Download or read book Neural Correlates of Semantic and Syntactic Language Functions written by Oliver Stock and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Identifying Differences in the Neural Correlates Underlying Semantic and Syntactic Development written by Julie Marie Schneider and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language comprehension requires millisecond level processing of semantic and syntactic information, yet children seem to integrate and comprehend all of this information with relative ease. Although this is done effortlessly, developmental differences exist in the speed by which children process speech. By understanding how variation in the developmental time-course of semantics and syntax may contribute to individual differences in language comprehension, we may lay a foundation to better understand how language develops in atypical populations. This study uses electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate how early school-age children, late school-age children, and adults process semantics and syntax in naturally paced sentences. Children ages 8-9 years, 12-13 years, and adults listened to semantically and syntactically correct and incorrect sentences and were asked to complete an acceptability judgment task. When processing a semantic error, there were no developmental differences in the N400; however, increases in theta, related to semantic processing, were greater for 8-9 year olds than 12-13 year olds and adults. These findings suggest that the N400 may be too gross a measure to identify more subtle aspects of semantic development that are ongoing in early school-aged children. For the syntactic task, errors resulted in a larger P600 and greater beta decrease than correct sentences, but the location of the P600 and the amplitude of beta decreases differed as a function of age, suggesting specialization of syntactic skills is ongoing through adolescence. Taken together, the findings from the current study suggest that the neural substrates underlying semantic processing appear to reach adult-like levels at a younger age, while syntactic skills develop over a protracted time course to support comprehension of natural language.

Download or read book German Sentence Processing written by B. Hemforth and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German language offers a variety of possibilities for asking and answering new questions in psycholinguistic sentence comprehension research. The collection of papers in this volume contributes to the increasingly relevant crosslinguistic comparison of mechanisms of human sentence processing. The topics covered are incremental structure assembly, on-line ambiguity resolution, and phonological, contextual, and working memory aspects of reanalysis. The new theoretical and experimental insights presented in this volume should be of great interest to linguists and psychologists working on human language comprehension. The introductory information provided by the authors makes the volume easily accessible to advanced students.

Download or read book Language and Cognition written by Kuniyoshi L. Sakai and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interaction between language and cognition remains an unsolved scientific problem. What are the differences in neural mechanisms of language and cognition? Why do children acquire language by the age of six, while taking a lifetime to acquire cognition? What is the role of language and cognition in thinking? Is abstract cognition possible without language? Is language just a communication device, or is it fundamental in developing thoughts? Why are there no animals with human thinking but without human language? Combinations even among 100 words and 100 objects (multiple words can represent multiple objects) exceed the number of all the particles in the Universe, and it seems that no amount of experience would suffice to learn these associations. How does human brain overcome this difficulty? Since the 19th century we know about involvement of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in language. What new knowledge of language and cognition areas has been found with fMRI and other brain imaging methods? Every year we know more about their anatomical and functional/effective connectivity. What can be inferred about mechanisms of their interaction, and about their functions in language and cognition? Why does the human brain show hemispheric (i.e., left or right) dominance for some specific linguistic and cognitive processes? Is understanding of language and cognition processed in the same brain area, or are there differences in language-semantic and cognitive-semantic brain areas? Is the syntactic process related to the structure of our conceptual world? Chomsky has suggested that language is separable from cognition. On the opposite, cognitive and construction linguistics emphasized a single mechanism of both. Neither has led to a computational theory so far. Evolutionary linguistics has emphasized evolution leading to a mechanism of language acquisition, yet proposed approaches also lead to incomputable complexity. There are some more related issues in linguistics and language education as well. Which brain regions govern phonology, lexicon, semantics, and syntax systems, as well as their acquisitions? What are the differences in acquisition of the first and second languages? Which mechanisms of cognition are involved in reading and writing? Are different writing systems affect relations between language and cognition? Are there differences in language-cognition interactions among different language groups (such as Indo-European, Chinese, Japanese, Semitic) and types (different degrees of analytic-isolating, synthetic-inflected, fused, agglutinative features)? What can be learned from sign languages? Rizzolatti and Arbib have proposed that language evolved on top of earlier mirror-neuron mechanism. Can this proposal answer the unknown questions about language and cognition? Can it explain mechanisms of language-cognition interaction? How does it relate to known brain areas and their interactions identified in brain imaging? Emotional and conceptual contents of voice sounds in animals are fused. Evolution of human language has demanded splitting of emotional and conceptual contents and mechanisms, although language prosody still carries emotional content. Is it a dying-off remnant, or is it fundamental for interaction between language and cognition? If language and cognitive mechanisms differ, unifying these two contents requires motivation, hence emotions. What are these emotions? Can they be measured? Tonal languages use pitch contours for semantic contents, are there differences in language-cognition interaction among tonal and atonal languages? Are emotional differences among cultures exclusively cultural, or also depend on languages? Interaction of language and cognition is thus full of mysteries, and we encourage papers addressing any aspect of this topic.

