Search

International audience; Speech perception involves segmenting a continuous stream of speech into its word components. This can be challenging in the case of homophonous utterances only differing in non-contrastive subphonemic features. Yet, the speech perception system seems able to discriminate subphonemic deviation in homophonous utterances, since it has been shown to elicit a mismatch response (MMN). Here, we focused on the oscillatory correlates, namely phase resetting and power, of non-contrastive subphonemic deviation processing in language. An oddball task that considered natural intraspeaker variability was used.Subphonemic deviance elicited intertrial phase coherence (ITC) differences in the theta band at Fz during the time window of the MMN. No differences in power were found. This suggests that the processing of subphonemic deviation in speech signals, reflected by the MMN, might rely on mechanisms of phase resetting. ITC might facilitate the synchronous firing of functional networks involved in the processing of subphonemic deviance

International audience; An important function of the brain is to predict which stimulus is likely to occur based on the perceived cues. The present research studied the branching behavior of a computational network model of populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, both analytically and through simulations. Results show how synaptic efficacy, retroactive inhibition and short-term synaptic depression determine the dynamics of selection between different branches predicting sequences of stimuli of different probabilities. Further results show that changes in the probability of the different predictions depend on variations of neuronal gain. Such variations allow the network to optimize the probability of its predictions to changing probabilities of the sequences without changing synaptic efficacy.

In a recent publication, Foster (2020) identified several promising directions for second language (L2) oral fluency research, including explicit attention to the parallel development of fluency and productive vocabulary knowledge. The present paper focuses on this issue and proposes an analysis of longitudinal data collected from five Francophone learners of L2 English before and after a nine-month stay in an Anglophone environment. The analysis focuses on speed fluency and breakdown fluency as well as on both free and controlled measures of productive vocabulary knowledge. Results point to clear evolution in speed fluency for all five participants and different individual trajectories for breakdown fluency after a stay abroad. Change with respect to productive vocabulary knowledge, as measured by three measures, was mixed. Findings are interpreted in light of previous research. In particular, we argue that the current results do not provide strong evidence for a clear relationship between productive vocabulary knowledge and oral fluency development.

The complex span task used to evaluate working memory (WM) capacity has been considered to be the most predictive task of fluid intelligence. However, the structure of the complex span tasks varies from one study to another, and it has not been questioned yet whether these variants could influence the predictive power of these tasks. Previous studies have typically used either structures based on alternating processing-storage patterns or alternating storage-processing patterns. We present one experiment in which the participants were submitted to both the processing-storage vs. storage-processing types. After completing both types of complex span tasks, the participants performed a reasoning test (Matrix Reasoning of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale - WAIS-IV). The results showed a significant difference in the WM spans between the two conditions, with higher spans observed in the processing-storage alternating structure, and different serial position curves. However, the correlations showed that both types of tasks remained equally predictive of performance in the reasoning test. These results are discussed in regard to the time-based resource-sharing model.

International audience

International audience; Towards an fMRI validation of our previous fNIRS-based explorations of cerebellar activity [Rocco et al. EMBC 2021], we introduce here a joint sequential fNIRS/fMRI study based on finger tapping that provides both finer time and space granularities for the assessment of BOLD effect in the cerebellum.

International audience; With today’s strong focus on communicative competence in second language (L2) classrooms, speech acts like suggestions, requests, refusals, and apologies are often investigated in interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) as well as instructional pragmatics. Even though there is strong evidence in ILP research that purports that L2 learners respond well to pragmatic instruction (Taguchi, 2015), the teaching of L2 pragmatics is not always prioritized in textbooks, teaching programmes or teacher education (Barron, 2016; Savvidou & Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2019) with the consequence that pragmatic learning can only occur incidentally. The present study examines opportunities to acquire L2 requests for 308 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners across 7 years of instruction in French secondary schools, investigating textbooks preferred by teachers, classroom interaction (39 hours), and teacher perspectives (semi-structured interviews with 10 teachers). After a pragmatic analysis of 15 EFL textbooks with a focus on requests, the study examines the incidence of metapragmatic input in 39 hours of teaching in 13 classes at 3 levels, and relates interactional patterns with interview data from the 10 teachers concerned. Findings suggest limited pragmatic input in both textbooks and classroom interaction. By comparing the profiles of teachers who encouraged L2 requests with those who did not, the study offers new explanations for L2 learners’ limited pragmatic development which also broadly corroborate previous findings of somewhat limited potential for L2 pragmatic development in obligatory school contexts.

L’effet de pratique distribuée, qui réfère à l’impact de l’organisation de l’apprentissage sur la rétention d’une information répétée, a fait l’objet d’une vaste littérature empirique. Ces travaux ont montré, d’une façon générale, que de longs intervalles temporels entre les épisodes répétés d’apprentissage d’une nouvelle information (condition espacée) permettent une rétention en mémoire plus importante par rapport à des répétitions massées ou fortement rapprochées dans le temps. L’effet de pratique distribuée a été examiné pour une grande variété de types d’apprentissage, et on dispose en particulier d’une riche littérature sur cet effet pour l’apprentissage du vocabulaire d’une langue seconde (L2). Dans cet article, nous présentons les concepts et théories nécessaires pour comprendre l’effet de pratique distribuée avant de présenter une synthèse des études qui se sont focalisées sur l’apprentissage du vocabulaire L2. Malgré l’intérêt que les chercheurs ont porté à la façon d’organiser temporellement l’apprentissage, ces résultats robustes sont relativement méconnus des enseignants et des apprenants des langues. Ainsi, après avoir réalisé une revue de la littérature la plus pertinente, nous identifierons comment ces travaux peuvent contribuer à l’apprentissage et à l’enseignement du vocabulaire L2. The distributed practice effect, which concerns the impact of the organization of learning time on the retention of repeated information learned, has inspired a large body of empirical research. Such research has generally shown, among other things, that longer temporal intervals between learning episodes (spaced learning) result in greater ultimate retention of new information, in comparison with both massed and more narrowly-spaced learning episodes. The distributed practice effect has been researched with respect to a wide variety of skills, including a rich body of research on how distributed practice may impact vocabulary learning in a second language (L2). In this article, we present the concepts and theories necessary to understand the distributed practice effect before offering an overview of studies that have focused on how L2 vocabulary learning may be influenced by distributed practice. Despite the large amount of sustained interest among researchers in this way of organizing learning, these robust findings are relatively unknown to language educators and language learners. Thus, after reviewing the relevant literature, we end by identifying how this research may fruitfully inform L2 vocabulary learning and teaching.

