Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing--the anticipation of upcoming percepts--as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental…

In today's globalized world, strong English listening skills have become more essential than ever before. Whether you're a language learner, a professional conducting business internationally, or a traveler exploring new cultures, the ability to understand spoken English is an asset. Fortunately, advancements in technology have opened new avenues…

I will propose a tentative framework of how words in two languages could be organized in the cerebral cortex based on neural assembly theory, according to which neurons that fire synchronously are bound into large-scale distributed functional units (assemblies), which represent a mental event as a whole ("gestalt"). For language this…

Speech scientists have long proposed that formant exaggeration in infant-directed speech plays an important role in language acquisition. This event-related potential (ERP) study investigated neural coding of formant-exaggerated speech in 6-12-month-old infants. Two synthetic /i/ vowels were presented in alternating blocks to test the effects of…

In this study we examined asymmetric semantic activation patterns as people listened to conversations and narratives that promoted causal inferences. Based on the hypothesis that understanding the unique features of conversational input may benefit from or require a modified pattern of conceptual activation during conversation, we compared…

Over the past years functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has substantially contributed to the understanding of language and its neural correlates. In contrast to other imaging techniques, fNIRS is well suited to study language function in healthy and psychiatric populations due to its cheap and easy application in a quiet and natural…

Eye gaze is an important communicative signal, both as mutual eye contact and as referential gaze to objects. To examine whether attention to speech versus nonspeech stimuli in 4- to 5-month-olds (n = 15) varies as a function of eye gaze, event-related brain potentials were used. Faces with mutual or averted gaze were presented in combination with…

Diffusion tensor imaging tractography is a structural magnetic resonance imaging technique allowing reconstruction and assessment of the integrity of three dimensional white matter tracts, as indexed by their fractional anisotropy. It is assumed that the left arcuate fasciculus plays a crucial role for reading development, as it connects two…

The mirror system provided a natural platform for the subsequent evolution of language. In nonhuman primates, the system provides for the understanding of biological action, and possibly for imitation, both prerequisites for language. I argue that language evolved from manual gestures, initially as a system of pantomime, but with gestures…

During speech communication, visual information may interact with the auditory system at various processing stages. Most noteworthy, recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) data provided first evidence for early and preattentive phonetic/phonological encoding of the visual data stream--prior to its fusion with auditory phonological features [Hertrich,…

The perception and the cerebral lateralization of spoken emotions were investigated in children and adolescents with high-functioning forms of autism (HFFA), and age-matched typically developing controls (TDC). A dichotic listening task using nonsense passages was used to investigate the recognition of four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and…

This literature review aims to interpret behavioural and electrophysiological studies addressing auditory processing in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Data have been organised according to the applied methodology (behavioural versus electrophysiological studies) and according to stimulus complexity (pure versus complex…

Despite the increased comprehension of the role of the basal ganglia in cognitive functions such as learning, attention, and executive functions, the exact implication of these structures in language remains unclear. A specific role of basal ganglia in language has been proposed. Nonetheless, a recent hypothesis gives the basal ganglia a…

Recent research in psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that co-speech gestures are semantically integrated with speech during language comprehension and development. The present study explored whether gestures also play a role in language learning in adults. In Experiment 1, we exposed adults to a brief training session presenting novel…

Although there is a strong link between the right hemisphere and understanding emotional prosody in speech, there are few data on how the right hemisphere is implicated for understanding the emotive "attitudes" of a speaker from prosody. This report describes two experiments which compared how listeners with and without focal right hemisphere…