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Peter Indefrey
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2024) 36 (1): 24–45.
Published: 01 January 2024
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When preparing to name an object, semantic knowledge about the object and its attributes is activated, including perceptual properties. It is unclear, however, whether semantic attribute activation contributes to lexical access or is a consequence of activating a concept irrespective of whether that concept is to be named or not. In this study, we measured neural responses using fMRI while participants named objects that are typically green or red, presented in black line drawings. Furthermore, participants underwent two other tasks with the same objects, color naming and semantic judgment, to see if the activation pattern we observe during picture naming is (a) similar to that of a task that requires accessing the color attribute and (b) distinct from that of a task that requires accessing the concept but not its name or color. We used representational similarity analysis to detect brain areas that show similar patterns within the same color category, but show different patterns across the two color categories. In all three tasks, activation in the bilateral fusiform gyri (“Human V4”) correlated with a representational model encoding the red–green distinction weighted by the importance of color feature for the different objects. This result suggests that when seeing objects whose color attribute is highly diagnostic, color knowledge about the objects is retrieved irrespective of whether the color or the object itself have to be named.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2014) 26 (7): 1428–1444.
Published: 01 July 2014
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Learning the syntax of a second language (L2) often represents a big challenge to L2 learners. Previous research on syntactic processing in L2 has mainly focused on how L2 speakers respond to “objective” syntactic violations, that is, phrases that are incorrect by native standards. In this study, we investigate how L2 learners, in particular those of less than near-native proficiency, process phrases that deviate from their own, “subjective,” and often incorrect syntactic representations, that is, whether they use these subjective and idiosyncratic representations during sentence comprehension. We study this within the domain of grammatical gender in a population of German learners of Dutch, for which systematic errors of grammatical gender are well documented. These L2 learners as well as a control group of Dutch native speakers read Dutch sentences containing gender-marked determiner–noun phrases in which gender agreement was either (objectively) correct or incorrect. Furthermore, the noun targets were selected such that, in a high proportion of nouns, objective and subjective correctness would differ for German learners. The ERP results show a syntactic violation effect (P600) for objective gender agreement violations for native, but not for nonnative speakers. However, when the items were re-sorted for the L2 speakers according to subjective correctness (as assessed offline), the P600 effect emerged as well. Thus, rather than being insensitive to violations of gender agreement, L2 speakers are similarly sensitive as native speakers but base their sensitivity on their subjective—sometimes incorrect—representations.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2010) 22 (6): 1165–1178.
Published: 01 June 2010
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Electrophysiological studies consistently find N400 effects of semantic incongruity in nonnative (L2) language comprehension. These N400 effects are often delayed compared with native (L1) comprehension, suggesting that semantic integration in one's second language occurs later than in one's first language. In this study, we investigated whether such a delay could be attributed to (1) intralingual lexical competition and/or (2) interlingual lexical competition. We recorded EEG from Dutch–English bilinguals who listened to English (L2) sentences in which the sentence-final word was (a) semantically fitting and (b) semantically incongruent or semantically incongruent but initially congruent due to sharing initial phonemes with (c) the most probable sentence completion within the L2 or (d) the L1 translation equivalent of the most probable sentence completion. We found an N400 effect in each of the semantically incongruent conditions. This N400 effect was significantly delayed to L2 words but not to L1 translation equivalents that were initially congruent with the sentence context. Taken together, these findings firstly demonstrate that semantic integration in nonnative listening can start based on word initial phonemes (i.e., before a single lexical candidate could have been selected based on the input) and secondly suggest that spuriously elicited L1 lexical candidates are not available for semantic integration in L2 speech comprehension.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2010) 22 (6): 1270–1282.
