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Lip-reading is crucial to understand speech in challenging conditions. Neuroimaging investigations have revealed that lip-reading activates auditory cortices in individuals covertly repeating absent—but known—speech. However, in real-life, one usually has no detailed information about the content of upcoming speech. Here we show that during silent lip-reading ofunknownspeech, activity in auditory cortices entrains more to absent speech than to seen lip movements at frequencies below 1 Hz. This entrainment to absent speech was characterized by a speech-to-brain delay of 50–100 ms as when actually listening to speech. We also observed entrainment to lip movements at the same low frequency in the right angular gyrus, an area involved in processing biological motion. These findings demonstrate that the brain can synthesize high-level features of absent unknown speech sounds from lip-reading that can facilitate the processing of the auditory input. Such a synthesis process may help explain well-documented bottom-up perceptual effects.

We investigated how native language experience shapes prediction mechanisms. Two groups of bilinguals (either Spanish or Basque natives) performed a word matching task (WMT) and a picture matching task (PMT). They indicated whether the stimuli they perceived matched with the noun they heard. Spanish noun endings were either diagnostic of the gender (transparent), or ambiguous (opaque). ERPs were time-locked to the gender-marked determiner preceding the predicted noun. In the WMT both groups showed a negative (~340 ms) effect. Basque natives displayed an earlier effect (~150 ms) for determiners preceding transparent nouns. In the PMT both groups showed an early effect (~160 ms) for determiners preceding opaque nouns. Transparent nouns' determiners elicited prediction at ~330 ms in Spanish natives, but at ~460 ms in Basque natives. It is concluded that bilinguals rely on the features of the L1 for predicting in the L2: native experience moulds prediction. Linguistic prediction is hierarchical, with different operation levels communicating at an interface stage.

First published: 28 December 2017 Cortical oscillations phase-align to the quasi-rhythmic structure of the speech envelope. This speech-brain entrainment has been reported in two frequency bands, that is both in the theta band (4-8 Hz) and in the delta band (

Developmental dyslexia is frequently associated with phonological difficulties such as poor phonological awareness, access, or short term memory skills, that further impede the acquisition of letter-to-sound mappings. Some hypotheses suggest that phonological disorders in dyslexia are themselves caused by a more basic auditory processing deficit. Here, we review evidence showing that a high sensitivity to auditory rhythmic cues may be critical for phonological and reading development. Moreover, the brain signature of prosodic and rhythmic processing difficulties in dyslexia may reside in atypical right hemisphere synchronization to slow frequency auditory modulations, that would then generate left hemisphere-based dyslexic reading symptoms. Overall, the data presented in this chapter suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating the extraction of rhythmic and temporally regular patterns in auditory sequences could improve reading in dyslexia through the enhancement of phonological skills.

Issue Online:21 September 2018 We investigated how native language experience shapes anticipatory language processing. Two groups of bilinguals (either Spanish or Basque natives) performed a word matching task (WordMT) and a picture matching task (PictureMT). They indicated whether the stimuli they visually perceived matched with the noun they heard. Spanish noun endings were either diagnostic of the gender (transparent) or ambiguous (opaque). ERPs were time-locked to an intervening gender-marked determiner preceding the predicted noun. The determiner always gender agreed with the following noun but could also introduce a mismatching noun, so that it was not fully task diagnostic. Evoked brain activity time-locked to the determiner was considered as reflecting updating/reanalysis of the task-relevant preactivated representation. We focused on the timing of this effect by estimating the comparison between a gender-congruent and a gender-incongruent determiner. In the WordMT, both groups showed a late N400 effect. Crucially, only Basque natives displayed an earlier P200 effect for determiners preceding transparent nouns. In the PictureMT, both groups showed an early P200 effect for determiners preceding opaque nouns. The determiners of transparent nouns triggered a negative effect at similar to 430 ms in Spanish natives, but at similar to 550 ms in Basque natives. This pattern of results supports a "retracing hypothesis" according to which the neurocognitive system navigates through the intermediate (sublexical and lexical) linguistic representations available from previous processing to evaluate the need of an update in the linguistic expectation concerning a target lexical item. Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) (grant PSI2015‐65694‐P to N. M.), Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness “Severo Ochoa” Programme for Centres/Units of Excellence in R&D (grant SEV‐2015‐490)

Published online 29 July 2018 Despite the growing literature on anticipatory language processing, the brain dynamics of this high-level predictive process are still unclear. In the present MEG study, we analyzed pre- and post-stimulus oscillatory activity time-locked to the reading of a target word. We experimentally contrasted the processing of the same target word following two highly constraining sentence contexts, in which the constraint was driven either by the semantic content or by the lexical association between words. Previous research suggests the presence of sensory facilitation for expected words in the latter condition but not in the former. We observed a dissociation between beta (∼20 Hz) and gamma (>50 Hz) band activity in pre- and post-stimulus time intervals respectively. Both the beta and gamma effects were evident in occipital brain regions, and only the pre-stimulus beta effect additionally involved left pre-articulatory motor regions. Lexically constrained (vs. semantically constrained) words elicited reduced beta power around 400 msec before the target word in motor regions and a functionally related gamma enhancement in occipital regions around 200 msec post-target. The present findings highlight the role of the motor network in word-form prediction and support proposals claiming that low-level perceptual representations can be pre-activated during language prediction. This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER) (grant PSI2015-65694-P, “Severo Ochoa” programme SEV-2015-490 for Centres of Excellence in R&D), and by the Basque government (grant PI_2016_1_0014). Further support derived from the AThEME project funded by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme, the ERC- 2011-ADG-295362 from the European Research Council.

Available online 29 March 2018 The current fMRI study was designed to investigate whether the processing of different gender-related cues embedded in nouns affects the computation of agreement dependencies and, if so, where this possible interaction is mapped in the brain. We used the Spanish gender agreement system, which makes it possible to manipulate two different factors: the agreement between different sentence constituents (i.e., by contrasting congruent versus incongruent determiner-noun pairs) and the formal (i.e., orthographical/morphological) and/or lexical information embedded in the noun –i.e., by contrasting transparent (e.g., libromasc. [book]; lunafem. [moon]) and opaque nouns (e.g., l apizmasc. [pencil]; vejezfem. [old age]). Crucially, these data illustrated, for the first time, how the network underlying agreement is sensitive to different gender-to-ending cues: different sources of gender information associated with nouns affect the neural circuits involved in the computation of local agreement dependencies. When the gender marking is informative (as in the case of transparent nouns), both formal and lexical information is used to establish grammatical relations. In contrast, when no formal cues are available (as in the case of opaque nouns), gender information is retrieved from the lexicon. We demonstrated the involvement of the posterior MTG/STG, pars triangularis within the IFG, and parietal regions during gender agreement computation. Critically, in order to integrate the different available information sources, the dynamics of this fronto-temporal loop change and additional regions, such as the hippocampus, the angular and the supramarginal gyri are recruited. These results underpin previous neuroanatomical models proposed in the context of both gender processing and sentence comprehension. But, more importantly, they provide valuable information regarding how and where the brain's language system dynamically integrates all the available form-based and lexical cues during comprehension. This research was partially supported by Severo Ochoa program grant SEV-2015-049; grant ERC-2011-ADG-295362 from the European Research Council, and grants PSI2015-67353-R and PSI2015-65694-P from the MINECO.

