No abstract

The functional sensorimotor nature of speech production has been demonstrated in studies examining speech adaptation to auditory and/or somatosensory feedback manipulations. These studies have focused primarily on flexible motor processes to explain their findings, without considering modifications to sensory representations resulting from the adaptation process. The present study explores whether the perceptual representation of the /s-b/ contrast may be adjusted following the alteration of auditory feedback during the production of /s/-initial words. Consistent with prior studies of speech adaptation, talkers exposed to the feedback manipulation were found to adapt their motor plans for /s/-production in order to compensate for the effects of the sensory perturbation. In addition, a shift in the /s-b/ category boundary was observed that reduced the functional impact of the auditory feedback manipulation by increasing the perceptual "distance" between the category boundary and subjects' altered /s/-stimuli-a pattern of perceptual adaptation that was not observed in two separate control groups. These results suggest that speech adaptation to altered auditory feedback is not limited to the motor domain, but rather involves changes in both motor output and auditory representations of speech sounds that together act to reduce the impact of the perturbation.

Normal aging is an inevitable race between increasing knowledge and decreasing cognitive capacity. Crucial to understanding and promoting successful aging is determining which of these factors dominates for particular neurocognitive functions. Here, we focus on the human capacity for language, for which healthy older adults are simultaneously advantaged and disadvantaged. In recent years, a more hopeful view of cognitive aging has emerged from work suggesting that age-related declines in executive control functions are buffered by life-long bilingualism. In this paper, we selectively review what is currently known and unknown with respect to bilingualism, executive control and aging. Our ultimate goal is to advance the view that these issues should be reframed as a specific instance of neuroplasticity more generally and, in particular, that researchers should embrace the individual variability among bilinguals by adopting experimental and statistical approaches that respect the complexity of the questions addressed. In what follows, we set out the theoretical assumptions and empirical support of the bilingual advantages perspective, review what we know about language, cognitive control and aging generally, and then highlight several of the relatively few studies that have investigated bilingual language processing in older adults, either on their own or in comparison with monolingual older adults. We conclude with several recommendations for how the field ought to proceed to achieve a more multifactorial view of bilingualism that emphasizes the notion of neuroplasticity over that of simple bilingual vs monolingual group comparisons. 3Moving Toward a Neuroplasticity View of Bilingualism, Executive Control and Aging Normal aging is an inevitable race between increasing knowledge and decreasing cognitive capacity. Crucial to understanding and promoting successful aging is determining which of these factors dominates for particular neurocognitive functions. Here, we focus on the human capacity for language, for which healthy older adults are simultaneously advantaged and disadvantaged.Older adults have greater word knowledge than younger adults, and make greater use of context when using language than younger adults (Wingfield & Tun, 2007). However, age-related deficits in perceptual acuity (Murphy, Daneman, & Schneider, 2006;Schneider, Daneman, & Pichora-Fuller, 2002;Schneider, Li, & Daneman, 2007;Stewart & Wingfield, 2009;Tun, McCoy, & Wingfield, 2009;Wingfield, McCoy, Peelle, Tun, & Cox, 2006) and executive control functions such as working memory and inhibitory capacity, counter these advantages (Burke, 1997;Burke & Shafto, 2004;Darowski, Helder, Zacks, Hasher, & Hambrick, 2008;Hasher, Lustig, & Zacks, 2007;Martin, Brouillet, Guerdoux, & Tarrago, 2006;Salthouse & Meinz, 1995). Thus, language processes that rely on executive control, such as the resolution of linguistic competition during spoken and written comprehension, and production, are especially vulnerable for older adults (Abada, Baum, & Titone, 2...

We investigated the independent contributions of second language (L2) age of acquisition (AoA) and social diversity of language use on intrinsic brain organization using seed-based resting-state functional connectivity among highly proficient French-English bilinguals. There were two key findings. First, earlier L2 AoA related to greater interhemispheric functional connectivity between homologous frontal brain regions, and to decreased reliance on proactive executive control in an AX-Continuous Performance Task completed outside the scanner. Second, greater diversity in social language use in daily life related to greater connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex and the putamen bilaterally, and to increased reliance on proactive control in the same task. These findings suggest that early vs. late L2 AoA links to a specialized neural framework for processing two languages that may engage a specific type of executive control (e.g., reactive control). In contrast, higher vs. lower degrees of diversity in social language use link to a broadly distributed set of brain networks implicated in proactive control and context monitoring.

Abstract■ In reading, a comma in the wrong place can cause more severe misunderstandings than the lack of a required comma. Here, we used ERPs to demonstrate that a similar effect holds for prosodic boundaries in spoken language. Participants judged the acceptability of temporarily ambiguous English "garden path" sentences whose prosodic boundaries were either in line or in conflict with the actual syntactic structure. Sentences with incongruent boundaries were accepted less than those with missing boundaries and elicited a stronger on-line brain response in ERPs (N400/P600 components). Our results support the notion that mentally deleting an overt prosodic boundary is more costly than postulating a new one and extend previous findings, suggesting an immediate role of prosody in sentence comprehension. Importantly, our study also provides new details on the profile and temporal dynamics of the closure positive shift (CPS), an ERP component assumed to reflect prosodic phrasing in speech and music in real time. We show that the CPS is reliably elicited at the onset of prosodic boundaries in English sentences and is preceded by negative components. Its early onset distinguishes the speech CPS in adults both from prosodic ERP correlates in infants and from the "music CPS" previously reported for trained musicians. ■

The supramarginal gyrus (SMG) is activated for phonological processing during both language and verbal working memory tasks. Using rTMS, we investigated whether the contribution of the SMG to phonological processing is domain specific (specific to phonology) or more domain general (specific to verbal working memory). A measure of phonological complexity was developed based on sonority differences and subjects were tested after low frequency rTMS on a same/different judgment task and an n-back verbal memory task. It was reasoned that if the phonological processing in the SMG is more domain general, i.e., related to verbal working memory demands, performance would be more affected by the rTMS during the n-back task than during the same/different judgment task. Two auditory experiments were conducted. The first experiment demonstrated that under conditions where working memory demands are minimized (i.e. same/different judgment), repetitive stimulation had no effect on performance although performance varied as a function of phonological complexity. The second experiment demonstrated that during a verbal working memory task (n-back task), where phonological complexity was also manipulated, subjects were less accurate and slower at performing the task after stimulation but the effect of phonology was not affected. The results confirm that the SMG is involved in verbal working memory but not in the encoding of sonority differences.

This paper reviews the major findings and hypotheses to emerge in the literature concerned with speech prosody. Both production and perception of prosody are considered. Evidence from studies of patients with lateralized left or right hemisphere damage are presented, as well as relevant data from anatomical and functional imaging studies

Deaf people often achieve low levels of reading skills. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers is not yet fully supported in the literature. We investigated skilled and less skilled adult deaf readers’ use of orthographic and phonological codes in reading. Experiment 1 used a masked priming paradigm to investigate automatic use of these codes during visual word processing. Experiment 2 used a serial recall task to determine whether orthographic and phonological codes are used to maintain words in memory. Skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less skilled deaf readers used orthographic codes during word recognition and recall, but only skilled hearing readers relied on phonological codes during these tasks. It is important to note that skilled and less skilled deaf readers performed similarly in both tasks, indicating that reading difficulties in deaf adults may not be linked to the activation of phonological codes during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved