Alina Leminen

• PhD, Docent (Adjunct Professor)
• Head of research at Laurea University of Applied Sciences

This article examines the concept of flow in foreign language learning, considers its relationship with intrinsic motivation and focusing on its applicability in the Multisensory Approaches to Language Learning (MALL/MAKU) project. Flow, characterized by intense concentration and reduced self-awareness, is considered as a means to create rewarding...

In this article we explore the practical facilitation of flow in foreign language learning, building upon theoretical concepts and previous research. We highlight the role of practitioners, emphasizing that teachers are facilitators shaping language learning experiences. We discuss the relationship between flow, enjoyment, and task-challenge alignm...

The shortage of workforce in several sectors has created a desperate need for immigrant workers in Nordic countries. However, integrating into the local work-life can be challenging for people moving to the region. To address these challenges, this paper explores the use of codesign as an approach to easing immigrant integration into the labour mar...

Capacity to quickly acquire new words and learn language makes us who we are—communicating human beings. With modern brain research methodologies, we can now uncover the neural mechanisms underlying this unique word learning skill. In this chapter, we specifically focus on electrophysiology of word learning, with a particular emphasis on the time c...

Planning and conduction of electrophysiological experiments involves considering numerous factors, such as meticulous matching linguistic stimuli by their psycholinguistic features, finding optimal data recording settings, and choosing data-analysis criteria. All these factors may considerably alter the results of your experiment. This chapter is i...

Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli selvittää, millaiselta Maahanmuuttoviraston (Migrin) teologiset käsitykset vaikuttavat kristityksi kääntyneiden turvapaikkapäätöksissä ja erityisesti sitä, miten Migrin tekemät tulkinnat vaikuttavat päätöksiin. Tutkimuksen aineistona oli 48 turvapaikkapäätöstä, joista 20 negatiivista päätöstä oli analyysin keskiössä po...

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However,...

Morphemes are defined as the smallest meaningful units of a language that can be used to form new words (derivation, e.g., suffix -ness in darkness) or convey grammatical information (inflection, e.g., plural affix -s in houses). Acquiring novel morphology thus represents an essential but also a challenging aspect of language learning. Emerging neu...

Morphemes are defined as the smallest meaningful units of a language, which can be used to form new words or convey grammatical information. Learning the meaning of morphemes and recognizing morphemic boundaries is thus an essential part of language learning, however, neural mechanisms underlying the acquisition of morphemes remain largely unexplor...

In this report we present Russian norms for 500 general knowledge questions in True-False format. The questions cover the topics of Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Culture and Sports. For each of the questions we report accuracy and confidence.

Memory monitoring processes are online assessments of the quality of our retrieval. Despite their importance for cognition, few studies on episodic memory and perceptual discrimination studied their neural dynamics and reported diverse results. Also, research showed increased theta in correct lexical identifications, but its monitoring was not inve...

Confidence in our retrieved memories, that is, retrospective confidence, is a meta-memory process we perform daily. There is an abundance of applied research focus-ing on the metamemory judgments and very diverse studies including a wide range of clinical populations. However, the neural correlates that support its functioning are not well defined...

Despite extensive behavioral research on complex word recognition, the neural mechanisms involved in the production of inflections in agglutinative languages, such as Finnish, are still poorly understood. Finnish inflected nouns typically involve morphophonological alternations of the stem (i.e. consonant gradation; CG), which is less common in oth...

The confidence in our retrieved memories, i.e. retrospective confidence, is a metamemory process we perform daily. There is a wide variety of applied research focused on this metamemory judgements and a very diverse studies including a wide a range of clinical populations. Yet, the neural correlates that support its functioning are not well defined...

Recent studies utilizing electrophysiological speech envelope reconstruction have sparked renewed interest in the cocktail party effect by showing that auditory neurons entrain to selectively attended speech. Yet, the neural networks of attention to speech in naturalistic audiovisual settings with multiple sound sources remain poorly understood. We...

In real-life noisy situations, we can selectively attend to conversations in the presence of irrelevant voices, but neurocognitive mechanisms in such natural listening situations remain largely unexplored. Previous research has shown distributed activity in the mid superior temporal gyrus (STG) and sulcus (STS) while listening to speech and human v...

