Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz

Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
  • M.D., Ph.D.
  • Research Director at French Institute of Health and Medical Research

About

246
Publications
65,862
Reads
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21,621
Citations
Current institution
French Institute of Health and Medical Research
Current position
  • Research Director
Additional affiliations
January 2012 - present
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
January 2011 - December 2012
Cyceron
January 2008 - present

Publications

Publications (246)
Article
Full-text available
At the physical level, the experience of pitch has a single determinant: the repetition rate of a waveform in the acoustic signal. Yet, psychologists describe pitch as composed of two perceptual dimensions, height and chroma. Chroma accounts for octave equivalence, whereby sounds with fundamental frequencies at a 1:2 ratio are perceived as sharing...
Preprint
Sensory inputs often display complex temporal interdependencies that typically conform to a latent underlying arrangement, whose learning facilitates the efficient interaction with the environment. However temporal dependencies may cover a large range of scales, from consecutive items (Saffran et al., 1996) , to relations in longer sequences (Dehae...
Article
Full-text available
Interest in statistical learning in developmental studies stems from the observation that 8-month-olds were able to extract words from a monotone speech stream solely using the transition probabilities (TP) between syllables (Saffran et al., 1996). A simple mechanism was thus part of the human infant’s toolbox for discovering regularities in langua...
Article
Full-text available
The emergence of symbolic thinking has been proposed as a dominant cognitive criterion to distinguish humans from other primates during hominisation. Although the proper definition of a symbol has been the subject of much debate, one of its simplest features is bidirectional attachment: the content is accessible from the symbol, and vice versa. Beh...
Preprint
Interest in statistical learning in developmental studies stems from the observation that 8-month-olds were able to extract words from a monotone speech stream solely using the transition probabilities (TP) between syllables (Saffran et al., 1996). A simple mechanism was thus part of the human infant’s toolbox for discovering regularities in langua...
Article
Full-text available
The need for attention to enable statistical learning is debated. Testing individuals with impaired consciousness offers valuable insight, but very few studies have been conducted due to the difficulties inherent in such studies. Here, we examined the ability of patients with varying levels of disorders of consciousness (DOC) to extract statistical...
Preprint
Interest in statistical learning in developmental studies stems from the observation that 8-month-olds were able to extract words from a monotone speech stream solely using the transition probabilities (TP) between syllables (Saffran et al., 1996). A simple mechanism was thus part of the human infant’s toolbox for discovering regularities in langua...
Preprint
Interest in statistical learning in developmental studies stems from the observation that 8-month-olds were able to extract words from a monotone speech stream solely using the transition probabilities (TP) between syllables (Saffran et al., 1996). A simple mechanism was thus part of the human infant’s toolbox for discovering regularities in langua...
Preprint
Full-text available
Interest in statistical learning in developmental studies stems from the observation that 8-month-olds were able to extract words from a monotone speech stream solely using the transition probabilities (TP) between syllables (Saffran et al., 1996). A simple mechanism was thus part of the human infant’s toolbox for discovering regularities in langua...
Preprint
Full-text available
The superior temporal sulcus (STS), one of the first sulci visible during brain development, is a key region for human communication, notably hosting linguistic functions in the left hemisphere. Fetuses and premature newborns already process external sound, but the auditory environment is vastly different in-utero and ex-utero. Does this have an im...
Article
Full-text available
Networks are a useful mathematical tool for capturing the complexity of the world. In a previous behavioral study, we showed that human adults were sensitive to the high-level network structure underlying auditory sequences, even when presented with incomplete information. Their performance was best explained by a mathematical model compatible with...
Preprint
Full-text available
Networks are a useful mathematical tool for capturing the complexity of the world. In a previous behavioral study, we showed that human adults were sensitive to the high-level network structure underlying auditory sequences, even when presented with incomplete information. Their performance was best explained by a mathematical model compatible with...
Preprint
Full-text available
The debate over whether conscious attention is necessary for statistical learning has produced mixed and conflicting results. Testing individuals with impaired consciousness may provide some insight, but very few studies have been conducted due to the difficulties associated with testing such patients. In this study, we examined the ability of pati...
