Language and vision are two primary source modalities of information for humans. To uncover shared and unique mental representations across linguistic and visual inputs, one approach is to test the extent to which a certain neural signature is shared. In the current EEG study, we tested whether the response profile of posterior alpha power – a neural signature well-studied for visual working memory – generalizes to non-visual linguistic input. Employing a novel imagine-one-then-more paradigm in a large EEG sample (N = 52), we found that increasing the number of imagined objects derived from a non-visual linguistic source – auditory speech during eye closure – led to greater suppression of left posterior alpha power, and that this suppression plateaued beyond ∼ 3 objects. This response profile closely mirrors effects previously observed for visually-derived representations. As posterior alpha power likely reflects the representational load of slots/pointers or spatial attention in moment-to-moment cognition, our study thus provides novel insights into the specific representational facets shared across language and vision.
While the orthographic expectation effect (OEE) is well-documented in alphabetic languages, its manifestation in logographic systems like Chinese, particularly among children with atypical auditory experience such as those with cochlear implants (CIs), remains unexplored. This study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking children can form orthographic expectations for Chinese characters through auditory exposure alone, comparing 36 prelingually deaf children with CIs and 36 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH). Using a novel-word learning paradigm, participants were auditorily exposed to pseudo-characters. Their reaction times in a subsequent lexical decision task were analyzed using Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Models (GLMM) to compare auditorily learned versus unlearned phonograms and non-phonograms, as well as predictable versus unpredictable phonetic radicals. Results revealed that both groups exhibited significantly faster reaction times for auditorily learned phonograms, and this expectation effect emerged robustly only when the phonetic radicals were highly predictable. However, children with CIs demonstrated markedly slower responses than their NH peers across all conditions. These findings demonstrate that Mandarin-speaking children can form robust orthographic expectations through auditory input regardless of hearing status. Although children with CIs exhibit slower baseline processing speeds due to underlying perceptual constraints, the magnitude of their orthographic expectation effect remains remarkably intact and comparable to their normal-hearing peers. Ultimately, this highlights the resilient nature of cross-modal reading acquisition, offering crucial neurocognitive insights for designing adaptive literacy interventions in clinical and educational settings.
The present study investigated whether syntactic processing in classical Chinese poetry is modular or interacts with prosodic processing, and whether semantic comprehensibility modulates this effect. Classical Chinese poetry, with its fixed rhythmic framework and flexible syntax, is ideal for examining this issue because it permits a dissociation between syntactic and rhythmic boundaries. Each poetic line had a 4 + 3 or 2 + 5 syntax, read with a conventional 4 + 3 or unconventional 2 + 5 rhythm. Syntactic structure effects were operationalized as differences between the 4 + 3 and 2 + 5 syntax. Participants listened to seven-character quatrains with high or low semantic comprehensibility and completed a word recognition task, with accuracy and reaction times recorded. EEG was recorded during listening, and the 2nd, 4th, and 7th characters of each line served as keywords. Behaviorally, reaction times showed only a Semantic Comprehensibility & times; Syntactic Structure interaction. Cluster-based permutation tests on EEG data revealed a significant three-way interaction (Semantic Comprehensibility & times; Rhythmic Pattern & times; Syntactic Structure) at the 2nd and 4th keywords. Within the conventional 4 + 3 rhythm, syntactic processing varied with semantic comprehensibility. Under high comprehensibility, the 2 + 5 syntax elicited a more negative N100 than the 4 + 3 syntax at the 2nd keyword. Under low comprehensibility, the 2 + 5 syntax elicited a larger P300 at the 2nd keyword, and the 4 + 3 syntax elicited a larger post-CPS negativity at the 4th keyword. These findings indicate that semantic comprehensibility modulates the temporal dynamics of the rhythm-syntax interaction, providing neural evidence from classical Chinese poetry for an interactive, rather than a modular, account of language comprehension.
This study investigated the influence of verb subcategorization preferences on sentence processing in Standard Indonesian. We examined how verb biases affect the processing of active and passive sentences by utilizing event-related potentials. Our findings revealed that passive sentences with active-bias verbs elicited a significant late positive shift (P600) relative to active sentences, which indicated increased processing difficulty. No such effect was detected for passive sentences with passive-bias verbs. The cost was observed only where the verb's preference conflicted with the passive structure, suggesting that verb-specific statistics, rather than word order alone, contribute to the difficulty of passive sentences. We highlight the need for a nuanced understanding of sentence comprehension that incorporates both structural and lexical influences.
The hippocampus has traditionally been understood as a memory system central to episodic representation, spatial navigation, and relational binding. Recent findings, however, suggest that its functions may extend beyond memory to the organization of sequential information. This raises the possibility that hippocampal mechanisms contribute to linguistic processes that require ordered expression, including the linearization of hierarchical syntactic structures. Linearization, defined as the mapping of parallel and recursive syntactic configurations onto a temporally constrained sequence of words, constitutes a fundamental problem for language production, yet its neurocognitive implementation remains insufficiently explained. Here, we advance the hypothesis that hippocampal sequence coding may provide one component of the neural substrate for this process. We review converging evidence from neuroimaging, patient studies, and developmental research that is consistent with hippocampal-prefrontal involvement during narrative construction, anaphora resolution, and temporal reference, as well as reports of disrupted discourse following hippocampal damage. We propose that these observations motivate testing whether hippocampal mechanisms help organize components of event representation into temporally structured relations within and across sentences. Building on proposals that sequence organization is relevant at both levels, we hypothesize that hippocampal indexing may interact with syntactic phases: syntactic phases define structurally bounded derivational domains, while hippocampal mechanisms may help relate event components and successive linguistic states across time. On this view, linearization may depend in part on a cross-modular interface between syntax and memory, with the hippocampus treated as a candidate contributor rather than as a dedicated linguistic linearizer.
