Concrete symbols (e.g., "sun," "run") can be learned in the context of objects and actions, thereby grounding their meaning in the world. However, it is controversial whether a comparable avenue to semantic learning exists for abstract symbols (e.g., "democracy"). When we simulated the putative brain mechanisms of…

Novelty seeking has been found to affect creative performance, but its impact on the temporal dynamics of creative information processing remains unclear. Creative information is identified by two key indicators--novelty and appropriateness. To explore the effect of novelty seeking on the temporal processing of novelty and appropriateness, a…

This study investigated whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeting the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) can alter the thinking process and neural basis of creativity. Participants' performance on the compound remote associates (CRA) task was analyzed considering the semantic features of each trial after receiving different tDCS…

Background: Humans often use co-speech gestures to promote effective communication. Attention has been paid to the cortical areas engaged in the processing of co-speech gestures. Aims: To investigate the neural network underpinned in the processing of co-speech gestures and to observe whether there is a relationship between areas involved in…

Vygotsky chose consciousness as a foundation for his approach to psychology, although it took several iterations to arrive at his final conception of a dynamic, semantic system, which included not only thought and language, the subject of most of his work up to that point, but how we refract our experience of the world through personhood as well.…

In order to examine whether syntactic processing is a necessary prerequisite for semantic integration in Japanese, cortical activation was monitored while participants engaged in silent reading task. Congruous sentences (CON), semantic violation sentences (V-SEM), and syntactic violation sentences (V-SYN) were presented in the experiment. The…

While morphology constitutes a crucial component of the human language system, the neural bases of morphological processing in the human brain remains to be elucidated. The current study aims at exploring the extent to which the second language (L2) morphological processing would resemble or differ from that of their first language (L1) in adult…

This study used event-related potential (ERP) and retrieval practice effect paradigm to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the retrieval practice effect in a third language (L3) vocabulary learning. Thirty-five Chinese (First Language, L1)-English (Second Language, L2) bilinguals without prior knowledge of French (L3) studied 120…

Semantic priming in Turkish was examined in 36 right-handed healthy participants in a delayed lexical decision task via taxonomic relations using EEG. Prime--target relations included related- unrelated- and pseudo-words. Taxonomically related words at long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were shown to modulate N400 and late positive component…

Associative thinking plays a major role in creativity, as it involves the ability to link distant concepts. Yet, the neural mechanisms allowing to combine distant associates in creative thinking tasks remain poorly understood. We investigated the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns related to combining remote associations for creative…

This study examined how Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without a history of late talking (LT) process familiar monosyllabic words with unexpected lexical tones, focusing on both phonological and semantic violations. This study initially enrolled 64 Mandarin-speaking toddlers: 31 with a history of LT (mean age: 27.67 months) and 33 without…

Statistical learning (SL) plays a key role in literacy acquisition. Studies have increasingly revealed the influence of distributional statistical properties of words on visual word processing, including the effects of word frequency (lexical level) and mappings between orthography, phonology, and semantics (sub-lexical level). However, there has…

This study investigates in a joint action setting a well-established effect in speech production, cumulative semantic interference, an increase in naming latencies when naming a series of semantically related pictures. In a joint action setting, two task partners take turns naming pictures. Previous work in this setting has demonstrated that…

Word reading is critical for reading development. However, it has long been debated on the processes involved in real word and pseudoword decoding in developmental dyslexia (DD). We conducted a meta-analysis of 28 neuroimaging studies (519 participants with DD, 562 typical readers, age range 5-63 years, female 37.65%, 382 foci, 64 experimental…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…