TY  - GEN
A1  - Giraudier, Manon
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation (tVNS) Improves High-Confidence Recognition Memory but Not Emotional Word Processing
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - Previous clinical research found that invasive vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) enhanced word recognition memory in epileptic patients, an effect assumed to be related to the activation of brainstem arousal systems. In this study, we applied non-invasive transcutaneous auricular VNS (tVNS) to replicate and extend the previous work. Using a single-blind, randomized, between-subject design, 60 healthy volunteers received active or sham stimulation during a lexical decision task, in which emotional and neutral stimuli were classified as words or non-words. In a subsequent recognition memory task (1 day after stimulation), participants' memory performance on these words and their subjective memory confidence were tested. Salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) levels, a putative indirect measure of central noradrenergic activation, were also measured before and after stimulation. During encoding, pleasant words were more accurately detected than neutral and unpleasant words. However, no tVNS effects were observed on task performance or on overall sAA level changes. tVNS also did not modulate overall recognition memory, which was particularly enhanced for pleasant emotional words. However, when hit rates were split based on confidence ratings reflecting familiarity- and recollection-based memory, higher recollection-based memory performance (irrespective of emotional category) was observed during active stimulation than during sham stimulation. To summarize, we replicated prior findings of enhanced processing and memory for emotional (pleasant) words. Whereas tVNS showed no effects on word processing, subtle effects on recollection-based memory performance emerged, which may indicate that tVNS facilitates hippocampus-mediated consolidation processes.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 649 
KW  - transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation
KW  - salivary alpha-amylase
KW  - emotion
KW  - words
KW  - episodic memory
KW  - recognition
KW  - recollection
KW  - confidence
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-474125
SN  - 1866-8364
IS  - 649
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Ott, Susan
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition
BT  - the impact of subsyllabic frequencies
T2  - Journal of Child Language
N2  - Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies
facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning
children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical
development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated
for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional
verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production
of inflected nonce verb forms (3 rd person singular with -t suffix)
with either high- or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in
sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1–5 ;1), sixteen
TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-
children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0–3 ;11). The findings
revealed that children with SLI, but not CA- or VA-children, showed
differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing
more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency
subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables,
replicating the results from English-learning children.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 530 
KW  - english past tense
KW  - phonotactic probability
KW  - sentence repetition
KW  - nonword repetition
KW  - speaking children
KW  - impairment
KW  - morphology
KW  - infants
KW  - speech
KW  - words
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-416475
SN  - 1866-8364
IS  - 530
ER  -