Cross-Cultural Sex/Gender Differences in Produced Word Content Before the Age of 3 Years.

Does sex/gender matter for language acquisition? Small advantages in vocabulary size for females are well documented. In this study, however, we found that children's early vocabulary composition was a significantly better predictor of sex/gender than their vocabulary size. We conducted classification analysis on word-production data from children (12-36 months old, n = 39,553) acquiring 26 different languages. Children's sex/gender was classified at above-chance levels in 22 of 26 languages. Classification accuracy was significantly higher than for models based on vocabulary size and increased as a function of sample size. Boys produced more words for vehicles and outdoor scenes, whereas girls produced more words for clothing and body parts. Classification accuracy also increased as a function of age and peaked at 30 months, reaching accuracy levels observed in studies of adult word use. These differences in vocabulary are indicative of differences in the lifeworld of children and may themselves cause further differences in development.

Sex, anxiety and the interplay with physiological variables of stress: a clinical study of patients about to undergo bronchoscopy.

Women often report more anxiety than men, but there are divergent results regarding the putative correlation between physiological variables, such as cortisol, blood pressure and heart rate and the experienced emotional states. The aim of the present study was to evaluate sex differences in anxiety, and the relation to serum cortisol, blood pressure and heart rate. We used data from two pooled studies with participants from the same population (N = 405) facing a real-life stressor, bronchoscopy, as part of examination for lung cancer. At admission, blood pressure and heart rate were recorded, and a blood sample was taken for analysis of serum cortisol. Participants then completed Spielberger's State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Patients had elevated anxiety measured with STAI state compared to relevant age and sex stratified norm scores. Women had significantly higher STAI state score than men (M = 44.9, SD = 13.2 vs M = 36.2, SD = 10.7; t(403) = 7.25, p < 0.001). Mean serum cortisol, systolic blood pressure and heart rate showed no significant sex difference. There was a weak but significant correlation between state anxiety and heart rate and cortisol but none between blood pressure and anxiety. This study adds an important confirmation of sex differences in anxiety in a real-life setting, where women report significantly more anxiety than men do. However, the physiological markers only show a weak link with experienced anxiety, and exhibit no sex differences.

Sex differences in longevity are relative, not independent.

I ask three questions related to the claims made within the staying alive theory (SAT): Is survival more fitness-enhancing for females than for males? Does the historical record on sex differences in mortality support the SAT? Is it possible to talk about "independent selective pressures on both male and female traits" when all we have are sex/gender comparisons?

Valence, form, and content of self-talk predict sport type and level of performance.

In this paper, we aimed to test whether we could predict sport type (badminton or running) and marathon proficiency from the valence, form, and content of the athletes' self-reported inner speech. Additionally, we wanted to assess the difference between self-talk during high intensity and low intensity exercise. The present study corroborated existing research - we were able to predict both sport type in Study 1 and intensity level as well as marathon proficiency in Study 2 from questionnaire data using machine learning models. In Study 1, we found that badminton players engage more in worry and anxiety-control while runners are more prone to task disengagement. Interestingly, it seemed in Study 2 that the more participants engaged in condensed, positive, and repetitive self-talk when not pushing themselves, the slower their fastest marathons and half marathons were. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and make suggestions for future research.

Language beyond the language system: Dorsal visuospatial pathways support processing of demonstratives and spatial language during naturalistic fast fMRI.

Spatial demonstratives are powerful linguistic tools used to establish joint attention. Identifying the meaning of semantically underspecified expressions like "this one" hinges on the integration of linguistic and visual cues, attentional orienting and pragmatic inference. This synergy between language and extralinguistic cognition is pivotal to language comprehension in general, but especially prominent in demonstratives. In this study, we aimed to elucidate which neural architectures enable this intertwining between language and extralinguistic cognition using a naturalistic fMRI paradigm. In our experiment, 28 participants listened to a specially crafted dialogical narrative with a controlled number of spatial demonstratives. A fast multiband-EPI acquisition sequence (TR = 388 m s) combined with finite impulse response (FIR) modelling of the hemodynamic response was used to capture signal changes at word-level resolution. We found that spatial demonstratives bilaterally engage a network of parietal areas, including the supramarginal gyrus, the angular gyrus, and precuneus, implicated in information integration and visuospatial processing. Moreover, demonstratives recruit frontal regions, including the right FEF, implicated in attentional orienting and reference frames shifts. Finally, using multivariate similarity analyses, we provide evidence for a general involvement of the dorsal ("where") stream in the processing of spatial expressions, as opposed to ventral pathways encoding object semantics. Overall, our results suggest that language processing relies on a distributed architecture, recruiting neural resources for perception, attention, and extra-linguistic aspects of cognition in a dynamic and context-dependent fashion.

