A harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) shows extensive respiratory control in sound production.

Unlabelled: The duration of animal vocalizations varies between and within species. Which mammals can learn to control this duration? Such respiratory production learning is a scarcely studied subcomponent of vocal learning. Here, we test the hypothesis that harbor seals () are capable of respiratory production learning by testing whether a harbor seal can be trained to i) actively control its vocalization’s duration in two directions (short and long), and ii) exceed the pre-experimental vocalization’s duration (min = 0.

Developing language in a developing body: genetic associations of infant gross motor behaviour and self-care/symbolic actions with emerging language abilities.

Background: Mastering gross motor abilities in early infancy and culturally defined actions (e.g. self-care routines) in late infancy can initiate cascading developmental changes that affect language learning.

Spatial and social cognition jointly determine multimodal demonstrative reference: Experimental evidence from Turkish and Spanish.

All languages in the world have demonstrative terms such as 'this' and 'that' in English, which have traditionally been treated as spatial words. Here we aim to provide experimental evidence that demonstrative choice is jointly determined by spatial considerations (e.g.

Humans can find rhythm in randomly timed sounds.

Humans are keen pattern-seekers and take advantage of regularities present in their environment. In the temporal domain, we may call these patterns rhythms, but what is rhythm? Definitions vary, but all presuppose a categorical distinction between rhythm and randomness. Here, we challenge this view and show that two types of random sound sequences-classically considered arrhythmic by experimenters-differ in the amount of regularity humans reconstruct from them.

De novo protein-coding gene variants in developmental stuttering.

Developmental stuttering is a common childhood condition characterized by disfluencies in speech, such as blocks, prolongations, and repetitions. While most children who stutter do so only transiently, there are some for whom stuttering persists into adulthood. Rare-variant screens in families including multiple relatives with persistent stuttering have so far identified six genes carrying putative pathogenic variants hypothesized to act in a monogenic fashion.

The time-course of phonological encoding: insights from time-resolved MVPA.

To produce a word, speakers need to decide which concept to express, select an appropriate item from the mental lexicon and spell out its phonological form. The temporal dynamics of these processes remain a subject of debate. We investigated the time course of lexical access in picture naming with electroencephalography (EEG).

Selective Attention in Early Word Learning: An Eye-Tracking Study on Viewing Naturalistic Egocentric Scenes.

To learn a word from an everyday context, infants need to be able to link the heard word with the correct object perceived. A prevailing view of the early learning environment is that infants' world is bombarded with objects and words. Therefore, it is difficult to find the named object from many possible candidates.

Left perisylvian rhythms encode prosody and syntax during delayed sentence repetition.

The human brain must add information to the acoustic speech signal in order to understand language. Many accounts propose that the prosodic structure of utterances (including their syllabic rhythm and speech melody), in combination with stored lexical knowledge, cue and interact with higher order abstract semantic and syntactic information. While cortical rhythms, particularly in the delta and theta band, synchronize to quasi-rhythmic low-level acoustic speech features, it remains unclear how the human brain encodes abstract speech properties in neural rhythms in the absence of an acoustic signal, i.

Multivariate genome-wide association analysis of dyslexia and quantitative reading skill improves gene discovery.

The ability to read is an important life skill and a major route to education. Dyslexia, characterized by difficulties with accurate/ fluent word reading, and poor spelling is influenced by genetic variation, with a twin study heritability estimate of 0.4-0.

Distinct genetic underpinnings of inter-individual differences in the sensorimotor-association axis of cortical organisation.

In humans, many neurobiological features of the cortex-including gene expression patterns, microstructure, and functional connectivity-vary systematically along a sensorimotor-association (S-A) axis of brain organisation. To date, it is still poorly understood whether inter-individual differences in patterns of S-A axis capture these robust spatial relationships across neurobiological properties observed at the group-level. Here, we examine inter-individual differences in structural and functional properties of the S-A axis, namely cortical microstructure, geodesic distances, and the functional gradient, in a sample of young adults from the Human Connectome Project (N = 992, including 328 twins).

Disentangling multivariate relationships between cognition, language and social traits: structures of G, E, and .

Background: Cognitive, language, and social abilities are complex, heritable and intertwined traits shaping children's development and later mental health. To better understand cross-trait interrelationships, we model here the structures of shared genomic and shared non-genomic/residual (i.e.

