language

Simple questions on simple associations: regularity extraction in non-human primates

When human and non-human animals learn sequences, they manage to implicitly extract statistical regularities through associative learning mechanisms. In two experiments conducted with a non-human primate species (Guinea baboons, Papio papio), we …

Gender-inclusive language as a Rational Speech Act in Spanish

Amidst social changes in gendered language use, there is pushback from institutions such as the Spanish Royal Academy, which claims that the use of the generic masculine (e.g., bomberos ‘firemen’) in describing a mixed-gender group is equally …

Parallel word reading revealed by fixation-related brain potentials

During reading, the brain is confronted with many relevant objects at once. But does lexical processing occur for multiple words simultaneously? Cognitive science has yet to answer this prominent question. Recently it has been argued that the issue …

Error detection and correction among adults with aphasia in a naming task

Slide slam talk about picture naming deficits in adults with aphasia at SNL21.

Language production in aphasia

How is language impacted by brain damage?

Positional cueing, string location variability, and letter-in-string identification

In three Experiments we measured accuracy in identifying a single letter among a string of five briefly presented consonants followed by a post-mask. The position of the to-be-identified letter was either indicated by an ordinal cue (e.g., position …

The sentence superiority effect in the reading brain

A word is better recognized when presented in a grammatical sequence of words (e.g., within a sentence) than when presented in an ungrammatical sequence of words. This sentence superiority effect was recently demonstrated in a series of behavioral …

Neural representation of linguistic feature hierarchy reflects second-language proficiency

Acquiring a new language requires individuals to simultaneously and gradually learn linguistic attributes on multiple levels. Here, we investigated how this learning process changes the neural encoding of natural speech by assessing the encoding of …

Activation of syntax-sensitive structures in the reading brain

Presentation about MEG results at Psychonomics 2020.

Parafoveal-on-foveal repetition effects in sentence reading: A co-registered eye-tracking and electroencephalogram study

When reading, can the next word in the sentence (word n + 1) influence how you read the word you are currently looking at (word n)? Serial models of sentence reading state that this generally should not be the case, whereas parallel models predict …