Preprint
During the last trimester of gestation, fetuses and preterm neonates begin to respond to sensory stimulation and to discover the structure of their environment. Yet, neuronal migration is still ongoing. This late migration notably concerns the supra-granular layers neurons, which are believed to play a critical role in encoding predictions and dete...
Preprint
Full-text available
The emergence of symbolic thinking has been proposed as a dominant cognitive criterion to distinguish humans from other primates during hominization. Although the proper definition of a symbol has been the subject of much debate, one of its simplest features is bidirectional attachment: the content is accessible from the symbol, and vice versa. Beh...
Preprint
The emergence of symbolic thinking has been proposed as a dominant cognitive criterion to distinguish humans from other primates during hominization. Although the proper definition of a symbol has been the subject of much debate, one of its simplest features is bidirectional attachment: the content is accessible from the symbol, and vice versa. Beh...
Article
Full-text available
Electrophysiology recordings are frequently affected by artifacts (e.g., subject motion or eye movements), which reduces the number of available trials and affects the statistical power. When artifacts are unavoidable and data are scarce, signal reconstruction algorithms that allow for the retention of sufficient trials become crucial. Here, we pre...
Article
Full-text available
Successive auditory inputs are rarely independent, their relationships ranging from local transitions between elements to hierarchical and nested representations. In many situations, humans retrieve these dependencies even from limited datasets. However, this learning at multiple scale levels is poorly understood. Here we used the formalism propose...
Article
In carefully designed experimental paradigms, cognitive scientists interpret the mean event-related potentials (ERP) in terms of cognitive operations. However, the huge signal variability from one trial to the next, questions the representability of such mean events. We explored here whether this variability is an unwanted noise, or an informative...
Article
Full-text available
Is hemisphere lateralization for speech processing linked to handedness? To answer this question, we compared hemisphere lateralization for speech processing and handedness in 18-month-old infants, the age at which infants start to produce words and reach a stable pattern of handedness. To assess hemisphere lateralization for speech perception, we...
Article
The core knowledge hypothesis postulates that infants automatically analyze their environment along abstract dimensions, including numbers. According to this view, approximate numbers should be encoded quickly, pre-attentively, and in a supra-modal manner by the infant brain. Here, we directly tested this idea by submitting the neural responses of...
Preprint
Full-text available
The emergence of symbolic thinking has been proposed as a dominant cognitive criterion to distinguish humans from other primates during hominization. Although the proper definition of a symbol has been the subject of much debate, one of its simplest features is bidirectional attachment: the content is accessible from the symbol, and vice versa. Beh...
Article
Full-text available
Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre‐verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word‐unit...
Article
Full-text available
Although words and faces activate neighboring regions in the fusiform gyrus, we lack an understanding of how such category selectivity emerges during development. To investigate the organization of reading and face circuits at the earliest stage of reading acquisition, we measured the fMRI responses to words, faces, houses, and checkerboards in thr...
Preprint
Full-text available
Successive auditory inputs are rarely independent, their relationships ranging from local transitions between elements to hierarchical and nested representations. In many situations, humans retrieve these dependencies even from limited datasets. However, this learning at multiple scale levels is poorly understood. Here We used the formalism propose...
Preprint
Full-text available
Although words and faces activate neighboring regions in the fusiform gyrus, we lack an understanding of how such category selectivity emerges during development. To investigate the organization of reading and face circuits at the earliest stage of reading acquisition, we measured the fMRI responses to words, faces, houses, and checkerboards in thr...
Article
Full-text available
Extracting statistical regularities from the environment is a primary learning mechanism that might support language acquisition. While it has been shown that infants are sensitive to transition probabilities between syllables in speech, it is still not known what information they encode. Here we used electrophysiology to study how full-term neonat...
Article
Full-text available
Infant electroencephalography (EEG) presents several challenges compared with adult data: recordings are typically short and heavily contaminated by motion artifacts, and the signal changes throughout development. Traditional data preprocessing pipelines, developed mainly for event-related potential analyses, require manual steps. However, larger d...
Preprint
Full-text available
Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre-verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word-unit...
