This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Purpose: The current study aimed to investigate the behavioral and electrophysiological patterns of the sentence superiority effect (SSE) in sentence repetition in monolingual adults with typical language development. The ultimate goal of this study is to establish the foundation for future studies of SSE in sentence repetition in individuals with…

The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound's constituent lemmas in…

Purpose: Listeners shift their listening strategies between lower level acoustic information and higher level semantic information to prioritize maximum speech intelligibility in challenging listening conditions. Although increasing task demands via acoustic degradation modulates lexical-semantic processing, the neural mechanisms underlying…

While many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with language processing, non-linguistic semantic processing may be intact. We examined neural responses to an implicit semantic priming task by comparing N400 responses--an event-related potential related to semantic processing--in response to semantically related…

Face recognition is a fundamental function that requires holistic processing. Differences in face processing have been consistently identified in autistic children, but it is unknown whether these differences persist across the adult lifespan. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured holistic face processing with a…

Recent studies on written word production aim at studying how information is transmitted between central (linguistic) and peripheral (motor) processes. Neurocognitive models propose that the interface between both types of processes would rely on a frontal writing center (i.e. the GMFA or "Exner's area"). However there is still debate…

Individual differences in reading skill have frequently been related to variability in working memory capacity; however, it is unclear what drives this relation. The present study investigated two attentional control mechanisms that may contribute to this relation: proactive control and online filtering. To examine how the neural mechanisms of…

Looking at hearing loss through the WHO-ICD model for disability reveals that auditory interventions do not necessarily address all of the components of auditory disability. Auditory training has been proposed as a solution to address activity-level deficits. The purpose of this study was to examine structure- and activity-level changes as the…

This study explored appropriate speaking activities for speakers of different proficiency levels by measuring the changes in their brain blood flow with near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Fifty adult speakers and learners of English of various proficiency levels participated in the study by undertaking four types of task: a single-speaker picture…

Several studies have demonstrated that individual differences in processing speed fully mediate the association between age and intelligence, whereas the association between processing speed and intelligence cannot be explained by age differences. Because measures of processing speed reflect a plethora of cognitive and motivational processes, it…

With a rising aging population, it is important to develop behavioral tasks that assess and track cognitive decline, and to identify protective factors that promote healthy brain aging. Mnemonic discrimination tasks that rely on pattern separation mechanisms are a promising metric to detect subtle age-related memory impairments. Behavioral…

Purpose: Cognition and language difficulties are frequently reported in both children and adults with epilepsy. The majority of the existing research has focused on pediatric epilepsy, documenting impairments in learning, academics, and social-emotional functioning. In comparison, language deficits in younger and older adults with epilepsy have…

Understanding language requires the ability to compose the meanings of words into phrase and sentence meanings. Formal theories in semantics have framed the hypothesis that all instances of meaning composition, irrespective of the syntactic and semantic properties of the expressions involved, boil down to a unique formal operation, that is, the…

When athletes fail to perform at an expected level during an important moment, it is implied the athletes have experienced "choking" (sudden decline in performance) under pressure.". Researchers have reported that persistent left-hemispheric activation patterns occur when an athlete experiences considerable performance…