Download or read book The Oscillatory Nature of Language written by Elliot Murphy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Develops a theory of how language is processed in the brain and provides a state-of-the-art review of current neuroscientific debates.

Download or read book What the Hands Reveal about the Brain written by Howard Poizner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What the Hands Reveal About the Brain provides dramatic evidence that language is not limited to hearing and speech, that there are primary linguistic systems passed down from one generation of deaf people to the next, which have been forged into antonomous languages and are not derived front spoken languages.

Download or read book Neurobiology of Language written by Gregory Hickok and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 1188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neurobiology of Language explores the study of language, a field that has seen tremendous progress in the last two decades. Key to this progress is the accelerating trend toward integration of neurobiological approaches with the more established understanding of language within cognitive psychology, computer science, and linguistics. This volume serves as the definitive reference on the neurobiology of language, bringing these various advances together into a single volume of 100 concise entries. The organization includes sections on the field's major subfields, with each section covering both empirical data and theoretical perspectives. "Foundational" neurobiological coverage is also provided, including neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, genetics, linguistic, and psycholinguistic data, and models. - Foundational reference for the current state of the field of the neurobiology of language - Enables brain and language researchers and students to remain up-to-date in this fast-moving field that crosses many disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries - Provides an accessible entry point for other scientists interested in the area, but not actively working in it – e.g., speech therapists, neurologists, and cognitive psychologists - Chapters authored by world leaders in the field – the broadest, most expert coverage available

Download or read book Lexical Categories written by Mark C. Baker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-13 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book Imaging Neural Correlates of Syntactic Complexity in a Naturalistic Context written by Asaf Bachrach and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this thesis, and the research project within which it is embedded, is to delineate a neural model of grammatical competence. For this purpose, we develop here a novel integrated, multi-disciplinary experimental paradigm that endorses the fundamental premise of generative grammar, that the study of language is in essence, the study of the mind. We use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activation while subjects listen to short narratives. The texts have been written so as to introduce various syntactic complexities (relative clauses, embedded questions, etc.) not usually found (in such density) in actual corpora. We have calculated a number of complexity measures (both at the level of the single word and at that of the phrase) based on current linguistic and psycholinguistic theory and with the use of a computationally implemented probabilistic parser. By correlating these measures with observed brain activity, we are able to identify the different brain networks that support linguistic processing and characterize their particular function. Conversely, we use the rich brain data to inform our cognitive, and linguistic, theory. We report here the neural correlates of surprisal (based on contextual predictions), syntactic complexity, structural ambiguity and disambiguation, Theory of Mind and non-local dependencies. This work made use of novel solutions to compute numerical predictions for these linguistic dimensions, which are often tested only qualitatively, and of a novel parametric fMRI design that allowed for the use of single subject unaveraged data as the dependent variable. The thesis ends with a synthesis of the results in the form of a blue print for a neural model of grammatical competence.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Neurolinguistics written by Kara Morgan-Short and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Neurolinguistics provides a comprehensive discussion of a wide range of neurocognitive and neurobiological scientific research about learning second or additional languages. It is a one-of-a-kind centralized resource that brings together research that is typically found in disperse publication venues. Eminent global scholars from various disciplines synthesize and cross-fertilize current and past neural research about second language through systematic, in-depth, and timely chapters that discuss cores issues for understanding the neurocognition of second language learning, representation, and processing. Handbook sections provide overviews of extant and emerging neuroscience methods, syntheses of neurocognitive research on second language syntax, morphosyntax, lexicon, phonology, and pragmatics, and up-to-date descriptions of theoretical approaches of the neural basis of second language learning. The volume provides additional sections that synthesize research on a variety of topics including factors that affect the neurocognition of second language, the neural mechanisms underlying second language learning, individual differences in the neurocognition of second language, as well as research on understudied languages and populations, such as sign language, child second language learners, and individuals with aphasia. This handbook will be an indispensable resource to scholars and students across a wide range of disciplines, including those interested in second language acquisition, applied linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and research methodology. It should facilitate transformative connections between ideas and disciplines and lead to informative and productive paths for future research.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience Volume 1 written by Kevin Ochsner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich source of authoritative information that supports reading and study in the field of cognitive neuroscience, this two-volume handbook reviews the current state-of-the-science in all major areas of the field.

