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First published online March 11, 2022 The COVID-19 pandemic has upended life like few other events in modern history, with differential impacts on varying population groups. This study examined trauma-related distress among 6,882 adults ages 18 to 94 years old in 59 countries during April to May 2020. More than two-thirds of participants reported clinically significant trauma-related distress. Increased distress was associated with unemployment; identifying as transgender, nonbinary, or a cisgender woman; being from a higher income country; current symptoms and positive diagnosis of COVID-19; death of a loved one; restrictive government-imposed isolation; financial difficulties; and food insecurity. Other factors associated with distress included working with potentially infected individuals, care needs at home, a difficult transition to working from home, conflict in the home, separation from loved ones, and event restrictions. Latin American and Caribbean participants reported more trauma-related distress than participants from Europe and Central Asia. Findings inform treatment efforts and highlight the need to address trauma-related distress to avoid long-term mental health consequences. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Commission (H2020-MSCA-IF-2018-837228-ENGRAVING). Daniela Ramos-Usuga was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the Basque Government (PRE_2019_1_0164).

Changes in sensory input with aging and disease affect brain tissue properties. To establish the link between glaucoma, the most prevalent cause of irreversible blindness, and changes in major brain connections, we characterized white matter tissue properties in diffusion MRI measurements in a large sample of subjects with glaucoma (N=905; age 49-80) and healthy controls (N=5,292; age 45-80) from the UK Biobank. Confounds due to group differences were mitigated by matching a sub-sample of controls to glaucoma subjects. A convolutional neural network (CNN) accurately classified whether a subject has glaucoma using information from the primary visual connection to cortex (the optic radiations, OR), but not from non-visual brain connections. On the other hand, regularized linear regression could not classify glaucoma, and the CNN did not generalize to classification of age-group or of age-related macular degeneration. This suggests a unique non-linear signature of glaucoma in OR tissue properties.

The latency of neural responses in the visual cortex changes systematically across the lifespan. Here, we test the hypothesis that development of visual white matter pathways mediates maturational changes in the latency of visual signals. Thirty‐eight children participated in a cross‐sectional study including diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) sessions. During the MEG acquisition, participants performed a lexical decision and a fixation task on words presented at varying levels of contrast and noise. For all stimuli and tasks, early evoked fields were observed around 100 ms after stimulus onset (M100), with slower and lower amplitude responses for low as compared to high contrast stimuli. The optic radiations and optic tracts were identified in each individual's brain based on diffusion MRI tractography. The diffusion properties of the optic radiations predicted M100 responses, especially for high contrast stimuli. Higher optic radiation fractional anisotropy (FA) values were associated with faster and larger M100 responses. Over this developmental window, the M100 responses to high contrast stimuli became faster with age and the optic radiation FA mediated this effect. These findings suggest that the maturation of the optic radiations over childhood accounts for individual variations observed in the developmental trajectory of visual cortex responses., This study elucidates the relationship between structural and functional properties of the visual pathways and how they change during childhood. Developmental changes of visual white matter pathways account for latency variations in electrophysiological responses of visual cortex. The present findings are an example of how relating white matter properties to functional aspects of the brain can help us reach a more complete understanding of the link between development of brain connectivity and changes in electrophysiology.

The white matter pathways that carry information from the foveal, macular, and peripheral visual fields have distinct biological properties. The optic radiations (OR) carry foveal and peripheral information from the thalamus to the primary visual cortex (V1) through adjacent but separate pathways in the white matter. Here, we perform white matter tractometry using pyAFQ 1 on a large sample of diffusion MRI (dMRI) data from the UK Biobank dataset (UKBB; N=6021; age 45-81). We use pyAFQ to characterize white matter tissue properties in parts of the OR that transmit information about the foveal, macular, and peripheral visual fields, and to characterize the changes in these tissue properties with age. We find that (1) independent of age there is higher fractional anisotropy, lower mean diffusivity, and higher mean kurtosis in the foveal and macular OR than in peripheral OR, consistent with denser, more organized nerve fiber populations in foveal/parafoveal pathways, and (2) age is associated with increased diffusivity and decreased anisotropy and kurtosis, consistent with decreased density and tissue organization with adulthood aging. However, anisotropy in foveal OR decreases faster with age than in peripheral OR, while diffusivity increases faster in peripheral OR, suggesting foveal/peri-foveal OR and peripheral OR differ in how they age.

