental changes over time. However, because of the long transitional periods involved, the internal dynamics of such changes are typically inaccessible. Here, we present a new approach to examining language change via its connection to language comprehension. By means of an EEG experiment on Icelandic, a prominent current example of a language in transition, we show that the neurophysiological responses of native speakers already reflect projected changes that are not yet apparent in their overt behavior. Neurocognitive measures thus offer a means of predicting, rather than only retracing, language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, language processing has been studied in tightly controlled experimental designs. However, in addition to raising questions about the generalisability of results to natural language use, these designs impose limitations on the types of research questions that can be examined. Accordingly, an increasing number of groups are now exploring new methodological approaches for studying language in rich contextual settings. This special issue aims to deliver an overview of the possibilities that are opened up by the use of context and naturalistic experimental designs. These include the ability to examine various - and hitherto understudied - populations, or linguistic phenomena on different levels (e.g. word, sentence, discourse) in the same naturalistic stimulus such as a story. Other special issue contributions focus on addressing the methodological challenges inherent to naturalistic experiments. Additionally, we stress the importance of interdisciplinary work and open sharing of data from naturalistic experiments in the neurobiology of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human language enables us to externalise self-internal information (e.g. emotions or beliefs that are not readily accessible to others). Thus, language bridges the gap between the self and the other (e.g. Frith and Frith, 2010) in a way that possibly no other communication system can provide. In many languages, the difference between the self and others is directly reflected in the distinction between first ("I"), second ("you") and third person ("he, she") marking. In the present study, we compared ERPs to first, second and third person pronouns during the comprehension of an audio-book version of The Little Prince. Our results revealed a strong P300 response following first person pronouns that is independent of contextual factors. In line with previous research on self-relevance and the P300 (e.g. Knolle, Schröger, and Kotz, 2013b), our results suggest that first-person marking is an attentional cue for self-relevance that is at the core of successful narrative comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language-related event-related potential (ERP) components such as the N400 have traditionally been associated with linguistic or cognitive functional interpretations. By contrast, it has been considerably more difficult to relate these components to neurobiologically grounded accounts of language. Here, we propose a theoretical framework based on a predictive coding architecture, within which negative language-related ERP components such as the N400 can be accounted for in a neurobiologically plausible manner. Specifically, we posit that the amplitude of negative language-related ERP components reflects precision-weighted prediction error signals, i.e., prediction errors weighted by the relevance of the information source leading to the error. From this perspective, precision has a direct link to cue validity in a particular language and, thereby, to relevance of individual linguistic features for internal model updating. We view components such as the N400 and LAN as members of a family with similar functional characteristics and suggest that latency and topography differences between these components reflect the locus of prediction errors and model updating within a hierarchically organized cortical predictive coding architecture. This account has the potential to unify findings from the full range of the N400 literature, including word-level, sentence-, and discourse-level results as well as cross-linguistic differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has demonstrated that Augmented Reality can reduce a user's task response time and mental effort when completing a procedural task. This paper investigates techniques to improve user performance and reduce mental effort by providing projector-based Spatial Augmented Reality predictive cues for future responses. The objective of the two experiments conducted in this study was to isolate the performance and mental effort differences from several different annotation cueing techniques for simple (Experiment 1) and complex (Experiment 2) button-pressing tasks. Comporting with existing cognitive neuroscience literature on prediction, attentional orienting, and interference, we hypothesized that for both simple procedural tasks and complex search-based tasks, having a visual cue guiding to the next task's location would positively impact performance relative to a baseline, no-cue condition. Additionally, we predicted that direction-based cues would provide a more significant positive impact than target-based cues. The results indicated that providing a line to the next task was the most effective technique for improving the users' task time and mental effort in both the simple and complex tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Individual alpha frequency (IAF) is a promising electrophysiological marker of interindividual differences in cognitive function. IAF has been linked with trait‐like differences in information processing and general intelligence, and provides an empirical basis for the definition of individualized frequency bands. Despite its widespread application, however, there is little consensus on the optimal method for estimating IAF, and many common approaches are prone to bias and inconsistency. Here, we describe