Article
Significance For adults to comprehend spoken language, and for infants to acquire their native tongue, it is fundamental to encode speech as a sequence of stable and invariant segments despite its extreme acoustic variability. We show that the brain of a 3-mo-old baby can achieve this critical task thanks to a decomposition system which breaks down...
Preprint
Full-text available
Extracting statistical regularities from the environment is a primary learning mechanism, which might support language acquisition. While it is known that infants are sensitive to transition probabilities between syllables in continuous speech, the format of the encoded representation remains unknown. Here we used electrophysiology to investigate h...
Article
Periodic and stable sensory input can result in rhythmic and stable neural responses, a phenomenon commonly referred to as neural entrainment. Although the use of neural entrainment to investigate the regularities the brain tracks has increased in recent years, the methods used for its quantification are not well-defined in the literature. Here we...
Preprint
Full-text available
Infant electroencephalography (EEG) presents several challenges compared with adult data. Recordings are typically short. Motion artifacts heavily contaminate the data. The EEG neural signal and the artifacts change throughout development. Traditional data preprocessing pipelines have been developed mainly for event-related potentials analyses, and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Creating invariant representations from an ever-changing speech signal is a major challenge for the human brain. Such an ability is particularly crucial for preverbal infants who must discover the phonological, lexical and syntactic regularities of an extremely inconsistent signal in order to acquire language. Within visual perception, an efficient...
Preprint
Full-text available
Patterns of trial-averaged post-stimulus neural activity, e.g. event related potentials (ERPs) are traditionally interpreted as the correlates of cognitive operations. However, single-trial trajectories of neural responses approach these ERP components only in a loose and stochastic manner, questioning legitimacy of these components , proposed role...
Preprint
Although words and faces activate neighboring regions in the fusiform gyrus, we lack an understanding of how this category selectivity emerges during development. To investigate the organization of reading and face circuits at the earliest stage of reading acquisition, we measured the fMRI responses to words, faces, houses, and checkerboards in thr...
Article
Preverbal infants are particularly good at discriminating syllables that differ by a single phoneme but do they perceive syllables as a whole unit or can they become aware of the underlying phonemes if their attention is attracted to the relevant level of analysis? We trained 3-month-old infants to pair two consonants, co-articulated with different...
Article
Full-text available
Estimating the extent to which newborn humans process input from their environment, especially regarding the depth of processing, is a challenging question. To approach this problem, we measured brain responses in 20 newborns with magnetoencephalography (MEG) in a “local-global” auditory oddball paradigm in which two-levels of hierarchical regulari...
Article
Full-text available
Are the brain mechanisms of reading acquisition similar across writing systems? And do similar brain anomalies underlie reading difficulties in alphabetic and ideographic reading systems? In a cross-cultural paradigm, we measured the fMRI responses to words, faces and houses in 96 Chinese and French 10-year-old children, half of whom were strugglin...
Article
Full-text available
Regularized generalized canonical correlation analysis (RGCCA) is a general multiblock data analysis framework that encompasses several important multivariate analysis methods such as principal component analysis, partial least squares regression, and several versions of generalized canonical correlation analysis. In this article, we extend RGCCA t...
Article
Full-text available
Identifying the genes that contribute to the variability in brain regions involved in language processing may shed light on the evolution of brain structures essential to the emergence of language in Homo sapiens. The superior temporal asymmetrical pit (STAP), which is not observed in chimpanzees, represents an ideal phenotype to investigate the ge...
Preprint
Full-text available
Estimating the extent to which newborn humans process input from their environment, especially regarding the depth of processing, is a challenging question. To approach this problem, we measured brain responses in 20 newborns with magnetoencephalography (MEG) in a "local-global" auditory oddball paradigm in which two-levels of hierarchical regulari...
Article
Full-text available
Infant brain development incorporates several intermingled mechanisms leading to intense and asynchronous maturation across cerebral networks and functional modalities. Combining electroencephalography (EEG) and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), previous studies in the visual modality showed that the functional maturation of the event-rel...
