Neurology of the language
Simin Meykadeh; Werner Sommer; Seyed a,mir hossien Batouli
Volume 15, Issue 3 , December 2023, , Pages 51-29
Abstract
Bilingualism is associated with structural adaptations of subcortical regions taking part in controlling multiple languages. The thalamus is a paired gray matter structure located near the center of the brain, regulating the information transmission to cortical regions. In a recent fMRI study, the sensitivity ...
Read More
Bilingualism is associated with structural adaptations of subcortical regions taking part in controlling multiple languages. The thalamus is a paired gray matter structure located near the center of the brain, regulating the information transmission to cortical regions. In a recent fMRI study, the sensitivity of the thalamus to grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli has been shown at whole-brain level in the first language (L1) of bilinguals. This study explored the activation patterns of bilateral thalamus in both L1 and L2 using a ROI-based approach. To do so, the percentage of signal change for grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli in L1 and L2 was extracted as the intensity measure per participant. Thirty-six Turkish-Persian bilinguals (21 women) who had acquired their L2 at the age of 7 were selected. Based on the Bilingual Dominance Scale, there was no significant difference between the proficiency level of participants in L1 (Turkish) and L2 (Persian). Participants carried out an auditory grammaticality judgment task in an alternating language switching paradigm while fMRI images were acquired. ROI-based results confirmed the grammaticality effect only in L1 and the left thalamus. Considering that L1 was the dominant language in this study and gave rise to larger reversed language dominance effects, it was suggested that the engagement of the thalamus in L1 is not associated with syntactic processing but instead may exert an overall monitoring and control function for language-specific cortical activities.
Neurology of the language
Shabnam Besharati; Marjan Taheri Osgouei; Hooshang Dadgar; Nazanin Amirarjmandi
Volume 14, Issue 3 , December 2022, , Pages 97-118
Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder children have problems with social interaction, and in producing and comprehending language structures. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of telling social stories on the use of syntactic features of speech in children with autism.This was an Interventional, ...
Read More
Autism Spectrum Disorder children have problems with social interaction, and in producing and comprehending language structures. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of telling social stories on the use of syntactic features of speech in children with autism.This was an Interventional, quasi-experimental single group study with a pretest-posttest design. The study subjects were selected by convenience sampling method which included 10 Persian-speaking (girls and boys) aged 7 to 15 years old with autism spectrum disorder (level 1: requiring support) from all autism population in Qazvin Autism Center (Sina), in 2019. The data was gathered through the book series of exceptional children's illustrated stories and pictorial flash cards which included syntactic components. It’s notable that in this level and before presenting social stories, descriptive speech (pictorial description) and spontaneous speech (that is used in everyday conversations) were taken from each autistic children in form of 50 language samples based on (Brown,1973) and considering to (Tek& Naigles, 2014) for a total of 1 hour, according to their syntactic features. Social stories were designed and written based on Gray (1993). The children received an interventional program (telling social stories) in 10 individual sessions 30 to 45 minutes. This study was done during 3 months. Syntactic problems in these children’s speech were analyzed after their spontaneous and pictorial speech was recorded. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to analyze the data using SPSS, version 22. The results of analysis of Wilcoxon showed that telling social stories improved some syntactic features of children with autism (p˂0.05).Based on the present study findings, telling social stories improved some syntactic skills in the use of copula, compounds, intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, auxiliary verbs, the negative and simple present, continuous present and simple past.
Neurology of the language
Fahimeh Nasib Zarraby; Mahmoud BijanKhan; Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh; Ali Darzi
Volume 13, Issue 1 , December 2021, , Pages 1-26
Abstract
During the recent two decades, the subject of processing well-formed and ill-formed words have been exploited in the literature for different languages and different purposes. Lexical retrieval for auditory inputs has been proved to start as soon as 200 ms after the stimulus onset. However, the questions ...
Read More
During the recent two decades, the subject of processing well-formed and ill-formed words have been exploited in the literature for different languages and different purposes. Lexical retrieval for auditory inputs has been proved to start as soon as 200 ms after the stimulus onset. However, the questions of when and how well-formed and ill-formed words change their processing paths have yet to be answered for Farsi speakers. In this study, Farsi speakers did a lexical decision task while their brain activity was being recorded by a 64 channel EEG. The stimuli included Farsi words, pseudowords and nonwords, which were very similar in structure and were consistent in terms of fundamental frequency, intensity and duration. The ERP data showed an LPC for nonwords in frontal regions, which is known to be an indicator of violating phonotactic constraints. In addition, nonwords and pseudowords showed almost equal N400 effects in parietal regions, which can reflect a more effortful semantic integration compared with words. Finally, the peak latency analysis revealed an earlier N400 peak for pseudowords as opposed to words and nonwords. The regions where N400 and LPC were identified differed from some studies in the literature.
