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Early cortical tracking of auditory stimuli predicts reading skills: A one-year longitudinal study (2024)
Zugarramurdi, C
, Marie Lallier
, Lucía Fernández Saldanha
, J.C. VALLE-LISBOA
, Manuela Carreiras
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: European Dyslexia Association
Año del evento: 2024
Publicación arbitrada
Palabras clave:
lectura
dislexia
rastreo cortical
Areas de conocimiento:
Ciencias Naturales y Exactas / Ciencias Biológicas /
Otros Tópicos Biológicos /
Neurociencia cognitiva
Medio de divulgación: Internet
https://eda-info.eu
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Rhythmic abilities in prereaders predict future reading skills (2020)Trabajo relevante
Zugarramurdi, C
, Carreiras, M.
, J.C. VALLE-LISBOA
Publicado
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Ciudad: Toronto
Año del evento: 2020
Publicación arbitrada
Medio de divulgación: Internet
Rhythmic abilities have been related to language processing skills such as phonological awareness, rise time discrimination and verbal memory. Following this reasoning, they have also been linked to reading acquisition. In particular, in prereaders, tapping to a beat, a task that entails rhythmic processing through auditory-motor synchronization (AMS), has shown to discriminate children with poor and good phonological skills. However, evidence regarding how the AMS-reading link develops through time, starting before reading instruction, is scarce. In the present study, we followed a large sample of 600 children from kindergarten to second grade, through a digital assessment of literacy and literacy-related skills, as well as rhythmic abilities. We found that AMS in K5 uniquely contributes to future reading performance, above and beyond phonological skills. These findings underscore the role of rhythmic abilities in reading acquisition, and its relation to phonological processing.
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Using brain rhythms to improve behavioral predictors of reading (2016)
Zugarramurdi, C
, Lallier, M.
, J.C. VALLE-LISBOA
, Carreiras, M.
Publicado
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: Eighth Annual Meeting for the Neurobiology of Language
Ciudad: Londres
Año del evento: 2016
Publicación arbitrada
Medio de divulgación: Internet
http://www.neurolang.org/programs/SNL_2016_Abstracts_Download.pdf
Predicting reading development is a crucial step towards designing timely interventions to prevent life-long consequences of reading difficulties. In the current literature, there?s general agreement on three behavioral predictors of reading development, irrespective of the language of study: phonological awareness, letter knowledge and rapid automatized naming (RAN). However, these combined measures account for up to 60 percent of the variance and have a false alarm rate of at least 10 percent , which potentially results in superfluous interventions that are undesirable in terms of both human and economic resources. Although in recent years new theories into the underlying mechanisms of reading difficulties have been put forward, these have not make its way into the behavioral assessment of reading development. The main claim of these theories is that the precision in the entrainment of oscillatory neural activity to external rhythmic stimuli, such as speech or words, underlies the distinctiveness of phonological representations at the auditory level, and the precise shifting of attention necessary for reading at the visual level. In the present study we aimed at improving the predictive validity of behavioral measures by including novel tasks that tap into evaluating the precision of synchronization in auditory and visual oscillatory activity. The behavioral assessment included: phonological awareness, letter knowledge, RAN, tapping to a beat, dichotic listening, visual entrainment, verbal and non-verbal short-term memory, receptive vocabulary, IQ and reading (decoding). The sample was composed of ~700 Spanish-speaking 5 y.o. prereaders attending kindergarten who were assessed at their schools in 3 sessions distributed in two successive weeks; the overall data collection was completed over a 2 month period. In order to accomplish such a large- scale assessment in a brief time course, a digital screening tool implemented in tablets in a game-like manner was developed. These data collection entails the first phase of a longitudinal study to be completed by the end of 2017. The results at this phase suggest that precision of entrainment to external rhythmic stimuli, behaviorally measured, can explain some of the variance found in phonological awareness tasks, underscoring its role in the specification of phonological representations and in the rapid allocation of attention that underlie reading performance. Furthermore, the results show that neural entrainment can be indirectly measured through behavioral tasks easily implemented in an educational environment, which can lead to improved prediction of early reading difficulties.