Prediction has been proposed to be a fundamental neurocognitive mechanism. However, its role in language comprehension is currently under debate. In this magnetoencephalography study we aimed to find evidence of word-form phonological pre-activation and to characterize the oscillatory mechanisms supporting this. Participants were presented firstly with a picture of an object, and then, after a delay (fixed or variable), they heard the corresponding word. Target words could contain a phoneme substitution, and participants' task was to detect mispronunciations. Word-initial phonemes were either fricatives or plosives, generating two experimental conditions (expect-fricative and expect-plosive). In the pre-word interval, significant differences (α = 0.05) emerged between conditions both for fixed and variable delays. Source reconstruction of this effect showed a brain-wide network involving several frequency bands, including bilateral superior temporal areas commonly associated with phonological processing, in a theta range. These results show that phonological representations supported by the theta band may be active before word onset, even under temporal uncertainty. However, in the evoked response just prior to the word, differences between conditions were apparent under variable- but not fixed-delays. This suggests that additional top-down mechanisms sensitive to phonological form may be recruited when there is uncertainty in the signal., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Published online: 11 Sep 2015. Recent proposals have suggested that language prediction is supported by the neurophysiological mechanisms involved in language production. Both prediction and production in language imply information processing percolating down from abstract semantic representations to lower-level processing steps, either for articulation (action) or active sensation (perception). Language production studies have repeatedly reported desynchronisation of oscillatory beta power (13– 30 Hz) over the left frontal cortex during word generation. Crucially, predictive coding theories propose that the beta frequency channel mediates top-down propagation of information during prediction. The present study evaluates initial experimental evidence on pre-stimulus activity during speech production and discusses the similar oscillatory dynamics involved in preparation for perception of words. We try to better characterise what processing dynamics the prestimulus beta-band activity represents, illustrating with some results from our lab. This evidence motivates the need for more fine-grained psycholinguistic paradigms to better characterise whether prediction and production are supported by similar neurophysiological mechanisms. This work was supported in part by grant PSI2012-32350 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and an Ikesbasque Research Fellowship to Nicola Molinaro.

Learning a second language (L2) can be crucial in the present globalized society. However, reaching the level of L1 performance of native speakers is still a challenge for many. Distinct factors could account for the persistent gap observed between natives' and non-natives' syntactic abilities: L1-L2 differences, AoA, proficiency, L2 immersion duration, L2 training duration. Although different theoretical approaches described the role of these several factors, not all studies using on-line measures have investigated them comprehensively and consistently. The present work reviews available ERP studies on L2 syntactic analysis in order to establish the relative weight of each factor on the time course of L2 processing. Logistic regression analyses were performed on the presence or absence of ERP effects reported in response to L2 syntactic violations, including all the influential factors as categorical independent variables. The results showed that immersion duration has an influence on the ERP correlates linked to early mechanisms of syntactic processing, while the global proficiency level has an impact on the ERP correlates related to late, language-monitoring activity.

The human semantic combinatorial system allows us to create a wide number of new meanings from a finite number of existing representations. The present study investigates the neural dynamics underlying the semantic processing of different conceptual constructions based on predictions from previous neuroanatomical models of the semantic processing network. In two experiments, participants read sentences for comprehension containing noun-adjective pairs in three different conditions: prototypical (Redundant), nonsense (Anomalous) and low-typical but composable (Contrastive). In Experiment 1 we examined the processing costs associated to reading these sentences and found a processing dissociation between Anomalous and Contrastive word pairs, compared to prototypical (Redundant) stimuli. In Experiment 2, functional connectivity results showed strong co-activation across conditions between inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG), as well as between these two regions and middle frontal gyrus (MFG), anterior temporal cortex (ATC) and fusiform gyrus (FG), consistent with previous neuroanatomical models. Importantly, processing of low-typical (but composable) meanings relative to prototypical and anomalous constructions was associated with a stronger positive coupling between ATC and angular gyrus (AG). Our results underscore the critical role of IFG-MTG co-activation during semantic processing and how other relevant nodes within the semantic processing network come into play to handle visual-orthographic information, to maintain multiple lexical-semantic representations in working memory and to combine existing representations while creatively constructing meaning.

Two experiments investigated the lexical inhibitory effect of orthographic neighbors relative to identity priming effects in an unmasked priming paradigm combined with a lexical decision task on word targets. Targets were preceded either by the same word, by a lower frequency orthographic word neighbor, by an orthographic pseudoword neighbor or by an unrelated prime. Experiment 1 showed a standard facilitatory effect from identity primes, whereas inhibitory priming effects were observed for both types of neighbor primes. Experiment 2 examined the time-course of these effects by using event-related potential recordings. A generalized relatedness effect was found in the 200–400 ms time-window, with smaller negativities generated by related primes than unrelated primes regardless of prime type. In contrast, at 400 ms, while identity primes were associated with smaller negativities than unrelated primes, word neighbor primes were associated with greater negativities than unrelated primes. Additionally, pseudoword neighbor primes produce null effects as compared to unrelated primes. These results are discussed in terms of competition between activated lexical representations and revealed that such a mechanism is modulated by the lexical status of the prime.