Article
Nous apprenons avec notre cerveau et ce que nous apprenons transforme notre cerveau. La période de l’enfance est une période de changements rapides liés au calendrier de maturation hétérogène et prolongé des différentes régions cérébrales que nous commençons à mieux comprendre grâce à l’imagerie cérébrale. Bien loin d’être passifs, les jeunes enfan...
Preprint
Full-text available
To determine whether the neural anomalies underlying developmental dyslexia are universal across languages or influenced by the writing system, we tested 10-year-old Chinese and French children, with or without dyslexia, in a cross-cultural fMRI paradigm. We compared their brain responses to words written in their known script, faces and houses whi...
Article
Full-text available
Audio‐visual associative learning – at least when linguistic stimuli are employed – is known to rely on core linguistic skills such as phonological awareness. Here we ask whether this would also be the case in a task that does not manipulate linguistic information. Another question of interest is whether executive skills, often found to support lea...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract Sensory development of the human brain begins prenatally, allowing cortical auditory responses to be recorded at an early age in preterm infants. Despite several studies focusing on the temporal characteristics of preterm infants’ cortical responses, few have been conducted on frequency analysis of these responses. In this study, we perfor...
Article
Full-text available
Shortly after reading instruction, a region in the ventral occipital temporal cortex (vOTC) of the left hemisphere, the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), becomes specialized for written words. Its reproducible location across scripts suggests important anatomical constraints, such as specific patterns of connectivity, notably to spoken language areas....
Preprint
Full-text available
Brain development incorporates several intermingled mechanisms throughout infancy leading to intense and asynchronous maturation across cerebral networks and functional modalities. Combining electroencephalography (EEG) and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), previous studies in the visual modality showed that the functional maturation of t...
Article
Significance Humans naturally entertain complex representations of the world based on various symbolic systems, from natural language to mathematical or musical notation. They recode the input into abstract symbolic representations that can be internally manipulated and projected back onto the external world. We show that preverbal infants can rede...
Article
Full-text available
The grey and white matter volumes are known to reduce with age. This cortical shrinkage is visible on magnetic resonance images and is conveniently identified by the increased volume of cerebrospinal fluid in the sulci between two gyri. Here, we replicated this finding using the UK Biobank dataset and studied the genetic influence on these cortical...
Preprint
Full-text available
Uncovering the genes that contribute to the variability in brain regions involved in language processing might shed light on the evolution of brain structures essential to the emergence of language in Homo sapiens. The superior temporal asymmetrical pit (STAP), which is not observed in chimpanzees, represents an ideal phenotype to investigate the g...
Article
Full-text available
Robust spatial alignment of post mortem data and in vivo MRI acquisitions from different ages, especially from the early developmental stages, into standard spaces is still a bottleneck hampering easy comparison with the mainstream neuroimaging results. In this paper, we test a landmark-based spatial normalization strategy as a framework for the se...
Preprint
Being aware of the phonemes that compose syllables is difficult without having learned to read an alphabetic script, a skill generally acquired around 5 to 7 years of age. Nevertheless, preverbal infants are particularly good at discriminating syllables that differ by a single phoneme. Do they perceive syllables as a whole unit or can they become a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Humans naturally entertain complex representations of the world based on various symbolic systems, from natural language to mathematical or musical notation. Above and beyond mere perceptual representations, the adult human mind can recode sensory inputs into abstract symbolic representations that can be internally manipulated and projected back on...
Article
Full-text available
In human adults, ventral extra-striate visual cortex contains a mosaic of functionally specialized areas, some responding preferentially to natural visual categories such as faces (fusiform face area) or places (parahippocampal place area) and others to cultural inventions such as written words and numbers (visual word form and number form areas)....
Preprint
Full-text available
The grey and white matter volumes are known to reduce with age. This cortical shrinkage is visible on magnetic resonance images and is conveniently identified by the increased volume of cerebrospinal fluid in the sulci between two gyri. Here, we replicated this finding using the UK Biobank dataset and studied the genetic influence on these cortical...
Article
Full-text available
The left hemisphere specialization for language is a well-established asymmetry in the human brain. Structural and functional asymmetries are observed as early as the prenatal period suggesting genetically determined differences between both hemispheres. The corpus callosum is a large tract connecting mostly homologous areas; some have proposed tha...
