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Phonological working memory is the capacity to briefly maintain and recall representations of sounds important for speech and language and is believed to be critical for language and reading acquisition. Whether phonological working memory is supported by fronto-parietal brain regions associated with short-term memory storage or perisylvian brain structures implicated in speech perception and production is unclear, perhaps due to variability in stimuli, task demands, and individuals. We used fMRI to assess neurophysiological responses while individuals performed two tasks with closely matched stimuli but divergent task demands—nonword repetition and nonword discrimination—at two levels of phonological working memory load. Using analyses designed to address intersubject variability, we found significant neural responses to the critical contrast of high vs. low phonological working memory load in both tasks in a set of regions closely resembling those involved in speech perception and production. Moreover, within those regions, the voxel-wise patterns of load-related activation were highly correlated between the two tasks. These results suggest that brain regions in the temporal and frontal lobes encapsulate the core neurocomputational components of phonological working memory; an architecture that becomes increasingly evident as neural responses are examined in successively finer-grained detail in individual participants.

This contribution provides new data on Italian first language acquisition and phonological development in preschool children. In total, 104 3- to 6;4-year-old typically developing Italian children were tested with two novel nonword tasks tackling the Italian consonantal system: one for repetition (NWR) and one for discrimination (NWD). NWR data were analyzed in terms of repetition accuracy, featural characteristics, and phonological processes, while NWD was analyzed according to signal detection theory (i.e., A-prime and d-prime) and in terms of discrimination accuracy. The results show the significant role of age on children’s repetition and discrimination abilities: as the children grow older, all the scores improve and the number of errors declines. No complete overlap is found between what children can produce and what they can discriminate, which is in line with what has already been documented in other languages. The findings contribute to the state of the art on the Italian language and provide new perspectives on some methodological issues specific to this language.

We used a novel nonword detection task to examine the lexical competition principle postulated in most models of spoken word recognition. To do so, in Experiment 1 we presented sequences of spoken words with half of the sequences containing a nonword, and the target nonword (i.e., press a response key whenever you detect a nonword in the sequence) could either be phonologically related (a phonological neighbor) or unrelated to the immediately preceding word. We reasoned that the reactivation of a phonological neighbor during target nonword processing should delay the moment at which a nonword decision can be made. Contrary to our hypothesis, participants were faster at detecting nonwords when they were preceded by a phonological neighbor compared with an unrelated word. In Experiment 2, an inhibitory effect of phonological relatedness on nonword decisions was observed in a classic priming situation using the same set of related and unrelated word-nonword pairs. We discuss the implications of these findings in regard to the main models of spoken word recognition, and conclude that our specific experimental set-up with phonological neighbors embedded in spoken sentences is more sensitive to cooperative interactions between co-activated sublexical representations than lexical competition between co-activated lexical representations, with the latter being modulated by whether or not the words compete for the same slot in time.

Background Scripts of different languages differ in the representation of symbols. Abugidas, used across India and other southeast Asian countries, originate from ancient Brahmi. Here, unlike in alphabetic scripts, each symbol (“akshara”) represents a syllable but can also be teased apart into individual phonemes. Despite their wide reach, how increasing cognitive impairment affects reading and spelling in abugidas remains unexplored. Method Sixty subjects (thirty each with Alzheimer's clinical syndrome‐dementia (ACS‐dem) and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI)), and 60 age‐ and education‐matched cognitively unimpaired (CU) subjects were asked to read a word list in Bengali, an abugida, and later spell the same words to dictation. The list included words containing the following: no consonant clusters; conjunct consonants where both original consonants retain their shape; one consonant in the conjunct loses its shape; both consonants in the conjunct lose their shape; plausible nonwords; irregular words. We focused on errors in reading or spelling conjunct consonants at the word level. Non‐parametric statistical analyses were performed. Result Mean age and education of subjects were 70 (1.35) years and 14.5 (1.25) years, respectively. Both aMCI and ACS‐dem subjects read non‐words significantly worse than CU subjects (p <0.05) but did not differ from each other. ACS‐dem subjects were worse in reading irregular words compared to the other groups. Spelling performance in all tested parameters were worse in aMCI and ACS‐dem compared to CU (p <0.001) but irregular word spelling in aMCI did not differ from CU. ACS‐dem subjects spelt significantly worse than aMCI subjects on words with no consonant clusters, words where both consonants in the conjunct retained their original shapes and non‐words (p <0.05 in all). However, the two groups performed similarly when even one consonant in the conjunct lost its original shape. Conclusion In ACS subjects who have Bengali as their first language, difficulty in spelling conjunct consonants within a word can be seen across all complexities of consonant cluster formation, even at the MCI stage. Reading is less severely affected and restricted to irregular words and non‐words. Our work should encourage more research on how cognitive impairment affects patterns of breakdown in other non‐alphabetic languages.

