Штыров Юрий Юрьевич

The Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) Task Induces Changes in Sensory Processing: ERP Evidence

2019 · ARTICLE · en

Numerous cognitive studies have demonstrated experience-induced plasticity in the primary sensory cortex, indicating that repeated decisions could modulate sensory processing. In this context, we investigated whether an auditory version of the monetary incentive delay (MID) task could change the neural processing of the incentive cues that code expected monetary outcomes. To study sensory plasticity, we presented the incentive cues as deviants during oddball sessions recorded before and after training in the two MID task sessions. We found that after 2 days of training in the MID task, incentive cues evoked a larger P3a (compared with the baseline condition), indicating there was an enhancement of the involuntary attention to the stimuli that predict rewards. At the individual level, the training-induced change of mismatch-related negativity was correlated with the amplitude of the feedback-related negativity (FRN) recorded during the first MID task session. Our results show that the MID task evokes plasticity changes in the auditory system associated with better passive discrimination of incentive cues and with enhanced involuntary attention switching towards these cues. Thus, the sensory processing of incentive cues is dynamically modulated by previous outcomes.

Intensive language-action therapy combined with anodal tDCS leads to verb generation improvements in non-fluent post-stroke aphasia

2019 · CHAPTER · en

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation as a Tool to Induce Language Recovery in Patients with Post-Stroke Aphasia

2019 · ARTICLE · en

In recent years, possible therapeutic effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) have been widely investigated in studies dealing with different types of neural pathologies. Initially, tDCS was applied for treatment of patients with motor stroke; later on, it was introduced into studies of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, and post-stroke aphasia. Recent reviews of tDCS application in patients with post-stroke aphasia did not provide coherent evidence on the tDCS efficiency. There were no uniform protocols of stimulation used, patients’ selection criteria were highly divergent, and the reports of treatment outcomes varied dramatically. In this review, we will focus on the reported heterogeneity of tDCS effects, trying to disentangle its putative underpinnings rooted in the diversity of lesion types, aphasia severity, and recovery stages. Given the current theoretical models suggesting the qualitatively different patterns of brain activity to accompany post-stroke aphasia recovery, a number of physiological factors should be taken into account to choose optimal tDCS parameters. With this in mind, we assess results of ten studies applying tDCS in post-stroke aphasia treatment, and, based on this analysis, suggest directions for further research in this rapidly developing field.

Hierarchical structure priming from mathematics to two- and three-site relative clause attachment

2019 · ARTICLE · en

A number of recent studies found evidence for shared structural representations across different cognitive domains such as mathematics, music, and language. For instance, Scheepers et al. (2011) showed that English speakers’ choices of relative clause (RC) attachments in partial sentences like The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church that … can be influenced by the structure of previously solved prime equations such as 80–(9 + 1) × 5 (making high RC-attachments more likely) versus 80–9 + 1 × 5 (making low RC-attachments more likely). Using the same sentence completion task, Experiment 1 of the present paper fully replicated this cross-domain structural priming effect in Russian, a morphologically rich language. More interestingly, Experiment 2 extended this finding to more complex three-site attachment configurations and showed that, relative to a structurally neutral baseline prime condition, N1-, N2-, and N3-attachments of RCs in Russian were equally susceptible to structural priming from mathematical equations such as 18+(7+(3 + 11)) × 2, 18 + 7+(3 + 11) × 2, and 18 + 7 + 3 + 11 × 2, respectively. The latter suggests that cross-domain structural priming from mathematics to language must rely on detailed, domain-general representations of hierarchical structure.

First Language Attrition: What It Is, What It Isn’t, And What It Can Be

2019 · PREPRINT · en

This review aims at clarifying the concept of first language attrition by tracing its limits, identifying its phenomenological and contextual constraints, discussing controversies associated with its definition, and suggesting potential future directions. We start by reviewing different definitions of attrition as well as associated inconsistencies. We then discuss the underlying mechanisms of first language attrition and review available evidence supporting different background hypotheses. Finally, we attempt to provide the groundwork to build a unified theoretical framework allowing for generalizable results. To this end, we suggest the deployment of a rigorous neuroscientific approach, in search of neural markers of first language attrition in different linguistic domains, putting forward hypothetical experimental ways to identify attrition's neural traces and formulating predictions for each of the proposed experimental paradigms.

