Rosario Tomasello- PhD
- Substitute Professor Neuroscience of Language & Pragmatics at Freie Universität Berlin
Rosario Tomasello
- PhD
- Substitute Professor Neuroscience of Language & Pragmatics at Freie Universität Berlin
Personal Webpage: https://rtomasello.wordpress.com
About
30
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Introduction
1) Language and semantic processing in undeprived and deprived populations;
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2) Neuropragmatics: neural basis of communicative actions expressed through speech, and gestures, taking into account social interaction, and common ground;
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3) Neurobiologically constrained cortex model for language learning and cognitive processes;
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4) Electroencephalography (EEG), event-related potentials (ERPs) and EEG source localisation
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Publications (30)
Speech prosody is essential for conveying communicative intentions. Although neurophysiological data has shown that communicative functions conveyed through prosody are processed rapidly in the human brain, it is still unclear when and to what extent prosodic information is needed for the conscious speech act recognition as speech unfolds. Using a...
The ability of humans to store spoken words in verbal working
memory and build extensive vocabularies is believed to stem
from evolutionary changes in cortical connectivity across primate species. However, the underlying neurobiological mechanisms remain unclear. Why can humans acquire vast vocabularies, while non-human primates cannot?
This study...
Digital twins enable simulation, comprehensive analysis and predictions, as virtual representations of physical systems. They are also finding increasing interest and application in the healthcare sector, with a particular focus on digital twins of the brain. We discuss how digital twins in neuroscience enable the modeling of brain functions and pa...
Neural circuits related to language exhibit a remarkable ability to reorganize and adapt in response to visual deprivation. Particularly, early and late blindness induce distinct neuroplastic changes in the visual cortex, repurposing it for language and semantic processing. Interestingly, these functional changes provoke a unique cognitive advantag...
Comprehenders are known to generate expectations about upcoming linguistic input at the sentence and discourse level. However, most previous studies on prediction focused mainly on word-induced brain activity rather than examining neural activity preceding a critical stimulus in discourse processing, where prediction actually takes place. In this E...
Digital twins enable simulation, comprehensive analysis and predictions, as virtual representations of physical systems. They are also finding increasing interest and application in the healthcare sector, with a particular focus on digital twins of the brain. We discuss how digital twins in neuroscience enable the modelling of brain functions and p...
Introduction:
Humans are able to learn and use a broad range of words and other symbols, whereas Monkeys are limited to acquiring small vocabularies of signs, including sounds and gestures. Although evolutionary changes on network architecture and connectivity features within the left-perisylvian regions has been reported, their functional contrib...
Although teaching animals a few meaningful signs is usually time-consuming, children acquire words easily after only a few exposures, a phenomenon termed “fast-mapping.” Meanwhile, most neural network learning algorithms fail to achieve reliable information storage quickly, raising the question of whether a mechanistic explanation of fast-mapping i...
What makes human communication exceptional is the ability to grasp speaker’s intentions beyond what is said verbally. How the brain processes communicative functions is one of the central concerns of the neurobiology of language and pragmatics. Linguistic-pragmatic theories define these functions as speech acts, and various pragmatic traits charact...
Understanding language semantically related to actions activates the motor cortex. This activation is sensitive to semantic information such as the body part used to perform the action (e.g. arm-/leg-related action words). Additionally, motor movements of the hands/feet can have a causal effect on memory maintenance of action words, suggesting that...
Comprehending conditional statements is fundamental for hypothetical reasoning about situations. However, the online comprehension of conditional statements containing different conditional connectives is still debated. We report two self-paced reading experiments on German conditionals presenting the conditional connectives wenn (‘if’) and nur wen...
The offer of some cake can be declined by saying "I am on a diet"-an indirect reply. Here, we asked whether certain well-established psychological and conceptual features are linked to the (in)directness of speech acts-an issue unexplored so far. Subjects rated direct and indirect speech acts performed by the same critical linguistic forms in diffe...
During conversations, speech prosody provides important clues about the speaker’s communicative intentions. In many languages, a rising vocal pitch at the end of a sentence typically expresses a question function, whereas a falling pitch suggests a statement. Here, the neurophysiological basis of intonation and speech act understanding were investi...
Neural network models are potential tools for improving our understanding of complex brain functions. To address this goal, these models need to be neurobiologically realistic. However, although neural networks have advanced dramatically in recent years and even achieve human-like performance on complex perceptual and cognitive tasks, their similar...
People normally know what they want to communicate before they start speaking. However, brain indicators of communication are typically observed only after speech act onset, and it is unclear when any anticipatory brain activity prior to speaking might first emerge, along with the communicative intentions it possibly reflects. Here, we investigated...
With strong and valid predictions, grasping a message is easy, whereas more demanding processing is required in the absence of robust expectations. We here demonstrate that brain correlates of the interplay between prediction and perception mechanisms in the understanding of meaningful sentences. Sentence fragments that strongly predict subsequent...
In the field of neurobiology of language, neuroimaging studies are generally based on stimulation paradigms consisting of at least two different conditions. Designing those paradigms can be very time-consuming and this traditional approach is necessarily data-limited. In contrast, in computational and corpus linguistics, analyses are often based on...
In the field of neurobiology of language, neuroimaging studies are generally based on stimulation paradigms consisting of at least two different conditions. Depending on the desired evaluation, these conditions, in turn, have to contain dozens of items to achieve a good signal to noise ratio. Designing those paradigms can be very time-consuming. Su...
During everyday social interaction, gestures are a fundamental part of human communication. The communicative pragmatic role of hand gestures and their interaction with spoken language has been documented at the earliest stage of language development, in which two types of indexical gestures are most prominent: the pointing gesture for directing at...
In blind people, the visual cortex takes on higher cognitive functions, including language. Why this functional reorganisation mechanistically emerges at the neuronal circuit level is still unclear. Here, we use a biologically constrained network model implementing features of anatomical structure, neurophysiological function and connectivity of fr...
One of the most controversial debates in cognitive neuroscience concerns the cortical locus of semantic knowledge and processing in the human brain. Experimental data revealed the existence of various cortical regions relevant for meaning processing, ranging from semantic hubs generally involved in semantic processing to modality-preferential senso...
When understanding language semantically related to actions, the motor cortex is active and may be sensitive to semantic information, for example about the body-part-relationship of displayed action-related words. Conversely, movements of the hands or feet can impair memory performance for arm- and leg-related action words respectively, suggesting...
Neuroimaging and patient studies show that different areas of cortex respectively specialize for general and selective, or category-specific, semantic processing. Why are there both semantic hubs and category-specificity, and how come that they emerge in different cortical regions? Can the activation time-course of these areas be predicted and expl...
Experimental evidence indicates that neurophysiological responses to well-known meaningful sensory items and symbols (such as familiar objects, faces, or words) differ from those to matched but novel and senseless materials (unknown objects, scrambled faces, and pseudowords). Spectral responses in the high beta- and gamma-band have been observed to...