From sequences of speech sounds 1 , 2 or letters 3 , humans can extract rich and nuanced meaning through language. This capacity is essential for human communication. Yet, despite a growing understanding of the brain areas that support linguistic and semantic processing 4 – 12 , the derivation of linguistic meaning in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action potentials remains largely unknown. Here we recorded from single cells in the left language-dominant prefrontal cortex as participants listened to semantically diverse sentences and naturalistic stories. By tracking their activities during natural speech processing, we discover a fine-scale cortical representation of semantic information by individual neurons. These neurons responded selectively to specific word meanings and reliably distinguished words from nonwords. Moreover, rather than responding to the words as fixed memory representations, their activities were highly dynamic, reflecting the words’ meanings based on their specific sentence contexts and independent of their phonetic form. Collectively, we show how these cell ensembles accurately predicted the broad semantic categories of the words as they were heard in real time during speech and how they tracked the sentences in which they appeared. We also show how they encoded the hierarchical structure of these meaning representations and how these representations mapped onto the cell population. Together, these findings reveal a finely detailed cortical organization of semantic representations at the neuron scale in humans and begin to illuminate the cellular-level processing of meaning during language comprehension. By tracking the activity of individual neurons using microarrays and Neuropixels probes, a study examines the representation of linguistic meaning, at the single-cell level, during natural speech processing in humans.

Purpose: A wealth of studies has assessed the diagnostic value of the nonword repetition task (NWRT) for the detection of developmental language disorder (DLD) in the clinical context of speech and language therapy, first in monolingual children and, more recently, in bilingual children. This review article reviews this literature systematically and conducts a meta-analysis on the discriminative power of this type of task in both populations. Method: Three databases were used to select articles based on keyword combinations, which were then reviewed for relevance and methodological rigor based on internationally recognized checklists. From an initial pool of 488 studies, 46 studies were selected for inclusion in the systematic review, and 35 of these studies could be included in a meta-analysis. Results: Most of the articles report significant discrimination between children with and without DLD in both monolingual and bilingual contexts, and the meta-analysis shows a large mean effect size. Three factors (age of the child, linguistic status, and language specificity of the task) yielded enough quantitative data for further exploration. Subgroups analysis shows variance in effect sizes, but none of the three factors, neither their interactions, were significant in a metaregression. We discuss how other, less explored factors (e.g., nature of the stimuli, scoring methods) could also contribute to differences in results. Sensitivity and specificity analyses reported in 33 studies confirmed that, despite possible effect size differences, the diagnostic accuracy of the NWRT is generally near thresholds considered to be discriminatory. It generally increases when it is combined with other tasks (e.g., parental questionnaire). Conclusions: This review indicates that the NWRT is a promising diagnostic tool to identify children with DLD in monolingual and bilingual contexts with a large mean effect size. However, it seems necessary to choose the precise NWRT materials based on the children's language background and to complement the assessment sessions with other tools in order to ensure diagnosis and to obtain complete language profile of the child.

