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Speech perception is mediated by both left and right auditory cortices but with differential sensitivity to specific acoustic information contained in the speech signal. A detailed description of this functional asymmetry is missing, and the underlying models are widely debated. We analyzed cortical responses from 96 epilepsy patients with electrode implantation in left or right primary, secondary, and/or association auditory cortex (AAC). We presented short acoustic transients to noninvasively estimate the dynamical properties of multiple functional regions along the auditory cortical hierarchy. We show remarkably similar bimodal spectral response profiles in left and right primary and secondary regions, with evoked activity composed of dynamics in the theta (around 4–8 Hz) and beta–gamma (around 15–40 Hz) ranges. Beyond these first cortical levels of auditory processing, a hemispheric asymmetry emerged, with delta and beta band (3/15 Hz) responsivity prevailing in the right hemisphere and theta and gamma band (6/40 Hz) activity prevailing in the left. This asymmetry is also present during syllables presentation, but the evoked responses in AAC are more heterogeneous, with the co-occurrence of alpha (around 10 Hz) and gamma (>25 Hz) activity bilaterally. These intracranial data provide a more fine-grained and nuanced characterization of cortical auditory processing in the 2 hemispheres, shedding light on the neural dynamics that potentially shape auditory and speech processing at different levels of the cortical hierarchy.
Perception of irony has been observed to be impaired in adults with autism spectrum disorder. In typically developed adults, the mismatch of verbal and nonverbal emotional cues can be perceived as an expression of irony even in the absence of any further contextual information. In this study, we evaluate to what extent high functioning autists perceive this incongruence as expressing irony. Our results show that incongruent verbal and nonverbal signals create an impression of irony significantly less often in participants with high-functioning autism than in typically developed control subjects. The extent of overall autistic symptomatology as measured with the autism-spectrum questionnaire (AQ), however, does not correlate with the reduced tendency to attribute incongruent stimuli as expressing irony. Therefore, the attenuation in irony attribution might rather be related to specific subdomains of autistic traits, such as a reduced tendency to interpret communicative signals in terms of complex intentional mental states. The observed differences in irony attribution support the assumption that a less pronounced tendency to engage in higher order mentalization processes might underlie the impairment of pragmatic language understanding in high functioning autism.
We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity––i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning––might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word combinations such that the meaning of a target word is iconically expressed, or highlighted, in the phonetic properties of its immediate verbal context. To this end, we extracted single lines from German poems that all include a word designating high or low dominance, such as large or small, strong or weak, etc. Based on insights from previous studies, we expected to find more vowels with a relatively short distance between the first two formants (low formant dispersion) in the immediate context of words expressing high physical or social dominance than in the context of words expressing low dominance. Our findings support this hypothesis, suggesting that neighboring words can form iconic dyads in which the meaning of one word is sound-iconically reflected in the phonetic properties of adjacent words. The construct of a contiguity-based phono-semantic iconicity opens many venues for future research well beyond lines extracted from poems.
This essay follows the productive discussion of Giorgio Agamben's "The Open: Man and Animal" that took place as part of the 'Openness in Medieval Culture' conference at the ICI Berlin. The essay attempts to develop a speculative notion of openness within Agamben's work, in particular by connecting the question of openness to the question of the promise: the promise of the resolution of the question of man and animal ("The Open"); the promise of the Franciscans' vow, or 'sacramentum' ("The Highest Poverty"); and the promise of language ("The Sacrament of Language").
This essay approaches the problem of untying the mother tongue using Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's critique of onto-typology, along with the concept of the 'outre-mère' (the 'beyond-mother'), a limit-figure he and Jean-Luc Nancy devised in their critical assessments of psychoanalysis and its relationship to politics and the problem of mimesis. The essay argues that it will not be possible to deconstruct the figure of the mother tongue, or to untie ourselves from it, as long as we leave unquestioned both the theoretical dependence on figuration and our affective tie ('Gefühlsbindung') to theory.
Research on the music-language interface has extensively investigated similarities and differences of poetic and musical meter, but largely disregarded melody. Using a measure of melodic structure in music––autocorrelations of sound sequences consisting of discrete pitch and duration values––, we show that individual poems feature distinct and text-driven pitch and duration contours, just like songs and other pieces of music. We conceptualize these recurrent melodic contours as an additional, hitherto unnoticed dimension of parallelistic patterning. Poetic speech melodies are higher order units beyond the level of individual syntactic phrases, and also beyond the levels of individual sentences and verse lines. Importantly, auto-correlation scores for pitch and duration recurrences across stanzas are predictive of how melodious naive listeners perceive the respective poems to be, and how likely these poems were to be set to music by professional composers. Experimentally removing classical parallelistic features characteristic of prototypical poems (rhyme, meter, and others) led to decreased autocorrelation scores of pitches, independent of spoken renditions, along with reduced ratings for perceived melodiousness. This suggests that the higher order parallelistic feature of poetic melody strongly interacts with the other parallelistic patterns of poems. Our discovery of a genuine poetic speech melody has great potential for deepening the understanding of the music-language interface.