Seeking Meaning: Incorporating Linguistic Information in Cross-Situational Verb Learning.

Learning the meaning of a verb is challenging because learners need to resolve two types of ambiguity: (1) word-referent mapping-finding the correct referent event of a verb, and (2) word-meaning mapping-inferring the correct meaning of the verb from the referent event (e.g., whether the meaning of an action word is TURNING or TWISTING).

EXPRESS: Repetition leads to short-term reduction to word frequency and name agreement effects: Evidence from a Dutch two-session picture naming experiment.

Word frequency (WF) and name agreement (NA) affect a word's accessibility during speech production. Speakers are faster to name pictures with high-frequency (e.g.

Using Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT) to Probe the Neural Interaction Between Representations of Speech Planning and Comprehension.

Interlocutors often use the semantics of comprehended speech to inform the semantics of planned speech. Do representations of the comprehension and planning stimuli interact? In this EEG study, we used rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) to better understand the attentional distribution to representations of comprehension and speech planning stimuli, and how they interact in the neural signal. To do this, we leveraged the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm with delayed naming, where participants simultaneously comprehend auditory distractors (auditory [f1]; tagged at 54 Hz) while preparing to name related or unrelated target pictures (visual [f2]; tagged at 68 Hz).

How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan, Australia).

Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influence sentence production, psycholinguistic studies of diverse languages are comparatively rare. Here, we present data from a sentence planning and production study in Pitjantjatjara, an Australian Indigenous language that has highly flexible word order.

Reduced temporal organization of narrative recall in adults with moderate-severe traumatic brain injury.

Narrative discourse impairments are well documented in individuals with moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Studies of narrative discourse (i.e.

Effects of subliminal emotional facial expressions on language comprehension as revealed by event-related brain potentials.

Emotional facial expressions often take place during communicative face-to-face interactions. Yet little is known as to whether natural spoken processing can be modulated by emotional expressions during online processing. Furthermore, the functional independence of syntactic processing from other cognitive and affective processes remains a long-standing debate in the literature.

Constructing language: a framework for explaining acquisition.

Explaining how children build a language system is a central goal of research in language acquisition, with broad implications for language evolution, adult language processing, and artificial intelligence (AI). Here, we propose a constructivist framework for future theory-building in language acquisition. We describe four components of constructivism, drawing on wide-ranging evidence to argue that theories based on these components will be well suited to explaining developmental change.

The Association Between Frequency of Social Media Use, Wellbeing, and Depressive Symptoms: Disentangling Genetic and Environmental Factors.

Meta-analyses report small to moderate effect sizes or inconsistent associations (usually around r = -0.10) between wellbeing (WB) and social media use (SMU) and between anxious-depressive symptoms (ADS) and SMU (also around r = 0.10).

Multiparty Communication: A New Direction in Characterizing the Impact of Traumatic Brain Injury on Social Communication.

Purpose: The purpose of this viewpoint is to advocate for increased study of common ground and audience design processes in multiparty communication in traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Method: Building on discussions at the 2024 International Cognitive-Communication Disorders Conference, we review common ground and audience design processes in dyadic and multiparty communication. We discuss how the diffuse profiles of neural and cognitive deficits place individuals with TBI at increased risk for keeping track of who knows what in group settings and using that knowledge to flexibly adapt their communication behaviors.

Preschool musicality is associated with school-age communication abilities through genes related to rhythmicity.

Early-life abilities involved in perceiving, producing and engaging with music (musicality) may shape later (social) communication and language abilities. Here, we investigate phenotypic and genetic relationships linking musicality and communication abilities by studying information from preschool and school-aged children of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N = 4169-6737 per measure, age 0.5-17 years).

Accelerando and crescendo in African penguin ecstatic display songs.

Many species produce rhythmic sound sequences. Some purportedly speed up their vocalizations throughout a display, reminiscent of-but not necessarily equivalent to-accelerando in human music. This phenomenon has been frequently reported but rarely quantified, which limits our ability to understand its mechanism, function, and evolution.

What's Surprising About Surprisal.

Unlabelled: In the computational and experimental psycholinguistic literature, the mechanisms behind syntactic structure building (e.g., combining words into phrases and sentences) are the subject of considerable debate.