ERP correlates of noun and verb processing in preschool-age children

Target detection in healthy 4-week old piglets from a passive two-tone auditory oddball paradigm

BACKGROUND

Passive auditory oddball tests are effort independent assessments that evaluate auditory processing and are suitable for paediatric patient groups. Our goal was to develop a two-tone auditory oddball test protocol and use this clinical assessment in an immature large animal model. Event-related potentials captured middle latency P1, N1, and P2 responses in 4-week old (N = 16, female) piglets using a custom piglet 32- electrode array on 3 non-consecutive days. The effect of target tone frequency (250 Hz and 4000 Hz) on middle latency responses were tested in a subset of animals.

RESULTS

Results show that infrequent target tone pulses elicit greater N1 amplitudes than frequent standard tone pulses. There was no effect of day. Electrodes covering the front of the head tend to elicit greater waveform responses. P2 amplitudes increased for higher frequency target tones (4000 Hz) than the regular 1000 Hz target tones (p < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

Two-tone auditory oddball tests produced consistent responses day-to-day. This clinical assessment was successful in the immature large animal model.

Early Verb-Action and Noun-Object Mapping Across Sensory Modalities: A Neuro-Developmental View

The authors provide an alternative to the traditional view that verbs are harder to learn than nouns by reviewing three lines of behavioral and neurophysiological evidence in word-mapping development across cultures. First, preverbal infants tune into word-action and word-object pairings using domain-general mechanisms. Second, while post-verbal infants from noun-friendly language environments experience verb-action mapping difficulty, infants from verb-friendly language environments do not. Third, children use language-specific conventions to learn all types of words, although still strongly influenced by their language environment. Additionally, the authors suggest neurophysiological research to advance these lines of evidence beyond traditional views of word learning.

Neural responses to category ambiguous words

Category ambiguous words (like hug and swing) have the potential to complicate both learning and processing of language. However, uses of such words may be disambiguated by acoustic differences that depend on the category of use. This article uses an event-related potential (ERP) technique to ask whether adult native speakers of English show neural sensitivity to those differences. The results indicate that noun and verb tokens of ambiguous words produce differences in the amplitude of the ERP response over left anterior sites as early as 100ms following stimulus onset and persisting for over 400ms. Nonsense words extracted from noun and verb contexts do not show such differences. These findings suggest that the acoustic differences between noun and verb tokens of ambiguous words are perceived and processed by adults and may be part of the lexical representation of the word.

Foreword to the special issue. "Before the N400: Early Latency Language ERPs"

As cognitive and neural models of language processing have developed, so have the ranks of language-related event-related potential (ERP) components. This special issue is intended to showcase current cutting-edge research on this topic, with an emphasis on those ERP components peaking earlier than the N400, and their implications for neurocognitive language models. Both reading and speech comprehension are addressed due to the close relationship between these two topics. As the contents of this special issue illustrate, the high temporal resolution of the ERP methodology makes it especially suitable for illuminating three fundamental questions about the language comprehension process: (1) How early is semantics? (2) In what order do these cognitive operations occur in? (3) To what extent are the cognitive operations serial and to what extent are they in parallel?