Article
While the main neural networks are in place at term birth, intense changes in cortical microstructure occur during early infancy with the development of dendritic arborization, synaptogenesis and fiber myelination. These maturational processes are thought to relate to behavioral acquisitions and the development of cognitive abilities. Nevertheless,...
Article
Full-text available
How does education affect cortical organization? All literate adults possess a region specialized for letter strings, the visual word form area (VWFA), within the mosaic of ventral regions involved in processing other visual categories such as objects, places, faces, or body parts. Therefore, the acquisition of literacy may induce a reorientation o...
Article
In the human brain, the appearance of cortical sulci is a complex process that takes place mostly during the second half of pregnancy, with a relatively stable temporal sequence across individuals. Since deviant gyrification patterns have been observed in many neurodevelopmental disorders, mapping cortical development in vivo from the early stages...
Article
The asymmetry of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) has been identified as a species-specific feature of the human brain. The so-called superior temporal asymmetrical pit (STAP) area is observed from the last trimester of gestation onwards and is far less pronounced in the chimpanzee brain. This asymmetry is associated with more frequent sulcal int...
Article
Full-text available
Intraventricular Hemorrhage (IVH) is the leading cause of neurological and cognitive impairment in preterm neonates with an incidence that increases with increasing prematurity. In the present study, we tested how preterm neonates with IVH react to external stimulation (i.e. speech syllables). We compared their neural responses measured by electroe...
Article
Full-text available
The ontogeny of the functional asymmetries of the human brain is poorly understood. Are they a consequence of differential development based on competition mechanisms, or are they constitutive of the human brain architecture from the start? Using structural magnetic resonance imaging and a face-discrimination electroencephalography paradigm with la...
Article
58th Annual Meeting of the Society-for-Psychophysiological-Research, Quebec City, CANADA, OCT 03-07, 2018
Article
Full-text available
We evaluated neuro-functional changes associated with late acquisition of reading in an illiterate adult who underwent 20 longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans during 2 years, while the participant progressed from complete illiteracy to a modest level of alphabetical decoding. Initially, the participant did not activate ne...
Article
Brain development relies on several maturational processes throughout infancy. Particularly, the myelination of white matter fibers occurs over different developmental periods, and at different rates along different regions and functional networks [1]. It plays a major role in the acceleration of neural information traveling through the axons, incr...
Article
Full-text available
In the mature human brain, the arcuate fasciculus mediates verbal working memory, word learning, and sublexical speech repetition. However, its contribution to early language acquisition remains unclear. In this work, we aimed to evaluate the role of the direct segments of the arcuate fasciculi in the early acquisition of linguistic function. We im...
Article
The influence of genes on cortical structures has been assessed through various phenotypes. The sulcal pits, which are the putative first cortical folds, have for long been assumed to be under tight genetic control, but this was never quantified. We estimated the pit depth heritability in various brain regions using the high quality and large sampl...
Article
Full-text available
Speech is a complex auditory stimulus which is processed according to several time-scales. Whereas consonant discrimination is required to resolve rapid acoustic events, voice perception relies on slower cues. Humans, right from preterm ages, are particularly efficient to encode temporal cues. To compare the capacities of preterms to those observed...
Article
To understand the type of neural computations that may explain how human infants acquire their native language in only a few months, the study of their neural architecture is necessary. The development of brain imaging techniques has opened the possibilities of studying human infants without discomfort, and although these studies are still sparse,...
Article
Full-text available
Already during the last trimester of gestation, functional responses are recorded in foetuses and preterm newborns, attesting an already complex cerebral architecture. Then throughout childhood, anatomical connections are further refined but at different rates and over asynchronous periods across functional networks. Concurrently, infants gradually...
Article
Full-text available
The volume fraction of water related to myelin (fmy) is a promising MRI index for in vivo assessment of brain myelination, that can be derived from multi-component analysis of T1 and T2 relaxometry signals. However, existing quantification methods require rather long acquisition and/or post-processing times, making implementation difficult both in...
