Response Modality and the Stroop Task.

A long-standing debate in the Stroop literature concerns whether the way we respond to the color dimension determines how we process the irrelevant dimension, or whether word processing is purely stimulus driven. Models and findings in the Stroop literature differ in their predictions about how response modes (e.g., responding manually vs. vocally) affect how the irrelevant word is processed (i.e., phonologically, semantically) and the interference and facilitation that results, with some predicting qualitatively different Stroop effects. Here, we investigated whether response mode modifies phonological facilitation produced by the irrelevant word. In a fully within-subject design, we sought evidence for the use of a serial print-to-speech prelexical phonological processing route when using manual and vocal responses by testing for facilitating effects of phonological overlap between the irrelevant word and the color name at the initial and final phoneme positions. The results showed phoneme overlap leads to facilitation with both response modes, a result that is inconsistent with qualitative differences between the two response modes.

What Influences Language Impairment in Bilingual Aphasia? A Meta-Analytic Review.

Patterns of language impairment in multilingual speakers with post-stroke aphasia are diverse: in some cases the language deficits are parallel, that is, all languages are impaired relatively equally, whereas in other cases deficits are differential, that is, one language is more impaired than the other(s). This diversity stems from the intricate structure of the multilingual language system, which is shaped by a complex interplay of influencing factors, such as age of language acquisition, frequency of language use, premorbid proficiency, and linguistic similarity between one's languages. Previous theoretical reviews and empirical studies shed some light on these factors, however no clear answers have been provided. The goals of this review were to provide a timely update on the increasing number of reported cases in the last decade and to offer a systematic analysis of the potentially influencing variables. One hundred and thirty cases from 65 studies were included in the present systematic review and effect sizes from 119 cases were used in the meta-analysis. Our analysis revealed better performance in L1 compared to L2 in the whole sample of bilingual speakers with post-stroke aphasia. However, the magnitude of this difference was influenced by whether L2 was learned early in childhood or later: those who learned L2 before 7 years of age showed comparable performance in both of their languages contrary to the bilinguals who learned L2 after 7 years of age and showed better performance in L1 compared to L2. These robust findings were moderated mildly by premorbid proficiency and frequency of use. Finally, linguistic similarity did not appear to influence the magnitude of the difference in performance between L1 and L2. Our findings from the early bilingual subgroup were in line with the previous reviews which included mostly balanced early bilinguals performing comparably in both languages. Our findings from the late bilingual subgroup stressed the primacy of L1 and the importance of age of L2 learning. In addition, the evidence from the present review provides support for theories emphasizing the role of premorbid proficiency and language use in language impairment patterns in bilingual aphasia.

ACC Sulcal Patterns and Their Modulation on Cognitive Control Efficiency Across Lifespan: A Neuroanatomical Study on Bilinguals and Monolinguals.

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a key structure implicated in the regulation of cognitive control (CC). Previous studies suggest that variability in the ACC sulcal pattern-a neurodevelopmental marker unaffected by maturation or plasticity after birth-is associated with intersubject differences in CC performance. Here, we investigated whether bilingual experience modulates the effects of ACC sulcal variability on CC performance across the lifespan. Using structural MRI, we first established the distribution of the ACC sulcal patterns in a large sample of healthy individuals (N = 270) differing on gender and ethnicity. Second, a participants' subsample (N = 157) was selected to test whether CC performance was differentially affected by ACC sulcation in bilinguals and monolinguals across age. A prevalent leftward asymmetry unaffected by gender or ethnicity was reported. Sulcal variability in the ACC predicted CC performance differently in bilinguals and monolinguals, with a reversed pattern of structure-function relationship: asymmetrical versus symmetrical ACC sulcal patterns were associated with a performance advantage in monolinguals and a performance detriment to bilinguals and vice versa. Altogether, these findings provide novel insights on the dynamic interplay between early neurodevelopment, environmental background and cognitive efficiency across age.

