Language experience shapes predictive coding of rhythmic sound sequences.

Perceptual systems heavily rely on prior knowledge and predictions to make sense of the environment. Predictions can originate from multiple sources of information, including contextual short-term priors, based on isolated temporal situations, and context-independent long-term priors, arising from extended exposure to statistical regularities. While the effects of short-term predictions on auditory perception have been well-documented, how long-term predictions shape early auditory processing is poorly understood. To address this, we recorded magnetoencephalography data from native speakers of two languages with different word orders (Spanish: functor-initial vs Basque: functor-final) listening to simple sequences of binary sounds alternating in duration with occasional omissions. We hypothesized that, together with contextual transition probabilities, the auditory system uses the characteristic prosodic cues (duration) associated with the native language's word order as an internal model to generate long-term predictions about incoming non-linguistic sounds. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that the amplitude of the mismatch negativity elicited by sound omissions varied orthogonally depending on the speaker's linguistic background and was most pronounced in the left auditory cortex. Importantly, listening to binary sounds alternating in pitch instead of duration did not yield group differences, confirming that the above results were driven by the hypothesized long-term 'duration' prior. These findings show that experience with a given language can shape a fundamental aspect of human perception - the neural processing of rhythmic sounds - and provides direct evidence for a long-term predictive coding system in the auditory cortex that uses auditory schemes learned over a lifetime to process incoming sound sequences.

Brain Signatures of Embodied Semantics and Language: A Consensus Paper.

According to embodied theories (including embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, situated, and grounded approaches to cognition), language representation is intrinsically linked to our interactions with the world around us, which is reflected in specific brain signatures during language processing and learning. Moving on from the original rivalry of embodied vs. amodal theories, this consensus paper addresses a series of carefully selected questions that aim at determining when and how rather than whether motor and perceptual processes are involved in language processes. We cover a wide range of research areas, from the neurophysiological signatures of embodied semantics, e.g., event-related potentials and fields as well as neural oscillations, to semantic processing and semantic priming effects on concrete and abstract words, to first and second language learning and, finally, the use of virtual reality for examining embodied semantics. Our common aim is to better understand the role of motor and perceptual processes in language representation as indexed by language comprehension and learning. We come to the consensus that, based on seminal research conducted in the field, future directions now call for enhancing the external validity of findings by acknowledging the multimodality, multidimensionality, flexibility and idiosyncrasy of embodied and situated language and semantic processes.

The concreteness advantage in lexical decision does not depend on perceptual simulations.

words are typically more difficult to identify than concrete words in lexical-decision, word-naming, and recall tasks. This behavioral advantage, known as the concreteness effect, is often considered as evidence for embodied semantics, which emphasizes the role of sensorimotor experience in the comprehension of word meaning. In this view, online sensorimotor simulations triggered by concrete words, but not by abstract words, facilitate access to word meaning and speed up word identification. To test whether perceptual simulation is the driving force underlying the concreteness effect, we compared data from early-blind and sighted individuals performing an auditory lexical-decision task. Subjects were presented with property words referring to abstract (e.g., "logic"), concrete multimodal (e.g., "spherical"), and concrete unimodal visual concepts (e.g., "blue"). According to the embodied account, the processing advantage for concrete unimodal visual words should disappear in the early blind because they cannot rely on visual experience and simulation during semantics processing (i.e., purely visual words should be abstract for early-blind people). On the contrary, we found that both sighted and blind individuals are faster when processing multimodal and unimodal visual words compared with abstract words. This result suggests that the concreteness effect does not depend on perceptual simulations but might be driven by modality-independent properties of word meaning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Augmented Modality Exclusivity Norms for Concrete and Abstract Italian Property Words.

How perceptual information is encoded into language and conceptual knowledge is a debated topic in cognitive (neuro)science. We present modality norms for 643 Italian adjectives, which referred to one of the five perceptual modalities or were abstract. Overall, words were rated as mostly connected to the visual modality and least connected to the olfactory and gustatory modality. We found that words associated to visual and auditory experience were more unimodal compared to words associated to other sensory modalities. A principal components analysis highlighted a strong coupling between gustatory and olfactory information in word meaning, and the tendency of words referring to tactile experience to also include information from the visual dimension. Abstract words were found to encode only marginal perceptual information, mostly from visual and auditory experience. The modality norms were augmented with corpus-based (e.g., Zipf Frequency, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20) and ratings-based psycholinguistic variables (Age of Acquisition, Familiarity, Contextual Availability). Split-half correlations performed for each experimental variable and comparisons with similar databases confirmed that our norms are highly reliable. This database thus provides a new important tool for investigating the interplay between language, perception and cognition.