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Relative Meaning Frequencies for Homonyms in Two Spanish Dialects (2016)
Zugarramurdi, C
, Armstrong, B. C.
, CABANA, A.
, J.C. VALLE-LISBOA
, Plaut, D. C.
Publicado
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: International Meeting of the Psychonomic Society
Ciudad: Granada
Año del evento: 2016
Publicación arbitrada
Medio de divulgación: Internet
http://www.ps2016.org/downloads/abstracts-ps2016.pdf
Relative meaning frequency is a critical factor to consider in studies of semantic ambiguity.In Spanish, however, relatively meaning frequency norms for homonyms are scarce and out of date. In the present study, we collected norms for 578 homonyms in two Spanish dialects?European Spanish and Rioplatense Spanish?using a computer-assisted norming approach based on dictionary definitions. The results show that the two dialects differ considerably in terms of the relative meaning frequencies of their constituent homonyms and that the overall distributions of relative frequency vary considerably between English and Spanish, as well. In quantifying the reliability of the norms, we also established that only seven ratings are needed to converge on a highly stable set of ratings. These results provide a possible explanation for some of the discrepant effects of homonymy reported in previous studies and underscore the importance and feasibility of developing localized norms.
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A neural network model of a semantic space: correlation with priming an EEG data (2014)
CABANA, A.
, Zugarramurdi, C
, VALLE-LISBOA J.C.
, MIZRAJI, E.
Publicado
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: 5th Annual Neurobiology of Language Conference
Ciudad: San Diego, California
Año del evento: 2014
Publicación arbitrada
Medio de divulgación: Papel
http://www.neurolang.org/programs/SNL2013_Abstracts.pdf
The relevance of the lexicon for present-day theories of language is sustained both on theoretical grounds and on psycholinguistic and neurobiological evidence. There is substantial discrepancies over what type of information is stored in the lexicon and how it is used in sentence production and comprehension. Neural network models of language processing have contributed to this and other related debates regarding the neurobiological substrates of language performance. In the present work, we use a particular neural model to explore the correlations between semantic space-derived word similarities and behavioral data obtained in priming and ERP experiments. Context- dependent memory modules are neural network models that have been used in many cognitive tasks and settings, such as goal-directed behavior, logic operations, and normal and pathological language processing (see: Mizraji, Pomi and Valle-Lisboa, Cog. Neurodynamics, 3, 401, 2009). These memory modules receive two input vectors and associate an output to the Kronecker product of the inputs; their performances are comparable to hidden-layer feedforward perceptrons, but they are successfully trained using simpler gradient descent methods. We present here a modular neural network that can be used to obtain a semantic space when trained on large corpora. The model consists of two main modules: a semantic module that implements the notion of topic context and retains mostly semantic relations between words, and a ?word-order? module that captures sequential information of word occurrences. Both modules resemble a simple recurrent network in which the output vector is fed back as a context input for the next input in the sequence. The semantic context module is inspired in a topic selector module, previously built, that is capable of text categorization with supervised training (Cabana, Mizraji and Valle-Lisboa, in preparation). In contrast, the word-order module is concerned with the prediction of the next word in the sequence, or more specifically, the next type of word, in a POS-like sense. We trained such a modular network on the Spanish version of the Wikipedia online article collection. We analyze its performance in explaining variance in semantic priming and ERP experiments, evaluating the influence of pragmatic and event information in lexical representation. In addition, we evaluated the correlation between amount of priming and N-400 amplitudes in experiments with semantic similarity measures derived from the modular neural network obtained. The main result is that the inclusion POS module, even if too simple to be taken as a realistic implementation of part of speech tagger, enhances recognition abilities of the modules and better matches the RT measurements. The semantic context module can be used as a semantic space, performing similarly as a LSA-based semantic space built from the same corpus. Finally, we analyze the idea that some of the discrepancies between the experiments and the model point toward the necessity of a richer model for the lexicon.