The Russian version of the Oxford Cognitive Screen: Validation study on stroke survivors.

OBJECTIVE: The Oxford Cognitive Screen (OCS) is a screening tool for the assessment of poststroke deficits in attention, memory, praxis, language, and number processing. The goal of the present study was to develop a Russian version of the OCS (Rus-OCS) via translation of the original battery, its cultural and linguistic adaptations, and reporting preliminary findings on its psychometric properties. METHOD: All parts of OCS were translated by native Russian-speaking neuropsychologists. Russian-speaking stroke patients (N = 205) were assessed with the Rus-OCS. Their performance was compared with performance of 60 healthy Russian-speaking adults aged between the ages of 18 and 91 years. The performance of 15 stroke patients and 42 healthy adults were assessed with a parallel version within 7 days of first testing. Convergent validity of the Rus-OCS was established via correlations with comparable tasks. Performance of three stroke groups with different lesion lateralization (right, left, and bilateral) was compared on language and visual attention subtasks. Preliminary normative data based on 5th to 95th percentile were also reported. RESULTS: Measures of internal consistency and test-retest reliability ranged from acceptable to very good and estimates of convergent validity ranged from moderate to high. Sensitivity and specificity was found to range from .56 to 1 and from .73 to 1, respectively. Significant differences in performance between stroke and healthy groups on all subtasks confirmed the discriminative power of the Rus-OCS was good. CONCLUSIONS: Rus-OCS is a promising cognitive screening instrument for Russian-speaking patients. However, further validation is needed. Constraints of socioeconomic differences between Russian speakers in the wider population should be considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Dorsolateral Prefrontal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Modulates Language Processing but Does Not Facilitate Overt Second Language Word Production.

Word retrieval in bilingual speakers partly depends on executive control systems in the left prefrontal cortex - including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We tested the hypothesis that DLPFC modulates word production of words specifically in a second language (L2) by measuring the effects of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (anodal-tDCS) over the DLPFC on picture naming and word translation and on event-related potentials (ERPs) and their sources. Twenty-six bilingual participants with "unbalanced" proficiency in two languages were given 20 min of 1.5 mA anodal or sham tDCS (double-blind stimulation design, counterbalanced stimulation order, 1-week intersession delay). The participants then performed the following tasks: verbal and non-verbal fluency during anodal-tDCS stimulation and first and second language (L1 and L2) picture naming and translation [forward (L1 → L2) and backward (L2 → L1)] immediately after stimulation. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded during picture naming and translation. On the behavioral level, anodal-tDCS had an influence on non-verbal fluency but neither on verbal fluency, nor on picture naming and translation. EEG measures revealed significant interactions between Language and Stimulation on picture naming around 380 ms post-stimulus onset and Translation direction and Stimulation on translation around 530 ms post-stimulus onset. These effects suggest that L2 phonological retrieval and phoneme encoding are spatially and temporally segregated in the brain. We conclude that anodal-tDCS stimulation has an effect at a neural level on phonological processes and, critically, that DLPFC-mediated activation is a constraint on language production specifically in L2.

Neuroplasticity across the lifespan and aging effects in bilinguals and monolinguals.

Evidence that bilingualism protects against age-related neurocognitive decline is mixed. One relatively consistent finding is that bilingual seniors have greater grey matter volume (GMV) in regions implicated in executive control (EC) and language processing. Here, we compare the neuroplastic effects of bilingual experience on the EC network of young and aging populations directly, and for the first time we evaluate the extent to which such effects may predict executive control performance across age. We used GMV as an index of neural reserve and response time (RT) performance on the Flanker task for measuring EC efficiency. In the presence of age-related widespread GM deterioration, bilinguals had greater GMV than monolinguals in key regions of interest across age. Moreover, whereas EC performance in monolingual seniors was strictly related to GMV, this was not observed for bilingual seniors or younger participants in either group. Interactions between expected effects-of-age and language group on the relationships between GMV and RT suggested that bilingualism affords differential benefits across the lifespan. In younger participants, greater GMV offered no behavioral benefit on EC performance, whilst it did for seniors. It thus appears that age-related cognitive decline following GMV loss in the EC network is delayed in bilinguals.