Repetition
(2019)
Background: The health status, health awareness and health behavior of persons with a migration background often differ from the autochthonous population. Little is known about the proportion of patients with a migration background (PMB) that participate in primary care studies on oral antithrombotic treatment (OAT) in Germany, and whether the quality of their antithrombotic care differs from patients without a migration background. The aim of this paper was to use the results of a cluster-randomized controlled trial (PICANT) to determine the proportion of PMB at different stages of recruitment, and to compare the results in terms of sociodemographic characteristics and antithrombotic treatment.
Methods: This study used screening and baseline data from the PICANT trial on oral anticoagulation management in GP practices. For this analysis, we determined the proportion of PMB during the recruitment period at stage 1 (screening of potentially eligible patients), stage 2 (eligible patients invited to participate in the trial), and stage 3 (assessment of baseline characteristics of patients participating in the PICANT trial). In addition, we compared patients in terms of sociodemographic characteristics and quality of anticoagulant treatment. Statistical analysis comprised descriptive and bivariate analyses.
Results: The proportion of PMB at each recruitment stage declined from 9.1% at stage 1 to 7.9% at stage 2 and 7.3% at stage 3). A lack of German language skills led to the exclusion of half the otherwise eligible PMB. At stages 1 and 3, PMB were younger (stage 1: 70.7 vs. 75.0 years, p<0.001; stage 3: 70.2 vs. 73.5 years, p = 0.013), but did not differ in terms of gender. The quality of their anticoagulant care was comparable (100.0% vs. 99.1% were receiving appropriate OAT, 94.4% vs. 95.7% took phenprocoumon, or warfarin, and the most recent INR measurement of 60.8% vs. 69.3% was within their individual INR range).
Conclusions: In the potentially eligible population and among participants at baseline, the quality of anticoagulant care was high in all groups of patients, which is reassuring. To enable the inclusion of more PMB, future primary care research on OAT in Germany should address how best to overcome language barriers. This will be challenging, particularly because the heterogeneity of PMB means the resulting sample sizes for each specific language group are small.
Trial registration: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN41847489.
Switching between reading tasks leads to phase-transitions in reading times in L1 and L2 readers
(2019)
Reading research uses different tasks to investigate different levels of the reading process, such as word recognition, syntactic parsing, or semantic integration. It seems to be tacitly assumed that the underlying cognitive process that constitute reading are stable across those tasks. However, nothing is known about what happens when readers switch from one reading task to another. The stability assumptions of the reading process suggest that the cognitive system resolves this switching between two tasks quickly. Here, we present an alternative language-game hypothesis (LGH) of reading that begins by treating reading as a softly-assembled process and that assumes, instead of stability, context-sensitive flexibility of the reading process. LGH predicts that switching between two reading tasks leads to longer lasting phase-transition like patterns in the reading process. Using the nonlinear-dynamical tool of recurrence quantification analysis, we test these predictions by examining series of individual word reading times in self-paced reading tasks where native (L1) and second language readers (L2) transition between random word and ordered text reading tasks. We find consistent evidence for phase-transitions in the reading times when readers switch from ordered text to random-word reading, but we find mixed evidence when readers transition from random-word to ordered-text reading. In the latter case, L2 readers show moderately stronger signs for phase-transitions compared to L1 readers, suggesting that familiarity with a language influences whether and how such transitions occur. The results provide evidence for LGH and suggest that the cognitive processes underlying reading are not fully stable across tasks but exhibit soft-assembly in the interaction between task and reader characteristics.
An information system is more than just the information technology; it is the system that emerges from the complex interactions and relationships between the information technology and the organization. However, what impact information technology has on an organization and how organizational structures and organizational change influence information technology remains an open question. We propose a theory to explain how communication structures emerge and adapt to environmental changes. We operationalize the interplay of information technology and organization as language communities whose members use and develop domain-specific languages for communication. Our theory is anchored in the philosophy of language. In developing it as an emergent perspective, we argue that information systems are self-organizing and that control of this ability is disseminated throughout the system itself, to the members of the language community. Information technology influences the dynamics of this adaptation process as a fundamental constraint leading to perturbations for the information system. We demonstrate how this view is separated from the entanglement in practice perspective and show that this understanding has far-reaching consequences for developing, managing, and examining information systems.