Valéria Csépe

HUN-REN Research Centre of Natural Sciences · Brain Imaging Centre

The speech multi-feature MMN (Mismatch Negativity) offers a means to explore the neurocognitive background of the processing of multiple speech features in a short time, by capturing the time-locked electrophysiological activity of the brain known as event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Originating from Näätänen et al. (Clin Neurophysiol 115:140–...

Humans can extract statistical regularities of the environment to predict upcoming events. Previous research recognized that implicitly acquired statistical knowledge remained persistent and continued to influence behavior even when the regularities were no longer present in the environment. Here, in an fMRI experiment, we investigated how the pers...

Forty-five years have passed since the first publication of the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential (ERP) component. The first 10 years of research hardly gained any particular attention of the scientific community interested in acoustic perception. Debates on the nature of sensation versus perception were going on, and the tech...

The classical aphasia literature has placed considerable emphasis on the language-centered understanding of aphasia and failed to consider the role of executive functions (EFs) regarding different aspects of patients’ performance. Many current studies suggest deficits in EFs in individuals with aphasia, however, the available data is still limited....

Predictions supporting risky decisions could become unreliable when outcome probabilities temporarily change, making adaptation more challenging. Therefore, this study investigated whether sensitivity to the temporal structure in outcome probabilities can develop and remain persistent in a changing decision environment. In a variant of the Balloon...

Reading Disability (RD) is often characterized by difficulties in the phonology of the language. While the molecular mechanisms underlying it are largely undetermined, loci are being revealed by genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In a previous GWAS for word reading (Price, 2020), we observed that top single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were...

Reading and writing are crucial life skills but roughly one in ten children are affected by dyslexia, which can persist into adulthood. Family studies of dyslexia suggest heritability up to 70%, yet few convincing genetic markers have been found. Here we performed a genome-wide association study of 51,800 adults self-reporting a dyslexia diagnosis...

The visual word N1 (N170w) is an early brain ERP component that has been found to be a neurophysiological marker for print expertise, which is a prelexical requirement associated with reading development. To date, no other review has assimilated existing research on reading difficulties and atypical development of processes reflected in the N170w r...

Previous research recognized that humans could extract statistical regularities of the environment to automatically predict upcoming events. However, it has remained unexplored how the brain encodes the distribution of statistical regularities if it continuously changes. To investigate this question, we devised an fMRI paradigm where participants (...

How listeners handle prosodic cues of linguistic and paralinguistic origin is a central question for spoken communication. In the present EEG study, we addressed this question by examining neural responses to variations in pitch accent (linguistic) and affective (paralinguistic) prosody in Swedish words, using a passive auditory oddball paradigm. T...

Skilled reading is thought to rely on well-specified lexical representations that compete during visual word recognition. The establishment of these lexical representations is assumed to be driven by phonology. To test the role of phonology, we examined the prime lexicality effect (PLE), the index of lexical competition in signing deaf (N = 28) and...

Beliefs about positive and negative outcome probabilities have been frequently investigated in experience-based risky decision making. However, it has not been clarified how these beliefs emerge and whether they remain persistent if the predictability and complexity of outcome probabilities change across decision contexts. Hence, the present study...

A magyarországi fejlődés-pszichofiziológia három évtizedes történetét összefoglaló tanulmány a jelentősebb kutatások eredményeit négy főbb témacsoportban mutatja be. Ezek: a) a fejlődés-pszichofiziológiai módszerekkel végzett kutatások kezdetei, b) a nemzetközi kutatási kapcsolatok főbb területei, c) az eseményhez kötött agyi potenciálok módszeréve...

Automatic visual word recognition requires not only well-established phonological and orthographic representations but also efficient audio-visual integration of these representations. One possibility is that in developmental dyslexia, inefficient orthographic processing might underlie poor reading. Alternatively, reading deficit could be due to in...

