The Neurobiology of Language Beyond Single Words

Hagoort, Peter; Indefrey, Peter

doi:10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-013847

Cited by 321 publications

(333 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…This correlation was found in an exploratory study using development data and subsequently confirmed by generalizing to held-out test data. These results are consistent with patterns observed in fMRI experiments: a large survey (Hagoort and Indefrey, 2014) identifies activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, including "Broca's area") and posterior parts of the left temporal cortex (including "Wernicke's area"), during both passive listening and passive reading tasks. Their findings indicate that, with listening tasks in particular, the anterior region of the right hemisphere is also active, and the results of Weiss et al (2005) suggest that EEG coherence between the left and right hemispheres of the brain increases with embedding depth.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Evidence of syntactic working memory usage in MEG data

Schijndel

Murphy²,

Schuler

2015

Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics

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While reading times are often used to measure working memory load, frequency effects (such as surprisal or n-gram frequencies) also have strong confounding effects on reading times. This work uses a naturalistic audio corpus with magnetoencephalographic (MEG) annotations to measure working memory load during sentence processing. Alpha oscillations in posterior regions of the brain have been found to correlate with working memory load in non-linguistic tasks (Jensen et al., 2002), and the present study extends these findings to working memory load caused by syntactic center embeddings. Moreover, this work finds that frequency effects in naturally-occurring stimuli do not significantly contribute to neural oscillations in any frequency band, which suggests that many modeling claims could be tested on this sort of data even without controlling for frequency effects.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Evidence of syntactic working memory usage in MEG data

Schijndel

Murphy²,

Schuler

2015

Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics

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“…In line with the literature (Hagoort & Indefrey, 2014;Hagoort & Levinson, 2014;Kintsch & Rawson, 2007;Perfetti & Stafura, 2014;Zwaan, 2015), word level processing, i.e., the processing and understanding of lexical items (e.g., words or signs), and language comprehension, i.e., understanding the meaning of one lexical item or several lexical items in a sequence (e.g., sentences), are herein assumed to represent connected albeit qualitatively different processes. Successful identification of lexical items as a language signal represents a starting level of language understanding.…”

Section: Language Processingmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…Producing rich and meaningful representational models from a language signal thus relies on language specific knowledge, domain general semantic knowledge and cognitive mechanisms, such as working memory, that support the integration of different sources of information and keeping a representational model in memory, and appropriate inference making (Kintsch & Rawson, 2007;Rönnberg et al, 2013;Zwaan, 2015). Further, language understanding is likely to become more precise if the intent of the speaker is taken into account (Hagoort & Indefrey, 2014), which involves ToM. Sign and spoken languages are processed in a similar manner at different linguistic levels, including the sub-lexical, lexical, and syntactic (for reviews, see MacSweeney, Capek, Campbell, & Woll, 2008).…”

Section: Language Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signs for Developing Reading : Sign Language and Reading Development in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Holmer¹

2016

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Reading development is supported by strong language skills, not least in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. Regional Special Needs Schools (RSNS) in Sweden have a bilingual curriculum, that is, DHH pupils at these schools learn Swedish Sign Language and written and/or spoken Swedish. The work in the present thesis investigates reading development in DHH children who attend these schools and who are learning to read. The primary aim of the present work was to investigate whether the reading skills of DHH signing children can be improved via computerized sign language based literacy training aimed at strengthening the connections between sign language and written language. Another aim was to investigate concurrent and longitudinal associations between skills in reading, sign language, and cognition in this population. The results indicate that sign language skills support developing reading skills in RSNS pupils (Paper I and Paper IV). In particular, sign language based literacy training appears to support development of word reading (Paper IV). In addition, awareness of the sublexical structure of sign language seems to assist word reading (Paper I). Interestingly, the ability to imitate manual gestures was related to reading skills. More specifically, precision of imitation of unfamiliar signs was associated with development of word reading (Paper IV) and precision of imitation of familiar signs, i.e., vocabulary, seemed to be associated with developing reading comprehension (Paper IV). Results also suggest that working memory and Theory of Mind (ToM) are related to reading comprehension in RSNS pupils (Paper III). In addition to these findings relating to reading development, results also suggest that sign language experience enhance the establishment of representations of manual gestures (Paper II), and that progression in ToM seem to be typical, although delayed, in RSNS pupils who are learning to read (Paper III). Taken together, the associations revealed between sign language skills and reading development support the notion that sign language skills may provide a foundation for promotion of reading skills in DHH signing children. Thus, interventions that support development of sign-based representations and their manipulation and use in written language processing, may improve reading skills in this population. To account for the present findings, a model of written language processing is proposed. Working memory has a central role in integrating environmental stimuli and language-mediated representations, and thereby provides a platform for cross-modal language processing and multimodal language development. SammanfattningEn god språklig förmåga bidrar till god läsutveckling, inte minst hos döva och hörselskadade barn. Specialpedagogiska skolmyndighetens specialskolor för döva och hörselskadade (D/H) barn har en tvåspråkig läroplan som innebär att elever på dessa skolor lär sig både svenskt teckenspråk och skriven och/eller talad svenska. De fyra arbeten som ingår i avhandlingen undersöker l...

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“…This finding is consistent with recent EEG evidence that response preparation starts well in overlap with the incoming turn . The claim that production planning significantly overlaps with comprehension processes is nevertheless puzzling, because it implies dual tasking using much of the same neural circuitry (e.g., Indefrey and Menenti et al, 2011;Hagoort and Indefrey, 2014) and an intensive sharing of attentional resources (cf. Jongman et al, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Holler

Kendrick

Casillas

et al. 2016

Frontiers Research Topics

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The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields

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The Neurobiology of Language Beyond Single Words

Cited by 321 publications

References 53 publications

Evidence of syntactic working memory usage in MEG data

Evidence of syntactic working memory usage in MEG data

Signs for Developing Reading : Sign Language and Reading Development in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

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