Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing…

This dissertation investigates the neural bases and development of displacement, which is a language property that allows us to communicate about situations outside the "here-and-now." One way to displace from our immediate environment is to project ourselves into the here-and-now point of an alternative actuality. Another form of…

To reveal the formation process of speech processing with early hearing experiences, we tracked the development of functional connectivity in the auditory and language-related cortical areas of 84 (36 female) congenitally deafened toddlers using repeated functional near-infrared spectroscopy for up to 36 months post cochlear implantation (CI).…

One of the basic tenets of predictive theories of language processing is that of misprediction cost. Post-N400 positive event-related potential (ERP) components are suitable for studying misprediction cost but are not adequately described, especially in older adults, who show attenuated N400 ERP effects. We report a secondary analysis of a…

Purpose: We explore a new approach to the study of cognitive effort involved in listening to speech by measuring the brain activity in a listener in relation to the brain activity in a speaker. We hypothesize that the strength of this brain-to-brain synchrony (coupling) reflects the magnitude of cognitive effort involved in verbal communication…

Semantic priming in Turkish was examined in 36 right-handed healthy participants in a delayed lexical decision task via taxonomic relations using EEG. Prime--target relations included related- unrelated- and pseudo-words. Taxonomically related words at long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were shown to modulate N400 and late positive component…

The use of smart technologies in bilingual education opens up new opportunities for language learning. This study aims to examine the influence of bilingualism on neural connections and brain activity in the context of education based on smart technologies. To achieve this goal, an experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). An…

Research in verbal and visual narratives has often emphasized backward-looking inferences, where absent information is subsequently inferred. However, comics use conventions like star-shaped "action stars" where a reader "knows" events are undepicted "at that moment," rather than omitted entirely. We contrasted the…

Due in part to its complex nature, there is still much to uncover in the investigation of the neural processes that contribute to synchronization between speakers and listeners during communication in the context of social cognition, specifically between native and nonnative English speakers and listeners. This study used a novel method of…

Background: Phonological working memory is key to vocabulary acquisition, spoken word recognition, real-time language processing, and reading. Transcranial direct current stimulation, when coupled with behavioral training, has been shown to facilitate speech motor output processes, a key component of nonword repetition, the primary task used to…

The developmental course of neural tuning to visual letter strings is unclear. Here we tested 39 children longitudinally, at the beginning of grade 1 (6.45 ± 0.33 years old) and 1 year after, with fast periodic visual stimulation in electroencephalography to assess the evolution of selective neural responses to letter strings and their…

Research investigating the brain basis of language comprehension has associated the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) with sentence-level combinatorics. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we test the parsing strategy implemented in this brain region. The number of incremental parse steps from a predictive left-corner parsing strategy that is…

Mirror writing occurs in healthy children, in various pathologies and occasionally in healthy adults. There are only scant experimental data on the underlying brain processes. Eight, right-handed, healthy young adults were scanned (BOLD-fMRI) before and after practicing left-hand mirror-writing (lh-MW) over seven sessions. They wrote dictated…

Studies of semantic context effects in spoken word production have typically distinguished between categorical (or taxonomic) and associative relations. However, associates tend to confound semantic features or morphological representations, such as whole-part relations and compounds (e.g., BOAT-anchor, BEE-hive). Using a picture-word interference…

Semantic priming, a well-established technique to study conceptual representation, has thus far produced variable fMRI results, both regarding the type of priming effects and their correlation with brain activation. The aims of the current study were (a) to investigate two types of semantic relations--categorical versus associative--under…