Alpha is the strongest electrophysiological rhythm in awake humans at rest. Despite its predominance in the EEG signal, strong variations can be observed in alpha properties during development, with an increase of alpha frequency over childhood and adulthood. Here we tested the hypothesis that these changes of alpha rhythm are related to the maturation of visual white matter pathways. We capitalized on a large dMRI-EEG dataset (dMRI n=2,747, EEG n=2,561) of children and adolescents (age range: 5-21 years old) and showed that maturation of the optic radiation specifically accounts for developmental changes of alpha frequency. Behavioral analyses also confirmed that variations of alpha frequency are related to maturational changes in visual perception. The present findings demonstrate the close link between developmental variations in white matter tissue properties, electrophysiological responses, and behavior.

Published: 04 March 2021 Reading typically involves phonological mediation, especially for transparent orthographies with a regular letter to sound correspondence. In this study we ask whether phonological coding is a necessary part of the reading process by examining prelingually deaf individuals who are skilled readers of Spanish. We conducted two EEG experiments exploiting the pseudohomophone effect, in which nonwords that sound like words elicit phonological encoding during reading. The first, a semantic categorization task with masked priming, resulted in modulation of the N250 by pseudohomophone primes in hearing but not in deaf readers. The second, a lexical decision task, confirmed the pattern: hearing readers had increased errors and an attenuated N400 response for pseudohomophones compared to control pseudowords, whereas deaf readers did not treat pseudohomophones any differently from pseudowords, either behaviourally or in the ERP response. These results offer converging evidence that skilled deaf readers do not rely on phonological coding during visual word recognition. Furthermore, the finding demonstrates that reading can take place in the absence of phonological activation, and we speculate about the alternative mechanisms that allow these deaf individuals to read competently. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Agencia Estatal de Investigación, AEI), through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres/Units of Excellence in R&D (SEV‐2015‐490); and Grants (PSI-2016-76435-P to B.C.; ACELERA RED2018-102615-T, SAPIENTIA-CM H2019/HUM-5705 and PGC2018-097145-B-I00 to J.A.D.; and RTI2018-093547-B-I00 to M.C.); and fellowships (Juan de la Cierva Fellowships FJCI-2017-31806 to B.C. and IJCI-2016-27702 to S.C., and predoctoral fellowship BES-2013-064140 to N.F. from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (AEI); and H2020-MSCA-IF-2018-837228 to S.C. from the European Commission). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 837228

We created resources to facilitate research on the role of human brain microstructure in the development of mental health disorders, based on openly-available diffusion MRI (dMRI) data from the Healthy Brain Network (HBN) study. First, we curated the HBN dMRI data (N=2747) into the Brain Imaging Data Structure and preprocessed it according to best-practices, including denoising and correcting for motion effects, susceptibility-related distortions, and eddy currents. Preprocessed, analysis-ready data was made openly available. Data quality plays a key role in the analysis of dMRI, and we provide automated quality control (QC) scores for every scan, as part of the data release. To scale QC to this large dataset, we trained a neural network through the combination of a small data subset scored by experts and a larger set scored by community scientists. The network performs QC highly concordant with that of experts on a held out set (ROC-AUC = 0.947). A further analysis of the neural network demonstrates that it relies on image features with relevance to QC. Altogether, this work both delivers a resource for transdiagnostic research in brain connectivity and pediatric mental health and serves as a novel tool for automated QC of large datasets.

Education sculpts specialized neural circuits for skills like reading that are critical to success in modern society but were not anticipated by the selective pressures of evolution. Does the emergence of brain regions that selectively process novel visual stimuli like words occur at the expense of cortical representations of other stimuli like faces and objects? To answer this question we conducted a randomized controlled trial with pre-school children (five years of age). We found that being taught reading versus oral language skills induced different patterns of change in category-selective regions of visual cortex. Reading instruction enhanced the response to text but did not diminish the response to other categories. How these changes play out over a longer timescale is still unknown but, based on these data, we can surmise that high-level visual cortex undergoes rapid changes as children enter school and begin establishing new skills like literacy.

Published Nov 17, 2021 The validity of research results depends on the reliability of analysis methods. In recent years, there have been concerns about the validity of research that uses diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) to understand human brain white matter connections in vivo, in part based on the reliability of analysis methods used in this field. We defined and assessed three dimensions of reliability in dMRI-based tractometry, an analysis technique that assesses the physical properties of white matter pathways: (1) reproducibility, (2) test-retest reliability, and (3) robustness. To facilitate reproducibility, we provide software that automates tractometry (https://yeatmanlab.github.io/pyAFQ). In measurements from the Human Connectome Project, as well as clinical-grade measurements, we find that tractometry has high test-retest reliability that is comparable to most standardized clinical assessment tools. We find that tractometry is also robust: showing high reliability with different choices of analysis algorithms. Taken together, our results suggest that tractometry is a reliable approach to analysis of white matter connections. The overall approach taken here both demonstrates the specific trustworthiness of tractometry analysis and outlines what researchers can do to establish the reliability of computational analysis pipelines in neuroimaging. This work was supported through grant 1RF1MH121868- 01 from the National Institute of Mental Health/the BRAIN Initiative, through grant 5R01EB027585-02 to Eleftherios Garyfallidis (Indiana University) from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, through Azure Cloud Computing Credits for Research & Teaching provided through the University of Washington’s Research Computing unit and the University of Washington eScience Institute, and NICHD R21HD092771 to Jason D. Yeatman

