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This study on analogical reasoning evaluates the impact of fluid intelligence on adaptive changes in neural efficiency over the course of an experiment and specifies the underlying cognitive processes. Grade 10 students (N = 80) solved unfamiliar geometric analogy tasks of varying difficulty. Neural efficiency was measured by the event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the alpha band, an indicator of cortical activity. Neural efficiency was defined as a low amount of cortical activity accompanying high performance during problem-solving. Students solved the tasks faster and more accurately the higher their FI was. Moreover, while high FI led to greater cortical activity in the first half of the experiment, high FI was associated with a neurally more efficient processing (i.e., better performance but same amount of cortical activity) in the second half of the experiment. Performance in difficult tasks improved over the course of the experiment for all students while neural efficiency increased for students with higher but decreased for students with lower fluid intelligence. Based on analyses of the alpha sub-bands, we argue that high fluid intelligence was associated with a stronger investment of attentional resource in the integration of information and the encoding of relations in this unfamiliar task in the first half of the experiment (lower-2 alpha band). Students with lower fluid intelligence seem to adapt their applied strategies over the course of the experiment (i.e., focusing on task-relevant information; lower-1 alpha band). Thus, the initially lower cortical activity and its increase in students with lower fluid intelligence might reflect the overcoming of mental overload that was present in the first half of the experiment. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This study examines the role of pitch and final lengthening in German intonation phrase boundary (IPB) perception. Since a prosody-related event-related potential (ERP) component termed Closure Positive Shift reflects the processing of major prosodic boundaries, we combined ERP and behavioural measures (i.e. a prosodic judgement task) to systematically test the impact of sole and combined cue occurrences on IPB perception. In two experiments we investigated whether adult listeners perceived an IPB in acoustically manipulated speech material that contained none, one, or two of the prosodic boundary cues. Both ERP and behavioural results suggest that pitch and final lengthening cues have to occur in combination to trigger IPB perception. Hence, the combination of behavioural and electrophysiological measures provides a comprehensive insight into prosodic boundary cue perception in German and leads to an argument in favour of interrelated cues from the frequency (i.e. pitch change) and the time (i.e. final lengthening) domain.
Speech and action sequences are continuous streams of information that can be segmented into sub-units. In both domains, this segmentation can be facilitated by perceptual cues contained within the information stream. In speech, prosodic cues (e.g., a pause, pre-boundary lengthening, and pitch rise) mark boundaries between words and phrases, while boundaries between actions of an action sequence can be marked by kinematic cues (e.g., a pause, pre-boundary deceleration). The processing of prosodic boundary cues evokes an Event-related Potentials (ERP) component known as the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), and it is possible that the CPS reflects domaingeneral cognitive processes involved in segmentation, given that the CPS is also evoked by boundaries between subunits of non-speech auditory stimuli. This study further probed the domain-generality of the CPS and its underlying processes by investigating electrophysiological correlates of the processing of boundary cues in sequences of spoken verbs (auditory stimuli; Experiment 1; N = 23 adults) and actions (visual stimuli; Experiment 2; N = 23 adults). The EEG data from both experiments revealed a CPS-like broadly distributed positivity during the 250 ms prior to the onset of the post-boundary word or action, indicating similar electrophysiological correlates of boundary processing across domains, suggesting that the cognitive processes underlying speech and action segmentation might also be shared.
Age of acquisition (AOA) has frequently been shown to influence response times and accuracy rates in word processing and constitutes a meaningful variable in aphasic language processing, while its origin in the language processing system is still under debate. To find out where AOA originates and whether and how it is related to another important psycholinguistic variable, namely semantic typicality (TYP), we studied healthy, elderly controls and semantically impaired individuals using semantic priming. For this purpose, we collected reaction times and accuracy rates as well as event-related potential data in an auditory category-member-verification task. The present results confirm a semantic origin of TYP, but question the same for AOA while favouring its origin at the phonology-semantics interface. The data are further interpreted in consideration of recent theories of ageing. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The semantics of focus particles like only requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992). In two experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that are mentioned in the prior context or unmentioned. The first experiment used a probe recognition task and showed that focus particles interfere with the recognition of mentioned alternatives and the rejection of unmentioned alternatives relative to a condition without a particle. A second lexical decision experiment demonstrated priming effects for mentioned and unmentioned alternatives (compared with an unrelated condition) while focus particles caused additional interference effects. Overall, our results indicate that focus particles trigger an active search for alternatives and lead to a competition between mentioned alternatives, unmentioned alternatives, and the focused element.
Das 15. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik mit dem Schwerpunktthema »Interdisziplinär (be-)handeln – Multiprofessionelle Zusammenarbeit in der Sprachtherapie« fand am 20.11.2021 als Online-Veranstaltung statt. Das Herbsttreffen wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl), seit 2021 vom Deutschen Bundesverband für akademische Sprachtherapie und Logopädie (dbs) in Kooperation mit der Universität Potsdam durchgeführt. Der vorliegende Tagungsband beinhaltet die Vorträge zum Schwerpunktthema und Informationen aus der Podiumsdiskussion sowie die Posterpräsentationen zu weiteren Themen aus der sprachtherapeutischen Forschung und Praxis.
Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, Lammertink et al. (2019) recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6–11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4–8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4–8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting.
Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, Lammertink et al. (2019) recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6–11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4–8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4–8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting.
This study investigates prosodic phrasing of bracketed lists in German. We analyze variation in pauses, phrase-final lengthening and f0 in speech production and how these cues affect boundary perception. In line with the literature, it was found that pauses are often used to signal intonation phrase boundaries, while final lengthening and f0 are employed across different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Deviations from expectations based on the standard syntax-prosody mapping are interpreted in terms of task-specific effects. That is, we argue that speakers add/delete prosodic boundaries to enhance the phonological contrast between different bracketings in the experimental task. In perception, three experiments were run, in which we tested only single cues (but temporally distributed at different locations of the sentences). Results from identification tasks and reaction time measurements indicate that pauses lead to a more abrupt shift in listeners׳ prosodic judgments, while f0 and final lengthening are exploited in a more gradient manner. Hence, pauses, final lengthening and f0 have an impact on boundary perception, though listeners show different sensitivity to the three acoustic cues.