International audience; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has been so far the golden standard to study the functional aspects of the cerebellum. In this paper, a low-cost alternative imaging, i.e. functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is demonstrated to achieve successful measurements of the cerebellar hemodynamics towards the challenging observation of motor and cognitive processes at the cerebellar level. The excitation and reception optodes need to be properly placed to circumvent a major hindering from the shielding by the neck muscles. A simple experimental protocol, i.e. finger tapping task, was implemented to observe the subject’s engagement and the presence of functional asymmetries. Marked differences among subjects with different levels of lateralization were clearly noticed in terms of activation and latencies, together with peaks in the hemodynamic response following neural activation. These preliminary results suggest also differences in the hemodynamic behavior between the brain and the cerebellum and encourage future and extended analysis in this direction.Clinical Relevance—This establishes the possibility to use a novel technique (fNIRS) to study cerebellar hemodynamics instead of fMRI.

International audience; The estimation of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) from the ambient EEG is a difficult task, usually achieved through the synchronous averaging of an extensive series of trials. However, this technique has some caveats: the ERPs have to be strictly time-locked with similar shape, i.e. emitted with the same latency and the same profile, with minor fluctuations of their amplitudes. Also, the method requires a huge number of valid trials (~100) to efficiently raise the ERPs from the EEG trials. In the case of cognitive ERPs, as with the N400, the delivered stimulus has to be different for each trial, the latencies are varying, and the number of available trials is usually low. In this paper, an alternative method, coined Integral Shape Averaging (ISA) and its derivatives are detailed. ISA is robust to varying latencies and affine transforms of shape. Furthermore, a new method coined ISAD can be derived to extract ERPs even from a single trial experiment. The aim here is to illustrate the potential of ISAD for N400 component extraction on real EEG data, with emphasis on its general applicability for ERPs computation and its major assets like reduced experimental protocol. Some insights are also given on its potential use to study ERP variability, through shape and latency.Clinical Relevance— The proposed algorithm aims to be a helpful tool in clinical practice to analyze and interpret evoked responses in real experimental settings, especially for particularities in neurology.

This article revisits the long-standing issue of the alternation betweenwh-in-situandwh-ex-situquestions in French in the light of diglossia and cross-linguistic data. A careful preliminary examination of the numerouswh-structures in Metropolitan French leads us to focus on Colloquial French, which undoubtedly displays bothwh-in-situandwh-ex-situquestions. Within this dataset,wh-ex-situquestions without theest-ce que‘is it that’ marker are more permissive thanin-situregarding weak-islandhood and superiority. In a Relativized Minimality framework, we suggest thatwh-ex-situitems bear an additional feature, which permits them to bypass these constraints. Colloquial French is thus awh-in-situlanguage that allows forwh-ex-situunder specific conditions, like otherwh-in-situlanguages. Hence we argue against free variation and claim thatwh-fronting is not driven by awh-feature, but by another feature. Exploring the contexts wherewh-ex-situis licensed, we highlight a type of non-exhaustive contrast specific to questions, namely Exclusivity, and provide a formalization. The article therefore also contributes to the larger debate on information structure in questions.

International audience; The input to phonological reasoning are alternations, that is, variations in the pronunciation of related words, such as in electri[k]electri[s]-ity. But phonologists cannot agree what counts as a relevant alternation: the issue is highly contentious despite a research record of over 50 years. We believe that the experimental setup presented may contribute to this debate based on a kind of evidence that was not brought to bear to date. Our experiment was thus designed to distinguish between alternations where phonological computation plays no role, and those where it has contributed to language production. The design manipulates two factors that to date have not been considered in experimental studies of language production: linguistic complexity and alternation specificity. The former is understood as extra processing demands issued by two types of linguistic activity, morphosyntactic and phonological. Our results show that reaction time latencies are longer when participants are burdened with both morphosyntactic and phonological tasks than when they carry out just a morphosyntactic task, and they are still shorter in absence of both types of demands. These results allowed us to address alternation specificity, that is, the fact that different alternations (within a language or across languages) may be driven by different production routines (an idea that is consensual among linguists but underdeveloped in the psycholinguistic literature). Our study shows that four different alternations in French produce alternation-specific signatures in reaction time latencies. These findings may thus redound to the advantage of psycholinguistic studies by identifying two new factors, as well as produce results that speak to the linguistic quarrels.

This study reports on an event-related potentials experiment to uncover whether per-millisecond electrophysiological brain activity and analogous behavioural responses are age-sensitive when comprehending anaphoric (referent-first) and cataphoric (pronoun-first) pronouns. Two groups of French speakers were recruited (young n = 18; aged 19–35 and older adults n = 15; aged 57–88) to read sentences where the anaphoric/cataphoric pronouns and their potential referents either matched or mismatched in gender. Our findings indicate that (1) the older adults were not less accurate or slower in their behavioural responses to the mismatches than the younger adults, (2) both anaphoric and cataphoric conditions evoked a central/parietally distributed P600 component with similar timing and amplitude in both the groups. Importantly, mean amplitudes of the P600 effect were modulated by verbal short-term memory span in the older adults but not in the younger adults, (3) nevertheless, the older but not the younger adults displayed an additional anterior negativity emerging on the frontal regions in response to the anaphoric mismatches. These results suggest that pronoun processing is resilient in healthy ageing individuals, but that functional recruitment of additional brain regions, evidenced with the anterior negativity, compensates for increased processing demands in the older adults’ anaphora processing.

Resume L’objectif de cette etude est de mieux comprendre comment l’enfant construit progressivement l’inconsistance du systeme lexical francais. Une etude des erreurs commises par des eleves du CE1 a la 3e dans une dictee de mots isoles a ete realisee. Les mots presentes variaient en longueur syllabique, consistance orthographique et frequence lexicale. Pour chaque categorie de mots, les trajectoires developpementales des erreurs phonologiquement plausibles (PP) et non phonologiquement plausibles (NPP) ont ete analysees. Cette etude montre que (1) meme si les taux d’erreurs diminuent progressivement, ils restent globalement eleves du CE1 au CM1, ainsi qu’au college pour les erreurs PP ; (2) les differents types d’erreurs ne suivent pas tous la meme evolution ; (3) leur occurrence varie en fonction du niveau scolaire et des caracteristiques des mots. Cette etude invite les chercheurs a mieux prendre en compte ces facteurs psycholinguistiques dans les modeles et/ou etudes impliquant un traitement orthographique.