Available online 18 August 2022 Previous studies show that there are differences in native and non-native speech processing (Lev-Ari, 2018). However, less is known about the differences between processing native and dialectal accents. Is dialectal processing more similar to foreign or native speech? To address this, two theories have been proposed. The Perceptual Distance Hypothesis states that the mechanisms underlying dialectal accent processing are attenuated versions of those of foreign (Clarke & Garrett, 2004). Conversely, the Different Processes Hypothesis argues that the mechanisms of foreign and dialectal accent processing are qualitatively different (Floccia et al., 2009). The present study addresses these hypotheses. Electroencephalographic data was recorded from 25 participants who listened to 40 isolated words in different accents. Event-Related Potential mean amplitudes were extracted: P2 [150–250 ms], PMN [250–400 ms] and N400 [400–600 ms]. Support for the Different Processes Hypothesis was found in different time windows. Results show that early processing mechanisms distinguish only between native and non-native speech, with a reduced P2 amplitude for foreign accent processing, supporting the Different Processes Hypothesis. Furthermore, later processing mechanisms show a similar binary difference in the processing of the accents, with a larger PMN negativity elicited in the foreign accent than the others, further supporting the Different Processes Hypothesis. Results contribute to the understanding of single word processing, in which it is uniquely difficult to extract acoustic characteristics from foreign accent, and in which foreign accented speech is associated with the largest cost, as compared to native and dialectal speech, of phonological matching between representations and acoustic input. This work was supported by the Basque Government [BERC 2018–2021 program]; the Spanish State Research Agency [BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation SEV-2015-0490]; the H2020 European Research Council [ERC Consolidator Grant ERC-2018-COG-819093 to CDM; Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant 837228 to SC]; the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [PID 2020-113926 GB-I00 to CDM]; the Basque Government [PIBA18-29 to CDM]; the Italian Ministry of University and Research (Programma giovani ricercatori Rita Levi Montalcini) to SC; and the Programa Predoctoral de Formaci´on de Personal Investigador No Doctor del Departamento de Educaci´on del Gobierno Vasco (PRE_2021_2_0006 to TT).

Over the past two decades, researchers have tried to uncover how the human brain can extract linguistic information from a sequence of visual symbols. The description of how the brain’s visual system processes words and enables reading has improved with the progressive refinement of experimental methodologies and neuroimaging techniques. This review provides a brief overview of this research journey. We start by describing classical models of object recognition in non-human primates, which represent the foundation for many of the early models of visual word recognition in humans. We then review functional neuroimaging studies investigating the word-selective regions in visual cortex. This research led to the differentiation of highly specialized areas, which are involved in the analysis of different aspects of written language. We then consider the corresponding anatomical measurements and provide a description of the main white matter pathways carrying neural signals crucial to word recognition. Finally, in an attempt to integrate structural, functional, and electrophysiological findings, we propose a view of visual word recognition, accounting for spatial and temporal facets of word-selective neural processes. This multi-modal perspective on the neural circuitry of literacy highlights the relevance of a posterior-anterior differentiation in ventral occipitotemporal cortex for visual processing of written language and lexical features. It also highlights unanswered questions that can guide us towards future research directions. Bridging measures of brain structure and function will help us reach a more precise understanding of the transformation from vision to language.

The ability to establish associations between visual objects and speech sounds is essential for human reading. Understanding the neural adjustments required for acquisition of these arbitrary audiovisual associations can shed light on fundamental reading mechanisms and help reveal how literacy builds on pre-existing brain circuits. To address these questions, the present longitudinal and cross-sectional MEG studies characterize the temporal and spatial neural correlates of audiovisual syllable congruency in children (4-9 years old, 22 males and 20 females) learning to read. Both studies showed that during the first years of reading instruction children gradually set up audiovisual correspondences between letters and speech sounds, which can be detected within the first 400 ms of a bimodal presentation and recruit the superior portions of the left temporal cortex. These findings suggest that children progressively change the way they treat audiovisual syllables as a function of their reading experience. This reading-specific brain plasticity implies (partial) recruitment of pre-existing brain circuits for audiovisual analysis.Significance StatementLinking visual and auditory linguistic representations is the basis for the development of efficient reading, while dysfunctional audiovisual letter processing predicts future reading disorders. Our developmental MEG project included a longitudinal and a cross-sectional study; both studies showed that children’s audiovisual brain circuits progressively change as a function of reading experience. They also revealed an exceptional degree of neuroplasticity in audiovisual neural networks, showing that as children develop literacy, the brain progressively adapts so as to better detect new correspondences between letters and speech sounds.