Összefoglaló. A humán kutatások eredményeit bemutató közlemények számos adattal szolgálnak a megismerni kívánt jelenségre vonatkozóan. Általánosan elfogadott elvárás a vonatkozó etikai szabályok szigorú betartása, az előírt vizsgálati protokollok betartása. Az emberekkel végzett vizsgálatoknak azonban van egy olyan dimenziója, amelyre az etikai sza...

In speech processing, in the first year of life, prosody and phoneme-relevant aspects serve different functions. Recent studies have assumed that the two aspects become integrated at around 9 months of age. The present study investigates the effect of lexical status on stress processing in a fixed stress language. We hypothesize that lexicality mod...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a learning disorder affecting the ability to read, with a heritability of 40-60%. A notable part of this heritability remains unexplained, and large genetic studies are warranted to identify new susceptibility genes and clarify the genetic bases of dyslexia. We carried out a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on 227...

Both primarily and recently encountered information have been shown to influence experience-based risky decision making. The primacy effect predicts that initial experience will influence later choices even if outcome probabilities change and reward is ultimately more or less sparse than primarily experienced. However, it has not been investigated...

Dealing with phonological variations is important for speech processing. This article addresses whether phonological variations introduced by assimilatory processes are compensated for at the pre-lexical or lexical level, and whether the nature of variation and the phonological context influence this process. To this end, Swedish nasal regressive p...

Research on literacy has become universal and is essential for researchers of various disciplines, educators, and psychologists. For this article, we examined the most important methodological challenges that arise when conducting literacy research across languages, some of which have long been acknowledged in the relevant literature. Specifically,...

The role of working memory (WM) has been evidenced in language processing; however, the contribution of WM to the detection of linguistic deviance has remained unclear. This study aimed to examine how WM performance influences the detection of prosodic deviance in a fixed-stress language, which is supposed to be determined by a long-term word stres...

Anticipation of upcoming events plays a crucial role in automatic behaviors. It is, however, still unclear whether the event-related brain potential (ERP) markers of anticipation could track the implicit acquisition of probabilistic regularities that can be considered as building blocks of automatic behaviors. Therefore, in a four-choice reaction t...

Background Several papers pointed out that the language disorders are the most commonly reported cognitive deficits of the preterm (PT) infants. However, neither the exact interpretation (disrupted or delayed) of their language development nor the most powerful perinatal risk factors have been specified yet. Aims We aimed to determine whether post...

The unanimous conclusion of developmental-psychological and the psycholinguistical research is that preterm birth enhances the risk of atypical language development, as preterm infants often undergo a special language development from infancy on. With reference to the results of scientific investigations published between 1999 and 2018, unambiguous...

Primarily encountered information has been shown to influence perceptual and memory processes. However, it has been scarcely investigated how initial risk probabilities influence subsequent risk-taking behavior in an environment with repeated decisions. Therefore, the present study tested in two experiments whether young adults adjusted their choic...

A szerzők az okoseszközök használatát megalapozó kognitív tényezők változásának néhány jellemzőjét bemutatva a 21. század oktatási lehetőségeit és kihívásait elemzik. A tanulmány kitér a digitális eszközök használatának kezdeti szakaszaira, az okostelefonok alkalmazásának lehetséges előnyeire, akadályaira, valamint veszélyeire. A tanulás neurális a...

Anticipation of upcoming events plays a crucial role in automatic behaviors. It is, however, still unclear whether the event-related brain potential (ERP) markers of anticipation could track the implicit acquisition of probabilistic regularities that can be considered as building blocks of automatic behaviors. Therefore, in a four-choice reaction t...

Adaptive behavior involves rapid error processing and action evaluation. However, it has not been clarified how errors contribute to automatic behaviors that can be retrieved to successfully adapt to our complex environment. Automatic behaviors strongly rely on the process of probabilistic sequence learning and memory. Therefore, the present study...