Psychological functioning, brain morphology, and functional neuroimaging in Klinefelter syndrome.

Klinefelter syndrome (KS; 47,XXY) impacts neurodevelopment and is associated with an increased risk of cognitive, psychological and social impairments, although significant heterogeneity in the neurodevelopmental profile is seen. KS is characterized by a specific cognitive profile with predominantly verbal deficits, preserved function in non-verbal and visuo-spatial domains, executive dysfunction and social impairments, and by an increased vulnerability toward psychiatric disorders. The neurobiological underpinnings of the observed neuropsychological profile have not been established. A distinct pattern of both global and regional brain volumetric differences has been demonstrated in addition to preliminary findings of functional brain alterations related to auditory, motor, language and social processing. When present, the combination of cognitive, psychological and social challenges has the potential to negatively affect quality of life. This review intends to provide information and insight to the neuropsychological outcome and brain correlates of KS. Possible clinical intervention and future directions of research will be discussed.

Grammar, Gender and Demonstratives in Lateralized Imagery for Sentences.

We investigated biases in the organization of imagery by asking participants to make stick-figure drawings of sentences containing a man, a woman and a transitive action (e.g. she kisses that guy). Previous findings show that prominent features of meaning and sentence structure are placed to the left in drawings, according to reading direction (e.g. Stroustrup and Wallentin in Lang Cogn 10(2):193-207, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2017.19 ). Five hundred thirty participants listened to sentences in Danish and made eight drawings each. We replicated three findings: (1) that the first mentioned element is placed to the left more often, (2) that the agent in the sentence is placed to the left, and (3) that the grammatical subject is placed to the left of the object. We further tested hypotheses related to deixis and gender stereotypes. By adding demonstratives (e.g. Danish equivalents of this and that), that have been found to indicate attentional prominence, we tested the hypothesis that this is also translated into a left-ward bias in the produced drawings. We were unable to find support for this hypothesis. Analyses of gender biases tested the presence of a gender identification and a gender stereotype effect. According to the identification hypothesis, participants should attribute prominence to their own gender and draw it to the left, and according to the stereotype effect participants should be more prone to draw the male character to the left, regardless of own gender. We were not able to find significant support for either of the two gender effects. The combination of replications and null-findings suggest that the left-ward bias in the drawing experiment might be narrowly tied to left-to-right distribution in written language and less to overall prominence. No effect of handedness was observed.

Context predicts word order processing in Broca's region.

The function of the left inferior frontal gyrus (L-IFG) is highly disputed. A number of language processing studies have linked the region to the processing of syntactical structure. Still, there is little agreement when it comes to defining why linguistic structures differ in their effects on the L-IFG. In a number of languages, the processing of object-initial sentences affects the L-IFG more than the processing of subject-initial ones, but frequency and distribution differences may act as confounding variables. Syntactically complex structures (like the object-initial construction in Danish) are often less frequent and only viable in certain contexts. With this confound in mind, the L-IFG activation may be sensitive to other variables than a syntax manipulation on its own. The present fMRI study investigates the effect of a pragmatically appropriate context on the processing of subject-initial and object-initial clauses with the IFG as our ROI. We find that Danish object-initial clauses yield a higher BOLD response in L-IFG, but we also find an interaction between appropriateness of context and word order. This interaction overlaps with traditional syntax areas in the IFG. For object-initial clauses, the effect of an appropriate context is bigger than for subject-initial clauses. This result is supported by an acceptability study that shows that, given appropriate contexts, object-initial clauses are considered more appropriate than subject-initial clauses. The increased L-IFG activation for processing object-initial clauses without a supportive context may be interpreted as reflecting either reinterpretation or the recipients' failure to correctly predict word order from contextual cues.

Capturing the musical brain with Lasso: Dynamic decoding of musical features from fMRI data.