© 2015 Society for Psychophysiological Research. Gender-to-ending consistency has been shown to influence grammatical gender retrieval in isolated word presentation. Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence, the exact role and the time course of processing of this distributional information remain unclear. This ERP study investigated if and when the brain detects gender-to-ending consistency in sentences containing Italian determiner-noun pairs. Determiners either agreed or disagreed in gender with the nouns whose endings were reliable or misleading cues to gender (transparent and irregular nouns). Transparent nouns elicited an increased frontal negativity and a late posterior positivity compared to irregular nouns (350-950 ms), suggesting that the system is sensitive to gender-to-ending consistency from relatively early stages of processing. Gender agreement violations evoked a similar LAN-P600 pattern for both types of nouns. The present findings provide evidence for an early detection of reliable gender-related endings during sentence reading.

Objectives COVID-19 escalated into a global pandemic affecting countries around the world. As communities shut down to reduce disease spread, all aspects of life have been altered, including sleep. This study investigated changes in sleep patterns and correlates of sleep health in a global sample and examined relationships between sleep health and psychological distress. Design Cross-sectional. Settings Online survey distributed between April 19 and May 3, 2020. Participants Total 6882 participants (18-94 years) across 59 countries. Measurements Sleep health (RU-SATED), demographics, pandemic-related factors, mood. Results More than half the sample shifted their sleep toward later bed- and wake-times, and more than a third reported increased sleep disturbances during the pandemic. Older age, being partnered, and living in a higher income country were associated with better sleep health, while a stricter level of quarantine and pandemic-related factors (being laid off from job, financial strain, or difficulties transitioning to working from home) were associated with poorer sleep health. Domestic conflict was the strongest correlate of poorer sleep health. Poorer sleep health was strongly associated with greater depression and anxiety symptoms. Participants from Latin America reported the lowest sleep health scores. Conclusions COVID-19-associated factors have impacted sleep health on a global level. While our data are correlational, sleep health is strongly linked with mental health and could play a protective role against developing mental distress during pandemic-related isolation. Sleep health should be incorporated into public health messages aimed at helping people cope with the effects of a pandemic to maintain optimal mental and physical health.

Published online: 30 Mar 2021 Previous research suggests that native listeners may be more tolerant to syntactic errors when they are produced in a foreign accent. However, studies investigating this topic within the semantic domain remain conflicting. The current study examined the effects of mispronunciations leading to semantic abnormality in foreign-accented speech. While their EEG was recorded, native speakers of Spanish listened to semantically correct and incorrect sentences produced by another native speaker and a native speaker of Chinese. The anomaly in the incorrect sentences was caused by a subtle mispronunciation (typical or atypical in Chinese-accented Spanish) during a critical word production. While initial-stage semantic processing yielded no accentspecific differences, late processing revealed a persistent N400-effect in the foreign-accent but not in the native-accent. These findings suggest that foreign-accented mispronunciations are more difficult to integrate than native-accented errors, regardless of their relative typicality. The distinction between syntactic and semantic processing of foreign-accented speech is discussed. This international collaboration was made possible by a Globalink Research Award Abroad (MITACS), as well as a CGS-M scholarship (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) conferred to the first author. The research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad] (SEV-2015-490 to the BCBL; PSI2017-82941-P to C.D.M.), the Basque government [Eusko Jaurlaritza] (PIBA18_29 to C.D.M.), and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 837228 to S.C. and No 819093 to C. D. M.), and by MINECO predoctoral grants from the Spanish goverment (BES-2016-078896 to E.N.B). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 837228