Whether phonological deficits in developmental dyslexia are associated with impaired neural sampling of auditory information at either syllabic‐ or phonemic‐rates is still under debate. In addition, whereas neuroanatomical alterations in auditory regions have been documented in dyslexic readers, whether and how these structural anomalies are linked to auditory sampling and reading deficits remains poorly understood. In this study, we measured auditory neural synchronization at different frequencies corresponding to relevant phonological spectral components of speech in children and adults with and without dyslexia, using magnetoencephalography. Furthermore, structural MRI was used to estimate cortical thickness of the auditory cortex of participants. Dyslexics showed atypical brain synchronization at both syllabic (slow) and phonemic (fast) rates. Interestingly, while a left hemispheric asymmetry in cortical thickness was functionally related to a stronger left hemispheric lateralization of neural synchronization to stimuli presented at the phonemic rate in skilled readers, the same anatomical index in dyslexics was related to a stronger right hemispheric dominance for neural synchronization to syllabic‐rate auditory stimuli. These data suggest that the acoustic sampling deficit in development dyslexia might be linked to an atypical specialization of the auditory cortex to both low and high frequency amplitude modulations. Hum Brain Mapp 36:4986–5002, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

In the field of neuroimaging, researchers often resort to contrasting parametric maps to identify differences between conditions or populations. Unfortunately, contrast patterns mix effects related to amplitude and location differences and tend to peak away from sources of genuine brain activity to an extent that scales with the smoothness of the maps. Here, we illustrate this mislocation problem on source maps reconstructed from magnetoencephalographic recordings and propose a novel, dedicated location-comparison method. In realistic simulations, contrast mislocation was on average ∼10 mm when genuine sources were placed at the same location, and was still above 5 mm when sources were 20 mm apart. The dedicated location-comparison method achieved a sensitivity of ∼90% when inter-source distance was 12 mm. Its benefit is also illustrated on real brain-speech entrainment data. In conclusion, contrasts of parametric maps provide precarious information for source location. To specifically address the question of location difference, one should turn to dedicated methods as the one proposed here., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

First Published December 21, 2016 It has been proposed that atypical neural oscillations in both the auditory and the visual modalities could explain why some individuals fail to learn to read and suffer from developmental dyslexia. However, the role of specific oscillatory mechanisms in reading acquisition is still under debate. In this article, we take a cross-linguistic approach and argue that both the phonological and orthographic specifics of a language (e.g., linguistic rhythm, orthographic depth) shape the oscillatory activity thought to contribute to reading development. The proposed theoretical framework should allow future research to test cross-linguistic hypotheses that will shed light on the heterogeneity of auditory and visual disorders and their underlying brain dysfunction(s) in developmental dyslexia, and inform clinical practice by helping us to diagnose dyslexia across languages. This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant, BILITERACY Project, to M.C.), and the Spanish government (Plan Nacional-PSI2012-32128 and PSI2015-65338-P to M.L., Plan Nacional-PSI2012-32350 and PSI2015-65694-P to N.M., and Plan Nacional-PSI2015-67353-R to M.C.). The Basque Center on Brain Cognition and Language acknowledges funding from Ayuda Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2015-0490.

Online First Publication, January 9, 2017 We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally plausible idioms (e.g., break the ice) are semantically composed and how the idiomatic meaning is integrated in the unfolding sentence representation. Participants read ambiguous idiom strings embedded in highly predictable, literal, and idiomatic contexts while their EEG was recorded. Control sentences only contained the idiom-final word whose cloze values were as high as in literal and idiomatic contexts. Event-related potentials data showed that differences in the amplitude of a frontal positivity (PNP) emerged at the beginning and at the end of the idiom strings, with the idiomatic context condition associated with more positive voltages. The time frequency analysis of the EEG showed an increase in power of the middle gamma frequency band only in the literal context condition. These findings suggest that sentence revision mechanisms, associated with the frontal PNP, are involved in idiom meaning integration, and that the literal semantic composition of the idiomatic constituents, associated with changes in gamma frequency, is not carried out after idiom recognition. This research was carried out at Universita` di Modena e Reggio Emilia. The experiment was funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) through a grant for “projects of national interest” (PRIN n. 2005119758_003).

Available online 3 April 2017 Language comprehension is largely supported by predictive mechanisms that account for the ease and speed with which communication unfolds. Both native and proficient non-native speakers can efficiently handle contextual cues to generate reliable linguistic expectations. However, the link between the variability of the linguistic background of the speaker and the hierarchical format of the representations predicted is still not clear. We here investigate whether native language exposure to typologically highly diverse languages (Spanish and Basque) affects the way early balanced bilingual speakers carry out language predictions. During Spanish sentence comprehension, participants developed predictions of words the form of which (noun ending) could be either diagnostic of grammatical gender values (transparent) or totally ambiguous (opaque). We measured electrophysiological prediction effects time-locked both to the target word and to its determiner, with the former being expected or unexpected. Event-related (N200– N400) and oscillatory activity in the low beta-band (15–17 Hz) frequency channel showed that both Spanish and Basque natives optimally carry out lexical predictions independently of word transparency. Crucially, in contrast to Spanish natives, Basque natives displayed visual word form predictions for transparent words, in consistency with the relevance that noun endings (post-nominal suffixes) play in their native language. We conclude that early language exposure largely shapes prediction mechanisms, so that bilinguals reading in their second language rely on the distributional regularities that are highly relevant in their first language. More importantly, we show that individual linguistic experience hierarchically modulates the format of the predicted representation. This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grants PSI2012-32350 and PSI2015-65694-P to N.M. and grant PSI2014-54500-P to C.M. and S.C.), by the Basque Government (grant PI_2015_1_25 to C.M. and S.C.) and by the Ikerbasque Research Fellowships to N.M and C.M. Further support derived from the AThEME project funded by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme, the ERC- 2011-ADG-295362 from the European Research Council and the award ‘‘Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2015-0490”.

Published online: 06 Feb 2017 Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1283426 Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1283426 The present event-related potential (ERP) study was aimed at testing whether form-function mappings can differently affect sentence comprehension in early bilinguals with a range of linguistic profiles. Basque–Spanish and Spanish–Basque early bilinguals were presented with Spanish sentences with article-noun gender agreement violations. The gender of the target noun could be retrieved based on the word-form (i.e. transparent nouns) or only on a lexical representation (i.e. opaque nouns). While Basque-dominant bilinguals showed an impact of gender-to-ending consistency on agreement computation, Spanish-dominant bilinguals’ agreement processing was not affected by form-function mappings. A multiple regression analysis on early ERP responses from all participants showed that the more Spanish was produced on a daily basis, the easier the detection of gender violation for opaque nouns. The present results suggest that the strength of the lexical representation of gender is not fixed and can change depending on the linguistic habits of early bilinguals. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [PSI 2014-54500-P, PSI2015-65694-P]; the Eusko Jaurlaritza [PI_2015_1_25]; the “Severo Ochoa” Programme for Centres/Units of Excellence in R&D [SEV-2015- 0490]; and the AThEME project [FP7-SSH-2013-1-GA613465], which has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 613465.