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On the different types of information stored in the lexicon and their neural bases (2013)
Zugarramurdi, C
, CABANA, A.
, VALLE-LISBOA J.C.
Publicado
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
Ciudad: Berlín
Año del evento: 2013
Medio de divulgación: Internet
https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/
We explore the idea that the neuropsychological organization of memory explains contradictory results about the lexicon. We believe that a semantic component stores the prototypic information and an ?episodic? component stores both the exceptions to the prototypes and the exceptionally common stimuli. With this theoretical insight we studied the different types of information that are accessed when a word is presented to a subject. To this end we first reproduced some results from Hare and coworkers showing that the presentation of a word for a noun facilitates the recognition of words related to the context of the word usage more than what could count as a semantic definition. The same pattern is observed for the neurophysiologically determined facilitation of the N400 component. Some of the results can be explained by corpus linguistic tools such as LSA. We present evidence from bimodal priming experiments supporting part of our theoretical proposition.
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The representation of polysemous words in semantic and episodic memory (2013)
CABANA, A.
, Zugarramurdi, C
, VALLE-LISBOA J.C.
Publicado
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
Ciudad: Berlin
Año del evento: 2013
Publicación arbitrada
Medio de divulgación: Internet
https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/
Many controversies in cognitive science hinge around the divide between the general and the particular. In language research, the Declarative Procedural (DP) model proposes that procedural memory deals with the generalizable aspects of grammar, while exceptions are handled by declarative memories. Extending the DP model, we believe that the existence in memory of a semantic component which stores the prototypic information and an ?episodic? component that stores both the exceptions to the prototypes and the exceptionally common stimuli, could explain results on polysemia research. We studied the representation of polysemous words. We tested whether different senses of a polysemous word prime each other. Although in general there is no priming there are items showing positive priming and others showing inhibition. We then used bimodal priming in order to understand the effect of context in both types of items. Our results support the idea that lexical representation uses different memory systems.
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Event-participant priming in spanish: a behavioral, corpus and electrophysiological approach (2012)
Zugarramurdi, C
, CABANA, A.
, GÓMEZ-SENA, L.
, J.C. VALLE-LISBOA
Publicado
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: Neurobiology of Language Conference
Ciudad: San Sebastián - Donostia
Año del evento: 2012
Publicación arbitrada
Medio de divulgación: Internet
http://www.neurolang.org/programs/NLC2012_Abstracts.pdf
The notion of a static and passive lexicon has been questioned based on several converging approaches. Recently, some reports have pointed out that the amount of information stored in the lexicon can be huge and diverse, casting doubts on the idea of the lexical store being a relevant entity. In particular it has been shown that nouns that denote events are effective primes for the nouns that denote the typical participants of the corresponding events and nouns that denote objects. We replicated the experiments of Hare and coworkers (Cognition, 2009, vol 111, pg 151) using nouns in Spanish. A set of the nouns denoting events shows a clear effect of priming over participants, but there is another set that shows the reverse pattern. This difference resisted changes in the protocol aimed at reducing variance or at improving the training of participants. In order to better understand this difference we created an LSA space based on the Spanish version of Wikipedia. We measured the cosine distance between primes and targets in the space showing that in most cases where no priming was observed the distance between unrelated pairs was effectively smaller than the distance between related pairs of words. In order to analyze the Neurobiological basis of such robust difference, we started analyzing the Electroencephalographic response using an evoked potential protocol and a wavelet approach. A set of hypothesis about the organization of the lexicon is presented based on the relationship between behavioural, EEG, and LSA data
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Pragmatic priming in Spanish (2012)
Zugarramurdi, C
, CABANA, A.
, VALLE-LISBOA J.C.
Publicado
Resumen
Evento: Internacional
Descripción: Language and Neuroscience Conference
Ciudad: Florianopolis
Año del evento: 2012
Publicación arbitrada
Medio de divulgación: Papel