Charlotte Jacquemot, Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Levi (2021). Striatum and language processing: Where do we stand? Cognition, 104785, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104785

Résumé :
More than a century ago, Broca (1861), Wernicke (1874) and Lichteim (1885) laid the foundations for the first anatomo-functional model of language, secondarily enriched by Geschwind (1967), leading to the Broca-Wernicke-Lichteim-Geschwind model. This model included the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices as well as a subcortical structure, which could be the striatum, whose nature and role have remained unclear. Although the emergence of language deficits in patients with striatal injury has challenged the cortical language models developed over the past 30 years, the integration of the striatum into language processing models remains rare. The main argument for not including the striatum in language processing is that the disorders observed in patients with striatal dysfunction may result from the striatal role in cognitive functions beyond language, and not from the impairment of language itself. Indeed, unraveling the role of the striatum and the frontal cortex, linked by the fronto-striatal pathway, is a challenge. Here, we first reviewed the studies that explored the link between striatal functions and the different levels of language (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexico-semantics). We then looked at the language models, which included the striatum, and found that none of them captured the diversity of experimental data in this area. Finally, we propose an integrative anatomo-functional model of language processing combining traditional language processing levels and some “executive” functions, known to improve the efficiency and fluidity of language: control, working memory, and attention. We argue that within this integrative model, the striatum is a central node of a verbal executive network that regulates, monitors, and controls the allocations of limited cognitive resources (verbal working memory and verbal attention), whatever the language level. This model combines data from neurology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.

Jérémy Kuhn (2021). The dynamics of negative concord. Linguist and Philos, doi:10.1007/s10988-020-09318-3

Résumé :
Concord describes a natural language phenomenon in which a single logical meaning is expressed syntactically on multiple lexical items. The canonical example is negative concord, in which multiple negative expressions are used, but a single negation is interpreted. Formally similar phenomena have been observed for the redundant marking of distributivity and definiteness. Inspired by recent dynamic analyses of these latter two phenomena, we extend a similar dynamic analysis to negative concord. We propose that negative concord items introduce a discourse referent (like an existential), but then test that no discourse referent has been introduced in any assignment. These apparently contradictory requirements are licensed with split scope around negation: introduction occurs below negation; the test appears above it. The analysis successfully predicts that negative concord items must be licensed by a sufficiently local negative operator. We further show that modulation of what is at-issue can account for cases in which NC items themselves carry negative force.

Gerda Melnik, Sharon Peperkamp (2021). High-variability phonetic training enhances second language lexical processing: evidence from online training of French learners of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24, 497-506. doi:10.1017/S1366728920000644

Résumé :
High-Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) has been shown to be effective in improving the perception of the hardest non-native sounds. However, it remains unclear whether such training can enhance phonological processing at the lexical level. The present study tested whether HVPT also improves word recognition. Late French learners of English completed eight online sessions of HVPT on the perception of English word-initial /h/. This sound does not exist in French and has been shown to cause difficulty both at the prelexical (Mah, Goad & Steinhauer, 2016) and the lexical level of processing (Melnik & Peperkamp, 2019). In pretest and posttest participants were administered a prelexical identification task and a lexical decision task. Results demonstrate that after training the learners’ accuracy improved in both tasks. Moreover, these improvements were retained four months after posttest. This is the first evidence that short training can enhance not only prelexical perception, but also word recognition.

Hugo Mercier (2021). How Good Are We At Evaluating Communicated Information? Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 89, 257-272. doi:10.1017/S1358246121000096

Résumé : Are we gullible? Can we be easily influenced by what others tell us, even if they do not deserve our trust? Many strands of research, from social psychology to cultural evolution suggest that humans are by nature conformist and eager to follow prestigious leaders. By contrast, an evolutionary perspective suggests that humans should be vigilant towards communicated information, so as not to be misled too often. Work in experimental psychology shows that humans are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms that allow them to carefully evaluate communicated information. These open vigilance mechanisms lead us to reject messages that clash with our prior beliefs, unless the source of the message has earned our trust, or provides good arguments, in which case we can adaptively change our minds. These mechanisms make us largely immune to mass persuasion, explaining why propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, and other attempts at persuading large groups nearly always fall in deaf ears. However, some false beliefs manage to spread through communication. I argue that most popular false beliefs are held reflectively, which means that they have little effect on our thoughts and behaviors, and that many false beliefs can be socially beneficial. Accepting such beliefs thus reflects a much weaker failure in our evaluation of communicated information than might at first appear.

Myrto Mylopoulos, Elisabeth Pacherie (2021). E. Editorial: "Skilled Action Control". Rev.Phil.Psych. doi:10.1007/s13164-021-00563-4

Leonardo Piot, Naomie Havron & Alejandrina Cristia (2021). Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system: A meta-analysis. Journal of Child Language, 1-15. doi:10.1017/S0305000921000441

Résumé : Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENATM measures, age and publication type revealed an effect size of rz= .186, indicating a small effect of SES on children's language experiences. The type of LENA metric measured emerged as a significant moderator, indicating stronger effects for adult word counts than child vocalization counts. These results provide important evidence for the strength of association between SES and children's everyday language experiences as measured with an unobtrusive recording analyzed automatically in a standardized fashion.

Sho Tsuji, Alejandrina Cristia, Emmanuel Dupoux (2021). SCALa: A blueprint for computational models of language acquisition in social context. Cognition, 104779, ISSN 0010-0277, doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104779.

Résumé :
Theories and data on language acquisition suggest a range of cues are used, ranging from information on structure found in the linguistic signal itself, to information gleaned from the environmental context or through social interaction. We propose a blueprint for computational models of the early language learner (SCALa, for Socio-Computational Architecture of Language Acquisition) that makes explicit the connection between the kinds of information available to the social learner and the computational mechanisms required to extract language-relevant information and learn from it. SCALa integrates a range of views on language acquisition, further allowing us to make precise recommendations for future large-scale empirical research.

