All posts; Tags Include "Neurolinguistics"
- November 6, 2015
- 06:47 AM
- 380 views
Broca’s area processes both music and language at the same time
by Richard Kunert in Brain's Idea
When you read a book and listen to music, the brain doesn’t keep these two tasks nicely separated. In a new article just out, I show that there is a brain area which is busy with both tasks at the same time (Kunert et al., 2015). This brain area might tell us a lot about […]... Read more »
Hagoort P. (2013) MUC (Memory, Unification, Control) and beyond. Frontiers in psychology, 416. PMID: 23874313
Kunert R, & Slevc LR. (2015) A Commentary on: "Neural overlap in processing music and speech". Frontiers in human neuroscience, 330. PMID: 26089792
Kunert R, Willems RM, Casasanto D, Patel AD, & Hagoort P. (2015) Music and Language Syntax Interact in Broca's Area: An fMRI Study. PloS one, 10(11). PMID: 26536026
- September 3, 2015
- 08:28 PM
- 522 views
Reproducibility project: A front row seat
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
A recent paper in Science reports the results of a large-scale effort to test reproducibility in psychological science. The results have caused much discussion (as well they should) in both general public and science forums. I thought I would offer my perspective as the lead author of one of the studies that was included in the reproducibility analysis. I had heard about the project even before being contacted to participate and one of the things that appealed to me about it was that they were t........ Read more »
Open Science Collaboration. (2015) Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251). DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4716
Mirman, D., & Magnuson, J. (2008) Attractor dynamics and semantic neighborhood density: Processing is slowed by near neighbors and speeded by distant neighbors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34(1), 65-79. DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.34.1.65
Mirman, D. (2010) Effects of near and distant semantic neighbors on word production. Cognitive, Affective, , 11(1), 32-43. DOI: 10.3758/s13415-010-0009-7
Mirman, D., & Graziano, K. (2013) The Neural Basis of Inhibitory Effects of Semantic and Phonological Neighbors in Spoken Word Production. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 25(9), 1504-1516. DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_00408
- April 20, 2015
- 09:45 AM
- 580 views
Aphasia factors vs. subtypes
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
One of the interesting things (to me anyway) that came out of our recent factor analysis project (Mirman et al., 2015, in press; see Part 1 and Part 2) is a way of reconsidering aphasia types in terms of psycholinguistic factors rather than the traditional clinical aphasia subtypes. The traditional aphasia subtyping approach is to use a diagnostic test like the Western Aphasia Battery or the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination to assign an individual with aphasia to one of several subtype cate........ Read more »
Mirman, D., Chen, Q., Zhang, Y., Wang, Z., Faseyitan, O.K., Coslett, H.B., & Schwartz, M.F. (2015) Neural Organization of Spoken Language Revealed by Lesion-Symptom Mapping. Nature Communications, 6(6762), 1-9. info:/
Mirman, D., Zhang, Y., Wang, Z., Coslett, H.B., & Schwartz, M.F. (2015) The ins and outs of meaning: Behavioral and neuroanatomical dissociation of semantically-driven word retrieval and multimodal semantic recognition in aphasia. Neuropsychologia. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.02.014
- April 17, 2015
- 10:03 AM
- 633 views
Mapping the language system: Part 2
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
This is the second of a multi-part post about a pair of papers that just came out (Mirman et al., 2015, in press). Part 1 was about the behavioral data: we started with 17 behavioral measures from 99 participants with aphasia following left hemisphere stroke. Using factor analysis, we reduced those 17 measures to 4 underlying factors: Semantic Recognition, Speech Production, Speech Recognition, and Semantic Errors. For each of these factors, we then used voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (........ Read more »
Hickok G. (2012) Computational neuroanatomy of speech production. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(2), 135-145. PMID: 22218206
Hickok, Gregory S, & Poeppel, David. (2007) The cortical organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(May), 393-402. info:/
Mirman, D., Zhang, Y., Wang, Z., Coslett, H.B., & Schwartz, M.F. (2015) The ins and outs of meaning: Behavioral and neuroanatomical dissociation of semantically-driven word retrieval and multimodal semantic recognition in aphasia. Neuropsychologia. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.02.014
Rauschecker J.P., & Scott S.K. (2009) Maps and streams in the auditory cortex: nonhuman primates illuminate human speech processing. Nature Neuroscience, 12(6), 718-724. PMID: 19471271