Bilingualism and healthy aging: Aging effects and neural maintenance.

Speaking more than one language is associated with neurocognitive benefits in seniors (Alladi et al. 2013). Few studies however have tested this hypothesis directly by comparing bilingual seniors who vary in chronological age. We report a Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) study showing cumulative effects of age on grey matter volume (GMV) in brain structures that are involved in cognitive control in bilingual seniors and found no differences in RT or accuracy between bilingual and monolingual seniors on a behavioral test of cognitive control called the Attentional Network Task (ANT), and no differences in GMV for selected ROIs between groups. However, chronological age predicted the size of interference and conflict effects for monolingual speakers only. We also observed a more widespread pattern of bilateral aging-effcts in brain regions that are classically associated with aging in monolingual speakers compared to bilingual speakers. Notably, GMV in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the level of daily exposure to a second language (L2) independently predict performance on the ANT in bilingual speakers. We conclude that regular (daily) bilingual experience mitigates the typical effects of aging on cognitive control at the behavioral and the neural level.

Aphasia in Persian: Implications for cognitive models of lexical processing.

Current models of oral reading assume that different routes (sublexical, lexical, and semantic) mediate oral reading performance and reliance on different routes during oral reading depends on the characteristics of print to sound mappings. Studies of single cases of acquired dyslexia in aphasia have contributed to the development of such models by revealing patterns of double dissociation in object naming and oral reading skill that follow brain damage in Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages. Print to sound mapping in Persian varies in transparency because orthography to phonology translation depends uniquely on the presence or absence of vowel letters in print. Here a hypothesis is tested that oral reading in Persian requires a semantic reading pathway that is independent of a direct non-semantic reading pathway, by investigating whether Persian speakers with aphasia show selective impairments to object naming and reading aloud. A sample of 21 Persian speakers with aphasia ranging in age from 18 to 77 (mean = 53, SD = 16.9) was asked to name a same set of 200 objects and to read aloud the printed names of these objects in different sessions. As an additional measure of sublexical reading, patients were asked to read aloud 30 non-word stimuli. Results showed that oral reading is significantly more preserved than object naming in Persian speakers with aphasia. However, more preserved object naming than oral reading was also observed in some cases. There was a moderate positive correlation between picture naming and oral reading success (p < .05). Mixed-effects logistic regression revealed that word frequency, age of acquisition and imageability predict success across both tasks and there is an interaction between these variables and orthographic transparency in oral reading. Furthermore, opaque words were read less accurately than transparent words. The results reveal different patterns of acquired dyslexia in some cases that closely resemble phonological, deep, and surface dyslexia in other scripts - reported here in Persian for the first time.

Bilingualism provides a neural reserve for aging populations.

It has been postulated that bilingualism may act as a cognitive reserve and recent behavioral evidence shows that bilinguals are diagnosed with dementia about 4-5 years later compared to monolinguals. In the present study, we investigated the neural basis of these putative protective effects in a group of aging bilinguals as compared to a matched monolingual control group. For this purpose, participants completed the Erikson Flanker task and their performance was correlated to gray matter (GM) volume in order to investigate if cognitive performance predicts GM volume specifically in areas affected by aging. We performed an ex-Gaussian analysis on the resulting RTs and report that aging bilinguals performed better than aging monolinguals on the Flanker task. Bilingualism was overall associated with increased GM in the ACC. Likewise, aging induced effects upon performance correlated only for monolinguals to decreased gray matter in the DLPFC. Taken together, these neural regions might underlie the benefits of bilingualism and act as a neural reserve that protects against the cognitive decline that occurs during aging.

Bilingualism protects anterior temporal lobe integrity in aging.

