Neurolinguistics

Objectives: The worldwide spread of Parkinson’s disease (PD) calls for sensitive and specific measures enabling its early (or, ideally, preclinical) detection. Here, we use language measures revealing deficits in PD to explore whether similar disturbances are present in asymptomatic individuals at risk for the disease. Methods: We administered executive, semantic, verb-production, and syntactic tasks to sporadic PD patients, genetic PD patients with PARK2 (parkin) or LRRK2 (dardarin) mutation, asymptomatic first-degree relatives of the latter with similar mutations, and socio-demographically matched controls. Moreover, to detect sui generis language disturbances, we ran analysis of covariance tests using executive functions as covariate. Results: The two clinical groups showed impairments in all measures, most of which survived covariation with executive functions. However, the key finding concerned asymptomatic mutation carriers. While these subjects showed intact executive, semantic, and action-verb production skills, they evinced deficits in a syntactic test with minimal working memory load. Conclusions: We propose that this sui generis disturbance may constitute a prodromal sign anticipating eventual development of PD. Moreover, our results suggest that mutations on specific genes (PARK2 and LRRK2) compromising basal ganglia functioning may be subtly related to language-processing mechanisms. (JINS, 2017, 23, 150–158)

ABSTRACT The paper aims to shed light on how serial order is computed in the human mind/brain, focusing on the nature of linearization in language. Linearization is here understood as the mapping of hierarchical syntactic structures onto linear strings. We take as our point of departure the now well-established need to subdivide Broca's region into different areas, and claim that these brain areas play important and distinct roles in the context of linearization. Crucially, for this mapping to be valid, linearization must be decomposed into a series of distinct (generic) sub-operations. Thus, the present work highlights the benefit of decomposing Broca's area and the linearization algorithm in parallel to formulate linking hypotheses between mind and brain.

This paper comments on Functional Categories (FCs) and their content fulness, morphological features and depiction as a heterogeneous set. This paper also discusses the view that the target of impairement  in agrammatism constitutes a natural class. Treatment of FCs in their connection to chains and Lexical-Relatedness is discussed in terms of feature checking and morphological characteristics.

Aphasics, brain-damaged patients with no language deficit, neurologically intact elderly subjects, and university undergraduates matched pictures to sentences having compelling tacit implications (e.g., the sentence The fox grabs the hen strongly invites one to assume that the fox will eat the hen). All groups made, for the same sentences, qualitatively similar referential errors consisting in choosing a tacit implication picture. Two auxiliary experiments using the same target sentences in other interpretive situations permitted ruling out the possibility that these errors were due to the putative intrinsic semantic properties of the sentences, showing that the sentences which were most liable to elicit integrative error varied from task to task. These results are interpreted within the conceptual framework which posits that reliable directions for interpretation are couched by the speaker in the very structure of his utterances (the utterance's referential structure) providing...

Impairments of action semantics (a cognitive domain that critically engages motor brain networks) are pervasive in early Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, no study has examined whether action semantic skills in persons with this disease can be influenced by non-invasive neuromodulation. Here, we recruited 22 PD patients and performed a five-day randomized, blinded, sham-controlled study to assess whether anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (atDCS) over the primary motor cortex, combined with cognitive training, can boost action–concept processing. On day 1, participants completed a picture–word association (PWA) task involving action-verb and object-noun conditions. They were then randomly assigned to either an atDCS (n = 11, 2 mA for 20 m) or a sham tDCS (n = 11, 2 mA for 30 s) group and performed an online PWA practice over three days. On day 5, they repeated the initial protocol. Relative to sham tDCS, the atDCS group exhibited faster reaction times for action (as opp...

ABSTRACT The present study investigates the on-line performance of a non-fluent Bulgarian-speaking aphasic patient and nine matched control participants in the recognition of prefixed verbs. A visual primed lexical decision experiment was employed to probe the role of aspect, semantic transparency, and root status (free vs. bound) in the recognition patterns obtained. Controls' results showed aspect and transparency effects. The patient demonstrated facilitation for verb forms featuring bound roots, while showing inhibition on transparent forms with free-standing roots, pointing to difficulties with decomposition, but not with accessing stored forms. These results suggest that the patient had a problem at the level of morphological decomposition-based mechanisms.