First Published December 16, 2020 We assessed monolingual Spanish and bilingual Spanish-Basque toddlers’ sensitivity to gender agreement in correct vs. incorrect Spanish noun phrases (definite article + noun), using a spontaneous preference listening paradigm. Monolingual Spanish-learning toddlers exhibited a tendency to listen longer to the grammatically correct phrases (e.g., la casa; “the house”), as opposed to the incorrect ones (e.g., *el casa). This listening preference toward correct phrases is in line with earlier results obtained from French monolingual 18-month-olds (van Heugten & Christophe, 2015). Bilingual toddlers in the current study, however, tended to listen longer to the incorrect phrases. Basque was not a source of interference in the bilingual toddler’s input as Basque does not instantiate grammatical gender agreement. Overall, our results suggest that both monolingual and bilingual toddlers can distinguish between the correct and incorrect phrases by 18 months of age; however, monolinguals and bilinguals allocate their attention differently when processing grammatically incorrect forms. The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the grant PSI2014-5452-P from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Grant (RGPIN-2019-06523) to M.M. The authors also acknowledge financial support from the following sources: “Severo Ochoa” Programme for Centres/Units of Excellence in R&D” (SEV-2015-490); Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FPDI-2013-15813 to J.A.B; FFI2016-76432 to S.M.; PSI2014-54500 and IJCI-2016-27702 to S.C.), the Gipuzkoa Fellowship Program and the Ramón y Cajal Fellowship Program (RYC-2017-01869) to SM; the European Commission (H2020-MSCA-IF-2018-837228), and the Basque Government (Eusko Jaurlaritza; PI_2015_1_25) to S.C.

Available online 27 January 2021 Skilled reading requires years of practice associating visual symbols with speech sounds. Over the course of the learning process, this association becomes effortless and automatic. Here we test whether automatic activation of spoken-language circuits in response to visual words is a hallmark of skilled reading. Magnetoencephalography was used to measure word-selective responses under multiple cognitive tasks (N = 42, 7–12 years of age). Even when attention was drawn away from the words by performing an attention-demanding fixation task, strong word-selective responses were found in a language region (i.e., superior temporal gyrus) starting at ~300 ms after stimulus onset. Critically, this automatic word-selective response was indicative of reading skill: the magnitude of word-selective responses correlated with individual reading skill. Our results suggest that automatic recruitment of spoken-language circuits is a hallmark of skilled reading; with practice, reading becomes effortless as the brain learns to automatically translate letters into sounds and meaning. This work was supported under the framework of international cooperation program managed by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (No. 2018K2A9A2A20088926 and 2019R1C1C1009383) to SJJ. This work was also funded by NSF BCS 1551330, NICHD R21HD092771 and R01HD09586101 and Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship to JDY. SC was funded by the European Commission (H2020-MSCA-IF-2018-837228-ENGRAVING). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 837228

Version of Record online: 31 October 2020 Objective: This study examined the impact of the COVID‐ 19 pandemic and subsequent social restrictions or quarantines on the mental health of the global adult population. Method: A sample of 6,882 individuals (Mage = 42.30; 78.8% female) from 59 countries completed an online survey asking about several pandemic‐related changes in life and psychological status. Results: Of these participants, 25.4% and 19.5% reported moderate‐to‐severe depression (DASS‐21) and anxiety symptoms (GAD‐7), respectively. Demographic characteristics (e.g. higher‐income country), COVID‐19 exposure (e.g., having had unconfirmed COVID‐19 symptoms), government‐imposed quarantine level, and COVID‐19‐ based life changes (e.g., having a hard time transitioning to working from home; increase in verbal arguments or conflict with other adult in home) explained 17.9% of the variance in depression and 21.5% in anxiety symptoms. Conclusions: In addition to posing a high risk to physical health, the COVID‐19 pandemic has robustly affected global mental health, so it is essential to ensure that mental health services reach individuals showing pandemic‐related depression and anxiety symptoms. Ramos‐Usuga, D. was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the Basque Government (PRE_2019_1_0164).

Published18 March 2021 An accurate model of the factors that contribute to individual differences in reading ability depends on data collection in large, diverse and representative samples of research participants. However, that is rarely feasible due to the constraints imposed by standardized measures of reading ability which require test administration by trained clinicians or researchers. Here we explore whether a simple, two-alternative forced choice, time limited lexical decision task (LDT), self-delivered through the webbrowser, can serve as an accurate and reliable measure of reading ability. We found that performance on the LDT is highly correlated with scores on standardized measures of reading ability such as the Woodcock-Johnson Letter Word Identification test (r = 0.91, disattenuated r = 0.94). Importantly, the LDT reading ability measure is highly reliable (r = 0.97). After optimizing the list of words and pseudowords based on item response theory, we found that a short experiment with 76 trials (2–3 min) provides a reliable (r = 0.95) measure of reading ability. Thus, the self-administered, Rapid Online Assessment of Reading ability (ROAR) developed here overcomes the constraints of resourceintensive, in-person reading assessment, and provides an efficient and automated tool for effective online research into the mechanisms of reading (dis)ability. We would like to thank the Pavlovia and PsychoPy team for their support on the browser-based experiments. This work was funded by NIH NICHD R01HD09586101, research grants from Microsoft and Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship to J.D.Y.

