Simona Mancini

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language

We explore sentence planning processes in neurotypical individuals and persons with aphasia (PWA), to test whether PWA show impairments and also whether sentences are planned ahead or "on the fly" (incrementally)

Language comprehension relies on the fundamental ability to create meaningful syntactic structures from single words during on-line processing. Time-resolved neuroimaging techniques can be used to measure electrophysiological activity revealing the neural dynamics underpinning these combinatorial processes in the brain. In this chapter, we review a...

This chapter provides an overview of the neural correlates related to L2 morphological processing, by integrating recent empirical evidence coming from event-related potentials, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and non-invasive brain stimulation. We show that the processing of morphological information in L2 cannot be seen as an encapsulated...

Previous research on argument structure (AS) has shown that verb processing costs scale with the number of arguments and as a result of non-canonical thematic mapping. The Basque language has unique AS: Basque unergatives and transitives select transitive auxiliary and ergative subject case markings, while unaccusatives are syntactically less compl...

In Spanish, several analogic instruments are currently available, like the adaptations of the Boston Diagnostic Examination (BDAE), the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB), PALPA, and BETA, which is the most recent tool available. However, these instruments face several validity issues. Here, we introduce Aphasia Cognitive Screening in Spanish (ACS.esp),...

The ability to think about non-present time is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Both the past and future imply a temporal displacement of an event outside the "now". They also intrinsically differ: the past refers to inalterable events; the future to alterable events, to possible worlds. Are the past and future processed similarly or differentl...

During reading, we can process and integrate information from words allocated in the parafoveal region. However, whether we extract and process the meaning of parafoveal words is still under debate. Here, we obtained Fixation-Related Potentials in a Basque-Spanish bilingual sample during a Spanish reading task. By using the boundary paradigm, we pr...

Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or phoneme-monitori...

We assessed monolingual Spanish and bilingual Spanish-Basque toddlers’ sensitivity to gender agreement in correct vs. incorrect Spanish noun phrases (definite article + noun), using a spontaneous preference listening paradigm. Monolingual Spanish-learning toddlers exhibited a tendency to listen longer to the grammatically correct phrases (e.g., la...

https://osf.io/hrgfy/

The main aim of this work is to investigate the processing of past and future time reference during language comprehension. Mentally locating events in the past or future plays a key role in many fundamental aspects of human cognition and behavior, such as planning, decision-making, and self-regulation. From the psycholinguistic perspective, previo...

https://osf.io/pz3ra/

Language comprehension relies on the fundamental ability to create meaningful syntactic structures from single words during on-line processing. Time-resolved neuroimaging techniques can be used to measure electrophysiological activity revealing the neural dynamics underpinning these combinatorial processes in the brain. In the present chapter, we r...

Restrictive contextual information has been found to bias syntactic disambiguation, when only one alternative leads to a meaningful interpretation. The current study tests whether disambiguation can be influenced by nonrestrictive cues – when several alternatives are equally plausible. We first evaluated if modifier number biased the disambiguation...

Assessing the synchrony and interplay between distributed neural regions is critical to understanding how language is processed. Here, we investigated possible neuro-functional links between form and meaning during sentence comprehension combining a classical whole-brain approach, which characterizes patterns of brain activation resulting from our...

Experimental evidence suggests that speaker and addressee quickly adapt to each other from the earliest moments of sentence processing, and that interlocutor-related information is rapidly integrated with other sources of nonpragmatic information (e.g., semantic, morphosyntactic, etc.). These findings have been taken as support for one-step models...

Agreement is a syntactic relation involving a controller (e.g., a noun) and a target with matching inflectional morphology (e.g., a verb). Across languages, electrophysiological studies consistently report that the presence of a mismatch yields late positive effects (P600), often preceded by early negativities. The current study focuses on person a...

Existing psycholinguistic models typically describe agreement relations as monolithic phenomena amounting to mechanisms that check mere feature consistency. This eye-tracking study aimed at widening this perspective by investigating the time spent reading subject-verb (number, person) and adverb-verb (tense) violations on an inflected verb during s...