A recent dual-stream model of language processing proposed that the postero-dorsal stream performs predictive sequential processing of linguistic information via hierarchically organized internal models. However, it remains unexplored whether the prosodic segmentation of linguistic information involves predictive processes. Here, we addressed this...

Understanding speech at the basic levels entails the simultaneous and independent processing of phonemic and prosodic features. While it is well-established that phoneme perception relies on language-specific long-term traces, it is unclear if the processing of prosodic features similarly involves language-specific representations. In the present s...

Background: Preterm birth is associated with various risks, including delayed or atypical language development. The prenatal start of prosodic tuning may affect the processing of word stress, an important suprasegmental feature of spoken utterances. Aim: Our study focused on the expected contribution of intra-uterine experience to word stress pr...

The implicit acquisition of complex probabilistic regularities has been found to be crucial in numerous automatized cognitive abilities, including language processing and associative learning. However, it has not been completely elucidated how the implicit extraction of second-order nonadjacent transitional probabilities is reflected by neurophysio...

Neuroscience findings have recently received critique on the lack of replications. To examine the reproducibility of brain indices of speech sound discrimination and their role in dyslexia, a specific reading difficulty, brain event-related potentials using EEG were measured using the same cross-linguistic passive oddball paradigm in about 200 dysl...

Neuroscience findings have recently received critique on the lack of replications. To examine the reproducibility of brain indices of speech sound discrimination and their role in dyslexia, a specific reading difficulty, brain event-related potentials using EEG were measured using the same cross-linguistic passive oddball paradigm in about 200 dysl...

Célkituzés Áttekinto tanulmányunk célja egy kevéssé kutatott terület, a súlyos fokban látássérült (vak) gyermekek nyelv- és beszédfejlodésének bemutatása. Módszertan A témában kevés publikáció jelent meg, leginkább esettanulmányok, aminek oka a populáció (nagyon) kis elemszáma és a vak gyermekek egymástól jelentosen eltéro fejlodési üteme. A vizsg...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders, with high impact on school and psychosocial development and high comorbidity with conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, and anxiety. DD is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including word reading, spelling, rapi...

Previous studies investigating the neurocognitive background of word stress processing demonstrated that words differing in their stress pattern are discriminated automatically and unconsciously as shown by the emergence of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential (ERP) component. However, it has remained unclear if the processin...

The N1 effect is an electrophysiological marker of visual specialization for print. The phonological mapping hypothesis (Maurer & McCandliss, 2007) posits that the left‐lateralized effect reflects grapheme‐phoneme integration. In this event‐related potential study, first (age = 7.06 years, N = 32) and third‐grade readers (age = 9.29 years, N = 28)...

A siketek olvasási folyamatainak vizsgálatából származó eredmények számos információval szolgálnak a tipikusan működő olvasási rendszer természetéről. A siketség következtében a fonológiai feldolgozás akadályozott, így tesztelhetővé válik a fonológiai rendszer szerepe az olvasásban. Jelen tanulmányban áttekintjük a siketekkel végzett olvasási vizsg...

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders among children and is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including reading, spelling, short term memory and others. To help unravel the genetic basis of these skills, we conducted a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS), including nine cohorts of readin...

Languages with contrastive stress, such as English or German, distinguish some words only via the stress status of their syllables, such as "CONtent" and "conTENT" (capitals indicate a stressed syllable). Listeners with a fixed-stress native language, such as Hungarian, have difficulties in explicitly discriminating variation of the stress position...

Technological development brings increasingly closer the era of widely available self-driving cars. However, presumably there will be a time when human drivers and self-driving cars would share the same roads. In the current paper, we propose a cognitive warning system that utilizes information collected from the behaviour of the human driver and s...

Objectives Stress “deafness” is a difficulty in the detection of stress pattern changes of second language (L2) words. This study investigated the influence of cognitive factors and L2 proficiency on the processing of L2 stress. Methodology Fifty-four native speakers of Hungarian, a language with non-contrastive stress, participated in the study;...

