Neuroscientists have debated for centuries whether some regions of the human brain are selectively engaged in specific high-level mental functions or whether, instead, cognition is implemented in multifunctional brain regions. For the critical case of language, conflicting answers arise from the neuropsychological literature, which features striking dissociations between deficits in linguistic ...

The processing of spoken language has been attributed to areas in the superior temporal lobe, where speech stimuli elicit the greatest activation. However, neurobiological and psycholinguistic models have long postulated that knowledge about the articulatory features of individual phonemes has an important role in their perception and in speech comprehension. To probe the possible involvement o...

PURPOSE Developmental dyslexia (DD) is commonly thought to arise from phonological impairments. However, an emerging perspective is that a more general procedural learning deficit, not specific to phonological processing, may underlie DD. The current study examined if individuals with DD are capable of extracting statistical regularities across sequences of passively experienced speech and nons...

Two experiments were conducted using both behavioral and Event-Related brain Potentials methods to examine conceptual priming effects for realistic auditory scenes and for auditory words. Prime and target sounds were presented in four stimulus combinations: Sound-Sound, Word-Sound, Sound-Word and Word-Word. Within each combination, targets were conceptually related to the prime, unrelated or am...

This article extends the validity of politeness theory ( P. Brown & S. Levinson, 1987 ) by investigating the nonlinguistic aspects of politeness in 2 cultures. Politeness strategies expressed through different channels of communication (silent video, speech, full-channel video and audio, and transcripts of speech ) were examined, and it was found that politeness strategies were communicated non...

The emergence of language was a defining moment in the evolution of modern humans. It was an innovation that changed radically the character of human society. Here, we provide an approach to language evolution based on evolutionary game theory. We explore the ways in which protolanguages can evolve in a nonlinguistic society and how specific signals can become associated with specific objects. ...

Are statistical methods useful in distinguishing written language from nonlinguistic symbol systems? Some recent articles (Rao et al. 2009a, Lee et al. 2010a) have claimed so. Both of these previous articles use measures based at least in part on bigram conditional entropy, and subsequent work by one of the authors (Rao) has used other entropic measures. In both cases the authors have argued th...

Speakers of a tone language, Thai, recognize pitch contrasts which are linguistically significant in their language better at the right ear in a dichotic listening task, but show no ear advantage for the same pitch contrasts occurring in a nonlinguistic context. American English speakers, divided into musically untrained and trained groups, show no ear advantage for those same pitch contrasts. ...

Recent research suggests that bilingual experience reconfigures linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive processes. We examined the relationship between linguistic competition resolution and nonlinguistic cognitive control in younger and older adults who were either bilingual or monolingual. Participants heard words in English and identified the referent among four pictures while eyemovements wer...