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Skills and Expertise
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July 2007 - present
Publications
Publications (91)
Behavioural tagging facilitates the temporary storage of seemingly insignificant episodic events, which may later become salient and enhanced in memory. Human behavioural studies have demonstrated selective memory enhancement for neutral stimuli from one category when this category is subsequently paired with reward. Although this phenomenon has im...
Large language models (LLMs) are not detailed models of human linguistic processing. They are, however, extremely successful at their primary task: Providing a model for language. For this reason LLMs are important in psycholinguistics: They are useful as a practical tool, as an illustrative comparative, and philosophically, as a basis for recastin...
The classical notion of a 'language of thought' (LoT), advanced prominently by the philosopher Jerry Fodor, is an influential position in cognitive science whereby the mental representations underpinning thought are considered to be compositional and productive, enabling the construction of new complex thoughts from more primitive symbolic concepts...
Sleep has long been thought of and promoted to be beneficial for memory. Some claims that sleep aids memory have been made in the absence of a critical interaction. This condition is necessary when using a commonly-used experimental design (a type of AM-PM PM-AM design). We propose that a sleep effect exists only if there is an interaction between...
The classical notion of a ‘language of thought’ (LoT), advanced prominently by the philosopher Jerry Fodor, is an influential position in cognitive science whereby the mental representations underpinning thought are considered to be compositional and productive, enabling the construction of new complex thoughts from more primitive symbolic concepts...
Large language models are not detailed models of human linguistic processing. They are, however, extremely successful at their primary task: providing a model for language. For this reason and because there are no animal models for language, large language models are important in psycholinguistics: they are useful as a practical tool, as an illustr...
Understanding what someone says requires relating words in a sentence to one another as instructed by the grammatical rules of a language. In recent years, the neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building...
LSTMs trained on next-word prediction can accurately perform linguistic tasks that require tracking long-distance syntactic dependencies. Notably, model accuracy approaches human performance on number agreement tasks (Gulordava et al., 2018). However, we do not have a mechanistic understanding of how LSTMs perform such linguistic tasks. Do LSTMs le...
Neural entrainment to speech appears to rely on syllabic features, especially those pertaining to the acoustic envelope of the stimuli. It has been proposed that the neural tracking of speech depends on the phoneme features. In the present electroencephalography experiment, we examined data from 25 participants to investigate neural entrainment to...
In addition to probabilities of monetary gains and losses, personality traits, socio-economic factors, and specific contexts such as emotions and framing influence financial risk taking. Here, we investigated the effects of joyful, neutral, and sad mood states on participants’ risk-taking behaviour in a simple task with safe and risky options. We a...
A traditional view on sentence comprehension holds that the listener parses linguistic input using hierarchical syntactic rules. Recently, physiological evidence for such a claim has been provided by Ding et al.’s (2016) MEG study that demonstrated, using a frequency-tagging paradigm, that regularly occurring syntactic constituents were spontaneous...
Understanding what someone says requires relating words in the sentence to one another as instructed by grammatical rules of language. In recent years, a neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building conver...
People with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are 6-10 times more likely to develop seizures than the healthy aging population. Leading hypotheses largely consider hyperexcitability of local cortical tissue as primarily responsible for increased seizure prevalence in AD. However, in the general population of people with epilepsy, large-scale brain network o...
The interlocking roles of lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in language comprehension has been the subject of longstanding debate. Recently, the cortical response to a frequency-tagged linguistic stimulus has been shown to track the rate of phrase and sentence, as well as syllable, presentation. This could be interpreted as evidence for th...
People with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are 6-10 times more likely to develop seizures than the healthy aging population. Leading hypotheses largely consider increased excitability of local cortical tissue as primarily responsible for increased seizure prevalence in AD. However, both local dynamics and large-scale brain network structure are believed...
The interlocking roles of lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in language comprehension has been the subject of longstanding debate. Recently, the cortical response to a frequency-tagged linguistic stimulus has been shown to track the rate of phrase and sentence, as well as syllable, presentation. This could be interpreted as evidence for th...
Abstract The dynamics of the resting brain exhibit transitions between a small number of discrete networks, each remaining stable for tens to hundreds of milliseconds. These functional microstates are thought to be the building blocks of spontaneous consciousness. The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a useful tool for imaging microstates, and EEG micr...
Behavioural studies investigating the preservation of semantic memory in healthy ageing have reported mixed findings. One suggested reason for this discrepancy is that the processes underpinning lexical access to semantic knowledge may be sensitive to ageing. It is therefore necessary to assess semantic memory utilising tasks that are not explicitl...
We discuss two instances in which the minimalist model of syntax offers a potential account of children's linguistic behavior: the Merge analysis of phrase structure and the analysis of pronominal structures and other long distance dependencies. In each case, we need to understand the relationship between performance mechanisms (the mechanisms for...
There is strong evidence that comprehenders can parse sentences in an incremental fashion. However, when the sentence contains a negation, the evidence is less clear. Previous work has shown that increasing the pragmatic felicity of a negative sentence reduces or eliminates any processing overhead relative to affirmative sentences. However, in prev...