Probabilistic sequence learning involves a set of robust mechanisms that enable the extraction of statistical patterns embedded in the environment. It contributes to different perceptual and cognitive processes as well as to effective behavior adaptation, which is a crucial aspect of decision making. Although previous research attempted to model re...

The spatial location of objects is processed in egocentric and allocentric reference frames, the early temporal dynamics of which have remained relatively unexplored. Previous experiments focused on ERP components related only to egocentric navigation. Thus, we designed a virtual reality experiment to see whether allocentric reference frame-related...

In the present study, we investigated the processing of word stress related acoustic features in a word context. In a passive oddball multi-feature MMN experiment, we presented a disyllabic pseudo-word with two acoustically similar syllables as standard stimulus, and five contrasting deviants that differed from the standard in that they were either...

In the present study, we investigate how lexicality affects the processing of suprasegmental features at the word level. In contrast to earlier studies which analyzed the role of either segmental or suprasegmental feature in language processing our aim was to investigate the effect of the lexical status on the processing of violated stress pattern...

Whether a visual stimulus seems near or far away depends partly on its vertical elevation. Contrasting theories suggest either that perception of distance could vary with elevation, because of memory of previous upwards efforts in climbing to overcome gravity, or because of fear of falling associated with the downwards direction. The vestibular sys...

A látássérült populáció kognitív vizsgálata mérésmetodikai problémák miatt nehézségbe ütközik. Ez kifejezetten érvényes a vak gyermekek mérésére. Tanulmányunk célja a korábban és jelenleg is használt populációspecifikus tesztbattériák bemutatása, majd az általunk kialakított és pszichometriai elemzésnek alávetett feladatsor használatával felmért 7–...

The present experiments focused on how orthographic processing develops during reading acquisition. Specifically, a large, cross-sectional sample of children from grade 2 to grade 4 was exposed to pairs of words, pseudowords, digit strings, and pseudo-letter (Armenian) strings while their sensitivity to transpositions (T) and substitutions (S) of i...

Understanding spoken language depends on processing the delicate combination of grammatical structure, meaning and prosody of utterances. Previous studies have established that prosody influences the processing of sentences when the grammatical structure is ambiguous, however it is unclear how closely prosody and syntax are related when there is no...

This study investigated the role of impaired inhibitory control as a factor underlying attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children with ADHD and typically developing children completed an animal Stroop task while electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. The lateralized readiness potential and event-related brain potentials associated...

Designing multimodal virtual environments promises revolutionary advances in interacting with computers in the near future. In this paper, we report the results of an experimental investigation on the possible use of surround-sound systems to support visualization, taking advantage of increased knowledge about how spatial perception and attention w...

The paper presents a versatile experimentation framework for psychophysical research of spatial cognition. The framework provides a systematic experiment description format, which does not require strong programming skills to define complex scenarios and stimulation strategies. A key feature of the system that it supports different displays from a...

Wireless EEG is a promising tool that can bring neuroscience research closer to the study of perception and cognition in realistic scenarios. Perhaps the most interesting approach is to combine wireless EEG and virtual reality, where one can create and manipulate realistic multimodal environments. However EEG recording during locomotion in a virtua...

High impulsive individuals have problems with self-monitoring and learning from their mistakes. The aim of this study was to investigate whether error processing is impaired in high trait impulsivity, and how it is modulated by the task difficulty. Adults were classified as high (n = 10) and low (n = 10) impulsive participants based on the Barratt...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of executive functions (EFs) in different strategies underlying risky decision making. Adult participants from a nonclinical sample were assigned to low or high EF groups based on their performance on EF tasks measuring shifting, updating, and inhibition. ERPs were recorded while participants...

From early months of life prosody has a prominent contribution to segmentation: prosodic boundaries overlap with syntactic ones and facilitate the extraction of syntactic regularities both at word and at phrase level. Therefore, the long-term representation of rhythmic features of the native language, especially the stress templates derived from re...