an automated strategy for deriving two of the most prevalent IAF estimators in the literature: peak alpha frequency (PAF) and center of gravity (CoG). These indices are calculated from resting‐state power spectra that have been smoothed using a Savitzky‐Golay filter (SGF). We evaluate the performance characteristics of this analysis procedure in both empirical and simulated EEG data sets. Applying the SGF technique to resting‐state data from n = 63 healthy adults furnished 61 PAF and 62 CoG estimates. The statistical properties of these estimates were consistent with previous reports. Simulation analyses revealed that the SGF routine was able to reliably extract target alpha components, even under relatively noisy spectral conditions. The routine consistently outperformed a simpler method of automated peak detection that did not involve spectral smoothing. The SGF technique is fast, open source, and available in two popular programming languages (MATLAB, Python), and thus can easily be integrated within the most popular M/EEG toolsets (EEGLAB, FieldTrip, MNE‐Python). As such, it affords a convenient tool for improving the reliability and replicability of future IAF‐related research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We hypothesize a beneficial influence of sleep on the consolidation of the combinatorial mechanisms underlying incremental sentence comprehension. These predictions are grounded in recent work examining the effect of sleep on the consolidation of linguistic information, which demonstrate that sleep-dependent neurophysiological activity consolidates the meaning of novel words and simple grammatical rules. However, the sleep-dependent consolidation of sentence-level combinatorics has not been studied to date. Here, we propose that dissociable aspects of sleep neurophysiology consolidate two different types of combinatory mechanisms in human language: sequence-based (order-sensitive) and dependency-based (order-insensitive) combinatorics. The distinction between the two types of combinatorics is motivated both by cross-linguistic considerations and the neurobiological underpinnings of human language. Unifying this perspective with principles of sleep-dependent memory consolidation, we posit that a function of sleep is to optimize the consolidation of sequence-based knowledge (the when) and the establishment of semantic schemas of unordered items (the what) that underpin cross-linguistic variations in sentence comprehension. This hypothesis builds on the proposal that sleep is involved in the construction of predictive codes, a unified principle of brain function that supports incremental sentence comprehension. Finally, we discuss neurophysiological measures (EEG/MEG) that could be used to test these claims, such as the quantification of neuronal oscillations, which reflect basic mechanisms of information processing in the brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have examined effects of explicit task demands on eye movements in reading. However, there is relatively little prior research investigating the influence of implicit processing demands. In this study, processing demands were manipulated by means of a between-subject manipulation of comprehension question difficulty. Consistent with previous results from Wotschack and Kliegl, the question difficulty manipulation influenced the probability of regressing from late in sentences and re-reading earlier regions; readers who expected difficult comprehension questions were more likely to re-read. However, this manipulation had no reliable influence on eye movements during first-pass reading of earlier sentence regions. Moreover, for the subset of sentences that contained a plausibility manipulation, the disruption induced by implausibility was not modulated by the question manipulation. We interpret these results as suggesting that comprehension demands influence reading behavior primarily by modulating a criterion for comprehension that readers apply after completing first-pass processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While listening to continuous speech, humans process beat information to correctly identify word boundaries. The beats of language are stress patterns that are created by combining lexical (word-specific) stress patterns and the rhythm of a specific language. Sometimes, the lexical stress pattern needs to be altered to obey the rhythm of the language. This study investigated the interplay of lexical stress patterns and rhythmical well-formedness in natural speech with fMRI. Previous electrophysiological studies on cases in which a regular lexical stress pattern may be altered to obtain rhythmical well-formedness showed that even subtle rhythmic deviations are detected by the brain if attention is directed toward prosody. Here, we present a new approach to this phenomenon by having participants listen to contextually rich stories in the absence of a task targeting the manipulation. For the interaction of lexical stress and rhythmical well-formedness, we found one suprathreshold cluster localized between the cerebellumand the brain stem. For themain effect of lexical stress, we found higher BOLD responses to the retained lexical stress pattern in the bilateral SMA, bilateral postcentral gyrus, bilateral middle fontal gyrus, bilateral inferior and right superior parietal lobule, and right precuneus. These results support the view that lexical stress is processed as part of a sensorimotor network of speech comprehension. Moreover, our results connect beat processing in language to domain-independent timing perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of linguistic typology for the neurobiology of language. Topics discussed include how language is represented by the human brain, the study of the human brain during cognitive processing, and the research domain of the neurobiology of language within the broad field of psycholinguistics.

