Narrative retelling in children with neurodevelopmental disorders: Is there a role for nonverbal temporal‐sequencing skills?

Oral narrative retelling is often problematic for children with communicative and neurodevelopmental disorders. However, beyond a suggested role of language level, little is known about the basis of narrative performance. In this study we examine whether oral narrative retelling might be associated not just with language level but also with skills related to nonverbal narrative temporal sequencing. A diagnostically heterogeneous sample of Swedish‐speaking children with a full scale IQ >70 was included in the study (N = 55; age 6–9 years). Narrative retelling skills were measured using the three subscores from the bus story test (BST). Independent predictors included (1) temporal sequencing skills according to a picture arrangement test and (2) a language skills factor consisting of definitional vocabulary and receptive grammar. Regression analyses show that language skills predicted BST Sentence Length and Subordinate Clauses subscores, while both temporal sequencing and language were independently linked with the BST Information subscore. When subdividing the sample based on nonverbal temporal sequencing level, a significant subgroup difference was found only for BST Information. Finally, a principal component analysis shows that temporal sequencing and BST Information loaded on a common factor, separately from the language measures. It is concluded that language level is an important correlate of narrative performance more generally in this diagnostically heterogeneous sample, and that nonverbal temporal sequencing functions are important especially for conveying story information. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Prospective duration judgments: The role of temporality and executive demands of concurrent tasks

It is known that concurrent non-temporal tasks shorten reproduced temporal durations in prospective duration judgments. Two experiments were carried out, one comparing a concurrent temporal task to a minimally demanding concurrent task (Experiment 1) and one comparing an executive concurrent (Simon) task with a less demanding non-executive concurrent task (Experiment 2). An effect of the concurrent task type on temporal reproductions was found. Furthermore, a duration length effect was found, where longer durations were underestimated more than shorter durations. This effect tended to be stronger for the experiments that included a concurrent task that demanded high attention.     

Contrived motivating operations alter delay‐discounting values of disordered gamblers

The present study required 9 disordered gamblers to make hypothetical selections between smaller and larger amounts of money at varying delays. Participants were also required to respond to the task given the contrived hypothetical conditions of earning twice or half as much as they did at their current jobs. The results demonstrated how participants’ delay discounting was altered via contrived motivating operations, strengthening the argument that discounting may be a state variable.     

视听时、空一致性对Pip-and-Pop效应的影响

多感觉整合遵循空间原则和时间原则, 有研究表明Pip-and-Pop效应产生的原因是多感觉整合, 那么Pip-and-Pop效应是否同样遵循空间原则和时间原则呢?本研究采用动态视觉搜索范式, 通过两个眼动实验考察空间一致性(实验1)和时间一致性(实验2)对Pip-and-Pop效应的影响。结果发现：(1)当视觉目标颜色变化伴随一个同侧的听觉刺激时所产生的Pip-and-Pop效应最大, 对侧条件没有发现Pip-and-Pop效应。(2)视听刺激同时呈现所产生的Pip-and-Pop效应最大, 随视听刺激呈现时间间隔的增加Pip-and-Pop效应逐渐减弱直至消失。结果表明, 视听时、空一致性对Pip-and-Pop效应具有调节作用, 这为多感觉整合在产生Pip-and-Pop效应中的作用提供了证据。     

BOLD response to motion verbs in left posterior middle temporal gyrus during story comprehension

A primary focus within neuroimaging research on language comprehension is on the distribution of semantic knowledge in the brain. Studies have shown that the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LPMT), a region just anterior to area MT/V5, is important for the processing of complex action knowledge. It has also been found that motion verbs cause activation in LPMT. In this experiment we investigated whether this effect could be replicated in a setting resembling real life language comprehension, i.e. without any overt behavioral task during passive listening to a story. During fMRI participants listened to a recording of the story “The Ugly Duckling”. We incorporated a nuisance elimination regression approach for factoring out known nuisance variables both in terms of physiological noise, sound intensity, linguistic variables and emotional content. Compared to the remaining text, clauses containing motion verbs were accompanied by a robust activation of LPMT with no other significant effects, consistent with the hypothesis that this brain region is important for processing motion knowledge, even during naturalistic language comprehension conditions.     

