1/f neural noise and electrophysiological indices of contextual prediction in aging.

Prediction of upcoming words during reading has been suggested to enhance the efficiency of discourse processing. Emerging models have postulated that predictive mechanisms require synchronous firing of neural networks, but to date, this relationship has been investigated primarily through oscillatory activity in narrow frequency bands. A recently-developed measure proposed to reflect broadband neural activity - and thereby synchronous neuronal firing - is 1/f neural noise extracted from EEG spectral power. Previous research has indicated that this measure of 1/f neural noise changes across the lifespan, and these neural changes predict age-related behavioral impairments in visual working memory. Using a cross-sectional sample of young and older adults, we examined age-related changes in 1/f neural noise and whether this measure predicted ERP correlates of successful lexical prediction during discourse comprehension. 1/f neural noise across two different language tasks revealed high within-subject correlations, indicating that this measure can provide a reliable index of individualized patterns of neural activation. In addition to age, 1/f noise was a significant predictor of N400 effects of successful lexical prediction; however, noise did not mediate age-related declines in other ERP effects. We discuss broader implications of these findings for theories of predictive processing, as well as potential applications of 1/f noise across research populations.

Understanding ambiguous words in sentence contexts: electrophysiological evidence for delayed contextual selection in Broca's aphasia.

This study investigates whether spoken sentence comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasics results from their inability to access the subordinate meaning of ambiguous words (e.g. bank), or alternatively, from a delay in their selection of the contextually appropriate meaning. Twelve Broca's aphasics and twelve elderly controls were presented with lexical ambiguities in three context conditions, each followed by the same target words. In the concordant condition, the sentence context biased the meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous word that was related to the target. In the discordant condition, the sentence context biased the meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous word that was incompatible with the target. In the unrelated condition, the sentence-final word was unambiguous and unrelated to the target. The task of the subjects was to listen attentively to the stimuli. The activational status of the ambiguous sentence-final words was inferred from the amplitude of the N400 to the targets at two inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) (100 ms and 1250 ms). At the short ISI, the Broca's aphasics showed clear evidence of activation of the subordinate meaning. In contrast to elderly controls, however, the Broca's aphasics were not successful at selecting the appropriate meaning of the ambiguity in the short ISI version of the experiment. But at the long ISI, in accordance with the performance of the elderly controls, the patients were able to successfully complete the contextual selection process. These results indicate that Broca's aphasics are delayed in the process of contextual selection. It is argued that this finding of delayed selection is compatible with the idea that comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasia result from a delay in the process of integrating lexical information.

Lexical-semantic event-related potential effects in patients with left hemisphere lesions and aphasia, and patients with right hemisphere lesions without aphasia.

Lexical-semantic processing impairments in aphasic patients with left hemisphere lesions and non-aphasic patients with right hemisphere lesions were investigated by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while subjects listened to auditorily presented word pairs. The word pairs consisted of unrelated words, or words that were related in meaning. The related words were either associatively related, e.g. "bread-butter', or were members of the same semantic category without being associatively related, e.g. "church-villa'. The latter relationships are assumed to be more distant than the former ones. The most relevant ERP component in this study is the N400. In elderly control subjects, the N400 amplitude to associatively and semantically related word targets is reduced relative to the N400 elicited by unrelated targets. Compared with this normal N400 effect, the different patient groups showed the following pattern of results: aphasic patients with only minor comprehension deficits (high comprehenders) showed N400 effects of a similar size as the control subjects. In aphasic patients with more severe comprehension deficits (low comprehenders) a clear reduction in the N400 effects was obtained, both for the associative and the semantic word pairs. The patients with right hemisphere lesions showed a normal N400 effect for the associatively related targets, but a trend towards a reduced N400 effect for the semantically related word pairs. A dissociation between the N400 results in the word pair paradigm and P300 results in a classical tone oddball task indicated that the N400 effects were not an aspecific consequence of brain lesion, but were related to the nature of the language comprehension impairment. The conclusions drawn from the ERP results are that comprehension deficits in the aphasic patients are due to an impairment in integrating individual word meanings into an overall meaning representation. Right hemisphere patients are more specifically impaired in the processing of semantically more distant relationships, suggesting the involvement of the right hemisphere in semantically coarse coding.