We examined the cross‐lagged relations between reading and spelling in five alphabetic orthographies varying in consistency (English, French, Dutch, German, and Greek). Nine hundred and forty‐one children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and were tested on word and pseudoword reading fluency and on spelling to dictation. Results indicated that the relations across languages were unidirectional: Earlier reading predicted subsequent spelling. However, we also found significant differences between languages in the strength of the effects of earlier reading on subsequent spelling. These findings suggest that, once children master decoding, the observed differences between languages are not related to the direction of the effects but to the strength of the effects from reading to spelling. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Sound symbolism is a phenomenon with broad relevance to the study of language and mind, but there has been a disconnect between its investigations in linguistics and psychology. This study tests the sound-symbolic potential of ideophones—words described as iconic—in an experimental task that improves over prior work in terms of ecological validity and experimental control. We presented 203 ideophones from five languages to eighty-two Dutch listeners in a binary-choice task, in four versions: original recording, full diphone resynthesis, segments-only resynthesis, and prosody-only resynthesis. Listeners guessed the meaning of all four versions above chance, confirming the iconicity of ideophones and showing the viability of speech synthesis as a way of controlling for segmental and suprasegmental properties in experimental studies of sound symbolism. The success rate was more modest than prior studies using pseudowords like bouba/kiki, implying that assumptions based on such words cannot simply be transferred to natural languages. Prosody and segments together drive the effect: neither alone is sufficient, showing that segments and prosody work together as cues supporting iconic interpretations. The findings cast doubt on attempts to ascribe iconic meanings to segments alone and support a view of ideophones as words that combine arbitrariness and iconicity. We discuss the implications for theory and methods in the empirical study of sound symbolism and iconicity.

Recent research on item-method directed forgetting demonstrates that forget instructions not only decrease recognition for targets, but also decrease false recognition for foils from the same semantic categories as targets instructed to be forgotten. According to the selective rehearsal account of directed forgetting, this finding suggests that remember instructions may engage elaborative rehearsal of the category-level information of items. In contrast to this explanation, Reid and Jamieson ( Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 76 (2), 75–86, 2022 ) proposed that the differential rates of false recognition may emerge at retrieval when foils from “remember” and “forget” categories are compared to traces in memory. Using MINERVA S, an instance model of memory based on MINERVA 2 that incorporates structured semantic representations, Reid and Jamieson successfully simulated lower false recognition for foils from “forget” categories without assuming rehearsal of category-level information. In this study, we extend the directed forgetting paradigm to categories consisting of orthographically related nonwords. Presumably participants would have difficulty rehearsing category-level information for these items because they would have no pre-experimental knowledge of these categories. To simulate the findings in MINERVA S, we imported structured orthographic representations rather than semantic representations. The model not only predicted differential rates of false recognition for foils from “remember” and “forget” categories, but also predicted higher rates of false recognition overall than what was observed for semantic categories. The empirical data closely matched these predictions. These data suggest that differential rates of false recognition due to remember and forget instructions emerge at retrieval when participants compare recognition probes to traces stored in memory.

Previous work has demonstrated that New Zealanders who do not speak Māori but are regularly exposed to the language develop implicit knowledge of it. The core of this knowledge, it has been argued, is the ‘proto-lexicon’—a set of stored word-forms, without associated meaning, which yields subsequent Māori phonotactic and morphological knowledge. Previous research shows that having a proto-lexicon gives learners a head start in learning Māori word meanings in formal education. We investigate experimentally whether the proto-lexicon confers an advantage for attaching meanings to words. In Experiment 1, non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders were tested on their ability to identify meanings of Māori words in a forced-choice definition task, and they did this relatively well. Then, words with low accuracy were selected for Experiment 2, where non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders and non-New Zealanders were asked to learn meanings for Māori words and nonwords. New Zealanders performed better, indicating that familiarity with Māori word shapes confers an advantage. However, they showed no greater advantage for real words over nonwords. If these words are definitely in the proto-lexicon, then this would suggest that knowledge of individual word-forms does not, in fact, confer an advantage. In Experiment 3, we therefore explore whether the words in Experiment 2 are actually robustly in the participants’ proto-lexicon, by running a word identification task with the same participants. These words were not robustly distinguished from nonwords. By selecting words for their lack of semantic knowledge, we also inadvertently selected words that do not appear to be in the proto-lexicon. Together, our results indicate that different levels of semantic knowledge exist for different words, even when we consider only words that cannot confidently be said to be in a full lexicon. The results suggest that the claim of previous studies that the proto-lexicon is ‘without semantics’ may be oversimplified.