Background and aims: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often perform below their typically developing peers on verbal memory tasks. However, the picture is less clear on visual memory tasks. Research has generally shown that visual memory can be facilitated by verbal representations, but few studies have been conducted using visual materials that are not easy to verbalize. Therefore, we attempted to construct non-verbalizable stimuli to investigate the impact of working memory capacity. Method and results: We manipulated verbalizability in visual span tasks and tested whether minimizing verbalizability could help reduce visual recall performance differences across children with and without developmental language disorder. Visuals that could be easily verbalized or not were selected based on a pretest with non-developmental language disorder young adults. We tested groups of children with developmental language disorder (N.23) and their typically developing peers (N.65) using these high and low verbalizable classes of visual stimuli. The memory span of the children with developmental language disorder varied across the different stimulus conditions, but critically, although their storage capacity for visual information was virtually unimpaired, the children with developmental language disorder still had difficulty in recalling verbalizable images with simple drawings. Also, recalling complex (galaxy) images with low verbalizability proved difficult in both groups of children. An item-based analysis on correctly recalled items showed that higher levels of verbalizability enhanced visual recall in the typically developing children to a greater extent than the children with developmental language disorder. Conclusions and clinical implication: We suggest that visual short-term memory in typically developing children might be mediated with verbal encoding to a larger extent than in children with developmental language disorder, thus leading to poorer performance on visual capacity tasks. Our findings cast doubts on the idea that short-term storage impairments are limited to the verbal domain, but they also challenge the idea that visual tasks are essentially visual. Therefore, our findings suggest to clinicians working with children experiencing developmental language difficulties that visual memory deficits may not necessarily be due to reduced non-verbal skills but may be due to the high amount of verbal cues in visual stimuli, from which they do not benefit in comparison to their peers.

Background Sentence repetition deficits have been shown to be critical in diagnosing primary progressive aphasia (PPA), particularly the logopenic variant, distinguishing its symptoms from other Alzheimer’s disease related dementias [1-3]. These impairments were found to be associated with working memory [4]. Method In the current preliminary study, to further investigate how sentence repetition is mediated in memory in PPA and AD, we used a spoken sentence-span task to examine groups of 6 French-speaking PPA (including lvPPA and non-fluent subtypes), 6 AD patients without aphasia, and 15 healthy ageing controls. The task required individuals to repeat meaningful French sentences with increasing number of content words ranging from three to nine. Each span of content words contained two items, and when the participants failed in repeating both items in one span, the task was terminated; when one item was incorrectly repeated half a point penalty was issued. Results Both the patient groups performed more poorly than healthy controls in all measures (ts>+/-3.27). A set of mixed-effects regression models showed that the PPA group had reduced sentence-span (MPPA=5.08 vs.MAD=5.66; ß=0.58, SE=0.16, t=3.53, 95%CIs[0.25,0.91]), greater difficulty repeating content words (MPPA= 44.33 vs.MAD=50.00; ß=5.66, SE=2.19, t=2.57, 95%CIs[-2.18,-0.48]), and elevated number of substitution errors (MPPA= 6.16 vs.MAD=4.83; ß=-1.33, SE=0.42, t=-3.10, 95%CIs[1.32,10.01]) compared to the AD group (Figure 1). No group differences were found in repetition duration standardized by number of content words. Conclusion We found that sentence repetition deficits in PPA have different characteristics than those in AD, submitting to earlier studies that associated PPA assessment with graphic markers [5]. We recommend clinicians to incorporate a sentence repetition task involving sentences with varying length and number of content words in their diagnostic assessment as this study suggests that working-memory intensive sentence repetition decline appears to be a neuropsychological clinical marker distinguishing cognitive profiles of PPA from AD patients. [1]Hohlbaum, et al., Aphasiology, 2018. 32(12):1445-1467. [2]Foxe, et al., Cortex, 2016. 83: p.39-50. [3]Gorno-Tempini, et al. Neurology, 2008. 71(16): p.1227-1234. [4]Beales, et al., Brain and Language, 2019. 194: p.1-11. [5]Gros, et al., Alzheimer’s&Dementia, 2019. P1-285(15): p.351-352.

International audience; Writing narratives allows dysphasic children to mobilize their syntactic knowledge. Dysphasic children have specific, severe and lasting oral language development disorders in which cognitive abilities are preserved. This study aims to show that explicit, long and formal learning of writing at school allows dysphasic children to perform better in writing than in speaking. The syntactic abilities of 24 dysphasic children with French mother tongue and enrolled in mainstream schools were compared to those of 48 children with typical controls of the same chronological ages. The results show that dysphasic children produce fewer syntactic errors per clause when narrating a personal event. In addition, the difference between the two groups of participants is more important in oral than in written form.; Les élèves dysphasiques présentent un trouble spécifique, sévère et durable du développement du langage oral dans lequel les capacités cognitives sont préservées. Cette étude vise à montrer que l'apprentissage explicite, long et formel de l'écrit dans le cadre scolaire permet aux élèves dysphasiques d'obtenir de meilleures performances à l'écrit qu'à l'oral. Les performances syntaxiques de 24 élèves dysphasiques de langue maternelle française et scolarisés en milieu ordinaire ont été comparées à celles de 48 élèves contrôles typiques des mêmes âges chronologiques. Les résultats obtenus montrent que dans une tâche de narration d'un évènement personnel les élèves dysphasiques produisent moins d'erreurs de syntaxe à l'écrit qu'à l'oral. De plus, la différence entre les deux groupes de participants est plus importante à l'oral qu'à l'écrit.

International audience

A recent study based on the SPoARC effect (spatial position association response codes) showed that culture heavily shapes cognition and more specifically the way thought is organized; when Western adults are asked to keep in mind a sequence of colors, they mentally organize them from left to right, whereas right-to-left reading/writing adults spatialize them in the opposite direction. Here, we investigate if the spontaneous direction of spatialization in Westerners can be reversed. Lists of five consonants were presented auditorily at a rate of 3 s per item, participants were asked to mentally organize the memoranda from right to left. Each list was followed by a probe. Participants had to indicate whether the probe was part of the sequence by pressing a "yes" key or a "no" key with the left or right index finger. Left/right-hand key assignment was switched after half of the trials were completed. The results showed a reverse SPoARC effect that was comparable in magnitude to the spontaneous left-to-right SPoARC effect found in a previous study. Overall, our results suggest that individuals can reverse the cultural direction of their thoughts.