Retroactive adjustment of perceived time

Accurately timing acoustic events in dynamic scenes is fundamental to scene analysis. To detect events in busy scenes, listeners must often identify a change in the pattern of ongoing fluctuation, resulting in many ubiquitous events being detected later than when they occurred. This raises the question of how delayed detection time affects the manner in which such events are perceived relative to other events in the environment.To model these situations, we use sequences of tone-pips with a time–frequency pattern that changes from regular to random (‘REG–RAND’) or vice versa (‘RAND–REG’). REG–RAND transitions are detected rapidly, but the emergence of regularity cannot be established immediately, and thus RAND–REG transitions take significantly longer to detect. Using a temporal order judgment task, and a light-flash as a temporal marker, we demonstrate that listeners do not perceive the onset of RAND–REG transitions at the point of detection (∼530 ms post transition), but automatically re-adjust their estimate ∼300 ms closer to the nominal transition.These results demonstrate that the auditory system possesses mechanisms that survey the proximal history of an ongoing stimulus and automatically adjust perception to compensate for prolonged detection time, allowing listeners to build meaningful representations of the environment.     

Noise on, voicing off: Speech perception deficits in children with specific language impairment

Speech perception of four phonetic categories (voicing, place, manner, and nasality) was investigated in children with specific language impairment (SLI) (n = 20) and age-matched controls (n = 19) in quiet and various noise conditions using an AXB two-alternative forced-choice paradigm. Children with SLI exhibited robust speech perception deficits in silence, stationary noise, and amplitude-modulated noise. Comparable deficits were obtained for fast, intermediate, and slow modulation rates, and this speaks against the various temporal processing accounts of SLI. Children with SLI exhibited normal “masking release” effects (i.e., better performance in fluctuating noise than in stationary noise), again suggesting relatively spared spectral and temporal auditory resolution. In terms of phonetic categories, voicing was more affected than place, manner, or nasality. The specific nature of this voicing deficit is hard to explain with general processing impairments in attention or memory. Finally, speech perception in noise correlated with an oral language component but not with either a memory or IQ component, and it accounted for unique variance beyond IQ and low-level auditory perception. In sum, poor speech perception seems to be one of the primary deficits in children with SLI that might explain poor phonological development, impaired word production, and poor word comprehension.     

Prominence vs. aboutness in sequencing: A functional distinction within the left inferior frontal gyrus

Prior research on the neural bases of syntactic comprehension suggests that activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) correlates with the processing of word order variations. However, there are inconsistencies with respect to the specific subregion within the IFG that is implicated by these findings: the pars opercularis or the pars triangularis. Here, we examined the hypothesis that the dissociation between pars opercularis and pars triangularis activation may reflect functional differences between clause-medial and clause-initial word order permutations, respectively. To this end, we directly compared clause-medial and clause-initial object-before-subject orders in German in a within-participants, event-related fMRI design. Our results showed increased activation for object-initial sentences in a bilateral network of frontal, temporal and subcortical regions. Within the lIFG, posterior and inferior subregions showed only a main effect of word order, whereas more anterior and superior subregions showed effects of word order and sentence type, with higher activation for sentences with an argument in the clause-initial position. These findings are interpreted as evidence for a functional gradation of sequence processing within the left IFG: posterior subportions correlate with argument prominence-based (local) aspects of sequencing, while anterior subportions correlate with aboutness-based aspects of sequencing, which are crucial in linking the current sentence to the wider discourse. This proposal appears compatible with more general hypotheses about information processing gradients in prefrontal cortex (Koechlin & Summerfield, 2007).     

Dissociating the representation of action- and sound-related concepts in middle temporal cortex

Modality-specific models of conceptual memory propose close links between concepts and the sensory-motor systems. Neuroimaging studies found, in different subject groups, that action-related and sound-related concepts activated different parts of posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG), suggesting a modality-specific representation of conceptual features. However, as these different parts of pMTG are close to each other, it is possible that the observed anatomical difference is merely related to interindividual variability. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we now investigated within the same participant group a possible conceptual feature-specific organization in pMTG. Participants performed lexical decisions on sound-related (e.g., telephone) and action-related (hammer) words. Sound words elicited higher activity in anterior pMTG adjacent to auditory association cortex, but action-related words did so in posterior pMTG close to motion sensitive areas. These results confirm distinct conceptual representations of sound and action in pMTG, just adjacent to the respective modality-specific cortices.