The hierarchical organization of human cortical circuits integrates information across different timescales via temporal receptive windows, which increase in length from lower to higher levels of the cortical hierarchy (Hasson et al., 2015). A recent neurobiological model of higher-order language processing (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al., 2015) posits that temporal receptive windows in the dorsal auditory stream provide the basis for a hierarchically organized predictive coding architecture (Friston and Kiebel, 2009). In this stream, a nested set of internal models generates time-based ("when") predictions for upcoming input at different linguistic levels (sounds, words, sentences, discourse). Here, we used naturalistic stories to test the hypothesis that multi-sentence, discourse-level predictions are processed in the dorsal auditory stream, yielding attenuated BOLD responses for highly predicted versus less strongly predicted language input. The results were as hypothesized: discourse-related cues, such as passive voice, which effect a higher predictability of remention for a character at a later point within a story, led to attenuated BOLD responses for auditory input of high versus low predictability within the dorsal auditory stream, specifically in the inferior parietal lobule, middle frontal gyrus, and dorsal parts of the inferior frontal gyrus, among other areas. Additionally, we found effects of content-related ("what") predictions in ventral regions. These findings provide novel evidence that hierarchical predictive coding extends to discourse-level processing in natural language. Importantly, they ground language processing on a hierarchically organized predictive network, as a common underlying neurobiological basis shared with other brain functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the developmental literature, the idea has been proposed that young children do not understand the specificity of non-literal communicative acts. In this article, I focus on young children's ability to produce and understand different forms of humor. I explore the acquisition of the communicative contexts that enable children to engage in humorous interactions before they possess the capacity to analyze them in the terms afforded by a full-fledged theory of mind. I suggest that different forms of humor share several basic features and that we can construct a continuum from simple to sophisticated forms. In particular, I focus on teasing, a form of humor already present in preverbal infants that is also considered a typical feature of irony. I argue that all forms of humor can be regarded as a type of interaction that I propose to call "playing with expectations". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neural correlates of theory of mind (ToM) are typically studied using paradigms which require participants to draw explicit, task-related inferences (e.g., in the false belief task). In a natural setup, such as listening to stories, false belief mentalizing occurs incidentally as part of narrative processing. In our experiment, participants listened to auditorily presented stories with false belief passages (implicit false belief processing) and immediately after each story answered comprehension questions (explicit false belief processing), while neural responses were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). All stories included (among other situations) one false belief condition and one closely matched control condition. For the implicit ToM processing, we modeled the hemodynamic response during the false belief passages in the story and compared it to the hemodynamic response during the closely matched control passages. For implicit mentalizing, we found activation in typical ToM processing regions, that is the angular gyrus (AG), superior medial frontal gyrus (SmFG), precuneus (PCUN), middle temporal gyrus (MTG) as well as in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) billaterally. For explicit ToM, we only found AG activation. The conjunction analysis highlighted the left AG and MTG as well as the bilateral IFG as overlapping ToM processing regions for both implicit and explicit modes. Implicit ToM processing during listening to false belief passages, recruits the left SmFG and billateral PCUN in addition to the 'mentalizing network' known form explicit processing tasks. Hum Brain Mapp 36:4231-4246, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hierarchical predictive coding has been identified as a possible unifying principle of brain function, and recent work in cognitive neuroscience has examined how it may be affected by age-related changes. Using language comprehension as a test case, the present study aimed to dissociate age-related changes in prediction generation versus internal model adaptation following a prediction error. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured in a group of older adults (60-81 years; n = 40) as they read sentences of the form "The opposite of black is white/yellow/nice." Replicating previous work in young adults, results showed a target-related P300 for the expected antonym ("white"; an effect assumed to reflect a prediction match), and a graded N400 effect for the two incongruous conditions (i.e. a larger N400 amplitude for the incongruous continuation not related to the expected antonym, "nice," versus the incongruous associated condition, "yellow"). These effects were followed by a late positivity, again with a larger amplitude in the incongruous non-associated versus incongruous associated condition. Analyses using linear mixed-effects models showed that the target-related P300 effect and the N400 effect for the incongruous nonassociated condition were both modulated by age, thus suggesting that age-related changes affect both prediction generation and model adaptation. However, effects of age were outweighed by the interindividual variability of ERP responses, as reflected in the high proportion of variance captured by the inclusion of by-condition random slopes for participants