Cerebral gray-matter volume (GMV) decreases in normal aging but the extent of the decrease may be experience-dependent. Bilingualism may be one protective factor and in this article we examine its potential protective effect on GMV in a region that shows strong age-related decreases-the left anterior temporal pole. This region is held to function as a conceptual hub and might be expected to be a target of plastic changes in bilingual speakers because of the requirement for these speakers to store and differentiate lexical concepts in 2 languages to guide speech production and comprehension processes. In a whole brain comparison of bilingual speakers (n = 23) and monolingual speakers (n = 23), regressing out confounding factors, we find more extensive age-related decreases in GMV in the monolingual brain and significantly increased GMV in left temporal pole for bilingual speakers. Consistent with a specific neuroprotective effect of bilingualism, region of interest analyses showed a significant positive correlation between naming performance in the second language and GMV in this region. The effect appears to be bilateral though because there was a nonsignificantly different effect of naming performance on GMV in the right temporal pole. Our data emphasize the vulnerability of the temporal pole to normal aging and the value of bilingualism as both a general and specific protective factor to GMV decreases in healthy aging.

Emotional valence and arousal affect reading in an interactive way: neuroimaging evidence for an approach-withdrawal framework.

A growing body of literature shows that the emotional content of verbal material affects reading, wherein emotional words are given processing priority compared to neutral words. Human emotions can be conceptualised within a two-dimensional model comprised of emotional valence and arousal (intensity). These variables are at least in part distinct, but recent studies report interactive effects during implicit emotion processing and relate these to stimulus-evoked approach-withdrawal tendencies. The aim of the present study was to explore how valence and arousal interact at the neural level, during implicit emotion word processing. The emotional attributes of written word stimuli were orthogonally manipulated based on behavioural ratings from a corpus of emotion words. Stimuli were presented during an fMRI experiment while 16 participants performed a lexical decision task, which did not require explicit evaluation of a word's emotional content. Results showed greater neural activation within right insular cortex in response to stimuli evoking conflicting approach-withdrawal tendencies (i.e., positive high-arousal and negative low-arousal words) compared to stimuli evoking congruent approach vs. withdrawal tendencies (i.e., positive low-arousal and negative high-arousal words). Further, a significant cluster of activation in the left extra-striate cortex was found in response to emotional than neutral words, suggesting enhanced perceptual processing of emotionally salient stimuli. These findings support an interactive two-dimensional approach to the study of emotion word recognition and suggest that the integration of valence and arousal dimensions recruits a brain region associated with interoception, emotional awareness and sympathetic functions.

Riddle appreciation and reading comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children.

PURPOSE: Inference-making skills are necessary for reading comprehension. Training in riddle appreciation is an effective way to improve reading comprehension among English-speaking children. However, it is not clear whether these methods generalize to other writing systems. The goal of the present study was to investigate the relationship between inference-making skills, as measured by riddle appreciation ability, and reading comprehension performance in typically developing Cantonese-speaking children in the 4th grade. METHOD: Forty Cantonese-speaking children between the ages of 9;1 (years;months) and 11;0 were given tests of riddle appreciation ability and reading comprehension. Chinese character reading and auditory comprehension abilities were also assessed using tests that had been standardized in Hong Kong. RESULTS: Regression analyses revealed that riddle appreciation ability explained a significant amount of variance in reading comprehension after variance due to character reading skills and auditory comprehension skills were first considered. Orthographic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic riddles were also significantly correlated with reading comprehension. CONCLUSION: Riddle appreciation ability predicts reading comprehension in Cantonese-speaking 4th-grade children. Therefore, training Cantonese speakers in riddle appreciation should improve their reading comprehension.

Predictors of timed picture naming in Persian.