International audience; Spelling difficulties often occur in children with developmental language disorder (DLD), the extent and drivers of these difficulties are underspecified. Meta-analyses were conducted to address this gap. We identified child-based factors (age, language spoken, profile of difficulties) and task-based factors (text production or dictation) as potential moderators of the impact of DLD on spelling performance. Thirty-two studies were analyzed, including 984 children with DLD. Large differences between the spelling of children with DLD and their age-matched peers were found. The average mean effect size was −1.42, 95% confidence interval [−1.60, −1.24]. Heterogeneity was large. Effect size estimates were larger when participants had additional phonological or reading difficulties than when they did not. No differences were found between participants with DLD and their language-matched peers. The results are discussed with respect to the underlying processes that impact on spelling across languages. Specific recommendations for future studies are made.

International audience; Reading while listening to texts (RWL) is a promising way to improve the learning benefits provided by a reading experience. In an exploratory study, we investigated the effect of synchronizing the highlighting of words (visual) with their auditory (speech) counterpart during a RWL task. Forty French children from 3rd to 5th grade read short stories in their native language while hearing the story spoken by a narrator. In the non-synchronized (S-) condition the text was written in black on a white background, whereas in the synchronized (S+) RWL, the text was written in grey and the words were dynamically written in black when they were aurally displayed, in a karaoke-like fashion. The children were then unexpectedly tested on their memory for the orthographic form and semantic category of pseudowords that were included in the stories. The effect of synchronizing was null in the orthographic task and negative in the semantic task. Children’s preference was mainly for the S- condition, except for the poorest readers who tended to prefer the S+ condition. In addition, the children's eye movements were recorded during reading. Gaze was affected by synchronization, with fewer but longer fixations on words, and fewer regressive saccades in the S+ condition compared to the S- condition. Thus, the S+ condition presumably captured the children's attention toward the currently heard word, which forced the children to be strictly aligned with the oral modality.

International audience; Evidentials specify information sources [1]. Turkish marks two obligatory evidential forms affixed to verbs when referringto the past: the direct evidential (-DI) is used when the event being expressed was witnessed by the speaker whereas the indirect evidential (–mIş) is appropriate when the event was reported to or inferred by the speaker.Evidentiality in Turkish has processingasymmetries –the direct evidential is acquired earlier than the indirect in children [e.g. 2], but direct evidentials are more severely impaired in aphasia [3]. To unveil the cognitive underpinnings of these asymmetries, we examined the moment-by-moment electrophysiological event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that occur during evidentiality processing in unimpaired adult Turkish speakers.25 Turkish native speakers (14 females; Mage=24years) silently read Turkish sentences presented with or without mismatches of the information source and evidentiality marker (e.g. I sawher while chopping, she *chopped (INDIRECT)onions in the kitchen). In a second condition, participants read sentences with time reference violations (but without evidential biases, e.g. Tomorrow Sedat *washed the car). We found no significant differences in ERPs between sentences that matched or mismatched for evidentiality. In contrast, for time reference, significant P600 effects (peaking around 800ms) were elicited (see Figure 1 andFigure 2) on the critical verb depending on whether the verb violated the time frame of the temporal adverb preceding it. We suggest that time reference violations are perceived as unacceptable (ungrammatical) thus leading to pronounced ERP patterns. In contrast, pragmatically infelicitous evidentiality mismatches evoke significant behavioural differences in the absence of any discernible ERP differences.References[1] Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[2] Ozturk,O., & Papafragou, A. (2016). The acquisition of evidentiality and source monitoring.Language Learning and Development,12(2), 199-230.[3] Arslan, S., Aksu-Koç, A., Maviş, I., &Bastiaanse, R. (2014). Finite verb inflections for evidential categories and source identification in Turkish agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. Journal of Pragmatics, 70, 165-181.[4] Arslan, S., de Kok, D., & Bastiaanse, R. (2017). Processing grammatical evidentiality and time reference in Turkish heritage and monolingual speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(3), 457-472.

In this article we present a biologically inspired model of activation of memory items in a sequence. Our model produces two types of sequences, corresponding to two different types of cerebral functions: activation of regular or irregular sequences. The switch between the two types of activation occurs through the modulation of biological parameters, without altering the connectivity matrix. Some of the parameters included in our model are neuronal gain, strength of inhibition, synaptic depression and noise. We investigate how these parameters enable the existence of sequences and influence the type of sequences observed. In particular we show that synaptic depression and noise drive the transitions from one memory item to the next and neuronal gain controls the switching between regular and irregular (random) activations., Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures

International audience; The appropriate use of (in-)definites can be notoriously difficult for language learners to acquire, suggesting that this linguistic domain is particularly prone to instability in language acquisition. The current study investigates whether heritage speakers also have difficulties in this domain. We report the results from a questionnaire study investigating heritage speakers' sensitivity to contextual cues to the appropriate use of (in-)definites both in their native language (Turkish) and in their second, societally dominant language (German). The results show that Turkish heritage speakers over-use definite noun phrases in contexts that normally require an indefinite noun phrase in both Turkish and German, in comparison to non-bilingual Turkish and German-speaking controls. This indicates that sensitivity to pragmatic constraints on the use of (in-)definites are generally reduced in languages that were acquired under conditions that differ from those of typical monolingually raised speakers, regardless of the age at which these languages were acquired or how definiteness is expressed morphosyntactically. Instead, our heritage speakers' daily use of Turkish proved to be the strongest predictor for their performance. Together, our findings indicate divergent attainment in both of our heritage speakers' languages, with pragmatic constraints on the use of (in-) definites being weakened in both Turkish and German.

Background Children with developmental language disorder (DLD)—previously called Specific Language Impairment (SLI)—often perform poorly in verbal working memory (WM) tasks, but the picture is less clear regarding their visuospatial WM capacity. Recent research has been inconclusive regarding whether visuospatial working memory is impaired in DLD. Additionally, it is still unclear whether the putative disparity of WM performance persists in adolescence. Aims The aim of the current study was to unveil potential impairments in verbal and visuospatial working memory in DLD by exploring two developmental age groups of French-speaking children and adolescents. Methods This study examined verbal and nonverbal short-term and working memory capacity using digit span and Corsi block tasks in twelve children (7–11-year-olds) and twelve adolescents (12-18-year-olds) with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to that in their typically developing peers. Results Our findings showed that both children and adolescents with DLD have deficits in storage and processing ability for the verbal domain. However, both the short-term and working memory estimates of immediate capacity for visuospatial information in adolescents with DLD were virtually intact. Conclusions These results indicate that both verbal and nonverbal storage and processing capacity are largely modulated by age, suggesting that the children with DLD show virtually intact nonverbal working memory capacity as they reach adolescence.