and items. We thus argue that - at both a neurophysiological and a functional level - the notion of general differences between language processing in young and older adults may only be of limited use, and that future research should seek to better understand the causes of interindividual variability in the ERP responses of older adults and its relation to cognitive performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do principles of language processing in the brain affect the way grammar evolves over time or is language change just a matter of socio-historical contingency? While the balance of evidence has been ambiguous and controversial, we identify here a neurophysiological constraint on the processing of language that has a systematic effect on the evolution of how noun phrases are marked by case (i.e. by such contrasts as between the English base form she and the object form her). In neurophysiological experiments across diverse languages we found that during processing, participants initially interpret the first base-form noun phrase they hear (e.g. she…) as an agent (which would fit a continuation like … greeted him), even when the sentence later requires the interpretation of a patient role (as in … was greeted). We show that this processing principle is also operative in Hindi, a language where initial base-form noun phrases most commonly denote patients because many agents receive a special case marker ("ergative") and are often left out in discourse. This finding suggests that the principle is species-wide and independent of the structural affordances of specific languages. As such, the principle favors the development and maintenance of case-marking systems that equate base-form cases with agents rather than with patients. We confirm this evolutionary bias by statistical analyses of phylogenetic signals in over 600 languages worldwide, controlling for confounding effects from language contact. Our findings suggest that at least one core property of grammar systematically adapts in its evolution to the neurophysiological conditions of the brain, independently of socio-historical factors. This opens up new avenues for understanding how specific properties of grammar have developed in tight interaction with the biological evolution of our species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of literature suggests that bilingualism strongly influences attentional processes among a variety of age groups. Increasing studies, however, indicate that culture may also have measurable effects on attentional processes. Bilinguals are often exposed to multiple cultural backgrounds, therefore, it is unclear if being exposed to multiple languages and culture together influence attentional processes, or if the effect themselves are uniquely linked to different attentional processes. The present study explores the relevancy of different attentional processes--alerting, orienting, and executive control--to language and to culture. In the present study, 97 3-years-old (Mean age = 38.78 months) monolingual and bilingual children from three countries (the U.S., Argentina, and Vietnam) were longitudinally tested for a total of five time points on a commonly used non-linguistic attentional paradigm--the Attention Network Test. Results demonstrate that when other factors are controlled (e.g., socio-economic status, vocabulary knowledge, age), culture plays an important role on the development of the alerting and executive control attentional network, while language status was only significant on the executive control attentional network. The present study indicates that culture may interact with bilingualism to further explain previous reported advantages, as well as elucidate the increasing disparity surrounding cognitive advantages in bilingual literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How human language arose is a mystery in the evolution of Homo sapiens. Miyagawa etal. (2013) put forward a proposal, which we will call the Integration Hypothesis of human language evolution, that holds that human language is composed of two components, E for expressive, and L for lexical. Each component has an antecedent in nature: E as found, for example, in birdsong, and L in, for example, the alarm calls of monkeys. E and L integrated uniquely in humans to give rise to language. A challenge to the Integration Hypothesis is that while these non-human systems are finite-state in nature, human language is known to require characterization by a non-finite state grammar. Our claim is that E and L, taken separately, are in fact finite-state; when a grammatical process crosses the boundary between E and L, it gives rise to the non-finite state character of human language. We provide empirical evidence for the Integration Hypothesis by showing that certain processes found in contemporary languages that have been characterized as non-finite state in nature can in fact be shown to be finite-state. We also speculate on how human language actually arose in evolution through the lens of the Integration Hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess the challenges of studying action and language mechanisms in the brain, both singly and in relation to each other to provide a novel perspective on neuroinformatics, integrating the development of databases for encoding - separately or together - neurocomputational models and empirical data that serve systems and cognitive neuroscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neurophysiological data from a range of typologically diverse languages provide evidence for a cross-linguistically valid, actor-based strategy of understanding sentence-level meaning. This strategy seeks to identify the participant primarily responsible for the state of affairs (the actor) as quickly and unambiguously as possible, thus resulting in competition for the actor role when there are multiple candidates. Due to its applicability across languages with vastly different characteristics, we have proposed