In this study, we report normative data by native Persian speakers for concept familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, image agreement, name agreement, and visual complexity, as well as values for word frequency, word length, and naming latency for 200 of the colored Snodgrass and Vanderwart (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 6:174-215, 1980) pictures created by Rossion and Pourtois (Perception 33:217-236, 2004). Using multiple regression analysis, we found independent effects of name agreement, image agreement, word frequency, and AoA on picture naming by native Persian speakers from Iran. We concluded that the psycholinguistic properties identified in studies of picture naming in many other languages also predict timed picture naming in Persian. Normative data for the ratings and picture-naming latencies for the 200 Persian object nouns are provided as an Excel file in the Supplemental materials.

Effects of valence and arousal on written word recognition: time course and ERP correlates.

Models of affect assume a two-dimensional framework, composed of emotional valence and arousal. Although neuroimaging evidence supports a neuro-functional distinction of their effects during single word processing, electrophysiological studies have not yet compared the effects of arousal within the same category of valence (positive and negative). Here we investigate effects of arousal and valence on written lexical decision. Amplitude differences between emotion and neutral words were seen in the early posterior negativity (EPN), the late positive complex and in a sustained slow positivity. In addition, trends towards interactive effects of valence and arousal were observed in the EPN, showing larger amplitude for positive, high-arousal and negative, low-arousal words. The results provide initial evidence for interactions between arousal and valence during processing of positive words and highlight the importance of both variables in studies of emotional stimulus processing.

Pupil size changes during recognition memory.

Pupils dilate to a greater extent when participants view old compared to new items during recognition memory tests. We report three experiments investigating the cognitive processes associated with this pupil old/new effect. Using a remember/know procedure, we found that the effect occurred for old items that were both remembered and known at recognition, although it was attenuated for known compared to remembered items. In Experiment 2, the pupil old/new effect was observed when items were presented acoustically, suggesting the effect does not depend on low-level visual processes. The pupil old/new effect was also greater for items encoded under deep compared to shallow orienting instructions, suggesting it may reflect the strength of the underlying memory trace. Finally, the pupil old/new effect was also found when participants falsely recognized items as being old. We propose that pupils respond to a strength-of-memory signal and suggest that pupillometry provides a useful technique for exploring the underlying mechanisms of recognition memory.

A case study of the effect of age-of-acquisition on reading aloud in Chinese dyslexia.

This paper reports the influence of age-of-acquisition (AoA) effects on the oral reading accuracy of a Chinese brain-injured individual, FWL, who has anomia and dyslexia resulting from moderate-to-severe semantic deficits. We found an effect of the phonological consistency of a character and tentative evidence for an interaction between AoA and consistency. These observations converge on previous reports of an effect of AoA on reading and spelling of alphabetic scripts and in the reading of Japanese Kanji, a non-alphabetic script. An effect of AoA is also the expected outcome of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis which assumes that the locus of the AoA effect resides in the connection between levels of representations in the lexical processing system. We consider alternative interpretations of the AoA effect being located at the representations themselves, including phonological output and the semantic system. We propose that future studies of dyslexic individuals who rely primarily on the semantic reading route for reading in Chinese may reveal effects of semantic variables, including those associated with the semantic radical in phonetic compound characters.

Bilingual deep dysphasia.

We report B.R.B., a bilingual Turkish-English speaker with deep dysphasia. B.R.B. shows the typical pattern of semantic errors in repetition with effects of lexicality and imageability on performance in both languages. The question we asked is whether language type (Turkish or English) or language status--that is, first acquired (L1) or second acquired (L2)--has a greater impact on performance. Results showed that repetition in L1 (Turkish) was better than that in L2 (English). We also observed effects of language status on oral reading, writing to dictation, and naming (spoken and written) with greater impairment to repetition than other tasks in both languages. An additional finding was that spoken-word translation in both directions was worse than written-word translation, and word class had an effect on translation from L1 to L2. We argue that interactive activation models of deep dysphasia could explain deep dysphasia in bilingual speakers and interactions between task and language, if the weighted connections that support language processing in L2 are assumed to be weaker, thus causing rapid phonological decay to have more impact on task performance in L2. Implications of the results for models of bilingual language processing are also considered.