Is there a common oscillatory brain mechanism for producing and predicting language?

Molinaro, Nicola; Monsalve, Irene Fernández

doi:10.1080/23273798.2015.1077978

Cited by 41 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…The topographical distribution of this effect is consistent with an increased N200, considered as reflecting orthographic processing in the visual domain (Holcomb & Grainger, 2006) and classically interpreted as a mismatch detector (see discussion about lexical prediction effects in Brother et al, 2015; see also Federmeier et al, 2005;Kim & Lai, 2012). The oscillatory evidence (involving the low beta-band channel, as in Bastos et al, 2015;Michalareas et al, 2016; see also Molinaro et al, 2016) for this transparent condition further supports our observation of a a prediction effect involving visual word form representations. In our view, the increased beta power for the unexpected determiner likely reflects an on-line update of the predicted representation: since the determiner is not genderconsistent with the predicted noun, the system inhibits such initial prediction and activates other possible (less predicted) lexical candidates.…”

Section: Early Prediction Effect For Basque Nativessupporting

confidence: 88%

“…They reported that the beta band activity was associated with feedback influences from higher processing regions to primary visual regions during pre-stimulus visual processing. Similar proposals have been advanced even in the sentence comprehension domain (Lewis & Bastiaansen, 2015;Molinaro et al, 2016). Consequently, we considered it relevant to estimate the beta band components time-locked to the target (unexpected vs. expected) determiner to quantify the strength of the prediction in our experimental design across groups.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hierarchical levels of representation in language prediction: The influence of first language acquisition in highly proficient bilinguals

et al. 2017

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Language comprehension is largely supported by predictive mechanisms that account for the ease and speed with which communication unfolds. Both native and proficient non-native speakers can efficiently handle contextual cues to generate reliable linguistic expectations. However, the link between the variability of the linguistic background of the speaker and the hierarchical format of the representations predicted is still not clear. We here investigate whether native language exposure to typologically highly diverse languages (Spanish and Basque) affects the way early balanced bilingual speakers carry out language predictions. During Spanish sentence comprehension, participants developed predictions of words the form of which (noun ending) could be either diagnostic of grammatical gender values (transparent) or totally ambiguous (opaque). We measured electrophysiological prediction effects time-locked both to the target word and to its determiner, with the former being expected or unexpected. Event-related (N200-N400) and oscillatory activity in the low beta-band (15-17Hz) frequency channel showed that both Spanish and Basque natives optimally carry out lexical predictions independently of word transparency. Crucially, in contrast to Spanish natives, Basque natives displayed visual word form predictions for transparent words, in consistency with the relevance that noun endings (post-nominal suffixes) play in their native language. We conclude that early language exposure largely shapes prediction mechanisms, so that bilinguals reading in their second language rely on the distributional regularities that are highly relevant in their first language. More importantly, we show that individual linguistic experience hierarchically modulates the format of the predicted representation.

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Section: Early Prediction Effect For Basque Nativessupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Hierarchical levels of representation in language prediction: The influence of first language acquisition in highly proficient bilinguals

et al. 2017

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“…In contrast, after picture presentation, the processing hierarchy could be rather different. In a language task, upon seeing a picture, the cognitive system directly activates a conceptual representation that can be mapped onto a lexical representation (after 200 ms poststimulus, affecting the P200 component; Strijkers & Costa, 2011)-similar to what happens in picture naming studies (see Dell & Chang, 2014;Molinaro, Monsalve, & Lizarazu, 2016;Pickering & Garrod, 2013). If we follow the parallel with the word production literature, the lexical representation (often defined as lemma) could be potentially mapped onto a sublexical one, that is, a sequence of speech sounds (after around 300 ms; Indefrey & Levelt, 2004;Strijkers & Costa, 2016).…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 92%

Reanalyzing language expectations: Native language knowledge modulates the sensitivity to intervening cues during anticipatory processing

Giannelli

Molinaro

2018

Psychophysiology

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We investigated how native language experience shapes anticipatory language processing. Two groups of bilinguals (either Spanish or Basque natives) performed a word matching task (WordMT) and a picture matching task (PictureMT). They indicated whether the stimuli they visually perceived matched with the noun they heard. Spanish noun endings were either diagnostic of the gender (transparent) or ambiguous (opaque). ERPs were time-locked to an intervening gender-marked determiner preceding the predicted noun. The determiner always gender agreed with the following noun but could also introduce a mismatching noun, so that it was not fully task diagnostic. Evoked brain activity time-locked to the determiner was considered as reflecting updating/reanalysis of the task-relevant preactivated representation. We focused on the timing of this effect by estimating the comparison between a gender-congruent and a gender-incongruent determiner. In the WordMT, both groups showed a late N400 effect. Crucially, only Basque natives displayed an earlier P200 effect for determiners preceding transparent nouns. In the PictureMT, both groups showed an early P200 effect for determiners preceding opaque nouns. The determiners of transparent nouns triggered a negative effect at ∼430 ms in Spanish natives, but at ∼550 ms in Basque natives. This pattern of results supports a "retracing hypothesis" according to which the neurocognitive system navigates through the intermediate (sublexical and lexical) linguistic representations available from previous processing to evaluate the need of an update in the linguistic expectation concerning a target lexical item.

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“…Top‐down predictions would thus result from the inner pre‐play of speech (cf. Perrone‐Bertolotti et al ., )—that is, the listener would anticipate the speaker's upcoming words based on their own speech production experiences or habits (Molinaro et al ., ). In line with this view, a body of studies has observed beta‐band power during language production to be modulated by the degree of lexical‐semantic association between the prior word sequences and to‐be‐produced words (Findlay et al ., ; Piai et al ., , ).…”

Section: The Delta Band: Chunking Of Words Into Syntactic Phrasesmentioning

confidence: 97%

The neural oscillations of speech processing and language comprehension: state of the art and emerging mechanisms

Meyer

2017

Eur J of Neuroscience

286

267

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Neural oscillations subserve a broad range of functions in speech processing and language comprehension. On the one hand, speech contains-somewhat-repetitive trains of air pressure bursts that occur at three dominant amplitude modulation frequencies, physically marking the linguistically meaningful progressions of phonemes, syllables and intonational phrase boundaries. To these acoustic events, neural oscillations of isomorphous operating frequencies are thought to synchronise, presumably resulting in an implicit temporal alignment of periods of neural excitability to linguistically meaningful spectral information on the three low-level linguistic description levels. On the other hand, speech is a carrier signal that codes for high-level linguistic meaning, such as syntactic structure and semantic information-which cannot be read from stimulus acoustics, but must be acquired during language acquisition and decoded for language comprehension. Neural oscillations subserve the processing of both syntactic structure and semantic information. Here, I synthesise a mapping from each linguistic processing domain to a unique set of subserving oscillatory mechanisms-the mapping is plausible given the role ascribed to different oscillatory mechanisms in different subfunctions of cortical information processing and faithful to the underlying electrophysiology. In sum, the present article provides an accessible and extensive review of the functional mechanisms that neural oscillations subserve in speech processing and language comprehension.

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Is there a common oscillatory brain mechanism for producing and predicting language?

Cited by 41 publications

References 66 publications

Hierarchical levels of representation in language prediction: The influence of first language acquisition in highly proficient bilinguals

Hierarchical levels of representation in language prediction: The influence of first language acquisition in highly proficient bilinguals

Reanalyzing language expectations: Native language knowledge modulates the sensitivity to intervening cues during anticipatory processing

The neural oscillations of speech processing and language comprehension: state of the art and emerging mechanisms

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