that the actor strategy may derive from more basic cognitive or neurobiological organizational principles, though it is also shaped by distributional properties of the linguistic input (e.g. the morphosyntactic coding strategies for actors in a given language). Here, we describe an initial computational model of the actor strategy and how it interacts with language-specific properties. Specifically, we contrast two distance metrics derived from the output of the computational model (one weighted and one unweighted) as potential measures of the degree of competition for actorhood by testing how well they predict modulations of electrophysiological activity engendered by language processing. To this end, we present an EEG study on word order processing in German and use linear mixed-effects models to assess the effect of the various distance metrics. Our results show that a weighted metric, which takes into account the weighting of an actor-identifying feature in the language under consideration outperforms an unweighted distance measure. We conclude that actor competition effects cannot be reduced to feature overlap between multiple sentence participants and thereby to the notion of similarity-based interference, which is prominent in current memory-based models of language processing. Finally, we argue that, in addition to illuminating the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms of actor competition, the present model can form the basis for a more comprehensive, neurobiologically plausible computational model of constructing sentence-level meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometimes, the relationship between form and meaning in language is not one-to-one. Here, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to illuminate the neural correlates of such flexible syntax–semantics mappings during sentence comprehension by examining split-intransitivity. While some (“rigid”) verbs consistently select one auxiliary, other (“flexible”) verbs do not. German speakers read sentences including rigid and flexible verbs and the auxiliarieshaben(HAVE) andsein(BE). In an additional condition, flexible verbs were presented with a telicity-inducing prefix that led them to select BE via the verb-prefix combination. Auxiliary selection violations engendered an N400-late positivity response for both rigid and prefixed verbs, thus suggesting that the processing system sets up an auxiliary-based expectation for particular verb classes. For unprefixed flexible verbs, average ERPs did not show differential effects of auxiliary choice. However, additional mixed-effects analyses for these verbs including by-participant and by-item acceptabilities as covariates revealed modulations of the N400 and late positivity for HAVE-trials via by-item and by-participant acceptabilities. We argue that the N400 reflects the degree of match between auxiliary choice and the lexical class of the verb, while two distinct positivity effects correlate with (1) a well-formedness categorisation and (2) the degree to which individual participants engage in enriched composition in order to render a flexible (telic) verb compatible with a particular auxiliary choice (HAVE). These results indicate that the gradient behaviour of flexible verbs is not due to indeterminacy, but rather to a higher propensity for enriched composition that results in the coercion of aspectual specification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Evidence is accruing that, in comprehending language, the human brain rapidly integrates a wealth of information sources–including the reader or hearer’s knowledge about the world and even his/her current mood. However, little is known to date about how language processing in the brain is affected by the hearer’s knowledge about the speaker. Here, we investigated the impact of social attributions to the speaker by measuring event-related brain potentials while participants watched videos of three speakers uttering true or false statements pertaining to politics or general knowledge: a top political decision maker (the German Federal Minister of Finance at the time of the experiment), a well-known media personality and an unidentifiable control speaker. False versus true statements engendered an N400 - late positivity response, with the N400 (150–450 ms) constituting the earliest observable response to message-level meaning. Crucially, however, the N400 was modulated by the combination of speaker and message: for false versus true political statements, an N400 effect was only observable for the politician, but not for either of the other two speakers; for false versus true general knowledge statements, an N400 was engendered by all three speakers. We interpret this result as demonstrating that the neurophysiological response to message-level meaning is immediately influenced by the social status of the speaker and whether he/she has the power to bring about the state of affairs described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the rapidly changing circumstances of our increasingly digital world, reading is also becoming an increasingly digital experience: electronic books (e-books) are now outselling print books in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, many readers still view e-books as less readable than print books. The present study thus used combined EEG and eyetracking measures in order to test whether reading from digital media requires higher cognitive effort than reading conventional books. Young and elderly adults read short texts on three different reading devices: a paper page, an e-reader and a tablet computer and answered comprehension questions about them while their eye movements and EEG were recorded. The results of a debriefing questionnaire replicated previous findings in that participants overwhelmingly chose the paper page over the two electronic devices as their preferred reading medium. Online measures, by contrast, showed shorter mean fixation durations and lower EEG