Formation of neural mechanisms for morphosyntactic processing in young children is still poorly understood. Here, we addressed neural processing and rapid online acquisition of familiar and unfamiliar combinations of morphemes. Three different types of morphologically complex words - derived, inflected, and novel (pseudostem + real suffix) - were p...

In real-life noisy situations, we can selectively attend to conversations in the presence of irrelevant voices, but neurocognitive mechanisms in such natural listening situations remaiin largely unexplored. Previous research has shown distributed activity in the mid superior temporal gyrus (STG) and sulcus (STS) while listening to speech and human...

L2 proficiency modulates the way morphologically complex words are produced, i.e., higher proficiency equals more native-like behavioral and neural responses. Contra to past research, beginners seem to utilize brain areas associated with both declarative and procedural memory instead of just declarative. Our data are also in line with recent resear...

There is considerable behavioral evidence that morphologically complex words such as ‘tax-able’ and ‘kiss-es’ are processed and represented combinatorially. In other words, they are decomposed into their constituents ‘tax’ and ‘-able’ during comprehension (reading or listening), and producing them might also involve onetheespot combination of these...

Learning to recognize morphemic boundaries is crucial for fluent language use. The question of morphological learning is especially relevant in languages with a rich morphology, such as Finnish. Neurocognitive studies propose separate systems for decomposition and storage, which are flexibly used during the processing of polymorphemic inflections a...

Learning a new language requires the acquisition of morphological units that enable the fluent use of words in different grammatical contexts. While accumulating research has elucidated the neural processing of native morphology, much less is known about how second-language (L2) learners acquire and process morphology in their L2. To address this q...

Abstract To master linguistic communication, humans must acquire large vocabularies quickly and effortlessly. Efficient word learning might be facilitated by the ability to rapidly acquire novel word forms even outside the focus of attention, occurring within minutes of repetitive exposure and suggesting fast and automatic lexicon acquisition. Howe...

A semi-overt production task during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was carried out to elucidate the neural correlates of online inflectional production in Finnish. Participants' task was to perform an acceptability judgment of visually presented complex words, as well as overtly produce an inflected version of a visually...

While previous studies on language processing highlighted several ERP components in relation to specific stages of sound and speech processing, no study has yet combined them to obtain a comprehensive picture of language abilities in a single session. Here, we propose a novel task‐free paradigm aimed at assessing multiple levels of speech processin...

Bilingualism is a sustained experience associated with structural changes in cortical grey matter (GM) morphology. Apart from a few studies, a dominant method used to assess bilingualism-induced GM changes has been the voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis. While VBM is sensitive to GM volume/density differences in general, it cannot be used to id...

The aim of this review is to provide a selective overview of priming studies which have employed the event-related brain potential (ERP) technique in order to investigate bilingual language processing. The priming technique can reveal an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences the processing of another stimulus. Behavior...

Despite numerous functional neuroimaging and intraoperative electrical cortical mapping studies aimed at investigating the cortical organisation of native (L1) and second (L2) language processing, the neural underpinnings of bilingualism remain elusive. We investigated whether the neural network engaged in speech production over the bilateral poste...

How does the brain process and control languages that are learned at a different age, when proficiency in all these languages is high? Early acquired strong languages are likely to have higher baseline activation levels than later learned less-dominant languages. However, it is still largely unknown how the activation levels of these different lang...

Language switching has been repeatedly found to be costly. Yet, there are reasons to believe that switches in language might benefit language comprehension in some groups of people, such as less proficient language learners. This study therefore investigated the interplay between language switching and semantic processing in groups with varying lan...

Children learn new words and word forms with ease, often acquiring a new word after very few repetitions. Recent neurophysiological research on word form acquisition in adults indicates that novel words can be acquired within minutes of repetitive exposure to them, regardless of the individual's focused attention on the speech input. Although it is...

Learning and speaking a second language (L2) may result in profound changes in the human brain. Here, we investigated local structural differences along two language-related white matter trajectories, the arcuate fasciculus and the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), between early simultaneous bilinguals and late sequential bilinguals. We...

Research into neurobiological mechanisms of morphosyntactic processing of language has suggested specialised systems for decomposition and storage, which are used flexibly during the processing of complex polymorphemic words (such as those formed through affixation, e.g., boy+s = noun + plural marker or boy+ish = noun plus attenuator). However, neu...