We investigated neural correlates of musical feature processing with a decoding approach. To this end, we used a method that combines computational extraction of musical features with regularized multiple regression (LASSO). Optimal model parameters were determined by maximizing the decoding accuracy using a leave-one-out cross-validation scheme. The method was applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data that were collected using a naturalistic paradigm, in which participants' brain responses were recorded while they were continuously listening to pieces of real music. The dependent variables comprised musical feature time series that were computationally extracted from the stimulus. We expected timbral features to obtain a higher prediction accuracy than rhythmic and tonal ones. Moreover, we expected the areas significantly contributing to the decoding models to be consistent with areas of significant activation observed in previous research using a naturalistic paradigm with fMRI. Of the six musical features considered, five could be significantly predicted for the majority of participants. The areas significantly contributing to the optimal decoding models agreed to a great extent with results obtained in previous studies. In particular, areas in the superior temporal gyrus, Heschl's gyrus, Rolandic operculum, and cerebellum contributed to the decoding of timbral features. For the decoding of the rhythmic feature, we found the bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right Heschl's gyrus, and hippocampus to contribute most. The tonal feature, however, could not be significantly predicted, suggesting a higher inter-participant variability in its neural processing. A subsequent classification experiment revealed that segments of the stimulus could be classified from the fMRI data with significant accuracy. The present findings provide compelling evidence for the involvement of the auditory cortex, the cerebellum and the hippocampus in the processing of musical features during continuous listening to music.

Lateralized task shift effects in Broca's and Wernicke's regions and in visual word form area are selective for conceptual content and reflect trial history.

We investigated whether lateralized BOLD-fMRI activations in Broca's region, Wernicke's region and visual word form area (VWFA) reflect task shift costs and to which extent these effects are specific to language related task shifts. We employed a linguistic one-back memory paradigm where participants (n=58) on each trial responded to whether a given word was the same as the previous word. In concordance with previous findings we found that conceptual shifts (CS), i.e. new words, elicited a strongly left-lateralized response in all three regions compared to repeat words. Words were sometimes presented through the visual modality (read) and sometimes through the auditory modality (spoken). This enabled the study of perceptual modality shifts (PS) relative to trials that stayed in the same modality as the previous trials. Again, we found a strongly left-lateralized effect in all regions. This was independent of whether the word was a CS or not, suggesting that linguistic translation across modalities taxes the same system as CS. Response shifts (RS), on the other hand, when shifting from one response (e.g. reporting a repeat word) to another (e.g. reporting a new word) did not yield an observable left lateralized response in any of the regions, suggesting that the lateralized task shift cost effects in these regions are not shared by all types of task shifts. Lateralization for individual tasks was found to be correlated across brain regions, but not across tasks, suggesting that lateralization may not be a unitary phenomenon, but vary across participants according to task demands. Both response time and lateralization were found to reflect the demands not only of the current trial but also of the previous trial, illustrating the context dependency of even simple cognitive tasks.

From Vivaldi to Beatles and back: predicting lateralized brain responses to music.

We aimed at predicting the temporal evolution of brain activity in naturalistic music listening conditions using a combination of neuroimaging and acoustic feature extraction. Participants were scanned using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while listening to two musical medleys, including pieces from various genres with and without lyrics. Regression models were built to predict voxel-wise brain activations which were then tested in a cross-validation setting in order to evaluate the robustness of the hence created models across stimuli. To further assess the generalizability of the models we extended the cross-validation procedure by including another dataset, which comprised continuous fMRI responses of musically trained participants to an Argentinean tango. Individual models for the two musical medleys revealed that activations in several areas in the brain belonging to the auditory, limbic, and motor regions could be predicted. Notably, activations in the medial orbitofrontal region and the anterior cingulate cortex, relevant for self-referential appraisal and aesthetic judgments, could be predicted successfully. Cross-validation across musical stimuli and participant pools helped identify a region of the right superior temporal gyrus, encompassing the planum polare and the Heschl's gyrus, as the core structure that processed complex acoustic features of musical pieces from various genres, with or without lyrics. Models based on purely instrumental music were able to predict activation in the bilateral auditory cortices, parietal, somatosensory, and left hemispheric primary and supplementary motor areas. The presence of lyrics on the other hand weakened the prediction of activations in the left superior temporal gyrus. Our results suggest spontaneous emotion-related processing during naturalistic listening to music and provide supportive evidence for the hemispheric specialization for categorical sounds with realistic stimuli. We herewith introduce a powerful means to predict brain responses to music, speech, or soundscapes across a large variety of contexts.

Mind over body: Interfering with the inner voice is detrimental to endurance performance.

In two preregistered experiments, we investigated whether covert language is involved in sustained physical efforts, specifically if people are less able to push themselves physically when distracted from using inner speech. In both experiments, participants performed 12 cycling trials (Experiment 1: N = 49; Experiment 2: N = 50), each lasting 1 min where participants were required to cycle as fast as possible while simultaneously engaging in either a visuospatial task, a verbal task or no interference. Experiment 1: Participants performed worse in the verbal interference condition compared with the control condition (d = 0.29) and verbal interference performance was numerically but not significantly worse than visuospatial interference (d = 0.22). Experiment 2: A more demanding interference task yielded significant slower cycling with verbal interference compared to both control (d = 1) and visuospatial interference (d = 0.43). These results indicate that inner speech plays a causal role in control of sustained physical efforts.