Zhang Y., Kimberg D.Y., Coslett H.B., Schwartz M.F., & Wang Z. (2014) Multivariate lesion-symptom mapping using support vector regression. Human Brain Mapping, 35(12), 5861-5876. PMID: 25044213
- April 16, 2015
- 09:48 AM
- 569 views
Mapping the language system: Part 1
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
My colleagues and I have a pair of papers coming out in Nature Communications and Neuropsychologia that I'm particularly excited about. The data came from Myrna Schwartz's long-running anatomical case series project in which behavioral and structural neuroimaging data were collected from a large sample of individuals with aphasia following left hemisphere stroke. We pulled together data from 17 measures of language-related performance for 99 participants, each of those participants was also........ Read more »
Mirman, D., Chen, Q., Zhang, Y., Wang, Z., Faseyitan, O.K., Coslett, H.B., & Schwartz, M.F. (2015) Neural Organization of Spoken Language Revealed by Lesion-Symptom Mapping. Nature Communications, 6(6762), 1-9. info:/
Mirman, D., Zhang, Y., Wang, Z., Coslett, H.B., & Schwartz, M.F. (2015) The ins and outs of meaning: Behavioral and neuroanatomical dissociation of semantically-driven word retrieval and multimodal semantic recognition in aphasia. Neuropsychologia. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.02.014
- March 25, 2015
- 08:00 AM
- 788 views
This Nose Knows
by Mark Lasbury in As Many Exceptions As Rules
Evolution has given the sperm whale the most amazing head in the animal kingdom. They’ve got the biggest brain – all 18 lb.s of it. It has 1900 liters of sperm oil that almost caused in the extinction of the animal. It has one nostril that’s offset on its head, making the whale asymmetric. But most impressively, he can change the density of his head to help him dive or surface, and to do it he uses the same organ he uses for echolocation!... Read more »
Ridgway, S., & Hanson, A. (2014) Sperm Whales and Killer Whales with the Largest Brains of All Toothed Whales Show Extreme Differences in Cerebellum. Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 83(4), 266-274. DOI: 10.1159/000360519
Oliveira, C., Wahlberg, M., Johnson, M., Miller, P., & Madsen, P. (2013) The function of male sperm whale slow clicks in a high latitude habitat: Communication, echolocation, or prey debilitation?. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(5), 3135. DOI: 10.1121/1.4795798
BODDY, A., McGOWEN, M., SHERWOOD, C., GROSSMAN, L., GOODMAN, M., & WILDMAN, D. (2012) Comparative analysis of encephalization in mammals reveals relaxed constraints on anthropoid primate and cetacean brain scaling. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 25(5), 981-994. DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2012.02491.x
Montgomery, S., Geisler, J., McGowen, M., Fox, C., Marino, L., & Gatesy, J. (2013) THE EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF CETACEAN BRAIN AND BODY SIZE. Evolution, 67(11), 3339-3353. DOI: 10.1111/evo.12197
- March 3, 2015
- 10:44 AM
- 534 views
When lexical competition becomes lexical cooperation
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
Lexical neighborhood effects are one of the most robust findings in spoken word recognition: words with many similar-sounding words ("neighbors") are recognized more slowly and less accurately than words with few neighbors. About 10 years ago, when I was just starting my post-doc training with Jim Magnuson, we wondered about semantic neighborhood effects. We found that things were less straightforward in semantics: near semantic neighbors slowed down visual word recognition, but distant semantic........ Read more »
Apfelbaum K S, Blumstein S E, & McMurray B. (2011) Semantic priming is affected by real-time phonological competition: evidence for continuous cascading systems. Psychonomic Bulletin , 18(1), 141-149. PMID: 21327343
Chen Q, & Mirman D. (2012) Competition and cooperation among similar representations: toward a unified account of facilitative and inhibitory effects of lexical neighbors. Psychological Review, 119(2), 417-430. PMID: 22352357
Chen Q, & Mirman D. (2015) Interaction Between Phonological and Semantic Representations: Time Matters. Cognitive Science. PMID: 25155249
Mirman D. (2011) Effects of near and distant semantic neighbors on word production. Cognitive, Affective , 11(1), 32-43. PMID: 21264640
Mirman D, & Magnuson J S. (2008) Attractor dynamics and semantic neighborhood density: processing is slowed by near neighbors and speeded by distant neighbors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34(1), 65-79. PMID: 18194055
- September 15, 2014
- 04:01 PM
- 712 views
Humanized FoxP2 and the timing of habits
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis et al. entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...... Read more »
Schreiweis, C., Bornschein, U., Burguiere, E., Kerimoglu, C., Schreiter, S., Dannemann, M., Goyal, S., Rea, E., French, C., Puliyadi, R.... (2014) Humanized Foxp2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414542111
- July 9, 2014
- 11:00 AM
- 714 views
Chimp Talk
by Viputheshwar Sitaraman in Draw Science
