About
26
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Introduction
Dr. Ashley Lewis' research focuses primarily on psycholinguistics/the cognitive neuroscience of language, and more specifically on what can be learned about language processing using electrophysiological methods like electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). He has a particular interest in sentence comprehension and syntax, the role of cognitive control and working memory in these processes, and studying many of these issues from a cross-linguistic perspective.
Current institution
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July 2018 - June 2022
July 2022 - present
December 2015 - June 2018
Publications
Publications (26)
There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is structured, through the use of focus, can up-regulate processing of focused constituents, likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is hypothesized to be universal, regardless of the different ways in which languages encode focus. In order...
Sentence comprehension is highly practiced and largely automatic, but this belies the complexity of the underlying processes. We used functional neuroimaging to investigate garden-path sentences that cause difficulty during comprehension, in order to unpack the different processes used to support sentence interpretation. By investigating garden-pat...
Sentence comprehension is highly practiced and largely automatic, but this belies the complexity of the underlying processes. We used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to investigate garden-path sentences that cause difficulty during comprehension, in order to unpack the different processes used to support sentence interpretation. By investigating gar...
Neural oscillations are thought to support speech and language processing. They may not only inherit acoustic rhythms, but might also impose endogenous rhythms onto processing. In support of this, we here report that human (both, male and female) eye movements during naturalistic reading exhibit rhythmic patterns that show frequency-selective coher...
There remains some debate about whether beta power effects observed during sentence comprehension reflect ongoing syntactic unification operations (beta‐syntax hypothesis), or instead reflect maintenance or updating of the sentence‐level representation (beta‐maintenance hypothesis). In this study, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate beta...
Brain oscillations are prevalent in all species and are involved in numerous perceptual operations. Alpha oscillations are thought to facilitate processing through the inhibition of task-irrelevant networks, while beta oscillations are linked to the putative reactivation of content representations. Can the proposed functional role of alpha and beta...
In sentence comprehension, the parser in many languages has the option to use both the morphological form of a noun and its lexical representation when evaluating agreement. The additional step of consulting the lexicon incurs processing costs, and an important question is whether the parser takes that step even when the formal cues alone are suffi...
Brain oscillations are prevalent in all species and are involved in numerous perceptual operations. Alpha oscillations are thought to facilitate processing through the inhibition of task-irrelevant networks, while beta oscillations are linked to the reactivation of content representations. Can the proposed functional role of alpha and beta oscillat...
The possibility to combine smaller units of meaning (e.g., words) to create new and more complex meanings (e.g., phrases and sentences) is a fundamental feature of human language. In the present project, we investigated how the brain supports the semantic and syntactic composition of two-word adjective-noun phrases in Dutch, using magnetoencephalog...
The possibility to combine smaller units of meaning (e.g., words) to create new and more complex meanings (e.g., phrases and sentences) is a fundamental feature of human language. In the present project, we investigated semantic and syntactic composition of two-word adjective-noun phrases by the brain in Dutch, using magnetoencephalography (MEG). T...
There is a range of variability in the speed with which a single speaker will produce the same word from one instance to another. Individual differences studies have shown that the speed of production and the ability to maintain attention are related. This study investigated whether fluctuations in production latencies can be explained by spontaneo...
The field of psycholinguistics is currently experiencing an explosion of interest in the analysis of neural oscillations—rhythmic brain activity synchronized at different temporal and spatial levels. Given that language comprehension relies on a myriad of processes, which are carried out in parallel in distributed brain networks, there is hope that...
Reinstatement of memory-related neural activity measured with high temporal precision potentially provides a useful index for real-time monitoring of the timing of activation of memory content during cognitive processing. The utility of such an index extends to any situation where one is interested in the (relative) timing of activation of differen...
File Download: http://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/168943
In this study, we used electroencephalography to investigate the influence of discourse-level semantic coherence on electrophysiological signatures of local sentence-level processing. Participants read groups of four sentences that could either form coherent stories or were semantically unrelated. For semantically coherent discourses compared to in...
For native speakers, many studies suggest a link between oscillatory neural activity in the beta frequency range and syntactic processing. For late second language (L2) learners on the other hand, the extent to which the neural architecture supporting syntactic processing is similar to or different from that of native speakers is still unclear. In...
Oscillatory neural dynamics have been steadily receiving more attention as a robust and temporally precise signature of network activity related to language processing. We have recently proposed that oscillatory dynamics in the beta and gamma frequency ranges measured during sentence-level comprehension might be best explained from a predictive cod...
There is a growing literature investigating the relationship between oscillatory neural dynamics measured using electroencephalography (EEG) and/or magnetoencephalography (MEG), and sentence-level language comprehension. Recent proposals have suggested a strong link between predictive coding accounts of the hierarchical flow of information in the b...