International audience; This paper investigates whether sentence accent detection in a non-native language is dependent on (relative) similarity between prosodic cues to accent between the non-native and the native language, and whether cross-linguistic differences in the use of local and more widely distributed (i.e., non-local) cues to sentence accent detection lead to differential effects of the presence of background noise on sentence accent detection in a non-native language. We compared Dutch, Finnish, and French non-native listeners of English, whose cueing and use of prosodic prominence is gradually further removed from English, and compared their results on a phoneme monitoring task in different levels of noise and a quiet condition to those of native listeners. Overall phoneme detection performance was high for the native and the non-native listeners, but deteriorated to the same extent in the presence of background noise. Crucially, relative similarity between the prosodic cues to sentence accent of one’s native language compared to that of a non-native language does not determine the ability to perceive and use sentence accent for speech perception in that non-native language. Moreover, proficiency in the non-native language is not a straightforward predictor of sentence accent perception performance, although high proficiency in a non-native language can seemingly overcome certain differences at the prosodic level between the native and non-native language. Instead, performance is determined by the extent to which listeners rely on local cues (English and Dutch) versus cues that are more distributed (Finnish and French), as more distributed cues survive the presence of background noise better.

International audience; Where readers move their eyes, while proceeding forward along lines of text, has long been assumed to be determined in a top-down word-based manner. According to this classical view, readers of alphabetic languages would invariably program their saccades towards the center of peripheral target words, as selected based on the (expected) needs of ongoing (word-identification) processing, and the variability in within-word landing positions would exclusively result from systematic and random errors. Here we put this predominant hypothesis to a strong test by estimating the respective influences of language-related variables (word frequency and word predictability) and lower-level visuo-motor factors (word length and saccadic launch-site distance to the beginning of words) on both word-skipping likelihood and within-word landing positions. Our eye-movement data were collected while forty participants read 316 pairs of sentences, that differed only by one word, the prime; this was either semantically related or unrelated to a following test word of variable frequency and length. We found that low-level visuo-motor variables largely predominated in determining which word would be fixated next, and where in a word the eye would land. In comparison, language-related variables only had tiny influences. Yet, linguistic variables affected both the likelihood of word skipping and within-word initial landing positions, all depending on the words’ length and how far on average the eye landed from the word boundaries, but pending the word could benefit from peripheral preview. These findings provide a strong case against the predominant word-based account of eye-movement guidance during reading, by showing that saccades are primarily driven by low-level visuo-motor processes, regardless of word boundaries, while being overall subject to subtle, one-off, language-based modulations. Our results also suggest that overall distributions of saccades’ landing positions, instead of truncated within-word landing-site distributions, should be used for a better understanding of eye-movement guidance during reading.

International audience; The goal of this study was to investigate the management of cohesion by children and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) when writing a narrative in a communicative situation. Twelve children with SLI (from 7 to 11 years old) and 12 adolescents with SLI (from 12 to 18 years old) were chronological age-matched with 24 typically developing (TD) children and 24 TD adolescents. All participants attended mainstream classes: children in elementary schools and adolescents in middle and high schools. Analyses of cohesion focused on both density and diversity of connectives, punctuation marks and anaphors. Results attested that children with SLI were greatly impaired in their management of written cohesion and used specific forms previously observed in narrative speech such as left dislocations. By contrast, and not expected, the management of written cohesion by adolescents with SLI was close to that of their TD peers. The communicative writing situation we set up, which engaged participants to take into account the addressee, also made possible for adolescents with SLI to manage cohesion in writing.

International audience

7th research program of the European Community FP7 2007-2013 (Marie Curie IIF Grant 63007); International audience; To increase the range of modal speech in natural ambient noise, individuals increase their vocal effort and may pass into the 'shouted speech' register. To date, most studies concerning the influence of distance on spoken communication in outdoor natural environments have focused on the 'productive side' of the human ability to tacitly adjust vocal output to compensate for acoustic losses due to sound propagation. Our study takes a slightly different path as it is based on an adaptive speech production/perception experiment. The setting was an outdoor natural soundscape (a plane forest in altitude). The stimuli were produced live during the interaction: each speaker adapted speech to transmit French disyllabic words in isolation to an interlocutor/listener who was situated at variable distances in the course of the experiment (30m, 60m, 90m). Speech recognition was explored by evaluating the ability of 16 normal-hearing French listeners to recognize these words and their constituent vowels and consonants. Results showed that in such conditions, speech adaptation was rather efficient as word recognition remained around 95% at 30m, 85% at 60m and 75% at 90m. We also observed striking differences in patterns of answers along several lines: different distances, speech registers, vowels and consonants.

International audience; Understanding speech in noisy environments is a challenge for almost everyone and particularly so for people with dyslexia. To better understand the phonological processing deficit, which has been posited as a core trait of dyslexia, we wanted to further characterize the impact of noise on speech perception. In this paper, we investigated phoneme resistance to noise for dyslexic and control adults and explored the pattern of errors produced by noise interference. Our aim was to examine differences between phoneme confusion matrices of the two populations. Disyllabic nouns were embedded in noise and participants had to perform an auditory word identification task. Error rates, phoneme resistance and phoneme confusions were compared between a dyslexic and a group of matched controls. Error rate was higher in the dyslexic group. However, no qualitative differences in the profile of errors were found. The coronals /ʃ and s/ were the most resistant phoneme in both groups while the labials /f, m and v/ were the most vulnerable. Although dyslexics showed a more scattered pattern of confusions, the matrices were correlated. Our results confirm a phonological deficit in dyslexia whereas they do not support the hypothesis of qualitative differences in phonological representation between the two groups.

International audience; This paper investigates the use of prosodic information signalling sentence accent and the role of different acoustic features on sentence accent perception during native and non-native speech perception in the presence of background noise. A phoneme detection experiment was carried out in which English native listeners and French highly proficient non-native listeners of English were presented with target phonemes in English sentences. Sentences were presented in different levels of speech-shaped noise and in two prosodic contexts in which the target-bearing word was either deaccented or accented. Acoustic analyses of the two prosodic conditions showed that the target-bearing words in the accented condition carried more energy, had a higher F0, and more spectral tilt than those in the deaccented condition. Results of the behavioural data showed that the native listeners outperformed the French listeners in the clean condition but not in the noise conditions and that the effect of noise was smaller for the non-native compared to the native listeners. Possibly, the non-native listeners use more and different acoustic cues than the native listeners who primarily relied on more local cues for sentence accent detection.

