Vitoria Piai

Radboud University | RU · Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour

According to a prominent theory of language production, concepts activate multiple associated words in memory, which enter into competition for selection. However, only a few electrophysiological studies have identified brain responses reflecting competition. Here, we report a magnetoencephalography study in which the activation of competing words...

Two fundamental factors affecting the speed of spoken word production are lexical frequency and sentential constraint, but little is known about their timing and electrophysiological basis. In the present study, we investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) and oscillatory brain responses induced by these factors, using a task in which participan...

Two major components form the basis of spoken word production: the access of conceptual and lexical/phonological information in long-term memory, and motor preparation and execution of an articulatory program. Whereas the motor aspects of word production have been well characterized as reflected in alpha-beta desynchronization, the memory aspects h...

When making statistical comparisons, the temporal dimension of the EEG signal introduces problems. Guthrie and Buchwald (1991) proposed a formally correct statistical approach that deals with these problems: comparing waveforms by counting the number of successive significant univariate tests and then contrasting this number to a well-chosen critic...

When engaged in a conversation, speakers sometimes have to withhold a planned response, for example, before it is their turn to speak. In the present study, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) outside of a conversational setting, we investigate the oscillatory brain mechanisms involved in the process of withholding a planned verbal response until it...

Background Information about cognitive functioning is vital in the management of stroke, but the literature is mostly based on data from individuals older than 50 years of age who make up the majority of the stroke population. As cognitive functioning is subject to change due to ageing, it is unclear whether such cognitive impairment patterns from...

In context-driven picture naming studies, pictures are named faster following constraining (e.g., "The leaves fall from the”, picture: TREE) relative to nonconstraining (e.g., “The family played by the”, picture: TREE) sentences, indicating that word planning starts prior to target picture onset. Power decreases in the electroencephalogram in the a...

Lesion-symptom mapping (LSM) studies have revealed brain areas critical for naming, typically finding significant associations between damage to left temporal, inferior parietal and inferior fontal regions and impoverished naming performance. However, specific subregions found in the available literature vary. Hence, the aim of this study was to pe...

Clinical populations with basal ganglia pathologies may present with language production impairments, which are often described in combination with comprehension measures or attributed to motor, memory, or processing-speed problems. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we studied word production in four (vascular and non-vascular) pathologi...

Lexical access is commonly studied using bare picture naming, which is visually guided, but in real-life conversation, lexical access is more commonly contextually guided. In this fMRI study, we examined the underlying functional neuroanatomy of contextually and visually guided lexical access, and its consistency across sessions. We employed a cont...

Background and Objective: This study explored the feasibility and usefulness of a set of observer rated outcome measures for the joint verbal functional communication of people with dementia and their communication partners, in combination with a set of quantitative measures for the language ability of the person with dementia. We hypothesized that...

Speaking is not only about retrieving words and structuring them into sentences, but it also requires top-down control to plan and execute speech. In previous electrophysiological research with young-adult speakers, mid-frontal theta oscillations have been observed using a picture-word interference paradigm. With this paradigm, participants name pi...

Our understanding of post‐stroke language function is largely based on older age groups, who show increasing age‐related brain pathology and neural reorganisation. To illustrate language outcomes in the young‐adult brain, we present the case of J., a 23 y.o. woman with chronic aphasia from a left‐hemisphere stroke affecting the temporal lobe. Diffu...

Background For speakers with mild to moderate expressive aphasia the ultimate goal of aphasia therapy is to improve verbal functional communication, which may be assessed with the Amsterdam-Nijmegen Test for Everyday Language (ANELT; Blomert et al., 1995). The ANELT is based on a qualitative and transcription-less method of analysis: the scoring is...

Background. People with gliomas need specialized neurosurgical, neuro-oncological, psycho-oncological, and neuropsychological care. The role of language and cognitive recovery and rehabilitation in patients’ well-being and resumption of work is crucial, but there are no clear guidelines for the ideal timing and character of assessments and interven...

In the present study, a modified replication of Schuhmann et al. (2012), we used chronometric TMS to probe the time-course of three brain regions during a picture naming task. The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) and left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) were all separately stimulated in one of...

The biological foundation for the language-ready brain in the human lineage remains a debated subject. In humans, the arcuate fasciculus (AF) white matter and the posterior portions of the middle temporal gyrus are crucial for language. Compared with other primates, the human AF has been shown to dramatically extend into the posterior temporal lobe...

