Search results for "verbal"
showing 10 items of 557 documents
Structural hemispheric asymmetries underlie verbal Stroop performance
2017
Performance on tasks involving cognitive control such as the Stroop task is often associated with left lateralized brain activations. Based on this neuro-functional evidence, we tested whether leftward structural grey matter asymmetries would also predict inter-individual differences in combatting Stroop interference. To check for the specificity of the results, both a verbal Stroop task and a spatial one were administered to a total of 111 healthy young individuals, for whom T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images were also acquired. Surface thickness and area estimations were calculated using FreeSurfer. Participants' hemispheres were registered to a symmetric template and Lat…
The role of animacy in the real time comprehension of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from auditory event-related brain potentials.
2007
Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which modulated the assignment of actor and undergoer roles to the arguments), both arguments were either animate or inanimate. This allowed us to examine the interplay of animacy with thematic interpretation. In Experiment 1, we observed no effect of animacy at NP1, but N400 effects for inanimate actor arguments in second position. This result mirrors previous findings in German, thus suggesting that an initial undergoer univer…
Information structure in language acquisition. Production and comprehension of (in)definite articles by German-speaking children.
2020
AbstractThe present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults. The results of a story-narration task and a truth-value judgment task reveal that children have more problems with new than with given referents in production as well as comprehension suggesting a “given better than new”-pattern. These findings are explained in the context of perspective-taking capacities and cue weighting theory.
Spatial Inferences in Narrative Comprehension: the Role of Verbal and Spatial Working Memory
2016
During the comprehension of narrative texts, readers keep a mental representation of the location of protagonists and objects; a breach in spatial coherence is detected by longer online reading times (consistency effect). We addressed whether these spatial inferences involve verbal or spatial working memory in two experiments, combining the consistency paradigm with selective verbal and spatial working memory concurrent tasks. The first experiment found longer reading times with a concurrent spatial task under imagery instructions (t33 = 2.87, p =.021). The second experiment, under comprehension reading instructions, found effects of verbal interference on reading times and accuracy. With a…
Acoustical analysis of Spanish vowels produced by laryngectomized subjects.
2001
The purpose of this study was to describe the acoustic characteristics of Spanish vowels in subjects who had undergone a total laryngectomy and to compare the results with those obtained in a control group of subjects who spoke normally. Our results are discussed in relation to those obtained in previous studies with English-speaking laryngectomized patients. The comparison between English and Spanish, which differ widely in the size of their vowel inventories, will help us to determine specific or universal vowel production characteristics in these patients. Our second objective was to relate the acoustic properties of these vowels to the perceptual data obtained in our previous work (J. L…
Reversibility in Chinese word formation influences target identification.
2011
We recorded event-related brain potentials during the processing of visually presented compound words in Mandarin Chinese. We capitalized on a particular characteristic of Chinese word formation, where two constituents can be combined in two different orders (A+B or B+A), yielding distinct meanings-so-called "reversible words". By investigating the impact of structural reversibility on the processing of compounds in Chinese during a lexical decision task, the present study revealed a pronounced difference between reversible and non-reversible words. Analyses revealed a more enhanced negativity (N400) for reversible words, reflecting demands during semantic processing, followed by a P300-lik…
Age of onset of Cannabis use and cognitive function in first-episode non-affective psychosis patients: Outcome at three-year follow-up
2018
In recent years, the effects of cannabis use on cognitive functions in patients with psychosis have been widely studied. Recently, special emphasis has been placed on the impact of age at the onset of consumption on cognition in these patients.349 patients with a first episode of non-affective psychosis were studied. Patients were classified as cannabis users and non-users. Users were divided, according to their age when they began using cannabis, into: early-onset (age 16) and late-onset (age ≥ 16) users. Differences between groups at baseline were studied based on sociodemographic, clinical, and cognitive variables. The groups were longitudinally (3-year) compared on cognitive variables.…
The formation of structurally relevant units in artificial grammar learning
2002
A total of 78 adult participants were asked to read a sample of strings generated by a finite state grammar and, immediately after reading each string, to mark the natural segmentation positions with a slash bar. They repeated the same task after a phase of familiarization with the material, which consisted, depending on the group involved, of learning items by rote, performing a short term matching task, or searching for the rules of the grammar. Participants formed the same number of cognitive units before and after the training phase, thus indicating that they did not tend to form increasingly large units. However, the number of different units reliably decreased, whatever the task that…
Visuospatial learning is fostered in migraine: evidence by a neuropsychological study
2018
Cognitive profile in migraine patients still remains undefined. Contradictory evidence has been provided, with impairments in different cognitive domains, normal cognition, or even better performance compared to healthy controls (HC). The latter is of particular interest considering the evidence of glutamatergic upregulation in migraine, particularly in the visual cortex, and the role of the glutamatergic system in synaptic plasticity and learning. The aim of our study is to compare cognitive performance for visuospatial memory and learning (supraspan modality) between migraineurs without aura (MwoA) and HC. Twenty-one subjects suffering from MwoA and 21 HC were enrolled. Migraineurs during…
Cognitive processess and cognitive reserve in multiple sclerosis
2015
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is characterized by motor, cognitive, and neuropsychiatric symptoms, which can occur independently. While MS is traditionally considered an inflammatory disease of the white matter, degeneration of gray matter is increasingly recognized as an important contributor to the progressive cognitive decline. A protective factor against the progression of cognitive dysfunction in MS could be the cognitive reserve, defined as resistance to brain dysfunction. Aim of the present study is to evaluate the role of cognitive reserve for different aspects of cognitive dysfunction of patients with MS. We found that patients with MS and lower cognitive reserve have poorer neuropsychol…