"Stay focused!": The role of inner speech in maintaining attention during a boring task.

Is inner speech involved in sustaining attention, and is this reflected in response times for stimulus detection? In Experiment 1, we measured response times to an infrequently occurring stimulus (a black dot appearing at 1-3 min intervals) and subsequently asked participants to report on the character of their inner experience at the time the stimulus appeared. Our main preregistered hypothesis was that there would be an interaction between inner speech and task relevance of thought with reaction times being the fastest on prompts preceded by task-relevant inner speech. This would indicate that participants could use their inner voice to maintain performance on the task. With generalized linear mixed-effects models fitted to a gamma distribution, we found significant effects of task relevance but no interaction with inner speech. However, using a hierarchical Bayesian analysis method, we found that trials preceded by task-relevant inner speech additionally displayed lower standard deviation and lower mode (independently of the main effect of task relevance), suggestive of increased processing efficiency. Due to deviations from the preregistered sampling and analysis procedures, we replicated our findings in Experiment 2. Our results add support to the hypothesis that inner speech serves a functional role in top-down attentional control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Verbal interference paradigms: A systematic review investigating the role of language in cognition.

This paper presents a systematic review of the empirical literature that uses dual-task interference methods for investigating the on-line involvement of language in various cognitive tasks. In these studies, participants perform some primary task X putatively recruiting linguistic resources while also engaging in a secondary, concurrent task. If performance on the primary task decreases under interference, there is evidence for language involvement in the primary task. We assessed studies (N = 101) reporting at least one experiment with verbal interference and at least one control task (either primary or secondary). We excluded papers with an explicitly clinical, neurological, or developmental focus. The primary tasks identified include categorization, memory, mental arithmetic, motor control, reasoning (verbal and visuospatial), task switching, theory of mind, visual change, and visuospatial integration and wayfinding. Overall, the present review found that covert language is likely to play a facilitative role in memory and categorization when items to be remembered or categorized have readily available labels, when inner speech can act as a form of behavioral self-cuing (inhibitory control, task set reminders, verbal strategy), and when inner speech is plausibly useful as "workspace," for example, for mental arithmetic. There is less evidence for the role of covert language in cross-modal integration, reasoning relying on a high degree of visual detail or items low on nameability, and theory of mind. We discuss potential pitfalls and suggestions for streamlining and improving the methodology.

Measuring Cognitive Abilities in the Wild: Validating a Population-Scale Game-Based Cognitive Assessment.

Rapid individual cognitive phenotyping holds the potential to revolutionize domains as wide-ranging as personalized learning, employment practices, and precision psychiatry. Going beyond limitations imposed by traditional lab-based experiments, new efforts have been underway toward greater ecological validity and participant diversity to capture the full range of individual differences in cognitive abilities and behaviors across the general population. Building on this, we developed Skill Lab, a novel game-based tool that simultaneously assesses a broad suite of cognitive abilities while providing an engaging narrative. Skill Lab consists of six mini-games as well as 14 established cognitive ability tasks. Using a popular citizen science platform (N = 10,725), we conducted a comprehensive validation in the wild of a game-based cognitive assessment suite. Based on the game and validation task data, we constructed reliable models to simultaneously predict eight cognitive abilities based on the users' in-game behavior. Follow-up validation tests revealed that the models can discriminate nuances contained within each separate cognitive ability as well as capture a shared main factor of generalized cognitive ability. Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent task-based measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of certain cognitive abilities with age in our large cross-sectional population sample (N = 6369). Taken together, our results demonstrate the feasibility of rapid in-the-wild systematic assessment of cognitive abilities as a promising first step toward population-scale benchmarking and individualized mental health diagnostics.

Spatial communication systems across languages reflect universal action constraints.

The extent to which languages share properties reflecting the non-linguistic constraints of the speakers who speak them is key to the debate regarding the relationship between language and cognition. A critical case is spatial communication, where it has been argued that semantic universals should exist, if anywhere. Here, using an experimental paradigm able to separate variation within a language from variation between languages, we tested the use of spatial demonstratives-the most fundamental and frequent spatial terms across languages. In n = 874 speakers across 29 languages, we show that speakers of all tested languages use spatial demonstratives as a function of being able to reach or act on an object being referred to. In some languages, the position of the addressee is also relevant in selecting between demonstrative forms. Commonalities and differences across languages in spatial communication can be understood in terms of universal constraints on action shaping spatial language and cognition.