Since the second-half of the twentieth century, intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), including both electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), has provided an intimate view into the human brain. At the interface between fundamental research and the clinic, iEEG provides both high temporal resolution and high spatia...

Background People with gliomas need specialized neurosurgical, neuro-oncological, psycho-oncological, and neuropsychological care. The role of language and cognitive recovery and rehabilitation in patients’ well-being and resumption of work is crucial, but there are no clear guidelines for the ideal timing and character of assessments and intervent...

The literature on repetition priming in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is inconsistent, with some findings supporting spared priming while others do not. Several factors may explain these inconsistencies, including AD severity (e.g., dementia vs. Mild Cognitive Impairment; MCI) and priming paradigm-related characteristics. This systematic review and meta...

Alpha and beta power decreases have been associated with prediction in a variety of cognitive domains. Recent studies in sentence comprehension have also reported alpha and/or beta power decreases preceding contextually predictable words, albeit with remarkable spatiotemporal variability across reports. To contribute to the understanding of the mec...

Source reconstruction of magnetoencephalography (MEG) has been used to assess brain reorganization after brain damage, such as stroke. Lesions result in parts of the brain having an electrical conductivity that differs from the normal values. The effect this has on the forward solutions (i.e., the propagation of electric currents and magnetic field...

Introduction: People with gliomas need specialized neurosurgical, neuro-oncological, psycho-oncological, and neuropsychological care. The role of language and cognitive recovery and rehabilitation in patients’ well-being and resumption of work is crucial, but there are no clear guidelines for the ideal timing and character of assessments and interv...

Background With a growing, younger population of head and neck cancer survivors, attention to long-term side-effects of prior, often radiotherapeutic, treatment is warranted. Therefore, we studied the long-term cognitive effects in young adult patients irradiated for head and neck neoplasms (HNN). Methods Young to middle-aged adults with HNN (aged...

Objective While declarative learning is dependent on the hippocampus, procedural learning and repetition priming can operate independently from the hippocampus, making them potential targets for behavioral interventions that utilize non-declarative memory systems to compensate for the declarative learning deficits associated with hippocampal insult...

Decreases in oscillatory alpha- and beta- band power have been consistently found in spoken- word production. These have been linked to both motor prepa-ration and conceptual- lexical retrieval processes. However, the observed power decreases have a broad frequency range that spans two “classic” (sensorimotor) bands: alpha and beta. It remains uncl...

Purpose The three variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) differ in clinical presentation, underlying brain pathology, and clinical course, which stresses the need for early differentiation. However, brief cognitive tests that validly distinguish between all PPA variants are lacking. The Sydney Language Battery (SYDBAT) is a promising screeni...

Background Neurocognition and speech, relevant domains in head and neck cancer (HNC), may be affected pretreatment. However, the prevalence of pretreatment deficits and their possible concurrent predictors are poorly understood. Methods Using an HNC prospective cohort (Netherlands Quality of Life and Biomedical Cohort Study, N ≥ 444) with a cross-...

Idioms can have both a literal interpretation and a figurative interpretation (e.g., to “kick the bucket”). Which interpretation should be activated can be disambiguated by a preceding context (e.g., “The old man was sick. He kicked the bucket.”). We investigated whether the idiomatic and literal uses of idioms have different predictive properties...

Our understanding of post-stroke language recovery and underlying neuroplasticity is largely based on older age groups, who have increasing brain pathology and potentially more bilateral language functioning. We present the case of A., a 23 y.o. woman with chronic aphasia from a left-hemisphere stroke. Deterministic tractography indicated that A.’s...

Retrieval from semantic memory of conceptual and lexical information is essential for producing speech. It is unclear whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms of conceptual and lexical retrieval when spreading activation through semantic memory is initiated by verbal or nonverbal settings. The same twenty participants took part in two...

One of the challenges in speech perception is that listeners must deal with considerable segmental and suprasegmental variability in the acoustic signal due to differences between talkers. Most previous studies have focused on how listeners deal with segmental variability. In this EEG experiment, we investigated whether listeners track talker-speci...

Purpose This systematic review focuses on the effect of bilateral deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) on language function in Parkinson's disease (PD). It fills an important gap in recent reviews by considering other language tasks in addition to verbal fluency. Method We critically and systematically reviewed the literat...