International audience; Working memory has been shown to be strongly related to fluid intelligence; however, our goal is to shed further light on the process of information compression in working memory as a determining factor of fluid intelligence. Our main hypothesis was that compression in working memory is an excellent indicator for studying the relationship between working‐memory capacity and fluid intelligence because both depend on the optimization of storage capacity. Compressibility of memoranda was estimated using an algorithmic complexity metric. The results showed that compressibility can be used to predict working‐memory performance and that fluid intelligence is well predicted by the ability to compress information. We conclude that the ability to compress information in working memory is the reason why both manipulation and retention of information are linked to intelligence. This result offers a new concept of intelligence based on the idea that compression and intelligence are equivalent problems.

International audience; People with central field loss (CFL) use peripheral vision to identify words. Eccentric vision provides ambiguous visual inputs to the processes leading to lexical access. Our purpose was to explore the hypothesis that this ambiguity leads to strong influences of inferential processes, our prediction being that increasing word frequency would decrease word reading time. Individuals with bilateral CFL induced by macular diseases read French sentences displayed with a self-paced reading method. Reading time of the last word of each sentence (target word) was recorded. Each target word (in sentence n) was matched with a synonym word (in sentence n+1) of the same length. When using absolute frequency value (Analysis 1), we found that reading time of target words decreased when word frequency increases, even when controlling for word length. The amplitude of this effect is larger than reported in previous investigations of reading with normal subjects. When comparing the effect of relative frequency (low vs. high) within each pair of synonyms (Analysis 2), results show the same pattern as the one observed in Analysis 1. Our results demonstrate clear-cut frequency effects on word reading time and suggest that inferential processes are stronger in CFL readers than in normally sighted observers. These results might also help design text simplification tools tailored for low-vision patients.

Inconsistent results have been obtained in experiments comparing the effects on retention of expanding, contracting, and uniform practice schedules, in which the spacing between successive practice sessions progressively increases, progressively decreases, or remains constant, respectively. In the present study, we experimentally assessed an apparent trend in the literature for expanding schedules to be more advantageous than other schedules following a low level of training during the initial learning session, but not following a high level of initial training. College students studied pseudocword-word pairs in multiple practice sessions distributed over a 13-day period according to expanding, contracting, and uniform schedules. During their initial learning session, participants received either low-level training (two study trials) or high-level training (one study trial and then five rounds of practice testing with corrective feedback). All participants were treated identically in the subsequent practice sessions. A final cued-recall test after a two-week retention interval revealed an expanding-schedule superiority following low-level initial training but not following high-level initial training. These results are interpreted in terms of a study-phase-retrieval mechanism and help explain the mixed results obtained in the prior literature.

Complex working memory span tasks were designed to engage multiple aspects of working memory and impose interleaved processing demands that limit the use of mnemonic strategies, such as chunking. Consequently, the average span is usually lower (4 ± 1 items) than in simple span tasks (7 ± 2 items). One possible reason for the higher span of simple span tasks is that participants can take advantage of the spare time to chunk multiple items together to form fewer independent units, approximating 4 ± 1 chunks. It follows that the respective spans of these two types of tasks could be equal (at around 4 ± 1) if stimulus lists exclusively used nonchunkable stimulus items. To manipulate the chunkability of the stimulus lists, our method involved a measure of their compressibility, i.e., the extent to which a pattern exists that can be detected and used as a basis of chunk formation. We predicted an interaction between the types of tasks and chunkability/compressibility, supporting a single higher span for the condition in which a simple span task was combined with chunkable items. The three other conditions were predicted to prevent chunking processes, either because the interleaved processing task did not allow any chunking process to occur or because the noncompressible material inherently limited the chunkability of information. The prediction that chunking is important solely in simple spans was not confirmed: Effects of information compression contributed to performance levels to a similar extent in both tasks according to a theoretically-based metric. This result suggests that i) complex span tasks might overestimate storage capacity in general, and ii) the difference between simple and complex span performance levels must rest in some mechanism other than prevention of a chunking strategy by the interleaved processing task in complex span tasks.

International audience; People with low vision, especially those with Central Field Loss (CFL), need magnification to read. The flexibility of Electronic Vision Enhancement Systems (EVES) offers several ways of magnifying text. Due to the restricted field of view of EVES, the need for magnification is conflicting with the need to navigate through text (panning). We have developed and implemented a real-time gaze-controlled system whose goal is to optimize the possibility of magnifying a portion of text while maintaining global viewing of the other portions of the text (condition 1). Two other conditions were implemented that mimicked commercially available advanced systems known as CCTV (closed-circuit television systems)—conditions 2 and 3. In these two conditions, magnification was uniformly applied to the whole text without any possibility to specifically select a region of interest. The three conditions were implemented on the same computer to remove differences that might have been induced by dissimilar equipment. A gaze-contingent artificial 10° scotoma (a mask continuously displayed in real time on the screen at the gaze location) was used in the three conditions in order to simulate macular degeneration. Ten healthy subjects with a gaze-contingent scotoma read aloud sentences from a French newspaper in nine experimental one-hour sessions. Reading speed was measured and constituted the main dependent variable to compare the three conditions. All subjects were able to use condition 1 and they found it slightly more comfortable to use than condition 2 (and similar to condition 3). Importantly, reading speed results did not show any significant difference between the three systems. In addition, learning curves were similar in the three conditions. This proof of concept study suggests that the principles underlying the gaze-controlled enhanced system might be further developed and fruitfully incorporated in different kinds of EVES for low vision reading.

International audience; Whistled speech in a non-tonal language consists of the natural emulation of vocalic and consonantal qualities in a simple modulated whistled signal. This special speech register represents a natural telecommunication system that enables high levels of sentence intelligibility by trained speakers and is not directly intelligible to naïve listeners. Yet, it is easily learned by speakers of the language that is being whistled, as attested by the current efforts of the revitalization of whistled Spanish in the Canary Islands. To better understand the relation between whistled and spoken speech perception, we look herein at how Spanish, French, and Standard Chinese native speakers, knowing nothing about whistled speech, categorized four Spanish whistled vowels. The results show that the listeners categorized differently depending on their native language. The Standard Chinese speakers demonstrated the worst performance on this task but were still able to associate a tonal whistle to vowel categories. Spanish speakers were the most accurate, and both Spanish and French participants were able to categorize the four vowels, although not as accurately as an expert whistler. These results attest that whistled speech can be used as a natural laboratory to test the perceptual processes of language.