Learn how to speak chimp with the newly translated language of chimpanzee gestures in non-play context. [Infographic]... Read more »
Hobaiter C, & Byrne RW. (2014) The Meanings of Chimpanzee Gestures. Current biology : CB. PMID: 24998524
- June 26, 2014
- 09:26 AM
- 644 views
Why use fruit flies to study a gene involved in language?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
This is the story behind our work on the function of the FoxP gene in the fruit fly Drosophila (more background info). As so many good things, it started with beer. Troy Zars and I were having a beer on […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...... Read more »
Mendoza, E., Colomb, J., Rybak, J., Pflüger, H., Zars, T., Scharff, C., & Brembs, B. (2014) Drosophila FoxP Mutants Are Deficient in Operant Self-Learning. PLoS ONE, 9(6). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0100648
- June 24, 2014
- 09:04 AM
- 767 views
No need to only send your best work to Science Magazine
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
The data clearly show that publications in Cell, Nature or Science (CNS for short), on average, cannot be distinguished from other publications, be it by methodology, reproducibility or other measures of quality. Even their citation advantage, while statistically significant, is […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...... Read more »
DasGupta, S., Ferreira, C., & Miesenbock, G. (2014) FoxP influences the speed and accuracy of a perceptual decision in Drosophila. Science, 344(6186), 901-904. DOI: 10.1126/science.1252114
- March 30, 2014
- 06:33 AM
- 708 views
The right inferior frontal cortex - The brain’s cognitive brake
by Robert Seymour in NeuroFractal
Whilst go/no-go tasks and stop-tasks have given researchers a lot of information about “pure” inhibition, this is not how people typically stop themselves performing actions in real life. In the past few years a slightly more ecologically valid paradigm has emerged in which participants anticipate they might have to inhibit a response, followed by the normal Go/No-Go signal. Participant’s responses are very slightly slower on go trials if they anticipate having to stop. This ha........ Read more »
Aron AR, Robbins TW, & Poldrack RA. (2014) Inhibition and the right inferior frontal cortex: one decade on. Trends in cognitive sciences. PMID: 24440116
- December 9, 2013
- 09:26 PM
- 256 views
Language in developmental and acquired disorders
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
As I mentioned in an earlier post, last June I had the great pleasure and honor of participating in a discussion meeting on Language in Developmental and Acquired Disorders hosted by the Royal Society and organized by Dorothy Bishop, Kate Nation, and Karalyn Patterson. Among the many wonderful things about this meeting was that it brought together people who study similar kinds of language deficit issues but in very different populations -- children with developmental language deficits such as d........ Read more »
Mirman, D, & Britt, A. E. (2014) What we talk about when we talk about access deficits. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1634). info:/
- November 10, 2013
- 05:26 PM
- 963 views
Bilingualism delays onset of dementia
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
It is by now widely known that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia. What is less widely known is the fact that this knowledge is almost exclusively derived from Canadian research conducted by Ellen Bialystok and her team (e.g., Bialystock … Continue reading →... Read more »
Alladi S, Bak TH, Duggirala V, Surampudi B, Shailaja M, Shukla AK, Chaudhuri JR, & Kaul S. (2013) Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status. Neurology. PMID: 24198291
Bialystok E, Craik FI, & Freedman M. (2007) Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 45(2), 459-64. PMID: 17125807
Chertkow H, Whitehead V, Phillips N, Wolfson C, Atherton J, & Bergman H. (2010) Multilingualism (but not always bilingualism) delays the onset of Alzheimer disease: evidence from a bilingual community. Alzheimer disease and associated disorders, 24(2), 118-25. PMID: 20505429
- October 21, 2013
- 05:39 PM
- 1,036 views
The mind is not a (digital) computer
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
The "mind as computer" has been a dominant and powerful metaphor in cognitive science at least since the middle of the 20th century. Throughout this time, many of us have chafed against this metaphor because it has a tendency to be taken too literally. Framing mental and neural processes in terms of computation or information processing can be extremely useful, but this approach can turn into the extremely misleading notion that our minds work kind of like our desktop or laptop computers. There ........ Read more »
McClelland JL, Mirman D, & Holt LL. (2006) Are there interactive processes in speech perception?. Trends in cognitive sciences, 10(8), 363-369. PMID: 16843037
- August 27, 2013
- 04:41 AM
- 664 views
Language Learning Begins in the Womb
by Josephine Lethbridge in United Academics