RAPID AUTOMATIC SYNTACTIC PARSING AND INTEGRATION OF EXTRALINGUISTIC INFORMATION INTO MORPHOSYNTACTIC ANALYSIS: ERP EVIDENCE

2019 · CHAPTER · en

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT MATTER: DIFFERENCES IN THE INFORMATIVENESS-ACCURACY TRADE-OFF DEPENDING ON THE SITUATION

2019 · CHAPTER · en

Different answers to different audiences: effects of social context on the accuracy-informativeness trade-off

2018 · ARTICLE · en

Research on conversational exchanges shows that people attempt to optimise their responses’ relevance when they definitely know the correct answer (e.g., “What time is it?”). However, such certainty is often unavailable while speakers may still be under social pressure to provide an answer. We investigated how social context influences the informativeness level when answering questions under uncertainty. In three experiments, participants answered difficult general-knowledge questions placed in different social contexts (formal vs. informal). Participants generated their answers, then they were presented with a given context, and decided on the number of alternative responses they wanted to provide (single, with one alternative vs. plural, with several alternatives) and whether the answer should be reported or withheld (report option). Participants reported more answers in the informal context. In the formal context, single answers were preferred, and they were more frequently reported. We conclude that social context influences the level of informativeness in a conversation, affecting achievable accuracy. Our results also show the joint influence of the confidence and the social context on willingness to share information.

Motor (but not auditory) attention affects syntactic choice

2018 · ARTICLE · en

Understanding the determinants of syntactic choice in sentence production is a salient topic in psycholinguistics. Existing evidence suggests that syntactic choice results from an interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic factors, and a speaker’s attention to the elements of a described event represents one such factor. Whereas multimodal accounts of attention suggest a role for different modalities in this process, existing studies examining attention effects in syntactic choice are primarily based on visual cueing paradigms. Hence, it remains unclear whether attentional effects on syntactic choice are limited to the visual modality or are indeed more general. This issue is addressed by the current study. Native English participants viewed and described line drawings of simple transitive events while their attention was directed to the location of the agent or the patient of the depicted event by means of either an auditory (monaural beep) or a motor (unilateral key press) lateral cue. Our results show an effect of cue location, with participants producing more passive-voice descriptions in the patient-cued conditions. Crucially, this cue location effect emerged in the motor-cue but not (or substantially less so) in the auditory-cue condition, as confirmed by a reliable interaction between cue location (agent vs. patient) and cue type (auditory vs. motor). Our data suggest that attentional effects on the speaker’s syntactic choices are modality-specific and limited to the visual and motor, but not the auditory, domain.

Crosslinguistic interplay between semantics and phonology in late bilinguals: neurophysiological evidence

2018 в печати · ARTICLE · en

We investigated effects of crosslinguistic phonological and semantic similarity on the bilingual lexicon of late unbalanced bilinguals. Our masked priming paradigm used L1 (Russian) words as masked primes and L2 (English) words as targets. The primes and the targets either overlapped – phonologically, semantically, both phonologically and semantically – or did not overlap. Participants maintained the targets in memory and matched them against occasionally presented catch stimuli. N170 and N400 components of the word-elicited high-density ERPs were identified and analysed in signal and source space. Crosslinguistic semantic similarity shortened the reaction times. The semantics-related N400 amplitude difference correlated with individual L2 proficiency, while phonological similarity suppressed the N400 amplitude in the semantically unrelated condition. ERP source analysis suggests that these ERP dynamics are underpinned by cortical generators in the left IFG and the temporal pole. We conclude that the semantic and phonological interplay between L1 and L2 suggest an integrated bilingual lexicon.