Download or read book Brain Experience written by C.R. Mukundan and published by Atlantic Publishers & Dist. This book was released on 2007 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Present Book Deals With The Brain-Mind, Based On The Findings Of Studies Using Functional Neuroimaging, Cognitive Electrophysiological And Clinical Neuropsychological Techniques. The Meta-Analysis Draws On The Emergence Of The Mind From The Brain And The Control Of Mental Activities By The Neural Systems. Nevertheless, Interpretations That Determine The Contents Of Processing And Their Qualitative Judgements Are Not Limited By The Brain Or The Realities Of The World. It Is Possible To Create A Subjective World, Which Is Not In Conformity With Objective Realities. The Environment Controls The Brain And The Brain Has Learnt To Internalize Such Controls And Selectively Use Them For Dealing With Various Environmental Exigencies. The Human Brain Has Further Learnt To Self-Define Purposes, Goals, Self-Programme And Perform Actions For Achieving The Self-Defined Goals, And Has Become Increasingly Independent Of The Environmental Controls.Development Of Language Skills In The Brain Has Led To Extensive Verbal Transcoding Of Perceptions, Responses, Actions, Emotions, And Experiences, As Well As To The Creation Of New Relationships At The Conceptual And Reality Levels. The Same Neural Functional Systems Monitor The Process Of Creation Of Thoughts, The Mental Imageries, And Their Contents, Which In Turn Has Led To The Emergence Of Awareness Of The Processes And Contents Of The Transcoding. Experience Is A Product Of Sensory-Motor Events, Emotions, Their Cognitive Interpretations, And Awareness. Despite The Possibilities And The Presence Of Erroneous As Well As Out Of Reality Interpretations, Experience Offers The Highest Levels Of Personal Contact With Reality, Which Makes Man Crave And Explore For It.The Present Book Is Thus A Comprehensive Study On Brain-Mind And It Is Hoped That It Will Prove Useful And Interesting To The Students, Researchers, And Teachers Of Neuropsychology. The Detailed References Included In The Book Will Facilitate Pursuing The Studies Further. Its Language And Approach To The Subject Matter Is Reader-Friendly And Easily Comprehensible.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience Volume 2 written by Kevin Ochsner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich source of authoritative information that supports reading and study in the field of cognitive neuroscience, this two-volume handbook reviews the current state-of-the-science in all major areas of the field.

Download or read book Language Music and the Brain written by Michael A. Arbib and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A presentation of music and language within an integrative, embodied perspective of brain mechanisms for action, emotion, and social coordination. This book explores the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: song and dance as a bridge between music and language; multiple levels of structure from brain to behavior to culture; the semantics of internal and external worlds and the role of emotion; and the evolution and development of language. The book offers specially commissioned expositions of current research accessible both to experts across disciplines and to non-experts. These chapters provide the background for reports by groups of specialists that chart current controversies and future directions of research on each theme. The book looks beyond mere auditory experience, probing the embodiment that links speech to gesture and music to dance. The study of the brains of monkeys and songbirds illuminates hypotheses on the evolution of brain mechanisms that support music and language, while the study of infants calibrates the developmental timetable of their capacities. The result is a unique book that will interest any reader seeking to learn more about language or music and will appeal especially to readers intrigued by the relationships of language and music with each other and with the brain. Contributors Francisco Aboitiz, Michael A. Arbib, Annabel J. Cohen, Ian Cross, Peter Ford Dominey, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Leonardo Fogassi, Jonathan Fritz, Thomas Fritz, Peter Hagoort, John Halle, Henkjan Honing, Atsushi Iriki, Petr Janata, Erich Jarvis, Stefan Koelsch, Gina Kuperberg, D. Robert Ladd, Fred Lerdahl, Stephen C. Levinson, Jerome Lewis, Katja Liebal, Jônatas Manzolli, Bjorn Merker, Lawrence M. Parsons, Aniruddh D. Patel, Isabelle Peretz, David Poeppel, Josef P. Rauschecker, Nikki Rickard, Klaus Scherer, Gottfried Schlaug, Uwe Seifert, Mark Steedman, Dietrich Stout, Francesca Stregapede, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Laurel Trainor, Sandra E. Trehub, Paul Verschure