Previous studies on the acquisition of semantics in the aspectual domain have suggested that a difficult case for achieving a targetlike representation in a second language arises when learners need to preempt a first language (L1) option (Gabriele, 2009). This study investigates this issue by focusing on a learning scenario where predicate-level v...
Composing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale ( n = 334) replication study, by investigati...
Introduction
Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a potentially useful clinical tool for aiding diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We hypothesized we can increase the accuracy of EEG for aiding diagnosis of AD using microstates, which are epochs of quasi-stability at the millisecond scale.
Methods
EEG was collected from two independent cohorts of AD...
Objectives:
Functional and structural disconnection of the brain is a prevailing hypothesis to explain cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). We aim to understand the link between alterations to networks and cognitive impairment using functional connectivity analysis and modelling.
Methods:
EEG was recorded from 21 AD patients and 26...
Composing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale ( N = 334) replication study, by investigati...
The study investigates semantic development of sublexically modal verbs of transfer, throw and send, in English-speaking children. For adults, sublexical modality of these verbs can be seen in the fact that the subevent of transfer of the object to the recipient need not take place in the actual world, e.g., Mary sent/threw a book to John does not...
Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probabilit...
p-values for the articles for each laboratory and each channel.
r-values for the articles for each channel, computed across laboratories.
r-values for the nouns for each channel, computed across laboratories.
p-values for the nouns for each channel, computed across laboratories.
This file contains Supplementary Tables 1-3.
Supplementary Table 1 contains the sentence materials with cloze probabilities (0-100%) of articles and nouns, along with post-noun sentence endings, comprehension questions and expected answer. Of note, because expectedness of the noun is here determined by the cloze value of the preceding article, the...
r-values for the nouns for each laboratory and each channel.
r-values for the articles for each laboratory and each channel
r-values for the nouns for each laboratory and each channel.
p-values for the articles for each channel, computed across laboratories.
In current theories of language comprehension, people routinely and implicitly predict upcoming words by pre-activating their meaning, morpho-syntactic features and even their specific phonological form. To date the strongest evidence for this latter form of linguistic prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience landmark publication by DeLong,...
The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children’s non-adultlike interpretations appear to be sca...
Phonemes play a central role in traditional theories as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations. Phonemes have two essential properties: they are ‘segment-sized’ (the size of a consonant or vowel) and abstract (a single phoneme may be have different acoustic realisations). Nevertheless, there is a long history of chal...
In current theories of language comprehension, people routinely and implicitly predict upcoming words by pre-activating their meaning, morpho-syntactic features and even their specific phonological form. To date the strongest evidence for this latter form of linguistic prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience landmark publication by DeLong,...
In Russian negative sentences the verb?s direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific ?genitive-of-negation? phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed...
Ageing affects the interplay between peripheral and cortical auditory processing. Previous studies have demonstrated that older adults are less able to regulate afferent sensory information and are more sensitive to distracting information. Using auditory event-related potentials we investigated the role of cortical inhibition on auditory and audio...
In two adaptation experiments we investigated the role of phonemes in speech perception. Participants repeatedly categorized an ambiguous test word that started with a blended /f/-/s/ fricative (?ail can be perceived as /fail/ or /sail/) or a blended /d/-/b/ stop (?ump can be perceived as /bump/ or /dump/) after exposure to a set of adaptor words....
Electroencephalography (EEG) non-invasively measures electrical activity produced by networks of neurones. EEG is routinely used in the clinical assessment of epilepsy, but its utility in dementia has not been fully exploited. Graph theory is a mathematical approach used to describe the properties of networks. It has wide-spread application in the...
Background:
Cortical visual association areas are highly vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease (AD) microscopic pathology. Visual evoked potentials (VEPs) provide the tools to examine the functional integrity of these areas and may provide useful indicators of early disease progression.
Objective:
To assess the functional integrity of visual associa...
Previous research has revealed that visually presented subset words embedded within a carrier word are processed to the level of semantics and can interfere with performance in a semantic categorisation task (Bowers, Davis, & Hanley, 2005). For example, a participant is presented with a category (e.g. “Is this a vehicle?”) followed by words belongi...
We investigate how the parser navigates local ambiguity, contrasting local coherence (LC) with active search (AS) for a cataphoric coreferent. An eye-tracking experiment manipulated Gender Congruency (Match vs Mismatch) and Punctuation after “leaves” (Comma vs No-Comma) as probes. If the parser prioritizes LC, we expect a surprisal slowdown at “is”...
To robustly examine the prevalence of the double peaked P1 visual evoked potential in healthy younger and older adult populations.
The evoked potentials and spectral power changes to simple visual stimuli of 26 healthy younger (M=20.0y) and 26 healthy older adults (M=76.0y) were examined.
Group and individual analyses showed a clear effect of age o...
