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Background: Event-related potentials (ERPs) are increasingly used in cognitive science. With their high temporal resolution, they offer a unique window into cognitive processes and their time course. In this paper, we focus on ERP experiments whose designs involve selecting participants and stimuli amongst many. Recently, Westfall et al. (2017) highlighted the drastic consequences of not considering stimuli as a random variable in fMRI studies with such designs. Most ERP studies in cognitive psychology suffer from the same drawback. New method: We advocate the use of the Quasi-F or Mixed-effects models instead of the classical ANOVA/by-participant F1 statistic to analyze ERP datasets in which the dependent variable is reduced to one measure per trial (e.g., mean amplitude). We combine Quasi-F statistic and cluster mass tests to analyze datasets with multiple measures per trial. Doing so allows us to treat stimulus as a random variable while correcting for multiple comparisons. Results: Simulations show that the use of Quasi-F statistics with cluster mass tests allows maintaining the family wise error rates close to the nominal alpha level of 0.05. Comparison with existing methods: Simulations reveal that the classical ANOVA/F1 approach has an alarming FWER, demonstrating the superiority of models that treat both participant and stimulus as random variables, like the Quasi-F approach. Conclusions: Our simulations question the validity of studies in which stimulus is not treated as a random variable. Failure to change the current standards feeds the replicability crisis.
Speech perception requires rapid extraction of the linguistic content from the acoustic signal. The ability to efficiently process rapid changes in auditory information is important for decoding speech and thereby crucial during language acquisition. Investigating functional networks of speech perception in infancy might elucidate neuronal ensembles supporting perceptual abilities that gate language acquisition. Interhemispheric specializations for language have been demonstrated in infants. How these asymmetries are shaped by basic temporal acoustic properties is under debate. We recently provided evidence that newborns process non-linguistic sounds sharing temporal features with language in a differential and lateralized fashion. The present study used the same material while measuring brain responses of 6 and 3 month old infants using simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS reveals that the lateralization observed in newborns remains constant over the first months of life. While fast acoustic modulations elicit bilateral neuronal activations, slow modulations lead to right-lateralized responses. Additionally, auditory-evoked potentials and oscillatory EEG responses show differential responses for fast and slow modulations indicating a sensitivity for temporal acoustic variations. Oscillatory responses reveal an effect of development, that is, 6 but not 3 month old infants show stronger theta-band desynchronization for slowly modulated sounds. Whether this developmental effect is due to increasing fine-grained perception for spectrotemporal sounds in general remains speculative. Our findings support the notion that a more general specialization for acoustic properties can be considered the basis for lateralization of speech perception. The results show that concurrent assessment of vascular based imaging and electrophysiological responses have great potential in the research on language acquisition.
This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis.
Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages.
Our paper reports an act out task with German 5- and 6-year olds and adults involving doubly-quantified sentences with a universal object and an existential subject. We found that 5- and 6-year olds allow inverse scope in such sentences, while adults do not. Our findings contribute to a growing body of research (e.g. Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino 2009, etc.) showing that children are more flexible in their scopal considerations than initially proposed by the Isomorphism proposal (Lidz & Musolino 2002; Musolino & Lidz 2006). This result provides support for a theory of German, a “no quantifier raising”-language, in terms of soft violable constraints, or global economy terms (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012), rather than in terms of hard inviolable constraints or rules (Frey 1993). Finally, the results are compatible with Reinhart’s (2004) hypothesis that children do not perform global interface economy considerations due to the increased processing associated with it.
In two experiments, we compared the dynamics of corticospinal excitability when processing visually or linguistically presented tool-oriented hand actions in native speakers and sequential bilinguals. In a third experiment we used the same procedure to test non-motor, low-level stimuli, i.e. scrambled images and pseudo-words.
Stimuli were presented in sequence: pictures (tool + tool-oriented hand action or their scrambled counterpart) and words (tool noun + tool-action verb or pseudo-words). Experiment 1 presented German linguistic stimuli to native speakers, while Experiment 2 presented English stimuli to non-natives. Experiment 3 tested Italian native speakers. Single-pulse trascranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) was applied to the left motor cortex at five different timings: baseline, 200 ms after tool/noun onset, 150, 350 and 500 ms after hand/verb onset with motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM) muscles.
We report strong similarities in the dynamics of corticospinal excitability across the visual and linguistic modalities. MEPs' suppression started as early as 150 ms and lasted for the duration of stimulus presentation (500 ms). Moreover, we show that this modulation is absent for stimuli with no motor content. Overall, our study supports the notion of a core, overarching system of action semantics shared by different modalities.
The purpose of this work is to investigate the role of three articulatory parameters (tongue position, jaw position and tongue grooving) in the production of /s/. Six normal speakers' speech was perturbed by a palatal prosthesis. The fricative was recorded acoustically and through electromagnetic articulography in four conditions: (1) unperturbed, (2) perturbed with auditory feedback masked, (3) perturbed with auditory feedback available and (4) perturbed after a 2-week adaptation period. At the end of the adaptation, speakers produced more high-frequency noise while either having a higher jaw position or more grooving of the tongue or both. We discuss the potential clinical implications of the results with regard to the role of jaw height and tongue grooving in the treatment of impaired /s/.
This study describes ME, a patient in the chronic stage after a traumatic brain injury. During an extensive training programme ME tried to regain automaticity in the retrieval of simple multiplication facts. He succeeded in substantially decreasing response latencies in multiplication, reducing the handicap at his job. This improvement generalised to a non-trained operand order, to non-trained problems, and to a non-trained output modality. Moreover, these effects were maintained over at least four months. Interestingly, however, ME's training effects were operation specific: No significant improvement occurred in addition, subtraction, or division. As coloured presentation of multiplication problems proved to be a valuable cue in facilitating the patient's performance, this might turn out to be a useful tool in the rehabilitation of fact retrieval in general