The role of the brain's frontal eye fields in constructing frame of reference.

Establishing contextual reference during discourse is a vital part of language function. Personal pronouns (e.g., he/she/it) are used to refer to previously experienced objects, utterances and events. These items, however, are often no longer present in the environment and have to be maintained and manipulated in working memory (WM). One aspect of this is the construction of a spatial frame of reference (e.g., "He was in front of it" where "he" is established as figure and "it" is the ground). The WM processes underlying this function may be different from those involved in establishing a non-spatial relation (e.g., "He was older than her"). The brain's frontal eye fields (FEFs), responsible for eye movement control, are known to be involved in processing spatial WM. This paper reviews both functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments and a subsequent behavioral interference study demonstrating a specific role for the FEFs and the brain's eye movement control system in manipulation of WM content for establishing object-centered spatial reference frames during verbally cued recall of recent visual and linguistic experiences.

The locative alternation: distinguishing linguistic processing cost from error signals in Broca's region.

The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is known to be involved in the processing of syntactic complexity, such as word order variation. It is also known to be involved in semantic interpretation in studies of various types of semantic and pragmatic anomalies. Across neuroimaging studies of language processing, two main approaches can be found, one that contrasts anomalous and well-formed words or sentences in order to yield an error response and one that contrasts two well-formed syntactic structures differing in complexity, investigating effects of increased integration costs. The present fMRI study aimed at disentangling the error signal from the processing cost signal in LIFG. To do so, we examined the so-called Locative Alternation, which involves the contrast between the Content-Locative construction, e.g. He sprays paint on the wall, and the Container-Locative construction, e.g. He sprays the wall with paint, which have been argued to differ in processing. By including asymmetric verbs, e.g. He blocks the road with rocks vs. *He blocks rocks on the road, we were able to study the contrast between well formed and anomalous constructions. Participants performed an acceptability judgment task during fMRI. The results showed that increased syntactic integration costs yielded both increased response time as well as LIFG activation. Anomalous sentences yielded low acceptability rating but no increase in response time, yet they also evoked increased LIFG activation. Thus, the processing cost and the error signal were found to be functionally independent, but spatially overlapping in the brain.

Amygdala and heart rate variability responses from listening to emotionally intense parts of a story.

Emotions are often understood in relation to conditioned responses. Narrative emotions, however, cannot be reduced to a simple associative relationship between emotion words and their experienced counterparts. Intensity in stories may arise without any overt emotion depicting words and vice versa. In this fMRI study we investigated BOLD responses to naturally fluctuating emotions evoked by listening to a story. The emotional intensity profile of the text was found through a rating study. The validity of this profile was supported by heart rate variability (HRV) data showing a significant correspondence across participants between intensity ratings and HRV measurements obtained during fMRI. With this ecologically valid stimulus we found that narrative intensity was accompanied by activation in temporal cortices, medial geniculate nuclei in the thalamus and amygdala, brain regions that are all part of the system for processing conditioned emotional responses to auditory stimuli. These findings suggest that this system also underpins narrative emotions in spite of their complex nature. Traditional language regions and premotor cortices were also activated during intense parts of the story whereas orbitofrontal cortex was found linked to emotion with positive valence, regardless of level of intensity.

Eye movement suppression interferes with construction of object-centered spatial reference frames in working memory.

The brain's frontal eye fields (FEF), responsible for eye movement control, are known to be involved in spatial working memory (WM). In a previous fMRI experiment (Wallentin, Roepstorff & Burgess, Neuropsychologia, 2008) it was found that FEF activation was primarily related to the formation of an object-centered, rather than egocentric, spatial reference frame. In this behavioral experiment we wanted to demonstrate a causal relationship between eye movement control and manipulation of spatial reference frames. Sixty-two participants recalled either spatial ("Was X in front of Y?") or non-spatial ("Was X darker than Y?") relations in a previously shown image containing two to four objects, each with an intrinsic orientation and unique luminance. During half of all recall trials a moving visual stimulus was presented, which participants had to ignore, thus suppressing eye movement. Response times were significantly slower for spatial relations with distraction while there was no effect on non-spatial relations. There was no effect on accuracy, i.e. WM maintenance. This is consistent with the hypothesis that in spatial representations the FEFs are involved in WM content manipulation, such as establishing an object-centered spatial frame of reference.