Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing…

One of the basic tenets of predictive theories of language processing is that of misprediction cost. Post-N400 positive event-related potential (ERP) components are suitable for studying misprediction cost but are not adequately described, especially in older adults, who show attenuated N400 ERP effects. We report a secondary analysis of a…

Second-language (L2) knowledge of English is an essential communication tool in the contemporary era of globalization in many research and business fields. Among the important tasks in English education is the measurement of student proficiency. While various tests purport to measure proficiency in learning English, repeated preparation and…

Purpose: We explore a new approach to the study of cognitive effort involved in listening to speech by measuring the brain activity in a listener in relation to the brain activity in a speaker. We hypothesize that the strength of this brain-to-brain synchrony (coupling) reflects the magnitude of cognitive effort involved in verbal communication…

The use of smart technologies in bilingual education opens up new opportunities for language learning. This study aims to examine the influence of bilingualism on neural connections and brain activity in the context of education based on smart technologies. To achieve this goal, an experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). An…

Due in part to its complex nature, there is still much to uncover in the investigation of the neural processes that contribute to synchronization between speakers and listeners during communication in the context of social cognition, specifically between native and nonnative English speakers and listeners. This study used a novel method of…

Most of the world's languages include multiple varieties and dialects. Individual ability to successfully alternate between these varieties can be a socio-cultural and academic necessity for many bilingual speakers, including children in the US who alternate between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE). This…

Research in verbal and visual narratives has often emphasized backward-looking inferences, where absent information is subsequently inferred. However, comics use conventions like star-shaped "action stars" where a reader "knows" events are undepicted "at that moment," rather than omitted entirely. We contrasted the…

One approach to understanding how the human cognitive system stores and operates with quantifiers such as "some," "many," and "all" is to investigate their interaction with the cognitive mechanisms for estimating and comparing quantities from perceptual input (i.e., nonsymbolic quantities). While a potential link…

We tested two accounts of the cognitive process underlying the N400 event-related potential component: one that it reflects meaning-based processing and one that it reflects the processing of specific words. The experimental design utilized separable Persian phrasal verbs, which form a strongly probabilistic, long-distance dependency, ideal for…

During language comprehension, the brain typically converts a stream of sensory input into meaningful mental representations. But not all of the information the brain needs or uses is physically available in the language signal it encounters: the brain often anticipates and processes some information before it becomes available, and it often also…

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…

In everyday life, humans rely on working memory (WM) processes to make sense of relationships between linguistic elements that are not linearly adjacent. For example, to understand the sentence "The dog that the cat chased is cute," we encode the referent "the dog" into WM, maintain and retrieve it after reading the verb…

Language processing is an extremely important, uniquely human cognitive ability. For well over a century, researchers have sought to understand how the human brain implements a system for instantaneously recognizing and generating complex linguistic patterns. Left perisylvian regions are considered to have certain computational abilities that are…

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…