We assessed monolingual and bilingual Spanish-learning toddlers’ sensitivity to correct vs. incorrect Spanish noun phrases (definite article + noun), using a spontaneous preference listening paradigm. Monolingual Spanish-learning toddlers exhibited a tendency to listen longer to the grammatically correct phrases (e.g., la casa; ‘the house’), as opposed to the incorrect ones (e.g., *el casa). This listening preference toward correct phrases is in line with earlier results obtained from French monolingual 18-month-olds (van Heugten & Christophe, 2015). Bilingual toddlers in the current study, however, tended to listen longer to the incorrect phrases. Further, we observed that toddlers who received less exposure to Spanish were more likely to listen longer to the incorrect phrases. Overall, our results suggest that both monolingual and bilingual toddlers can distinguish between the correct and incorrect phrases by 18 months of age, however monolinguals and bilinguals might rely on different cognitive mechanisms when processing grammatically incorrect forms.

Issue online: 30 March 2020 Experimental evidence suggests that speaker and addressee quickly adapt to each other from the earliest moments of sentence processing, and that interlocutor-related information is rapidly integrated with other sources of nonpragmatic information (e.g., semantic, morphosyntactic, etc.). These findings have been taken as support for one-step models of sentence comprehension. The results from the present eventrelated potential study challenge this theoretical framework providing a case where discourse level information is integrated only at a late stage of processing, when morphosyntactic analysis has been already initiated. We considered the case of Basque allocutive agreement, where information about addressee gender is encoded in verbal inflection. Two different types of Basque grammatical violations were presented together with the corresponding control conditions: one could be detected based on a morphosyntactic mismatch (person agreement violation), while the other could be detected only if the addressee's gender was considered (allocutive violation). Morphosyntactic violations elicited greater N400 effects followed by P600 effects, while allocutive violations elicited only P600 effects. These results provide new constraints to one-step accounts as they represent a case where speakers do not immediately adjust to the addressee's perspective. We propose that the relevance of discourse-level information might be a crucial variable to reconcile the dichotomy between one- and two-step models. Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, Grant/Award Number: H2020-MSCAIF- 2018-837228; Fundación BBVA, Grant/ Award Number: IN[18]_HMS_LIN_0058; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Grant/Award Number: IJCI-2016-27702, PSI2014-54500, RYC 2017-22015 and SEV-2015-490; Eusko Jaurlaritza, Grant/ Award Number: PI_2015_1_25; Gipuzkoa Fellowship Program, Grant/Award Number: FFI2016-76432-P. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 837228

First published: 07 July 2019 Distinct theoretical proposals have described how communicative constraints (contextual biases, speaker identity) impact verbal irony processing. Modular models assume that social and contextual factors have an effect at a late stage of processing. Interactive models claim that contextual biases are considered early on. The constraint‐ satisfaction model further assumes that speaker's and context's characteristics can compete at early stages of analysis. The present ERP study teased apart these models by testing the impact of context and speaker features (i.e., speaker accent) on irony analysis. Spanish native speakers were presented with Spanish utterances that were ironic or literal. Each sentence was preceded by a negative or a positive context. Each story was uttered in a native or a foreign accent. Results showed that contextual biases and speaker accent interacted as early as 150 ms during irony processing. Greater N400‐like effects were reported for ironic than literal sentences only with positive contexts and native accent, possibly suggesting semantic difficulties when non‐prototypical irony was produced by natives. A P600 effect of irony was also reported indicating inferential processing costs. The results support the constraintsatisfaction model and suggest that multiple sources of information are weighted and can interact from the earliest stages of irony analysis. Spanish State Research Agency (Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation), Grant/ Award Number: SEV‐2015‐0490; the Basque Government, Grant/Award Number: BERC 2018–2021, PI_2015_1_25; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Grant/Award Number: PSI2014‐54500, PSI2017‐82941‐P, IJCI‐2016‐27702; Grant/Award Number: H2020‐MSCA‐IF‐2018‐837228. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 837228.