The time-course of agreement processing was investigated through three eye-tracking experiments and one grammaticality judgment task by making use of the Spanish Unagreement pattern, which allows the presence of a 3rd person plural subject followed by a 1st person plural verb, as in Los manifestantes anunciamos una huelga (The protesters3.pl announced1.pl a strike). Grammaticality is ensured by re-interpreting the subject as 1st person plural, thereby changing the underlying discourse composition of the sentence (We protesters announced a strike). The comparison of Unagreement with structurally similar sentences (Experiment 1), truly person-anomalous sentences (Experiments 2 and 3) and discourse-incongruent sentences (Experiment 4) revealed a clear dissociation between morphosyntactic-related and discourse-related analysis in agreement comprehension. The constant first-pass effect elicited by Unagreement with respect to structurally similar (grammatical and ungrammatical) sentences across the four experiments evidences the sensitivity of early stages to morphosyntactic evaluation, while the differential effect for discourse-congruous and discourse-incongruous sentences in later measures suggests that discourse-related analyses are dealt with by the parser in subsequent stages of processing.

article i nfo Grammatical agreement is a widespread language phenomenon that indicates formal syntactic relations between words; however, it also conveys basic lexical (e.g. grammatical gender) or semantic (e.g. numerosity) information about a discourse referent. In this study, we focus on the reading of Spanish noun phrases, violating either number or gender determiner-noun agreement compared to grammatical controls. Magnetoencephalographic activity time-locked to the onset of the noun in both types of violation revealed a left-lateralized brain network involving anterior temporal regions (~220 ms) and, later in time, ventro-lateral prefrontal regions (>300 ms). These activa- tionscoexistwithdependency-specific effects:inaninitial step(~170 ms), occipito-temporalregionsare employed for fine-grained analysis of the number marking (in Spanish, presence or absence of the suffix '-s'), while anterior temporal regions show increased activation for gender mismatches compared to grammatical controls. The seman- tic relevance of number agreement dependencies was mainly reflected by left superior temporal increased activity around 340 ms. These findings offer a detailed perspective on the multi-level analyses involved in the initial com- putation of agreement dependencies, and theoretically support a derivational approach to agreement computation.

Collocational complex prepositions (CCPs, e.g., in the hands of) are prefabricated strings of words that play a prepositional role in natural language. Typically, CCPs are formed by a first preposition (P1) followed by a content word (N1) and a second, final preposition (P2) (in the - P1 - hands - N1 - of - P2). Despite their default structure stored in semantic memory, some CCPs allow internal modification (e.g., adjective insertion). In this study, two experiments tested the comprehension of CCPs in which we modified their default structure inserting an adjective before the noun. This modification preserved the semantic well-formedness of the string. The self-paced reading time study (Experiment 1) showed that readers took significantly longer to read the CCP constituents after the inserted adjective (N1 and P2). The ERP (Experiment 2) showed a smaller N400 response to the noun when preceded by the adjective, suggesting that the insertion did not disrupt the online processing of the CCP. Critically, the...

Word reading is heavily influenced by the information provided by previous context. In this study, we analyzed the neurophysiological bases of sentence reading through the EEG activity elicited during reading the same word embedded in differently constraining contexts: a) a low-constraining context; b) a high-constraining semantic compositional context; c) a high-constraining collocational context in which the item was in final position of a multi-word fixed-order expression. Cloze-probability of the two high-constraining contexts was equated. Before reading the target word we observed increased EEG gamma phase synchronization for the high-constraining compositional context and increased EEG theta synchronization for the collocational context (both compared to the low-constraining condition). After reading the target word we observed increased frontal positive EEG evoked activity (~220 ms) for the high-constraining compositional context but an even earlier (~120 ms) effect for the high-constraining collocational condition that was distributed over the scalp. A positive correlation was found only between the increased theta synchronization and the early EEG effect for the high-constraining collocational condition. Results indicate that long-range frontal-occipital interactions in the theta band - indexing working memory operations - support early visual-orthographic analysis of an incoming stimulus (such as the expected word); gamma-phase synchronization better represents binding operations between feed-forward activation and matching feedback. These data suggest that internal linguistic knowledge stored in long-term memory - if unambiguously pre-activated - supports the low-level perceptual processes involved in reading.

In this chapter, we focus on how bilinguals cope with reading individual words and sentences in their different languages, and on how electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings could be used to explore the time course of the cognitive processes underlying bilingual comprehension of visually delivered linguistic stimuli. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) comparing native and nonnative written language processing have been repeatedly used to reveal effects that occur very early in the stream of processing and that are essential for a correct understanding of the cognitive processes leading to efficient word and sentence processing by multilingual readers. We summarize the most relevant studies from this field and offer a list of recommendations for researchers aiming at using EEG recordings as a tool to investigate the complex pattern of feed-forward and feedback interactive activations flowing along the visual recognition system that ultimately lead to efficient bilingual reading.

Published online 18 July 2016 Asymmetric number attraction effects have been typically explained via a privative markedness account: plural nouns are more marked than singular ones and thus stronger attractors. However, this account does not explain results from tripartite systems, in which a third number value is available, like paucal. Here we tested whether attraction effects can be driven by specific markedness sub-components, such as frequency/naturalness of use, using Serbian, in which participles can agree with masculine subjects in singular, plural and paucal. We first conducted a naturalness judgment task, finding the following naturalness/frequency pattern: singular,plural

Available online 21 April 2016 Many studies have provided evidence for the automaticity and immediacy with which stereotypical knowledge affects our behavior. However, less is known about how such social knowledge interacts with linguistic cues during comprehension. In this ERP sentence processing study we took advantage of the rich grammatical gender morphology of Spanish to explore the processing of role nouns in which stereotype and grammatical cues were simultaneously manipulated, in a factorial design. We show that stereotypical knowledge overrides syntactic cues, highlighting the immediacy with which stereotype knowledge is activated during language comprehension and supporting proposals claiming that social knowledge impacts on language processing differently from other forms of semantics. This research was supported by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013), Marie Curie Initial Training Network – Language, Cognition and Gender [237907 to J.-J. Su], the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) [PSI2015-65694-P to N.M., PSI2012-31448 to M.C.], the European Research Council [ERC-2011-ADG-295362 to M.C.]; and the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Science, Consolider- Ingenio 2010 [CSD2008-00048 to M.C.]. The project was also partially supported by the award ‘‘Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2015-0490”.

Unagreement patterns consist in a person feature mismatch between subject and verb that is nonetheless grammatical in Spanish. The processing of this type of construction gives new insights into the understanding of agreement processes during language comprehension. Here, we contrasted oscillatory brain activity triggered by Unagreement in different EEG bands with those triggered by Standard Agreement and Person Mismatch sentences. In Spectral Power analysis, a similar pattern for Unagreement to that elicited by Person Mismatch was found in lower beta and alpha bands, approximately around 600 ms. This suggests that fast oscillations reflect the evaluation of the feature match between two structurally related constituents (independently of its grammaticality). In an equivalent time window, the Unagreement condition behaves similarly to the Standard Agreement condition in the theta band, but different from the Person Mismatch condition that shows an enhanced spectral power. In addition, an enhanced phase synchrony in lower beta frequency around 600 ms is associated to standard agreement patterns, while beta-high frequencies at 800 ms characterize processing of Unagreement sentences. These results support the functional dissociation between the evaluation of the feature match between two structurally related constituents (independently of its grammaticality—in fast oscillatory bands) and integration of linguistic material in working memory (reflected by theta oscillations). Successful resolution of an agreement dependency is better reflected in phase synchronizations at beta band.