Article
Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a disorder of motor coordination which interferes with academic achievement. Difficulties in mathematics have been reported. Performance in the number line task is very sensitive to atypical development of numerical cognition. We used a position-to-number task in which twenty 7-to-10years old children wi...
Article
Even before a child learns to read, the future location of his or her letter-processing area can be predicted from its connections to the rest of the brain. Reading acquisition thus piggybacks on a pre-existing brain circuit.
Article
Can babies think? A fundamental challenge for cognitive neuroscience is to answer when brain functions begin and in what form they first emerge. This is challenging with behavioral tasks, as it is difficult to communicate to an infant what a task requires, and motor function is impoverished, making execution of the appropriate response difficult. T...
Article
Full-text available
During the last trimester of human gestation, neurons reach their final destination and establish long- and short-distance connections. Due to the difficulties obtaining functional data at this age, the characteristics of the functional architecture at the onset of sensory thalamocortical connectivity in humans remain largely unknown. In particular...
Article
Full-text available
Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of sentences from a finite number of words. How this unique, productive power of human language unfolds over the course of language development is still hotly debated. When they listen to sentences comprising newly-learned words, do children generalize from their knowledge of the legal combinat...
Conference Paper
Multimodal coregistration (fNIRS-EEG)offer unique opportunities for studying cerebral responses of preemies.In IntraVentricular Hemorrhage, it revealed weaker hemodynamic response which can provide early diagnosis of neurovascular coupling impairment
Article
Full-text available
UN DES « MIRACLES » les plus incroyables de l'enfance humaine est l'apprentissage du langage : comment, en à peine trois ans, le nourrisson parvient-il à maîtriser sa langue maternelle alors que beaucoup d'adultes peinent dans l'apprentissage d'une seconde langue ? Cet apprentissage rapide et implicite alors que beaucoup d'autres capacités, comme l...
Article
27th International Symposium on Cerebral Blood Flow, Metabolism and Function / 12th International Conference on Quantification of Brain Function with PET, Vancouver, CANADA, JUN 27-30, 2015
Article
27th International Symposium on Cerebral Blood Flow, Metabolism and Function / 12th International Conference on Quantification of Brain Function with PET, Vancouver, CANADA, JUN 27-30, 2015
Article
In the human brain, development of the cortex involves several overlapping mechanisms that proceed at different times and speeds among brain regions, from the first weeks of pregnancy until the end of adolescence. In the recent years, studies of healthy fetuses, infants, and children using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have provided original ins...
Article
The human infant brain is the only known machine able to master a natural language and develop explicit, symbolic, and communicable systems of knowledge that deliver rich representations of the external world. With the emergence of noninvasive brain imaging, we now have access to the unique neural machinery underlying these early accomplishments. A...
Article
We report the case of a 14-year-old girl suffering from severe developmental visual impairment along with delayed language and cognitive development, and featuring a clear-cut dissociation between spared dorsal and impaired ventral visual pathways. Visual recognition of objects, including faces and printed words, was affected. In contrast, movement...
Article
Full-text available
Microstructural and physiological changes are intense in the developing brain, thus considerably modifying parameters quantified by MRI (relaxation times, anisotropy and diffusivities). The latest advances in EPI enabled to non-invasively measure these parameters in infants in a reasonable acquisition time to follow brain maturation. To take advant...
Article
The auditory neural representations of infants can easily be studied with electroencephalography using mismatch experimental designs. We recorded high-density event-related potentials while 3-month-old infants were listening to trials consisting of CV syllables produced with different vowels (/bX/ or /gX/). The consonant remained the same for the f...
Article
Deep in the occipitotemporal cortex lie two functional regions, the visual word form area (VWFA) and the number form area (NFA), which are thought to play a special role in letter and number recognition, respectively. We review recent progress made in characterizing the origins of these symbol form areas in children or adults, sighted or blind subj...
Article
Full-text available
Linguistic processing is based on a close collaboration between temporal and frontal regions connected by two pathways: the "dorsal" and "ventral pathways" (assumed to support phonological and semantic processing, respectively, in adults). We investigated here the development of these pathways at the onset of language acquisition, during the first...

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