The literature suggests that while there is insufficient evidence to strongly advocate for the use of dry needling, it may be a useful addition to conventional physiotherapy in headache management. Further research with a stronger methodological design is required.

No abstract

This study used ERPs to a) assess the neural correlates of cross-linguistic, cross-modal translation priming in hearing beginning learners of American Sign Language (ASL) and deaf highly proficient signers and b) examine whether sign iconicity modulates these priming effects. Hearing learners exhibited translation priming for ASL signs preceded by English words (greater negativity for unrelated than translation primes) later in the ERP waveform than deaf signers and exhibited earlier and greater priming for iconic than non-iconic signs. Iconicity did not modulate translation priming effects either behaviorally or in the ERPs for deaf signers (except in a 800–1000 ms time window). Because deaf signers showed early translation priming effects (beginning at 400ms-600ms), we suggest that iconicity did not facilitate lexical access, but deaf signers may have recognized sign iconicity later in processing. Overall, the results indicate that iconicity speeds lexical access for L2 sign language learners, but not for proficient signers.

No abstract

A domain-general monitoring mechanism is proposed to be involved in overt speech monitoring. This mechanism is reflected in a medial frontal component, the error negativity (Ne), present in both errors and correct trials (Ne-like wave) but larger in errors than correct trials. In overt speech production, this negativity starts to rise before speech onset and is therefore associated with inner speech monitoring. Here, we investigate whether the same monitoring mechanism is involved in sign language production. Twenty deaf signers (American Sign Language [ASL] dominant) and 16 hearing signers (English dominant) participated in a picture–word interference paradigm in ASL. As in previous studies, ASL naming latencies were measured using the keyboard release time. EEG results revealed a medial frontal negativity peaking within 15 msec after keyboard release in the deaf signers. This negativity was larger in errors than correct trials, as previously observed in spoken language production. No clear negativity was present in the hearing signers. In addition, the slope of the Ne was correlated with ASL proficiency (measured by the ASL Sentence Repetition Task) across signers. Our results indicate that a similar medial frontal mechanism is engaged in preoutput language monitoring in sign and spoken language production. These results suggest that the monitoring mechanism reflected by the Ne/Ne-like wave is independent of output modality (i.e., spoken or signed) and likely monitors prearticulatory representations of language. Differences between groups may be linked to several factors including differences in language proficiency or more variable lexical access to motor programming latencies for hearing than deaf signers.