Theaimofthischapteristosketchanoverviewoftheresearchthathasbeencarriedout on reading in Spanish at the word and sentence level. The study of Spanishpsycholinguistics has played an important role in the converging evidence sup-portingcurrenttheoriesofprocessingatthewordandsentencelevel.Moreover,ithasalsochallengedtheenduringbiastowardmodelsoflanguageprocessingbasedon data collected exclusively from the English language.Thishas also contributedto the larger goal of moving towards a comprehensive theory of language proces-sing that is built on data that are not language specific, while taking into consid-eration specific language features that can modulate processing. The mainsubtopicsaddressedandthemainfindingsfromSpanishpsycholinguisticresearchwill be described. The first half of the chapter will be devoted to the recognition ofprinted words, while the second part will describe the research on sentenceprocessing.Efficientreadingisbasedonthecorrectrecognitionandprocessingofindividualprinted words, which constitute the primary building blocks of language proces-sing, and on the assembly of the words into phrases and sentences. Research onvisual word recognition in Spanish can help to characterize the universal and thelanguage-specificmechanismsofwordrecognition.Inthischapter,wewillrefertosome of the unique features of Spanish and describe how they have an impact onthe core processes of word processing. These features are: alphabetical orthogra-phy;quasi-univocalgrapheme-to-phonememappings;clearsyllabicstructure;richmorphology; and close coexistence with other languages. In Section 2, we willpresent some of the basic findings from each of these research topics that haveprovided important insights into how printed words are perceived, encoded, andprocessed.

Published online 18 November 2016 Sentence comprehension is successfully accomplished by means of a form-to-meaning mapping procedure that relies on the extraction of morphosyntactic information from the input and its mapping to higher-level semantic–discourse representations. In this study, we sought to determine whether neuroanatomically distinct brain regions are involved in the processing of different types of information contained in the propositional meaning of a sentence, namely person and number. While person information indexes the role that an individual has in discourse (i.e., the speaker, the addressee or the entity being talked about by speaker and addressee), number indicates its cardinality (i.e., a single entity vs a multitude of entities). An event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment was run using agreement-Correct and Person- and Number-violated sentences in Spanish, to disentangle the processing mechanisms and neural substrates associated with the building of discourse and cardinality representations. The contrast between Person and Number Violations showed qualitative and quantitative differences. A greater response for person compared to number was found in the left middle temporal gyrus (LMTG). However, critically, a posterior-to-anterior functional gradient emerged within this region. While the posterior portion of the LMTG was sensitive to both Person and Number Violations, the anterior portion of this region showed selective response for Person Violations. These results confirm that the comprehension of the propositional meaning of a sentence results from a composite, feature-sensitive mechanism of form-to-meaning mapping in which the nodes of the language network are differentially involved. BCBL acknowledges funding from Ayuda Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2015-0490. S.M. acknowledges funding from the Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia Fellowship Program and from grant PI_2014_38 from the Basque Government. N.M. was funded by grant PSI2012- 32350 and PSI2015-65694-P from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. M.C was funded by grant PSI2012-31448 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and ERC-2011-ADG-295362 from the European Research Council.

Developmental dyslexia is a reading disorder often characterized by reduced awareness of speech units. Whether the neural source of this phonological disorder in dyslexic readers results from the malfunctioning of the primary auditory system or damaged feedback communication between higher‐order phonological regions (i.e., left inferior frontal regions) and the auditory cortex is still under dispute. Here we recorded magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals from 20 dyslexic readers and 20 age‐matched controls while they were listening to ∼10‐s‐long spoken sentences. Compared to controls, dyslexic readers had (1) an impaired neural entrainment to speech in the delta band (0.5–1 Hz); (2) a reduced delta synchronization in both the right auditory cortex and the left inferior frontal gyrus; and (3) an impaired feedforward functional coupling between neural oscillations in the right auditory cortex and the left inferior frontal regions. This shows that during speech listening, individuals with developmental dyslexia present reduced neural synchrony to low‐frequency speech oscillations in primary auditory regions that hinders higher‐order speech processing steps. The present findings, thus, strengthen proposals assuming that improper low‐frequency acoustic entrainment affects speech sampling. This low speech‐brain synchronization has the strong potential to cause severe consequences for both phonological and reading skills. Interestingly, the reduced speech‐brain synchronization in dyslexic readers compared to normal readers (and its higher‐order consequences across the speech processing network) appears preserved through the development from childhood to adulthood. Thus, the evaluation of speech‐brain synchronization could possibly serve as a diagnostic tool for early detection of children at risk of dyslexia. Hum Brain Mapp 37:2767–2783, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Agreement is a very important mechanism for language processing. Mainstream psycholinguistic research on subject–verb agreement processing has emphasized the purely formal and encapsulated nature of this phenomenon, positing an equivalent access to person and number features. However, person and number are intrinsically different, because person conveys extra-syntactic information concerning the participants in the speech act. To test the person-number dissociation hypothesis we investigated the neural correlates of subject–verb agreement in Spanish, using person and number violations. While number agreement violations produced a left-anterior negativity followed by a P600 with a posterior distribution, the negativity elicited by person anomalies had a centro-posterior maximum and was followed by a P600 effect that was frontally distributed in the early phase and posteriorly distributed in the late phase. These data reveal that the parser is differentially sensitive to the two features and that it deals with the two anomalies by adopting different strategies, due to the different levels of analysis affected by the person and number violations.

In the domain of written sentence comprehension, the computation of agreement dependencies is generally considered as a form-driven processing routine whose domain is syntactic in nature. In the present review we discuss the main findings emerging in the Event-Related Potential (ERP) literature on sentence comprehension, focusing on the different dimensions of agreement patterns (features, values, constituents involved and language): Agreement mismatches usually evoke a biphasic electrophysiological pattern (Left Anterior Negativity e LAN, 300e450 msec and P600 after 500 msec). This ERP pattern is assumed to reflect rule-based computations sensitive to formal (inflectional) covariations of related words (triggeretarget). Here we claim that agreement processing is sensitive to both the type of feature involved and the constituents that express the agreement dependency. More specifically, LAN could reflect violation of expectancy (elicited by the trigger) for the target functional morphology; later, trigger and target are structurally integrated at the sentence level (earlyP600). However, morphosyntactic information could trigger the activation of higher-level representations that are not strictly syntactic in nature. The recruitment of this additional non-syntactic information (mirrored by N400like effects) indicates that rule-based computations of agreement dependencies are not blind to non-syntactic information but are often recruited to establish sentence-level relations.

