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…

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…

Evidence from neuropsychological studies of individuals with brain damage post-stroke has supported the separation of working memory (WM) capacities for semantic (word meaning) and phonological (speech sound) information. These separate capacities have been shown to play different roles in supporting multiword language production, with semantic WM…

Previous research has shown a relationship between robust neural encoding of speech by the auditory brainstem and children's phonological abilities. Two areas of brainstem encoding this work has included are the ABR dimensions of consistency, or how similar responses are to a repeated stimulus, and differentiation, or the degree to which responses…

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: Background noise has been categorized as energetic masking due to spectrotemporal overlap of the target and masker on the auditory periphery or informational masking due to cognitive-level interference from relevant content such as speech. The effects of masking on cortical and sensory auditory processing can be objectively studied with…

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…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to quantify changes in speech intelligibility in two cohorts of people with Parkinson's disease (PD; those with and without deep brain stimulation [DBS]) across a broad range of self-selected speech rate alterations in: (1) read sentences; and (2) extemporaneous speech (monologues). Method: Four speaker groups…

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…

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…

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental…

Purpose: Recent findings in preschool children indicated novel adjective recall was enhanced when learned using repeated retrieval with contextual reinstatement (RRCR) compared to repeated study (RS). Recall was similar for learned pictures used during training and new (generalized) pictures with the same adjective features. The current study…

Purpose: Rapid maximum performance repetition tasks have increasingly demonstrated their utility as clinimetric markers supporting diagnosis and monitoring of bulbar disease in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). A recently developed protocol uses novel real-word repetitions instead of traditional nonword/syllable sequences in hopes of improving…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between nonverbal cognitive functions and language processing of people with aphasia (PWA) by taking a data-driven approach, as well as multiple cognitive components and multilevel linguistic perspectives. It is hypothesized that language performance is differentially associated with…