Words and morphemes are understood very quickly, but there are few techniques available to study the brain9s response to them at the time-scale at which they occur. The left anterior negativity (LAN) has been reported as the primary ERP signature of morphosyntactic processing, but recent reports have questioned whether the LAN effect, in fact, exists, suggesting that it might result from component overlap during ERP averaging. Given that the LAN is relevant in sentence comprehension models, and that averaging procedure is widely used in ERP analysis, it becomes important to model the variability of this ERP effect. The present project examined whether the LAN effect, observed in the grand average response to local agreement violations in Spanish, is the result of the overlap between two different ERP effects (N400 and P600) at the level of subjects (n=80), items (n=120), or trials (n=6160). By-subject, by-item, and by-trial analyses of the gender violation effect between 300 ms and 500 ms showed a clear left-anterior negativity for 55% of the participants, 46% of the items, and 49% of the trials. Further analyses showed many examples of the biphasic LAN-P600 response. Mixed-linear models showed that the LAN effect size was not reduced after accounting for subject variability. The present results suggest that there are cases where the grand average LAN effect represents the brain responses of individual participants, items, and trials.

Introduction The novel COVID-19 disease rapidly escalated into a global pandemic affecting people around the world. While communities imposed mitigation measures to stop the spread of the disease, the mass (home) confinement in addition to the uncertainty of the pandemic led to drastic changes in all aspects of life, including sleep. Sleep health is strongly linked with mental and overall health and could play a protective role against the development of mental distress during the pandemic. Here, we investigated sleep health in a global multicultural sample of adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We surveyed 6,882 adults (18-94 years) across 59 countries about their sleep health (RU-SATED scale), sleep behaviors, demographics, pandemic-related factors, and mood between late April and early May 2020. A hierarchical stepwise multiple linear regression was performed to investigate correlates of sleep health. Results Compared with pre-pandemic times, more than one third of the sample reported an increase in sleep disturbances, and more than half of the sample shifted their sleep schedule towards later bed- and wake-up times. Better sleep health was associated with being partnered, older age and living in a higher-income country (p Conclusion Our findings highlight how sleep behavior has changed during the international quarantine- and isolation measurements and show the association between pandemic-related factors and poor sleep health, which, in turn, is closely linked with poorer mental health. These results emphasize the importance of maintaining good sleep health during the pandemic, since poorer sleep health may trigger or exacerbate mental disorders. Maintenance of good sleep health should be incorporated into public health messages aimed at helping people maintain optimal mental and physical health during major stressful life events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Support (if any)

Published: August 8, 2018 In modern multi-cultural societies, conversations between foreign speakers and native listeners have become very common. These exchanges often include the use of figurative language. The present study examines, for the first time, whether native listeners’ non-literal interpretation of discourse is influenced by indexical cues such as speaker accent. Native listeners were presented with ironic and literal Spanish stories uttered in a native or foreign accent (Spanish and British English accents, respectively). Two types of irony were considered: ironic criticism (frequently used) and ironic praise (less frequently used). Participants were asked to rate stories on their level of irony. Results showed an impact of foreign accent on natives’ non-literal interpretation. The effect was evident in the less frequent ironic constructions (ironic praise), with foreign accented utterances considered less ironic than native accented utterances. These findings revealed that native listeners’ figurative interpretation of ironic praise can change depending on indexical cues, with a reduction of pragmatic inferences in the case of foreign accent. CM and SC were supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI2014-54500; SEV-2015-490; CM: PSI2017- 82941-P; SC: IJCI-2016-27702; http://www.mineco.gob.es/portal/site/mineco); the Basque Government (Eusko Jaurlaritza; PI_2015_1_25; http://www.irekia.euskadi.eus/en) and the FP7 Ideas: European Research Council (GA-613465- FP7-SSH-2013-1-AThEME to CM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

First Online: 14 November 2017 The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-letter processing in two reading-related skills: visual attention span (VAS) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). VAS (i.e., the number of visual elements that can be processed at once in a multi-element array) was tested with a visual 1-back task and RAN was measured in a serial letter naming task that introduced a novel manipulation (some letter sequences formed frequent words). Spanish-Basque and French-Basque bilingual children were tested at early (30 children in 1st and 2nd grade), and more advanced (24 children in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade) stages of reading acquisition to investigate whether they would be differently biased towards multi-letter processing due to reading in two shallow (Spanish, Basque), or a deep and a shallow (French, Basque) orthography. The French-Basque bilinguals, who read in a deep orthography, were expected to rely on larger orthographic units in reading and thus to be more biased towards multi-letter processing in both tasks. This was expected to be reflected by: (a) a uniform distribution of attention across letter strings in the VAS task, and (b) a greater interference of the embedded words on letter-by-letter naming in RAN, leading to longer naming times. The expected group differences were observed in the more advanced readers, with French-Basque bilinguals showing a wider distribution of VAS across letter strings and longer naming times in RAN. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Basque Government (PRE_2015_2_0049 to A.A, PI_2015_1_25 to C.M, PRE_2015_2_0247 to S.S), the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG-295362 to M.C.), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI20153653383P to M.L., PSI20153673533R to M. C, PSI2014-54500 to C. M. and SEV-2015-490 awarded to the BCBL through the “Severo Ochoa Program for Centers/Units of Excellence in R&D”) and the FP7/2007-2013 Cooperation grant agreement (613465-AThEME).