How is morphological and morphosyntactic information processed during sentence reading? Are the neural mechanisms underlying word- and phrase-level combinatorial processing overlapping or distinct? Here, electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses were recorded simultaneously during silent reading of Finnish sentences. T...

Abstract Children's obligatory auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to speech and nonspeech sounds have been shown to associate with reading performance in children at risk or with dyslexia and their controls. However, very little is known of the cognitive processes these responses reflect. To investigate this question, we recorded ERPs to sem...

How do late proficient bilinguals process morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in their non-native language (L2)? How is this information represented in the L2 mental lexicon? And what are the neural signatures of L2 morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic processing? We addressed these questions in one behavioral and two ERP priming exper...

In most languages, sentences can be broken down into words, which themselves can be further decomposed into units that contain meaning of their own, so-called morphemes (e.g., “play” or plural form “-s”). Morphemes are the main building blocks and tools, which we use to create and change words. The representation of morphologically complex words (i...

Children’s obligatory auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to speech and nonspeech sounds have been shown to associate with reading performance in children at risk or with dyslexia and their controls. However, very little is known of the cognitive processes these responses reflect. To investigate this question, we recorded ERPs to semisynthetic...

A unique feature of human communication system is our ability to rapidly acquire new words and build large vocabularies. However, its neurobiological foundations remain largely unknown. In an electrophysiological study optimally designed to probe this rapid formation of new word memory circuits, we employed acoustically controlled novel word-forms...

Speech production, both overt and covert, down-regulates the activation of auditory cortex. This is thought to be due to forward prediction of the sensory consequences of speech, contributing to a feedback control mechanism for speech production. Critically, however, these regulatory effects should be specific to speech content to enable accurate s...

We investigated neural distinctions between inflectional and derivational morphology and their interaction with lexical frequency using the mismatch negativity (MMN), an established neurophysiological index of experience-dependent linguistic memory traces and automatic syntactic processing. We presented our electroencephalography (EEG) study partic...

This study determined to what extent morphological processing of spoken inflected and derived words is attention-independent. To answer these questions EEG and MEG responses were recorded from healthy participants while they were presented with spoken Finnish inflected, derived, and monomorphemic words. In the non-attended task, the participants we...

The spatiotemporal dynamics of the neural processing of spoken morphologically complex words are still an open issue. In the current study, we investigated the time course and neural sources of spoken inflected and derived words using simultaneously recorded electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses. Ten participants (...

Event-related potentials were recorded to examine the time course of the neural processing of spoken (i) existing derived words, (ii) morphologically legal, and (iii) illegal pseudowords in the Finnish language. The stimuli were matched by (complex) uniqueness/deviation points and event-related potentials were time-locked to stimulus onset and suff...

The aim of the study was to investigate how the input modality affects the processing of a morphologically complex word. The processing of Finnish inflected vs. monomorphemic words and pseudowords was examined during a lexical decision task, using behavioral responses and event-related potentials. The stimuli were presented in two modalities, visua...

  In many languages, case is distributed among many grammatical elements inside of argument DPs. This article shows that case distribution in Finnish is sensitive to certain nontrivial structural properties of those DPs. This makes it possible to use case distribution as a tool to investigate the internal structure of a variety of DPs, including no...

Event-related potentials (ERP) were used to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of inflectional and derivational morphology. The participants were presented with visual sentences containing critical words in which either inflectional, derivational or both rules (combined violation) of Finnish were violated. Inflectional anomalies violat...

Event-related desynchronization (ERD) and event-related synchronization (ERS) of the 1-30 EEG frequencies were studied in eight early Finnish-Swedish bilinguals during an auditory bilingual Sternberg memory task using Finnish-Swedish cognates as stimuli. Only subtle differences between languages were expected, since cognates have been assumed to ha...

The aim of the current study was to assess modality-specific brain oscillatory responses during cognitive processing. Brain oscillatory ERD/ERS responses of the 4- to 30-Hz EEG frequency bands were examined during lexical decision where the task is to identify whether the presented stimulus is a word or a pseudoword. Seven subjects performed the ta...

In some languages, such as Turkish, Hungarian or Finnish, word formation can be said to be characteristically creative. In these languages, it is quite normal to create novel words by merging several suffixes after the stem. This process may be iterative, allowing recursive stacking of morphemes to the stem. Although it is well-known that in some l...