Agreement is one of the main devices used by languages to signal grammatical relations. In this study, we investigated the neurophysiological processing correlates of subject-verb agreement in Spanish using Unagreement, a phenomenon characterized by a person mismatch between subject and verb that nonetheless produces a grammatical pattern. Unagreement was compared to well-formed sentences with full agreement, and ill-formed sentences with a person mismatch. Compared to control sentences, Unagreement produced a left posterior negativity followed by a more central negativity; no P600 effect was observed. In contrast, person violations generated a negativity that was widely distributed over the scalp, followed by a P600 effect. These data suggest that the comprehension of qualitatively different agreement patterns, which could reflect the performance of different processing routines, recruits different neural generators.

Word reading in alphabetic languages involves letter identification, independently of the format in which these letters are written. This process of letter ‘regularization’ is sensitive to word context, leading to the recognition of a word even when numbers that resemble letters are inserted among other real letters (e.g., M4TERI4L ). The present study investigates the electrophysiological correlates of number-to-letter regularization by means of the masked priming paradigm: target words ( MATERIAL ) were preceded by fully alphabetic primes ( MATERIAL ), primes with letter-like numbers ( M4T3R14L ), or primes with unrelated numbers ( M7T6R28L ). ERPs revealed three subsequent effects. Around 150 ms the unrelated numbers condition elicited a positive effect, compared to the other two conditions, in the occipital electrodes. Then, target words preceded by primes with numbers elicited a more negative N200 in the same electrodes compared to the fully alphabetic condition. Finally, both alphabetic primes and letter-like numbers elicited a posterior positive component peaking around 260 ms compared to unrelated numbers. Source analysis for each electrophysiological effect revealed a similar early increase of activity in the left occipito-temporal pathway for alphabetic primes and primes with letter-like numbers. Around 200 ms, the orthographic interference due to the numerical values correlated with an increase of activity in parietal areas; finally, a recursive effect in the left occipital cortex was found, reflecting abstract letter activation. These results indicate that direct feedback interaction from word units strongly influences the activation of the letter units at a format-independent abstract level.

Despite the potentially infinite creativity of language, many words are patterned in ordered strings called collocations. Final words of these clusters are highly predictable; in addition, their overall meaning can vary on the literality dimension, ranging from (figurative) idiomatic strings to literal strings. These structures thus offer a natural linguistic scenario to contrast ERP correlates of contextual expectation and semantic integration processes during comprehension. In this study, expected endings elicited a positive peak around 300ms compared to less expected synonyms, suggesting that the earlier recognition of the string leads to the specific pre-activation of the lexical items that conclude the expression. On the other hand, meaning variations of these fixed strings (either a literal or a figurative whole meaning) affected ERPs only around 400ms, i.e. in the frontal portion of the N400. These findings are discussed within a more general cognitive framework as outlined in Kok's (2001) dual categorization model.

Electrical scalp recordings revealed the brain's sensitivity to both lexical properties of words and their contextual fit with a previous sentence context around 400 ms after word presentation. The so-called N400 component has been suggested to reflect the cost either of target word recognition or of a postlexical process for integrating word meaning into a context. In a sentence comprehension study, we manipulated the potential interference exerted in visual word recognition by target words' orthographic neighbors and the semantic constraints induced by the context in one and the same experiment. Neighbor frequency modulated the N400 only in low-constraint contexts; in high-constraint contexts the largely suppressed N400 did not show this neighbor interference effect. Furthermore, the earlier onset of the ERP effect (about 100 ms) induced by the contextual manipulation compared to the neighbor manipulation suggests distinct neurocognitive processes affecting the N400 component in an interactive manner.

We examined the electrophysiological correlates of one of the most influential orthographic effects: the transposed-letter-masked priming effect. Transposed-letter nonword-word pairs ('jugde-judge'), as well as transposed-letter word-word pairs ('casual-causal') were included to investigate the influence of prime's lexicality in the transposed-letter effect. The results showed that when compared with the substituted-letter control conditions ('jugde-judge' vs. 'jupte-judge'), transposed-letter primes produced a lower negativity in the N250 component. In contrast, no differences were obtained between the two word-word priming conditions ('casual-causal' vs. 'carnal-causal'). The influence of lexicality in the transposed-letter effect is discussed according to the models of visual word recognition and previous evidence from event-related potentials.

In the present study we analyzed the processing of grammatically anomalous sentences like "The famous dancer were nervously preparing herself/themselves to face the crowd.", which contains two anomalies, one early and one late. We investigated how processing of the later anomaly (at the pronoun 'herself' or 'themselves') was affected by the processing of the early anomaly (at 'were'). We considered two processing scenarios involving the first anomaly: (1) The representation of the subject-verb number agreement error at the first verb is coerced to match the verb, rendering 'herself' anomalous; (2) The representation of the subject-verb agreement error is coerced to match the subject noun, rendering 'themselves' anomalous. Our dependent measure was event-related scalp potentials (ERPs). When the pronoun disagreed with the verb (and agreed with the subject), a P600 was recorded, while the opposite condition elicited no reliable effect. Our data suggest that interpretation of reflexive pronouns involves the reactivation of multiple lexical items, verbs included.

In this study, we compared the brain activation profiles obtained from resting state Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) activity in 15 dyslexic patients with the profiles of 15 normal controls, using power spectral density (PSD) analysis. We first estimated intracranial dipolar MEG sources on a dense grid on the cortical surface and then projected these sources on a standardized atlas with 68 regions of interest (ROIs). Averaging the PSD values of all sources in each ROI across all control subjects resulted in a normative database that was used to convert the PSD values of dyslexic patients into z-scores in eight distinct frequency bands. We found that dyslexic patients exhibited statistically significant overactivation in the delta band (0.1-4 Hz) in the right temporal (entorhinal and insula), left inferior frontal (Broca's area), and right inferior frontal regions. Overactivation may be interpreted as a compensatory mechanism for reading characterizing dyslexic patients. These findings suggest that resting-state MEG activation maps may be used as specific biomarkers that can help with the diagnosis of and assess the efficacy of intervention in dyslexia.