International audience; Prediction is the ability of the brain to quickly activate a target concept in response to arelated stimulus (prime). Experiments point to the existence of an overlap between the populationsof the neurons coding for different stimuli, and other experiments show that prime-targetrelations arise in the process of long term memory formation. The classical modellingparadigm is that long term memories correspond to stable steady states of a Hopfield networkwith Hebbian connectivity. Experiments show that short term synaptic depressionplays an important role in the processing of memories. This leads naturally to a computationalmodel of priming, called latching dynamics; a stable state (prime) can become unstableand the system may converge to another transiently stable steady state (target).Hopfield network models of latching dynamics have been studied by means of numericalsimulation, however the conditions for the existence of this dynamics have not been elucidated.In this work we use a combination of analytic and numerical approaches to confirmthat latching dynamics can exist in the context of a symmetric Hebbian learning rule, howeverlacks robustness and imposes a number of biologically unrealistic restrictions on themodel. In particular our work shows that the symmetry of the Hebbian rule is not an obstructionto the existence of latching dynamics, however fine tuning of the parameters of themodel is needed.

International audience; Native listeners process and understand homophones, such as la locution ‘the phrase’ vs. l'allocution ‘the speech’, both [lalɔkysjɔ̃], without much semantical ambiguity in connected speech. Yet, behavioral experiments show that disambiguation is partial under intra-speaker variability without semantical context. To investigate electrophysiological correlates of perception of non-contrastive subphonemic features in French homophonous sequences, we examined the event-related potential Mismatch Negativity (MMN) using a multitoken stimuli oddball paradigm. Stimuli were taken from multiple natural productions of nominal homophonous utterances. In the first experiment, we used the first syllables, while in the second experiment, the whole utterances.The homophonous sequence elicited an MMN response in both experiments. This suggests that non-contrastive acoustic features that differentiate homophones, such as pitch and duration, are robust enough despite intra-speaker variability to allow listeners to automatically extract regularities associated with each utterance. This ability of the perception system might contribute to correct segmentation and comprehension of ambiguous utterances.

International audience; This paper attempts to evaluate the capacity of immediate memory to cope with new situations in relation to the compressibility of information likely to allow the formation of chunks. We constructed a task in which untrained participants had to immediately recall sequences of stimuli with possible associations between them. Compressibility of information was used to measure the chunkability of each sequence on a single trial. Compressibility refers to the recoding of information in a more compact representation. Although compressibility has almost exclusively been used to study long-term memory, our theory suggests that a compression process relying on redundancies within the structure of the list materials can occur very rapidly in immediate memory. The results indicated a span of about three items when the list had no structure, but increased linearly as structure was added. The amount of information retained in immediate memory was maximal for the most compressible sequences, particularly when information was ordered in a way that facilitated the compression process. We discuss the role of immediate memory in the rapid formation of chunks made up of new associations that did not already exist in long-term memory, and we conclude that immediate memory is the starting place for the reorganization of information.

International audience; The ability of the auditory system to change the perceptual weighting of acoustic cues when faced with degraded speech has long been evidenced. However, the exact changes that occur remain mostly unknown. Here, we proposed to use the Auditory Classification Image (ACI) methodology to reveal the acoustic cues used in natural speech comprehension and in reduced (i.e. noise-vocoded or re-synthesized) speech comprehension. The results show that in the latter case the auditory system updates its listening strategy by de-weighting secondary acoustic cues. Indeed, these are often weaker and thus more easily erased in adverse listening conditions. Furthermore our data suggests that this de-weighting does not directly depend on the actual reliability of the cues, but rather on the expected change in informativeness.

International audience; Neural network models describe semantic priming effects by way of mechanisms of activation of neuron coding for the words that rely strongly on synaptic efficacies between pairs of neurons. Biologically inspired Hebbian learning defines efficacy values as a function of the activity of pre- and post-synaptic neurons only. It generates only pair associations between words in the semantic network. However, the statistical analysis of large text databases points to the frequent occurrence not only of pairs of words (e.g., “the way”) but also of patterns of more than two words (e.g., “by the way”). The learning of these frequent patterns of words is not reducible to associations between pairs of words but must take into account the higher level of coding of three-word patterns. The processing and learning of pattern of words challenges classical Hebbian learning algorithms used in biologically inspired models of priming. The aim of the present study was to test the effects of patterns on the semantic processing of words and investigates how an inter-synaptic learning algorithm succeeds at reproducing the experimental data.The experiment manipulates the frequency of occurrence of patterns of three words in a multiple-paradigm protocol. Results show for the first time that target words benefit more priming when embedded in a pattern with the two primes than when only associated with each prime in a pair. A biologically inspired, inter-synaptic learning algorithm is tested that potentiates synapses as a function of the activation of more than two pre- and post-synaptic neurons. Simulations show that the network can learn patterns of three words to reproduce the experimental results

This article is about the question of how morpho-syntactic information impacts phonology. Its broad subject matter is thus the morpho-syntax-phonology interface. Note that inquiry is restricted to the direction mentioned: there is also literature on how phonology conditions morpho-syntactic computation, which is not discussed here. There are two ways for morpho-syntax to affect phonology: by inserting an object into the linear string that is interpreted by the phonology, or by arranging the chunks that are submitted to phonological interpretation in a specific way. The former proposes a representational, the latter a derivational management of phonology. The derivational means of influencing phonology is implemented by inside-out interpretation (i.e., the idea that morpho-syntactic structure is interpreted phonologically from the most to the least embedded item). This genuinely generative device was introduced in the mid-1950s and successively known as the transformational cycle, the phonological cycle, cyclic derivation, and finally today as derivation by phase (in syntactic quarters). On the representational side (which has been a tradition since the 19th century), carriers of morpho-syntactic information that were inserted into the linear string have successively incarnated as (juncture) phonemes, SPE-type boundaries (# and the like), and prosodic constituency (the Prosodic Word, etc.), each being representative of its time. That is, carriers of morpho-syntactic information were (juncture) phonemes when phonemes were the basic units in phonological theory, they were made segments in SPE (# was supposed to be a [-segment] segment) when the basic phonological units were segments and finally became autosegmental domains (prosodic constituency) in the early 1980s when all areas of phonology were autosegmentalized. Since the early 1980s, the two channels that import morpho-syntactic information into phonology are each associated with a specific theory: Lexical Phonology is the derivational theory of the interface, while Prosodic Phonology organizes its representational management. The question of how exactly both can or should coexist is examined in Division of Labor Between Representational and Derivational Means of Influencing Phonology. Another question from the 1980s that has moved up on the agenda in the current minimalist environment is whether there should be a representational channel of communication at all: Direct Syntax approaches hold that no carriers of morpho-syntactic information are ever inserted into phonology. Instead, phonological instructions make direct reference to morpho-syntactic structure and labels (see Direct Syntax vs. Prosodic Phonology).