Beschreibung der Mechanik des konzeptuellen Denkens das sich aus Interaktionssequenzen zwischen dem limbischen System und den verbalen Bereichen des Neokortex ergibt. Beschreibung des Aufstiegs des Aufmerksamkeitsniveaus zur vollen aktiven Wahrnehmung, wenn durch die Amygdala ein Gefühl der Unruhe aufgrund eines verbalen Stimulus ausgelöst wird, von einem aktiven Kogitationsprozess gefolgt, der die verbalen Bereiche des Neocortex einbezieht, das schließt durch eine Stärkung einer synaptischen Arboreszenz im Neocortex durch den Hippocampus ab, das entspricht einer modifizierten verbalen Reihenfolge das das Gefühl der Unruhe das initiierte die Sequenz beseitigt oder reduziert. Beschreibung der Verallgemeinerungsfähigkeit dass sich aus dem Gebrauch von artikulierten Sprachen ergibt, die durch Bildung erworben werden, und daraus konzeptuelles Denken und die kollektiv verständliche mathematische Sprache entsteht, die sich in einigen Individuen durch Bildung zu verschiedenen Graden entwickeln. Beschreibung des mathematischen Denkmodus, dessen Engramme im Neokortex in Bereichen lokalisiert wurden, die die verbalen Bereiche nicht überlappen.

This article reports the results of using a three-layer backpropagation artificial neural network to predict item difficulty in a reading comprehension test. Two network structures were developed: one with the sigmoid function in the output processing unit and the other ...

This paper is a contribution to a long-standing discussion related to the domain of aspectual interpretation. More precisely, it focuses on the impact of the degree of specificity and morphological complexity on the time course of processing of perfective (prefixed perfective and semelfactive perfective) and imperfective (simple imperfective and iterative imperfective) verbs in Polish. In two experiments, eye-tracking during reading and self-paced reading, we tested a hypothesis based on Frisson & Pickering (1999), Pickering & Frisson (2001) and Frisson (2009) that the interpretation of semantically underspecified verbs should be delayed to the end of a sentence. As predicted, in both of the reported experiments significantly longer reading measures were observed for aspectually underspecified simple imperfective verbs as compared to aspectually more specific perfective verbs in the sentence-final region. Our second major prediction was that morphological complexity of aspectual for...

Impairments of action semantics (a cognitive domain that critically engages motor brain networks) are pervasive in early Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, no study has examined whether action semantic skills in persons with this disease can be influenced by non-invasive neuromodulation. Here, we recruited 22 PD patients and performed a five-day randomized, blinded, sham-controlled study to assess whether anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (atDCS) over the primary motor cortex, combined with cognitive training, can boost action–concept processing. On day 1, participants completed a picture–word association (PWA) task involving action-verb and object-noun conditions. They were then randomly assigned to either an atDCS (n = 11, 2 mA for 20 m) or a sham tDCS (n = 11, 2 mA for 30 s) group and performed an online PWA practice over three days. On day 5, they repeated the initial protocol. Relative to sham tDCS, the atDCS group exhibited faster reaction times for action (as opposed to object) concepts in the post-stimulation test. This result was exclusive to the atDCS group and held irrespective of the subjects’ cognitive, executive, and motor skills, further attesting to its specificity. Our findings suggest that action-concept deficits in PD are distinctively grounded in motor networks and might be countered by direct neuromodulation of such circuits. Moreover, they provide new evidence for neurosemantic models and inform a thriving agenda in the embodied cognition framework.