Literacy and numeracy are two fundamental cognitive skills that require mastering culturally-invented symbolic systems for representing spoken language and quantities. How numbers and words are processed in the human brain and their temporal dynamics remain unclear. Using MEG (magnetoencephalography), we find brain activation differences for literacy and numeracy from early stages of processing in the temporal-occipital and temporal-parietal regions. Native speakers of Spanish were exposed to visually presented words, pseudowords, strings of numbers, strings of letters and strings of symbols while engaged in a go/no-go task. Results showed more evoked neuromagnetic activity for words and pseudowords compared to symbols at ~120-130ms in the left occipito-temporal and temporal-parietal cortices (angular gyrus and intra-parietal sulcus) and at ~200ms in the left inferior frontal gyrus and left temporal areas. In contrast, numbers showed more activation than symbols at similar time windows in homologous regions of the right hemisphere: occipito-temporal and superior and middle temporal cortices at ~100-130ms. A direct comparison between the responses to words and numbers confirmed this distinct lateralization for the two stimulus types. These results suggest that literacy and numeracy follow distinct processing streams through the left and right hemispheres, respectively, and that the temporal-parietal and occipito-temporal regions may interact during processing alphanumeric stimuli.

Whether the neural mechanisms that underlie the processing of a second language in highly proficient late bilinguals (L2 late learners) are similar or not to those that underlie the processing of the first language (L1) is still an issue under debate. In this study, a group of late learners of Spanish whose native language is English and a group of Spanish monolinguals were compared while they read sentences, some of which contained syntactic violations. A brain complex network analysis approach was used to assess the time-varying topological properties of the functional networks extracted from the electroencephalography (EEG) recording. Late L2 learners showed a lower degree of parallel information transfer and a slower propagation between regions of the brain functional networks while processing sentences containing a gender mismatch condition as compared with a standard sentence configuration. In contrast, no such differences between these conditions were detected in the Spanish monolinguals. This indicates that when a morphosyntactic language incongruence that does not exist in the native language is presented in the second language, the neural activation pattern is configured differently in highly proficient late bilinguals than in monolinguals.

Language comprehension is incremental, involving the integration of information from different words together with the need to resolve conflicting cues when unexpected information occurs. The present fMRI design seeks to segregate the neuro-anatomical substrates of these two processes by comparing well-formed and ill-formed sentences during subject–verb agreement computation. Our experiment takes advantage of a particular Spanish feature, the Unagreement phenomenon: a subject–verb agreement mismatch that results in a grammatical sentence (“Los pintores trajimos…” [The painters 3.pl (we) brought 1.pl …]). Comprehension of this construction implies a shift in the semantic interpretation of the subject from 3rd-person to 1st-person, enabling the phrase “The painters” to be re-interpreted as “We painters”. Our results include firstly a functional dissociation between well-formed and ill-formed sentences with Person Mismatches: while Person Mismatches recruited a fronto-parietal network associated to monitoring operations, grammatical sentences (both Unagreement and Default Agreement ) recruited a fronto-temporal network related to syntactic–semantic integration. Secondly, there was activation in the posterior part of the left middle frontal gyrus for both Person Mismatches and Unagreement , reflecting the evaluation of the morpho-syntactic match between agreeing constituents. Thirdly, the left angular gyrus showed increased activation only for Unagreement , highlighting its crucial role in the comprehension of semantically complex but non-anomalous constructions. These findings point to a central role of the classic fronto-temporal network, plus two additional nodes: the posterior part of the left middle frontal gyrus and the left angular gyrus; opening new windows to the study of agreement computation and language comprehension.

Reading is an ability that appears simple and automatic to the experienced reader, in the same way that driving a car holds no mysteries for the practiced driver. However, most drivers would recall that the number of operations which needed to be learned to move the car smoothly seemed insurmountable during the first days of driving instruction. Nonetheless, as time passed by, thanks to repetition and practicing, and to the operations progressively becoming automatized, driving was no longer a challenge. Considering that in modern societies reading is typically acquired during early childhood, it is relatively implausible that we remember the hard moments we went through on the road to becoming fluent readers. Still, as is the case with driving, reading requires a substantial number of perceptual, attentional and mnemonic abilities, and a vast array of operations that can appear overwhelming to the neophyte until they become automatized. Reading requires complex abstraction of the highly variable alphabetic visual input, which ultimately allows the access to the abstract orthographic categories that are in turn the door to the retrieval of phonological, morphological, lexical, and semantic representations. This stimulus-to-meaning mapping has to be robust enough to face font variability, handwriting styles, orthographic errors, contractions, and many other potential alterations in the input. This mapping poses the first paradoxical conundrum for the reader, who on the one hand has to be relatively “blind” to the obvious perceptual differences between multiple fonts, cases or handwriting of the same word (e.g., door, dOoR), and on the other hand needs to be “sighted” enough to detect basic perceptual differences between a given word and other similar items (e.g., door, deer, odor, dear). The time window in which a given letter string passes from being a mere sequence of printed curves and strokes to acquiring the word status takes around one third of a second. In that fraction of a second the expert reader manages to access the meaning represented by the written symbolic and arbitrary graphic patterns. This phenomenon represents a model of human abstract symbolic thinking, since there is no direct relation between the meaning of a word and its written form. If we consider the concepts of a door and a window, it seems relatively straightforward to define the semantic relation between them. However, from a linguistic perspective there is no physical or functional relation between the two written codes door and window. How is it then possible that readers are able to compute the semantic relation between these two written codes through a simple eye fixation of 250 ms? What does reading imply for the human brain? And where and when in the brain does reading take place? The answers to these questions are still controversial. Nonetheless, in recent years the neurocognitive literature has provided the grounds for constructing the perfect test scenario to help solve this issue. What, where and when? Neuroimaging and behavioral methods have demonstrated that reading implies a complex pattern of feed-forward and feedback interactive activations flowing along the visual recognition system, mainly in ventral regions of the left temporal lobe. Still, the precise way in which all the intermediate representations between a physically concrete printed stimulus and the mentally stored abstract lexico-semantic representation are activated is still debated and needs to be further explored. The present Research Topic aimed to create a landmark forum in which experts in the field define the state of the art and future directions. A total of 10 excellent articles have been compiled (six Original Research articles, three Review articles and one General Commentary). Su et al. (2012) open the section of Original Research articles with an experiment using ERPs to test the interactions between graphemic similarity, position of the radicals of Chinese characters and lexical access. Next, Sliwinska et al. (2012) present the readership with a study using chronometric TMS devoted to better characterizing the role of the supramarginal gyrus in phonological processing, and ultimately, in visual-word identification. In the third article, Grossi et al. (2012) present an ERP study exploring the interactions between bilinguals' linguistic experience and orthographic and lexico-semantic effects associated with cross-language orthographic neighborhood effects in two groups of English-Welsh bilinguals. Hand et al. (2012) present an article exploring the early interactions between the orthographic constraint imposed by word-initial letters and context-based predictability effects using eye movement tracking techniques. A similar rationale is followed in the article by Lee et al. (2012), offering electrophysiological data regarding interactions between contextual information and early orthographic processing. Kinoshita and Norris (2012) provide the last Original Research article summarizing recent findings from the visual-word recognition domain and proposing an interpretation of masked priming based on the Bayesian Reader account that explains some controversial task-dependent effects. The Research Topic then continues with three Review articles and one General Commentary. Van Assche et al. (2012) offer an outline of recent data demonstrating that lexical access is language-non-selective in bilinguals, both at the level of recognizing words in isolation and at the level of recognizing words in sentence context. Hyona (2012) presents an overview of the findings on compound word identification, and provides a physiologically valid for the way in which polymorphemic words are processed in alphabetic languages, based on visual acuity principles. Amenta and Crepaldi (2012) offer the last Review article, which is also related to the processing of polymorphemic words. They summarize benchmark morphological processing effects and set the scenario for future experimental and theoretical work by highlighting the most consistent and inconsistent findings. The General Commentary by Koester (2012) extends some of the issues raised by Amenta and Crepaldi (2012), and raises other concerns regarding the future of neurocognitive scientific activity on morphological processing (see also the General Commentary by Crepaldi and Amenta; doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00056). As the (proud) Editors of this Research Topic, we honestly believe that the initial aims have been fulfilled. The excellence of the Original Research articles is doubtless, and they nicely cover different experimental approaches (i.e., behavioral or eye-tracking techniques, ERPs, TMS) to current questions regarding monolingual and bilingual lexical access. Similarly, the worth of the Review articles is undeniable. These Review articles represent a compelling updated overview of critical topics for the community investigating lexical access, and they will certainly serve for inspiration for other researchers in the field. Now it is time for the audience to assess the value of all these articles, and we sincerely hope that the reception will be at least as good as it has been during these last months, in which the amount of views and downloads of the articles has been heartening.