The current fMRI study was designed to investigate whether the processing of different gender-related cues embedded in nouns affects the computation of agreement dependencies and, if so, where this possible interaction is mapped in the brain. We used the Spanish gender agreement system, which makes it possible to manipulate two different factors: t...

Information about interlocutor identity is pragmatic in nature and has traditionally been distinguished from explicitly coded linguistic information, including mophosyntax. Study of speaker identity in language processing has questioned this distinction, but addressee identity has been less considered. We used Basque to explore how addressee identi...

Sentence comprehension is successfully accomplished by means of a form-to-meaning mapping procedure that relies on the extraction of morphosyntactic information from the input and its mapping to higher-level semantic-discourse representations. In this study, we sought to determine whether neuroanatomically distinct brain regions are involved in the...

Even when bilinguals learn both languages from birth and achieve high levels of proficiency, they rarely use their languages to the same degree. Recent findings suggest that individual differences in bilingual profile such as the usage of the bilingual's different languages could affect the way they retrieve and analyse linguistic information, with...

Interlocutor’s identity has a strong impact not only on what we will say but also on how we will convey information. However, the impact of the addressee on the analysis of an utterance is still unclear. The present behavioral study will shed light on this issue investigating the case of Basque allocutives, where the verb needs to agree with the se...

Asymmetric number attraction effects have been typically explained via a privative markedness account: plural nouns are more marked than singular ones and thus stronger attractors. However, this account does not explain results from tripartite systems, in which a third number value is available, like paucal. Here we tested whether attraction effect...

Agreement computation is one of the pillars of language comprehension. In this fMRI study, we investigated the neuro-cognitive processes of agreement associated with number feature covariance in subject-verb agreement and determiner-noun concord in Spanish by creating mismatches (ella/*ellas corre, she/*they dances vs. el/*los anillo, thesg/*thepl...

The time-course of agreement processing was investigated through three eye-tracking experiments and one grammaticality judgment task by making use of the Spanish Unagreement pattern, which allows the presence of a 3rd person plural subject followed by a 1st person plural verb, as in Los manifestantes anunciamos una huelga (The protesters 3.pl annou...

Agreement is generally conceived as a syntactic dependency whose computation and comprehension processes deal with agreement features uniformly, without differentiating among them. However, different interpretive properties are associated with Person and Number. While Person expresses the status of an argument with respect to the participants in th...

Most linguistic theories of language offer analysis of agreement describing the rules and constraints involved in the computation and interpretation of this dependency. A good testing ground for theoretical accounts of agreement is mismatching patterns. In this article we focus on a mismatch available in the Spanish agreement system – Unagreement –...

Most linguistic theories of language offer analysis of agreement describing the rules and constraints involved in the computation and interpretation of this dependency. A good testing ground for theoretical accounts of agreement is mismatching patterns. In this article we focus on a mismatch available in the Spanish agreement system - Unagreement -...

In its most basic form, agreement manifests itself in the form of a systematic feature-sharing or covariance (Steele 1978) between the members of a struc-tural relation: a subject and a verb, a determiner and a noun, or a noun and an adjective that possess the same gender, number, or person feature specifica-tions. Agreement seems thus entirely red...

Unagreement patterns consist in a person feature mismatch between subject and verb that is nonetheless grammatical in Spanish. The processing of this type of construction gives new insights into the understanding of agreement processes during language comprehension. Here, we contrasted oscillatory brain activity triggered by Unagreement in differen...

Agreement is a very important mechanism for language processing. Mainstream psycholinguistic research on subject-verb agreement processing has emphasized the purely formal and encapsulated nature of this phenomenon, positing an equivalent access to person and number features. However, person and number are intrinsically different, because person co...

Agreement is one of the main devices used by languages to signal grammatical relations. In this study, we investigated the neurophysiological processing correlates of subject-verb agreement in Spanish using Unagreement, a phenomenon characterized by a person mismatch between subject and verb that nonetheless produces a grammatical pattern. Unagreem...