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.

Gender-to-ending consistency has been shown to influence grammatical gender retrieval in isolated word presentation. Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence, the exact role and the time course of processing of this distributional information remain unclear. This ERP study investigated if and when the brain detects gender-to-ending consistency in sentences containing Italian determiner-noun pairs. Determiners either agreed or disagreed in gender with the nouns whose endings were reliable or misleading cues to gender (transparent and irregular nouns). Transparent nouns elicited an increased frontal negativity and a late posterior positivity compared to irregular nouns (350–950 ms), suggesting that the system is sensitive to gender-to-ending consistency from relatively early stages of processing. Gender agreement violations evoked a similar LAN-P600 pattern for both types of nouns. The present findings provide evidence for an early detection of reliable gender-related endings during sentence reading.

Published online 22 March 2018 Intercultural communication has become more and more frequent in the recent globalized society.When native listeners try to understand non-native speakers, they have to deal with different types of grammatical errors, some being frequently encountered and others being less common. The present Event-Related Potential (ERP) study investigated how native listeners process different types of morphosyntactic errors in foreign accented speech and whether they are sensitive to error typicality. Spanish natives listened to Spanish sentences in native and foreign (English) accent. ERPs were recorded in response to morphosyntactic violations that were commonly (gender errors) encountered in English accented Spanish or not (number errors). Although sentence comprehension accuracy did not differ across accents, the ERP responses changed as a function of accent and error type. In line with previous studies, gender and number violations in native accented speech elicited LAN-P600 responses. When speech was uttered by foreign speakers, number violations (uncommon errors) showed a P600 effect, while gender violations (common errors) did not elicit late repair processes (reflected by the P600) but an N400 effect. The present results provide evidence that the neural time course of parsing depends not only on speaker's accent, but also on input error typicality. This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG_20110406, 613465-AThEME); the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (SEV-2015-490); the Spanish Government (PSI 2014-54500); and the Basque Government (PI_2015_1_25).

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.

This ERP study employed an N2pc paradigm to investigate possible functional interactions between mechanisms of visual spatial attention and grammatical gender processing. Previous studies showed that the N2pc, an attention-related ERP component, can be modulated by lexical-semantic variables. However, it remains to be seen whether the N2pc can be affected by grammatical features as well. To test this, we conducted an N2pc study with Italian word pairs whose grammatical gender either agreed or disagreed. Participants read a centrally presented noun followed by an adjective in a lateralized position during a gender agreement task. Between 170 and 310ms, the N2pc was elicited contralaterally to the adjective position with a left-lateralized effect of the agreement manipulation. These results suggest that this component could be influenced by grammatical features, supporting a functional interaction between processes mediating visual spatial attention and agreement computation.

Published Online: 2016-08-27 Even when bilinguals learn both languages from birth and achieve high levels of proficiency, they rarely use their languages to the same degree. Recent findings suggest that individual differences in bilingual profile such as the usage of the bilingual’s different languages could affect the way they retrieve and analyse linguistic information, with greater use of linguistic mechanisms from the dominant language. One of the linguistic areas where a wide variety of bilingual performance has been reported is morphosyntax. The present study tests whether language usage can account for a certain amount of the individual variability in morphosyntactic feature extraction. Basque-Spanish simultaneous bilinguals with a range of language dominance profiles were asked to judge the grammatical gender of Spanish nouns the ending of which could provide a reliable cue to gender (i. e., transparent) or not (i. e., opaque). Results showed that the more bilinguals used Basque (i. e., an agglutinative language) on a daily basis, the faster they were at detecting the presence of transparent morphemes relative to opaque nouns. These findings suggest that simultaneous bilinguals have different ways of retrieving grammatical gender depending on their language profile. Language usage can contribute to explaining the presence of individual differences in morphosyntactic feature retrieval. SC was funded by ATheME grant FP7-SSH-2013-1-GA613465, a grant from the Spanish Ministry PSI 2014-54500-P and a grant from the Basque Government PI_2015_1_25. SM was founded by the Gipuzkoa Fellowship Program and a grant from the Basque Government PI_2014_1_38. SC and SM were funded by the Severo Ochoa program grant SEV-2015-049.