theta band voltage density – known to covary with memory encoding and retrieval – for the older adults when reading from a tablet computer in comparison to the other two devices. Young adults showed comparable fixation durations and theta activity for all three devices. Comprehension accuracy did not differ across the three media for either group. We argue that these results can be explained in terms of the better text discriminability (higher contrast) produced by the backlit display of the tablet computer. Contrast sensitivity decreases with age and degraded contrast conditions lead to longer reading times, thus supporting the conclusion that older readers may benefit particularly from the enhanced contrast of the tablet. Our findings thus indicate that people's subjective evaluation of digital reading media must be dissociated from the cognitive and neural effort expended in online information processing while reading from such devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In two visual ERP studies, we investigated whether Mandarin Chinese shows a subject-preference in spite of the controversial status of grammatical relations in this language. We compared ERP responses at the position of the verb and the second NP in object-verb-subject (OVS) and subject-verb-object (SVO) structures. While SVO is the basic word order in Chinese and OV with subject-drop is possible, OVS is strongly dispreferred. At the position of the verb, which disambiguated towards an object or a subject reading of NP1, Experiment 1 revealed an N400 for both subject-initial control conditions in comparison with the critical object-initial condition. Experiment 2 showed that this result was due to differences in lexical-semantic relatedness between NP1 and the verb. When these were controlled for, we observed an N400 for the disambiguation towards an object-initial order, i.e., evidence for a subject-preference. At the postverbal NP, the object-initial condition showed a biphasic N400-late positivity pattern in both experiments. We interpret the N400 as reflecting the processing of an unexpected argument and the late positivity as a correlate of a well-formedness mismatch. Overall, our results suggest that Mandarin Chinese shows a subject-preference for an initial argument, thus providing further converging support for the notion that the subject-preference might constitute a universal processing strategy. We argue that the functional basis for this strategy lies in cross-linguistically applicable economy principles that serve to constrain incremental interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores whether the metrical foot is necessary for the description of prosodic systems. To this end, we present empirical findings on the perception of German word stress using event-related brain potentials as the dependent measure. A manipulation of the main stress position within three-syllable words revealed differential brain responses, which (a) correlated with the reorganisation of syllables into feet in stress violations, and (b) differed in strength depending on syllable weight. The experiments therefore provide evidence that the processing of word stress not only involves lexical information about stress positions, but also (quantity-sensitive) information about metrical structures, in particular feet and syllables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, we discuss the limitations of linguistic judgements by comparing them to a variety of other empirical data types. In particular, we show that judgements are inherently multimensional in that they incorporate a range of linguistic and extra-linguistic influences, which cannot be teased apart by only considering the final judgement itself. Judgements of the gradient and time-insensitive type therefore give rise to the same interpretation problems as those faced by introspection. Thus, while we agree with Featherston that an improvement of data replicability in theoretical linguistics is highly desirable, we disagree with his claim that gradient judgements can provide significantly more grammatically-relevant information than other types of empirical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report a series of event-related potential experiments designed to dissociate the functionally distinct processes involved in the comprehension of highly restricted lexical–semantic relations (antonyms). We sought to differentiate between influences of semantic relatedness (which are independent of the experimental setting) and processes related to predictability (which differ as a function of the experimental environment). To this end, we conducted three ERP studies contrasting the processing of antonym relations (black–white) with that of related (black–yellow) and unrelated (black–nice) word pairs. Whereas the lexical–semantic manipulation was kept constant across experiments, the experimental environment and the task demands varied: Experiment 1 presented the word pairs in a sentence context of the form The opposite of X is Y and used a sensicality judgment. Experiment 2 used a word pair presentation mode and a lexical decision task. Experiment 3 also examined word pairs, but with an antonymy judgment task. All three experiments revealed a graded N400 response (unrelated > related > antonyms), thus supporting the assumption that semantic associations are processed automatically. In addition, the experiments revealed that, in highly constrained task environments, the N400 gradation occurs simultaneously with a P300 effect for the antonym condition, thus leading to the superficial impression of an extremely ‘reduced'’ N400 for antonym pairs. Comparisons across experiments and participant groups revealed that the P300 effect is not only a function of stimulus constraints (i.e., sentence context) and experimental task, but that it is also crucially influenced by individual processing strategies used to achieve successful task performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]