Download or read book Brain and Music written by Stefan Koelsch and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive survey of the latest neuroscientific research into the effects of music on the brain Covers a variety of topics fundamental for music perception, including musical syntax, musical semantics, music and action, music and emotion Includes general introductory chapters to engage a broad readership, as well as a wealth of detailed research material for experts Offers the most empirical (and most systematic) work on the topics of neural correlates of musical syntax and musical semantics Integrates research from different domains (such as music, language, action and emotion both theoretically and empirically, to create a comprehensive theory of music psychology

Download or read book Language Development across Childhood and Adolescence written by Ruth Berman and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together work by scholars with backgrounds in linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, education, and language pathology. As such, the book adds psycholinguistic and crosslinguistic perspectives to the clinical and classroom approaches that have dominated the study of “later language development”. Incorporating insights from prior language acquisition research, it goes beyond preschool age to consider both isolated utterances and extended discourse, conversational interactions and monologic text construction, and both written and spoken language use from early school-age across adolescence. Data from French, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swedish as well as English cover varied domains: morphology and lexicon, syntax and verb–argument structure, as well as peer interaction, spelling, processing of on-line writing, and reading poetry. The epilogue suggests explanations for the findings documented. Across the book, the authors show how cognitive and social maturation combines with increased literacy in the path taken by schoolchildren and adolescents towards the flexible deployment of a growing repertoire of lexical elements in varied morpho-syntactic constructions and different discourse contexts that constitutes the hallmark of maturely proficient language use.

Download or read book Exploring the Nature of Neural Correlates of Language Attention and Memory written by Daniele Ortu and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing data from different subfields of research may help in understanding emerging patterns and refining interpretations. This is especially true in neuroscience because brain functions can be studied at multiple levels of analysis, spatially and temporally, and with a variety of complementary measurement techniques. Within the ERP domain, several subfields of research have evolved over time, typically reflecting the specific time-window of interest and brain function investigated. The current investigation focused on three widely studied ERP effects reflecting a variety of key brain functions: the N400 effect, the P3b effect and the Left Parietal effect. The N400 effect has attracted researchers interested in language processing, the P3b effect researchers interested in attentional processes and the Left Parietal effect researchers focused on episodic recollection. Even though the ERP technology constitutes a common thread across these subfields, there is often a lack of communication across groups of researchers. The literatures on the N400 effect, P3b effect and Left Parietal effect have been written by relatively non-overlapping groups of researchers, and as such the kind of analysis carried out in the current thesis is not a common one, as it compares effects investigated within different subfields. Specifically, the approach taken in the current thesis involves assessment of the comparative reliability of the three effects of interest, and at the same time allowing refining their validity. Results showed that all three effects were found to be reliable at the group level and the N400 effect and the P3b effect were also found to be reliable at the single participant level. A correlational analysis involving all three effects yielded a significant correlation between the P3b and the Left Parietal effect but not between the P3b and the N400, or between the Left Parietal effect and the N400. Following up on the significant correlation, suggesting a convergence between the P3b effect and the Left Parietal effect, a probability manipulation of the Left Parietal effect was carried out to investigate if the old/new effect is sensitive to probability changes similarly to the P3b. The size of the Left Parietal effect was found to be sensitive to the relative probability of old and new items, in a manner consistent with the P3b effect‟s sensitivity to probability manipulations. The results pointing to a relationship between the P3b effect and the Left Parietal effect suggest that attentional processes sensitive to probability may temporally overlap and confound memory processes as indexed by the Left Parietal effect. The N400 effect, in the initial correlational study, was found to be independent from attentional processes as reflected by the P3b, and from episodic recollection as indexed by the Left Parietal effect. The validity of the N400 effect as a measure of semantic processing was then assessed by manipulating associative relationships while keeping constant semantic relationships, with results showing that the effect can be clearly modulated by associative changes when semantic relatedness is kept constant. The same association norms were then used in an old/new recognition experiment to assess if the Bilateral-Frontal old/new effect behaves in reaction to association relationships similarly or differently from the N400, in the attempt of assessing if the N400 is only a measure of associative relationships or also a measure of the process of familiarity. The observed pattern suggests independence between the N400 and the Bilateral Frontal effect. Overall, the N400 effect was found to be independent from memory processes occurring in the same time window, but, contrary to the dominant interpretation of the effect, the effect was modulated by changes in association strength while keeping semantic relatedness constant, suggesting that the N400 effect may be sensitive to a contiguity-based associative learning process not constrained to the linguistic domain.