While there is consensus regarding a two-step architecture involving lexical-conceptual and phonological word form levels of processing, accounts of how activation spreads between them (e.g. in a serial, cascaded, or interactive fashion) remain contentious. In addition, production models differ with respect to whether selection occurs at lexical or...

Objective: Large structural brain changes, such as chronic stroke lesions, alter the current pathways throughout the patients' head and therefore have to be taken into account when performing transcranial direct current stimulation simulations. Approach: We implement, test and distribute the first MATLAB pipeline that automatically generates rea...

Foreign language attrition (FLA) appears to be driven by interference from other, more recently-used languages (Mickan et al., 2020). Here we tracked these interference dynamics electrophysiologically to further our understanding of the underlying processes. Twenty-seven Dutch native speakers learned 70 new Italian words over two days. On a third d...

Word-production theories argue that during language production, a concept activates multiple lexical candidates in left temporal cortex, and the intended word is selected from this set. Evidence for theories on spoken-word production comes, for example, from the picture-word interference task, where participants name pictures superimposed by congru...

The presence of white matter lesions in patients with cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is among the main causes of cognitive decline. We investigated the relation between white matter hyperintensity (WMH) locations and executive and language abilities in 442 SVD patients without dementia with varying burden of WMH. We used Stroop Word Reading, S...

Three-dimensional (3D) technologies are being used for patient education. For glioma, a personalized 3D model can show the patient specific tumor and eloquent areas. We aim to compare the amount of information that is understood and can be recalled after a pre-operative consult using a 3D model (physically printed or in Augmented Reality (AR)) vers...

Objective Long-term outcomes of early implanted, young adult cochlear implant (CI) users remain variable. We measured auditory discrimination by means of event-related potentials in this population to examine whether variability at the level of cortical auditory processing helps to explain speech abilities. Methods Using an auditory oddball paradi...

In context-driven word production, picture naming is faster following constrained than neutral sentential contexts (e.g., “The farmer milked the… [picture]” vs. “The child drew a… [picture]”, followed by the picture of a cow), suggesting conceptual-lexical pre-activation of the target response. Power decreases in the alpha-beta oscillatory band (8–...

According to a prominent account of inflectional encoding (Pinker, 1999; Pinker & Ullman, 2002b), regular forms are encoded by a rule-governed combination of stems and affixes, whereas irregular forms are retrieved from memory while inhibiting rule application. Sahin, Pinker, and Halgren (2006) suggested that this concerns a domain-general mechanis...

Flexible language use requires coordinated functioning of two systems: conceptual representations and control. The interaction between the two systems can be observed when people are asked to match a word to a picture. Participants are slower and less accurate for related word-picture pairs (word: banana, picture: apple) relative to unrelated pairs...

Changes in brain organization following damage are commonly observed, but they remain poorly understood. These changes are often studied with imaging techniques that overlook the temporal granularity at which language processes occur. By contrast, electrophysiological measures provide excellent temporal resolution. To test the suitability of magnet...

Little is known about language impairment in brain tumor patients, especially in the presurgical phase. Impairment in this population may be missed because standardized tests fail to capture mild deficits. Additionally, neuroplasticity may also contribute to minimizing language impairments. We examined 14 presurgical patients with brain tumors in t...

Verbal fluency is commonly used to evaluate cognitive dysfunction in a variety of neuropsychiatric diseases, yet the neurobiology underlying performance of this task is incompletely understood. Electrocorticography (ECoG) provides a unique opportunity to investigate temporal activation patterns during cognitive tasks with high spatial and temporal...

Het is voor mensen met chronische Broca-afasie beter om te leren spreken in telegramstijl. In plaats van automatisch compelte zinnen te willen maken. SimpTell afasietherapie en TST kunnen hierbij helpen

In conversation, speech planning can overlap with listening to the interlocutor. It has been postulated that once there is enough information to formulate a response, planning is initiated and the response is maintained in working memory. Concurrently, the auditory input is monitored for the turn end such that responses can be launched promptly. In...

While much progress has been made in how brain organization supports language function, the language network's ability to adapt to immediate disturbances by means of reorganization remains unclear. The aim of this study was to examine acute reorganizational changes in brain activity related to conceptual and lexical retrieval in unimpaired language...