In this study, semantic meaning composition is investigated focusing on the ERP correlates of reading of minimal Spanish noun-adjective pairs. Comprehending these constructs requires combining the concepts expressed by nouns with the--not contextually expected--semantic feature expressed by the adjectives. Previous studies have mainly focused on the processing of either semantic anomalies or contextually expected target words; we focus on the comprehension of more natural expressions, manipulating the typicality of the noun-adjective relation. In two different ERP experiments, compared to neutral pairs (monstruo solitario, lonely monster), only anomalous adjectives (monstruo geografico, geographic monster) elicited increased N400, the effect classically associated with lexical/semantic processing. Low-typicality adjectives that apparently contrasted with the inherent prototypical features associated with the noun (monstruo hermoso, lovely monster) elicited a long-lasting frontal late positive effect (LPC, 550-750 ms) in Experiment 1; high-typicality adjectives that expressed redundant information (monstruo horrible, horrible monster) elicited a similar, but shorter, positivity (550-650 ms) in Experiment 2. These findings suggest that the combination of non-anomalous noun-adjective pairs involves additional neurocognitive resources to the ones represented by the N400. Correlation analyses indicate that the LPC is associated with a meta-linguistic analysis of the expressions: a significant inverse correlation was found between the stimuli's naturality and the amplitude of the LPC.

Agreement is one of the main devices used by languages to signal grammatical relations. In this study, we investigated the neurophysiological processing correlates of subject-verb agreement in Spanish using Unagreement, a phenomenon characterized by a person mismatch between subject and verb that nonetheless produces a grammatical pattern. Unagreement was compared to well-formed sentences with full agreement, and ill-formed sentences with a person mismatch. Compared to control sentences, Unagreement produced a left posterior negativity followed by a more central negativity; no P600 effect was observed. In contrast, person violations generated a negativity that was widely distributed over the scalp, followed by a P600 effect. These data suggest that the comprehension of qualitatively different agreement patterns, which could reflect the performance of different processing routines, recruits different neural generators.

In the present study we analyze how the cognitive system deals on-line with number agreement mismatches and whether this on-line process influences the off-line interpretation of the sentence. In two ERP experiments we monitored the on-line processing consequences of subject-verb agreement mismatches, focusing on the integration of a following number- marked related constituent. In Experiment 1, after initial detection of a mismatch between a plural noun phrase (The siblings) and its singular verb, indexed by LAN + P600, ERP correlates of agreement processing difficulties were recorded on a following modifier when it was plural. In Experiment 2, after detection of the mismatch between two conjoined singular noun phrases in subject position (The brother and the sister) and the verb, indexed by a short-lived P600, only the singular modifier showed indexes of agreement processing difficulties. These findings support the hypothesis that when processing a morphosyntactic mismatch, the cognitive system constructs on-line a well-formed internal representation of the sentence fragment. This on-line regularization allows comprehenders to easily integrate additional incoming constituents and also influences off-line interpretation of the message (Experiment 3).

At early stages of object identification we process correctly oriented and mirrored versions of an object similarly. However, in letter and word perception, such tolerance to mirror reversals is harmful for efficient reading. Do readers successfully develop blindness mechanisms for mirror-letters and words? We conducted two masked priming experiments while recording participants' electrophysiological brain responses to briefly presented primes including mirror-letters (Experiment 1) or to shortly presented mirror-words (Experiment 2). Results showed that the human visual word recognition system is not totally blind to mirror-letters and mirror-words, since the early stages of processing mirror-letters and mirror-words produced effects on target word recognition that were highly similar to the effects produced by identical primes (N250 component). In a posterior stage of processing (N400 epoch), the effect of mirror-letters and mirror-words was different from the effect of identical primes, even though reversed primes still elicited N400 priming effects different from unrelated primes. These results demonstrate that readers perceive mirror-letters and words as correct at initial stages of word recognition, and that the visual word recognition system's neural representation is grounded on basic principles that govern object perception.

Prediction is pervasive in human cognition and plays a central role in language comprehension. At an electrophysiological level, this cognitive function contributes substantially in determining the amplitude of the N400. In fact, the amplitude of the N400 to words within a sentence has been shown to depend on how predictable those words are: The more predictable a word, the smaller the N400 elicited. However, predictive processing can be based on different sources of information that allow anticipation of upcoming constituents and integration in context. In this study, we investigated the ERPs elicited during the comprehension of idioms, that is, prefabricated multiword strings stored in semantic memory. When a reader recognizes a string of words as an idiom before the idiom ends, she or he can develop expectations concerning the incoming idiomatic constituents. We hypothesized that the expectations driven by the activation of an idiom might differ from those driven by discourse-based constraints. To this aim, we compared the ERP waveforms elicited by idioms and two literal control conditions. The results showed that, in both cases, the literal conditions exhibited a more negative potential than the idiomatic condition. Our analyses suggest that before idiom recognition the effect is due to modulation of the N400 amplitude, whereas after idiom recognition a P300 for the idiomatic sentence has a fundamental role in the composition of the effect. These results suggest that two distinct predictive mechanisms are at work during language comprehension, based respectively on probabilistic information and on categorical template matching.