International audience; It has been proposed that inner speech supports task selection in task switching studies, especially when the need for endogenous control is increased. This has been established through the suppression of inner speech in cognitive-flexibility tasks that leads to poorer performance. The aim of this study is to quantify the role of inner speech in a flexibility task by using surface laryngeal electromyography, which, contrary to previous studies, enables participants to freely verbalize the tasks. We manipulated endogenous and exogenous flexibility in a mathematical switching task paradigm. Experiment 1 shows that inner speech acts as a support for switching and is recruited more often when the tasks are of an endogenous type. The main result of Experiment 2 that language is recruited more for the mixing cost than for the switch cost (regardless of the endogenous factor) extends past findings obtained through articulatory suppression.

The time-based resource sharing (TBRS) model is a prominent model of working memory that is both predictive and simple. The TBRS is the mainstream decay-based model and the most susceptible to competition with interference-based models. A connectionist implementation of the TBRS, the TBRS*, has recently been developed. However, the TBRS* is an enriched version of the TBRS, making it difficult to test the general characteristics resulting from the TBRS assumptions. Here, we describe a novel model, the TBRS2, built to be more transparent and simple than the TBRS*. The TBRS2 is minimalist and allows only a few parameters. It is a straightforward mathematical transcription of the TBRS that focuses exclusively on the activation level of memory items as a function of time. Its simplicity makes it possible to derive several theorems from the original TBRS and allows several variants of the refreshing process to be tested without relying on particular architectures., 21 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

Abstract. This study of supervised categorization shows how different kinds of category representations are influenced by the order in which training examples are presented. We used the well-studied 5-4 category structure of Medin and Schaffer (1978) , which allows transfer of category learning to new stimuli to be discriminated as a function of rule-based or similarity-based category knowledge. In the rule-based training condition (thought to facilitate the learning of abstract logical rules and hypothesized to produce rule-based classification), items were grouped by subcategories and randomized within each subcategory. In the similarity-based training condition (thought to facilitate associative learning and hypothesized to produce exemplar classification), transitions between items within the same category were determined by their featural similarity and subcategories were ignored. We found that transfer patterns depended on whether the presentation order was similarity-based, or rule-based, with the participants particularly capitalizing on the rule-based order.

Przedmiotem artykułu jest teoria fonologii laryngalnej zaprezentowana w pracy Cyrana (2014), czyli relatywizm laryngalny. Podejście to opiera się na założeniu, iż spółgłoski sonorne oraz samogłoski nie mają specyfikacji fonologicznej ze względu na dźwięczność - w ich przypadku ma ona zawsze charakter jedynie fonetyczny. Głównym elementem jest zatem interpretacja fonetyczna wyniku komputacji fonologicznej - to właśnie wówczas fonetyczna dźwięczność przenika na sąsiadujące segmenty. W niniejszej, pierwszej części artykułu ocenie podlega potencjał generatywny teorii zakładającej relatywizm laryngalny, a zasada jej działania porównana zostaje z wcześniejszymi analizami. Podjęta zostaje również kwestia wpływu jednostek fonologicznych pozbawionych substancji. The article discusses the theory of laryngeal phonology exposed in Cyran (2014), Laryngeal Relativism. The basic assumption of this approach is that sonorants and vowels never bear phonological specifications for voicing: their voicing is only ever phonetic in nature. Therefore phonetic interpretation, i.e. spell-out of the output of phonology into phonetic categories, is central: this is where phonetic voicing leaks into neighbouring segments. In the first part of the article, the generative power of Laryngeal Relativism is evaluated, and its workings are compared with previous analyses. The impact of substance-free primes is also discussed.

In this paper we study the origin of modern scientific childcare as a practice of subjectivation. From this point of view, we analyse the parenting or childrearing technologies which are proposed in a sample of 23 Spanish and Latin American early childcare handbooks published between 1898 and 1939. These technologies of subjectivation should be understood as an important element of a process for the construction of subject as a responsible, adapted and self-governing citizen. These technologies should also be understood in the context defined by the biopolitics and the development of eugenics, which helped many authors –most of them doctors– to defend the need to ensure the physical and moral health of nation through a scientific rearing of little children, that is to say, the future citizens.; En este artículo abordamos el origen de la puericultura moderna como práctica de subjetivación. En concreto, analizamos desde este punto de vista las técnicas de crianza infantil recomendadas, en una muestra de 23 manuales de puericultura españoles e hispanoamericanos, publicados entre 1898 y 1939. Dichas técnicas estaban subordinadas a la construcción de un modelo de sujeto, cuyo horizonte era el del ciudadano responsable, adaptado y autogobernado, dentro del contexto definido por la biopolítica de la época. Los planteamientos eugenistas servían a gran parte de los autores de los manuales –casi todos médicos– para defender la necesidad de asegurar la salud física y moral de la nación, mediante la crianza científica de los niños que serían los futuros ciudadanos.

Selecting responses in working memory while processing combinations of stimuli depends strongly on their relations stored in long-term memory. However, the learning of XOR-like combinations of stimuli and responses according to complex rules raises the issue of the non-linear separability of the responses within the space of stimuli. One proposed solution is to add neurons that perform a stage of non-linear processing between the stimuli and responses, at the cost of increasing the network size. Based on the non-linear integration of synaptic inputs within dendritic compartments, we propose here an inter-synaptic (IS) learning algorithm that determines the probability of potentiating/depressing each synapse as a function of the co-activity of the other synapses within the same dendrite. The IS learning is effective with random connectivity and without either a priori wiring or additional neurons. Our results show that IS learning generates efficacy values that are sufficient for the processing of XOR-like combinations, on the basis of the sole correlational structure of the stimuli and responses. We analyze the types of dendrites involved in terms of the number of synapses from pre-synaptic neurons coding for the stimuli and responses. The synaptic efficacy values obtained show that different dendrites specialize in the detection of different combinations of stimuli. The resulting behavior of the cortical network model is analyzed as a function of inter-synaptic vs. Hebbian learning. Combinatorial priming effects show that the retrospective activity of neurons coding for the stimuli trigger XOR-like combination-selective prospective activity of neurons coding for the expected response. The synergistic effects of inter-synaptic learning and of mixed-coding neurons are simulated. The results show that, although each mechanism is sufficient by itself, their combined effects improve the performance of the network.