Published: 01 June 2010
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The human brain contains cortical areas specialized in representing object categories. Visual experience is known to change the responses in these category-selective areas of the brain. However, little is known about how category training specifically affects cortical category selectivity. Here, we investigated the experience-dependent formation of object categories using an fMRI adaptation paradigm. Outside the scanner, subjects were trained to categorize artificial bird types into arbitrary categories (jungle birds and desert birds). After training, neuronal populations in the occipito-temporal cortex, such as the fusiform and the lateral occipital gyrus, were highly sensitive to perceptual stimulus differences. This sensitivity was not present for novel birds, indicating experience-related changes in neuronal representations. Neurons in STS showed category selectivity. A release from adaptation in STS was only observed when two birds in a pair crossed the category boundary. This dissociation could not be explained by perceptual similarities because the physical difference between birds from the same side of the category boundary and between birds from opposite sides of the category boundary was equal. Together, the occipito-temporal cortex and the STS have the properties suitable for a system that can both generalize across stimuli and discriminate between them.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2009) 21 (3): 433–446.
Published: 01 March 2009
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Based on recent findings showing electrophysiological changes in adult language learners after relatively short periods of training, we hypothesized that adult Dutch learners of German would show responses to German gender and adjective declension violations after brief instruction. Adjective declension in German differs from previously studied morphosyntactic regularities in that the required suffixes depend not only on the syntactic case, gender, and number features to be expressed, but also on whether or not these features are already expressed on linearly preceding elements in the noun phrase. Violation phrases and matched controls were presented over three test phases (pretest and training on the first day, and a posttest one week later). During the pretest, no electrophysiological differences were observed between violation and control conditions, and participants' classification performance was near chance. During the training and posttest phases, classification improved, and there was a P600-like violation response to declension but not gender violations. An error-related response during training was associated with improvement in grammatical discrimination from pretest to posttest. The results show that rapid changes in neuronal responses can be observed in adult learners of a complex morphosyntactic rule, and also that error-related electrophysiological responses may relate to grammar acquisition.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2004) 16 (5): 727–741.
Published: 01 June 2004
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In order to separate the cognitive processes associated with phonological encoding and the use of a visual word form lexicon in reading, it is desirable to compare the processing of words presented in a visually familiar form with words in a visually unfamiliar form. Japanese Kana orthography offers this possibility. Two phonologically equivalent but visually dissimilar syllabaries allow the writing of, for example, foreign loanwords in two ways, only one of which is visually familiar. Familiarly written words, unfamiliarly written words, and pseudowords were presented in both Kana syllabaries (yielding six conditions in total) to participants during an fMRI measurement with a silent articulation task (Experiment 1) and a phonological lexical decision task (Experiment 2) using an event-related design. Consistent over two experimental tasks, the three different stimulus types (familiar, unfamiliar, and pseudoword) were found to activate selectively different brain regions previously associated with phonological encoding and word retrieval or meaning. Compatible with the predictions of the dual-route model for reading, pseudowords and visually unfamiliar words, which have to be read using phonological assembly, caused an increase in brain activity in left inferior frontal regions (BA 44/47), as compared to visually familiar words. Visually familiar and unfamiliar words were found to activate a range of areas associated with lexico-semantic processing more strongly than pseudowords, such as the left and right temporo-parietal region (BA 39/40), a region in the left middle/inferior temporal gyrus (BA 20/21), and the posterior cingulate (BA 31).
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (1999) 11 (4): 383–398.
Published: 01 July 1999
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Silent reading and reading aloud of German words and pseudowords were used in a PET study using ( 15 O) butanol to examine the neural correlates of reading and of the phonological conversion of legal letter strings, with or without meaning. The results of 11 healthy, right-handed volunteers in the age range of 25 to 30 years showed activation of the lingual gyri during silent reading in comparison with viewing a fixation cross. Comparisons between the reading of words and pseudo-words suggest the involvement of the middle temporal gyri in retrieving both the phonological and semantic code for words. The reading of pseudowords activates the left inferior frontal gyrus, including the ventral part of Broca's area, to a larger extent than the reading of words. This suggests that this area might be involved in the sublexical conversion of orthographic input strings into phonological output codes. (Pre)motor areas were found to be activated during both silent reading and reading aloud. On the basis of the obtained activation patterns, it is hypothesized that the articulation of high-frequency syllables requires the retrieval of their concomitant articulatory gestures from the SMA and that the articulation of low-frequency syllables recruits the left medial premotor cortex.