New research from the University of Helsinki suggests that humans begin to distinguish between sounds before they are even born. Eino Partanen and colleagues explored how prenatal experiences influence learning. “We wanted to find out what kind of material foetuses can learn in the womb, what kind of neural representations they form,” he said.... Read more »
Eino Partanen et al. (2013) Learning-induced neural plasticity of speech processing before birth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1302159110
- July 8, 2013
- 04:57 AM
- 1,454 views
A New Slant on Frontal Connectivity: the Frontal Aslant Tract
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
The frontal aslant tract is shown in yellow (Fig 5, Catani et al., 2012). It's not every day that you hear about a newly described white matter pathway in the human brain. An interesting new study by a group of researchers in London and Chicago found a novel fiber tract implicated in verbal fluency impairments in patients with a lesser known neurodegenerative illness (Catani et al., 2013). This short fiber tract connects two different regions in the frontal lobe. It was recently identified usin........ Read more »
Catani M, Dell'acqua F, Vergani F, Malik F, Hodge H, Roy P, Valabregue R, & Thiebaut de Schotten M. (2012) Short frontal lobe connections of the human brain. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 48(2), 273-91. PMID: 22209688
Catani M, Mesulam MM, Jakobsen E, Malik F, Matersteck A, Wieneke C, Thompson CK, Thiebaut de Schotten M, Dell'acqua F, Weintraub S.... (2013) A novel frontal pathway underlies verbal fluency in primary progressive aphasia. Brain : a journal of neurology. PMID: 23820597
Gorno-Tempini ML, Hillis AE, Weintraub S, Kertesz A, Mendez M, Cappa SF, Ogar JM, Rohrer JD, Black S, Boeve BF.... (2011) Classification of primary progressive aphasia and its variants. Neurology, 76(11), 1006-14. PMID: 21325651
Lawes IN, Barrick TR, Murugam V, Spierings N, Evans DR, Song M, & Clark CA. (2008) Atlas-based segmentation of white matter tracts of the human brain using diffusion tensor tractography and comparison with classical dissection. NeuroImage, 39(1), 62-79. PMID: 17919935
Thiebaut de Schotten M, Dell'Acqua F, Valabregue R, & Catani M. (2012) Monkey to human comparative anatomy of the frontal lobe association tracts. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 48(1), 82-96. PMID: 22088488
- June 21, 2013
- 09:00 AM
- 852 views
Models are experiments
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
I spent last week at a two-part meeting on language in developmental and acquired disorders, hosted by the Royal Society. The organizers (Dorothy Bishop, Kate Nation, and Karalyn Patterson) devised a meeting structure that stimulated – and made room for – a lot of discussion and one of the major discussion topics throughout the meeting was computational modeling. A major highlight for me was David Plaut’s aphorism “Models are experiments”. The idea is that models are sometimes taken to........ Read more »
Mirman D, Britt AE, & Chen Q. (2013) Effects of phonological and semantic deficits on facilitative and inhibitory consequences of item repetition in spoken word comprehension. Neuropsychologia. PMID: 23770302
Oppenheim GM, Dell GS, & Schwartz MF. (2010) The dark side of incremental learning: A model of cumulative semantic interference during lexical access in speech production. Cognition, 114(2), 227-252. PMID: 19854436
- June 19, 2013
- 10:03 PM
- 769 views
Wanna learn a second language? Ditch that familiar face.
by Shelly Fan in Neurorexia
Have you ever felt like you behave differently depending on your cultural surroundings? As an immigrant, I know I start mimicking others’ accents and body language once I’m out of my heritage culture. This type of environment-induced chameleon-like morphing is called – quite aptly - “frame switching” in psychology. Scientists don’t really know if it […]... Read more »
Zhang S, Morris MW, Cheng CY, & Yap AJ. (2013) Heritage-culture images disrupt immigrants' second-language processing through triggering first-language interference. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 23776218
- June 12, 2013
- 10:21 PM
- 961 views
Brain imag(in)ing the make believe
by Shelly Fan in Neurorexia
I seldom get worked up over the fate of fictional characters. That said, I joined millions in horror as the infamous Red Wedding (or “Rains of Castarmere”) finally unfolded on screen in last week’s Game of Thrones. Having read the books, I’ve waited for the *spoilers/youknowwhat* with a mixture of dread and anticipation. When it […]... Read more »
Mikkel Wallentin, Andreas Højlund Nielsen, Peter Vuust, Anders Dohn, Andreas Roepstorff, & Torben Ellegaard Lund. (2011) Amygdala and heart rate variability responses from listening to emotionally intense parts of a story. Neuroimage, 963-973. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.06.077
Mar RA. (2011) The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. Annual review of psychology, 103-34. PMID: 21126178
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