Flexible language use requires coordinated functioning of two systems: conceptual representations and control. The interaction between two systems can be observed when people are asked to match a word to a picture. Participants are slower and less accurate for related word-picture pairs (word: banana, picture: apple) relative to unrelated pairs (wo...

Language production involves the retrieval of information from memory, the planning of an articulatory programme, and executive control and self-monitoring. These processes can be related to the domains of long-term memory, motor control, and executive control. Here, we argue that studying neuronal oscillations provides an important opportunity to...

Picture-word interference task, conducted in presurgical brain tumour patients the day prior to the surgery

In context-driven word production, picture naming is faster following constrained than neutral sentential contexts (e.g., “The farmer milked the… [picture]” vs. “The child drew a… [picture]”, followed by the picture of a cow). In addition, power decreases in the alpha and beta oscillatory bands (8-25 Hz) are consistently found for constrained relat...

The cognitive processes and neural mechanisms supporting language production have received considerably less research attention than those involved in language comprehension. This situation is partly attributable to the methodological challenges involved in acquiring electrophysiological and neuroimaging data during overt speech. However, our knowl...

Language impairment is common after left-hemisphere damage. However, the involvement of perilesional and homologous contralateral regions in compensating for left-sided lesions remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to examine acute organizational changes in brain activity related to conceptual and lexical retrieval in unimpaired lang...

Human language is organized along two main processing streams connecting posterior temporal cortex and inferior frontal cortex in the left hemisphere, travelling dorsal and ventral to the Sylvian fissure. Some views propose a dorsal motor versus ventral semantic division. Others propose division by combinatorial mechanism, with the dorsal stream re...

Importance Head and neck cancer (HNC) and its treatment may negatively alter neurocognitive and speech functioning. However, the prevalence of neurocognitive impairment among patients with HNC before treatment is poorly studied, and the association between neurocognitive and speech functioning is unknown, which hampers good interpretability of the...

Intracranial electrophysiological recording in humans has been a long standing technique in neurosurgical treatment for epilepsy and have served as an important window in to how the human brain processes language. This chapter is aimed to introduce the reader to the technique, how it historically contributed to language mapping, its advantages and...

Recent psycholinguistic research suggests that language attrition (i.e. forgetting) is driven by interference and competition from other, more recently used languages (Levy et al, 2004; Mickan et al, 2018). Mickan et al (2018), for example, have shown that retrieval failure in a foreign language can be caused by the recent, repeated practice of tra...

Background Although language deficits after awake brain surgery are usually milder than post-stroke, postoperative language assessments are needed to identify these. Follow-up of brain tumor patients in certain geographical regions can be difficult when most patients are not local and come from afar. We developed a short telephone-based test for pr...

Language impairment is common after left-hemisphere stroke. However, the involvement of perilesional and homologous contralateral regions in compensating for left-sided lesions remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to transiently disrupt the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and examine acute spatial changes in brain activity related...

Previous studies examining context-driven word production have shown that picture naming is faster following constraining than non-constraining sentential contexts (e.g., “The farmer milked the… [picture]” vs. “The child drew a… [picture]”, followed by the picture of a cow). In addition, desynchronization in the alpha and beta oscillatory bands (8-...

Unraveling the causes and pathomechanisms of progressive disorders is essential for the development of therapeutic strategies. Here, we identified heterozygous pathogenic missense variants of LMX1A in two families of Dutch origin with progressive nonsyndromic hearing impairment (HI), using whole exome sequencing. One variant, c.721G > C (p.Val241Le...

The neural basis of reading and writing has been a source of inquiry as well as controversy in the neuroscience literature. Reading has been associated with both left posterior ventral temporal zones (termed the "visual word form area") as well as more dorsal zones, primarily in left parietal cortex. Writing has also been associated with left parie...

Objective: We report the case of a professional violin player who underwent an awake craniotomy to resect a tumor in the left supplementary motor area, an area involved in motor planning. Method: A careful pre- and intraoperative monitoring plan for music performance and complex motor function was established that could be used in combination wi...

Picture naming is a language task that involves multiple neural networks and is used to probe aphasia-induced language deficits. The pattern of neural activation seen in healthy individuals during picture naming is disrupted in individuals with aphasia, but the time-course of the disruption remains unclear. Specifically, it remains unclear which an...