Frédéric Lanore, Alex Cayco-Gajic, Harsha Gurnani, Diccon Coyle & R.Angus Silver (2021). Cerebellar granule cell axons support high-dimensional representations. Nat Neurosci. doi:10.1038/s41593-021-00873-x

Résumé :
In classical theories of cerebellar cortex, high-dimensional sensorimotor representations are used to separate neuronal activity patterns, improving associative learning and motor performance. Recent experimental studies suggest that cerebellar granule cell (GrC) population activity is low-dimensional. To examine sensorimotor representations from the point of view of downstream Purkinje cell ‘decoders’, we used three-dimensional acousto-optic lens two-photon microscopy to record from hundreds of GrC axons. Here we show that GrC axon population activity is high dimensional and distributed with little fine-scale spatial structure during spontaneous behaviors. Moreover, distinct behavioral states are represented along orthogonal dimensions in neuronal activity space. These results suggest that the cerebellar cortex supports high-dimensional representations and segregates behavioral state-dependent computations into orthogonal subspaces, as reported in the neocortex. Our findings match the predictions of cerebellar pattern separation theories and suggest that the cerebellum and neocortex use population codes with common features, despite their vastly different circuit structures.

Leonardo Piot, Naomie Havron, & Alejandrina Cristia (2021). Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system: A meta-analysis. Journal of Child Language, 1-15. doi:10.1017/S0305000921000441

Résumé:
Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENATM measures, age and publication type revealed an effect size of rz= .186, indicating a small effect of SES on children's language experiences. The type of LENA metric measured emerged as a significant moderator, indicating stronger effects for adult word counts than child vocalization counts. These results provide important evidence for the strength of association between SES and children's everyday language experiences as measured with an unobtrusive recording analyzed automatically in a standardized fashion.

Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Salvador Mascarenhas (2021). Indirect illusory inferences from disjunction: a new bridge between deductive inference and representativeness. Rev.Phil.Psych. doi:10.1007/s13164-021-00543-8

Résumé :
We provide a new link between deductive and probabilistic reasoning fallacies. Illusory inferences from disjunction are a broad class of deductive fallacies traditionally explained by recourse to a matching procedure that looks for content overlap between premises. In two behavioral experiments, we show that this phenomenon is instead sensitive to real-world causal dependencies and not to exact content overlap. A group of participants rated the strength of the causal dependence between pairs of sentences. This measure is a near perfect predictor of fallacious reasoning by an independent group of participants in illusory inference tasks with the same materials. In light of these results, we argue that all extant accounts of these deductive fallacies require non-trivial adjustments. Crucially, these novel indirect illusory inferences from disjunction bear a structural similarity to seemingly unrelated probabilistic reasoning problems, in particular the conjunction fallacy from the heuristics and biases literature. This structural connection was entirely obscure in previous work on these deductive problems, due to the theoretical and empirical focus on content overlap. We argue that this structural parallelism provides arguments against the need for rich descriptions and individuating information in the conjunction fallacy, and we outline a unified theory of deductive illusory inferences from disjunction and the conjunction fallacy, in terms of Bayesian confirmation theory.

Frédérique de Vignemont, Andrea Serino, Hong Yu Wong, and Alessandro Farnè (2021). The World at Our Fingertips: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Peripersonal Space. OUP Oxford, doi:10.1093/oso/9780198851738.001.0001

Résumé :
Where do you end and the external world begin? This might seem to be a straightforward, binary question: your skin is the boundary, with the self on one side and the rest of the world on the other. Peripersonal space shows that the division is not that simple. The boundary is blurrier than you might have thought. Our ability to monitor the space near the body appears to be deeply ingrained. Our evolutionary history has equipped our brains with a special mechanism to track multisensory stimuli that can potentially interact with our physical body in its immediate surroundings and prime appropriate actions. The processing of the immediate space around one’s body thus displays highly specific multisensory and motor features, distinct from those that characterize the processing of regions of space that are further away. The computational specificities here lead one to wonder whether classic theories of perception apply to the special case of peripersonal space. We think that there is a need to reassess the relationship between perception, action, emotion, and self-awareness in the highly special context of the immediate surroundings of our body. For the first time, leading experts on peripersonal space in cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, neuroscience, and ethology gathered in this volume describe the vast number of fascinating discoveries about this special way of representing space. For the first time too, these empirical results and the questions they open are brought into dialogue with philosophy.

Frédérique de Vignemont, Victor Pitron, and Adrian J.T. Alsmith (2021). What is the body schema? In Yochai Ataria, Shogo Tanaka, and Shaun Gallagher (Eds.), Schema and Body Image: New Directions Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Résumé :
Body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring. Body image consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one's own body.
In 2005 Shaun Gallagher published an influential book entitled How the Body Shapes the Mind (OUP). That book not only defined both body schema and body image, but explored the complicated relationship between the two. It also established the idea that there is a double dissociation, whereby body schema and body image refer to two different but closely related systems. Given that many kinds of pathological cases can be described in terms of body schema and body image (phantom limbs, asomatognosia, apraxia, schizophrenia, anorexia, depersonalization, and body dysmorphic disorder, among others), we might expect to find a growing consensus about these concepts and the relevant neural activities connected to these systems. Instead, an examination of the scientific literature reveals continued ambiguity and disagreement.
This volume brings together leading experts from the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry in a lively and productive dialogue. It explores fundamental questions about the relationship between body schema and body image, and addresses ongoing debates about the role of the brain and the role of social and cultural factors in our understanding of embodiment.