ABSTRACT Studies show that patients with schizophrenia have problems with understanding non-literal language, presumably due to theory of mind (ToM) dysfunction, while literal language processing remains intact in these patients. Furthermore, studies about the influence of general intelligence on non-literal language processing show incongruent results in schizophrenia. In the present study, our aim was to identify the influence of good intellectual skills (that is, good neurocognitive skills in general) on non-literal language comprehension on a preliminary sample of schizophrenic patients. 19 patients with schizophrenia and 19 healthy controls (carefully matched for all subtests of WAIS) completed different language tasks in the form of an interview, including conventional and unconventional metaphors, irony, Gricean implicatures, control implicatures and semantics. In the case of the Gricean implicatures, the comprehension of the linguistic incongruity of the utterance and also the comprehension of the intended meaning of the speaker were examined separately. To explore the effect of IQ on non-literal language comprehension, we divided the schizophrenia group into a lower-IQ (IQ ≤ 106) and a higher-IQ (IQ > 106) subgroup by making a median split (median IQ = 106). Our results showed that schizophrenics with lower-IQ were able to understand conventional metaphors presumably relying on their good semantic processing, while they were impaired in the comprehension of unconventional metaphors and irony. However, the higher-IQ schizophrenia subgroup was able to comprehend not only conventional metaphors, but also unconventional metaphors and irony, supposedly using IQ-dependent compensatory mechanisms. Interestingly, both the lower- and the higher-IQ schizophrenia subgroups showed significant impairment in the comprehension of the ToM question of the Gricean implicatures and the patients' IQ had no significant impact on the comprehension of such ToM questions. In conclusion, our findings assume a possible compensatory effect of general cognitive skills on non-literal language processing in schizophrenia. We also argue for the importance of using more complex ToM tasks in order to detect the existing ToM deficit in schizophrenic patients with good cognitive skills.

In this event-related potential (ERP) study we reevaluate syntax-first approaches to sentence processing by implementing a novel paradigm in French that includes correct sentences , pure syntactic category violations, lexical-semantic anomalies, and combined anomalies. Our balanced design systematically controlled for target word (noun vs. verb) and the context immediately preceding it. Group results from 36 native speakers of Quebec French revealed that, up to 300 ms, ERPs elicited by syntactic category violations were comparable with ERP responses to correct sentences, showing that there is no early activation reflecting syntactic category identification. Instead, in response to all anomalous conditions , we observed an N400 followed by a P600. Combined anomalies yielded additive effects of syntactic category and lexical-semantic anomalies on the N400, and a large P600 effect similar to the one observed in the pure syntactic condition. These results provide strong evidence against the hypothesis that (i) syntactic categories are processed first, and (ii) that syntactic category errors "block" lexical-semantic processing. Further, the N400 effect in response to pure syntactic category violations reflects a mismatch detection between a predicted word-stem and the actual target. This mechanism takes place simultaneously (and potentially in parallel) with lexical-semantic processing. In contrast, an interaction of syntax and semantics for the P600 reveals that the same neurocognitive resources are recruited for syntactic and semantic integration, both promoted by the implementation of an acceptability judgement task in our design. Additional analyses of individual data complemented these observations: during sentence processing, participants did not rely on one single cognitive mechanism reflected by either the N400 or the P600 effect but on both, suggesting that the biphasic N400-P600 ERP wave can indeed be considered to be an index of phrase-structure violations in most individuals, at least if they are realized on content words.

Generation of hierarchical structures, such as the embedding of subordinate elements into larger structures, is a core feature of human cognition. Processing of hierarchies is thought to rely on lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, the neural underpinnings supporting active generation of new hierarchical levels remain poorly understood. Here, we created a new motor paradigm to isolate this active generative process by means of fMRI. Participants planned and executed identical movement sequences by using different rules: a Recursive hierarchical embedding rule, generating new hierarchical levels; an Iterative rule linearly adding items to existing hierarchical levels, without generating new levels; and a Repetition condition tapping into short term memory, without a transformation rule. We found that planning involving generation of new hierarchical levels (Recursive condition vs. both Iterative and Repetition) activated a bilateral motor imagery network, including cortical and subcortical structures. No evidence was found for lateral PFC involvement in the generation of new hierarchical levels. Activity in basal ganglia persisted through execution of the motor sequences in the contrast Recursive versus Iteration, but also Repetition versus Iteration, suggesting a role of these structures in motor short term memory. These results showed that the motor network is involved in the generation of new hierarchical levels during motor sequence planning, while lateral PFC activity was neither robust nor specific. We hypothesize that lateral PFC might be important to parse hierarchical sequences in a multi-domain fashion but not to generate new hierarchical levels. K E Y W O R D S fMRI, hierarchy, motor, prefrontal cortex, recursion

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.

This paper aims at presenting the development of modern neurolinguistic research by providing its review and summary. At the end, the author includes a catalog of correlations between language functions and neural networks as well as an extensive bibliography, containing selected publications in the field of neurolinguistics.

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.