The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) response is typically examined by subtracting the average response to a deviant stimulus from the response to the standard. This approach, however, can omit a critical element of the neural response, i.e., the non-phase-locked (“induced”) oscillatory activity. Recent investigations of the oscillatory characteri...
Sixty-four channel grand average plots for all time-frequency analyses for (A) standard, (B) deviant and (C) significant difference t-values (i.e., deviant minus standard, p < 0.05) after Monte Carlo permutation correction for multiple comparisons. Non-significant differences are masked in white. X and Y axes scales for all electrode plots are indi...
There is considerable controversy on island constraints on wh-dependencies in the psycholinguistics literature. One major point of contention is whether islands result from processing limitations suchas Working Memory capacity or from domain-specific linguistic knowledge. The current study investigates whether islands can be reduced to processing c...
A recent study of semantic categorisation in monolinguals (1) demonstrated semantic interference to meaning related words embedded within larger non-related written words (e.g. “hat” within “that”). The present study examines whether the same effect of semantic interference could be elicited in a bilingual population using mixed linguistic stimuli,...
Whereas O’Seaghdha et al. (1) generally agree with our argument that phoneme-sized segments are implicated in Chinese language production (2), they raise two critical points. First, they argue that our main event-related potential (ERP) finding (i.e., ERP modulation resulting from initial phoneme repetition) may reflect phonological connectivity ra...
Do speakers of all languages use segmental speech sounds when they produce words? Existing models of language production generally assume a mental representation of individual segmental units, or phonemes, but the bulk of evidence comes from speakers of European languages in which the orthographic system codes explicitly for speech sounds. By contr...
A recent study of semantic categorisation in monolinguals (1) demonstrated semantic interference to meaning related words embedded within larger non-related written words (e.g. “hat” within “that”). The present study examines whether the same effect of semantic interference could be elicited in a bilingual population using mixed linguistic stimuli,...
Speech sounds are not always perceived in accordance with their acoustic-phonetic content. For example, an early and automatic process of perceptual repair, which ensures conformity of speech inputs to the listener's native language phonology, applies to individual input segments that do not exist in the native inventory or to sound sequences that...
This paper brings new evidence to bear on the topic of the Imperfective Paradox – a semantic puzzle involving tense-aspectual categories that lack completion entailments. The lack of completion entailments is usually associated with the so-called progressive and conative readings, illustrated
I examined the nature of morphological decomposition in a series of masked-priming experiments with Russian prefixed nouns. In Experiments 1A and 1B, I tested 3 types of prime-target pairs in which the prime was a morphologically simple word, and a facilitation was found when the prime and the target were truly morphologically related (e.g., narost...
The P600 is an event-related brain potential (ERP) typically associated with the processing of grammatical anomalies or incongruities. A similar response has also been observed in fully acceptable long-distance wh-dependencies. Such findings raise the question of whether these ERP responses reflect common underlying processes, and what might be the...
The study explores the role of stress and vowel harmony as cues for speech segmentation. Both in French and in Turkish stress is demarcative, typically falling on word-final syllables. Additionally, Turkish (but not French) has a regular front-back vowel harmony which dictates that all vowels within a word must be either front or back. French and T...
Anaphoric relations between pronouns and their antecedents are subject to a number of different linguistic constraints, which exclude the possibility of coreference in specific syntactic or discourse contexts. Constraints on anaphora may, in principle, impact online sentence processing in a couple of different ways. They may act as constraints on t...
The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) transparent, in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the dimi...
Imperfective or progressive verb morphology makes it possible to use the name of a whole event to refer to an activity that is clearly not a complete instance of that event, leading to what is known as the Imperfective Paradox. For example, a sentence like 'John was building a house' does not entail that a house ever got built. The Imperfective Par...
This article presents three studies that investigate when syntactic constraints become available during the processing of long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies (backwards anaphora or cataphora). Earlier work demonstrated that in such structures the parser initiates an active search for an antecedent for a pronoun, leading to gender mismat...
As part of knowledge of language, an adult speaker possesses information on which sounds are used in the language and on the distribution of these sounds in a multidimensional acoustic space. However, a speaker must know not only the sound categories of his language but also the functional significance of these categories, in particular, which soun...
In behavioral studies on sentence comprehension, much evidence indicates that shorter dependencies are preferred over longer dependencies, and that longer dependencies incur a greater processing cost. However, it remains uncertain which of the various steps involved in the processing of long-distance dependencies is responsible for the increased co...
realization associated with abstract tense and agreement. Spontaneous production data from an adult Chinese learner of English named ,Patty whose ,English was at end-state level showed ,that although emergence,of tense marking,and 3, person,singular agreement,morphology,was low (35% and 17% respectively), perfect nominative case assignment was obse...
The grammatical aspect that a speaker uses to describe an event reflects the speaker s perspective on the event. Perfective aspect has been characterized as viewing an event from the outside, imperfective aspect as taking an internal perspective on an event. This difference in perspective may also give rise to truth-conditional differences between...
