Coma and disorders of consciousness (DoC) are common manifestations of acute severe brain injuries. Research into their neuroanatomical basis can be traced from Hippocrates to the present day. Lesions causing DoC have traditionally been conceptualized as decreasing "alertness" from damage to the ascending arousal system, and/or, reducing level of "awareness" due to structural or functional impairment of large-scale brain networks. Within this framework, pharmacological and neuromodulatory interventions to promote recovery from DoC have hitherto met with limited success. This is partly due to inter-individual heterogeneity of brain injury patterns, and an incomplete understanding of brain network properties that characterize consciousness. Advances in multiscale computational modelling of brain dynamics have opened a unique opportunity to explore the causal mechanisms of brain activity at the biophysical level. These models can provide a novel approach for selection and optimization of potential interventions by simulation of brain network dynamics individualized for each patient.

We assessed phonological and apraxic impairments in Hindi persons with aphasia (PwA) and compared them to Italian PwA reported in previous studies. Overall, we found strong similarities. Phonological errors were present across production tasks (repetition, reading and naming), most errors were non-lexical and, among those, a majority involved individual phonemes. There were significant effects of length, but not frequency. Hindi PwA, like the Italian PwA, showed strong effects of syllabic structure, with most errors occurring on consonants and weak syllabic positions, preserving syllable structure and simplifying phonemes or syllabic templates. These similarities were modulated by some language-specific patterns. Vowel insertions were more common in Hindi, possibly due to the presence of a central vowel, and segmental simplifications concentrated on marked aspiration and retroflection features. We hope our study will encourage further research in Hindi and other Indian languages. This will improve clinical diagnosis and our understanding of cross-linguistic differences.

This study investigates factors influencing lexical access in language production across modalities (signed and oral). Data from deaf and hearing signers were reanalyzed (Baus and Costa, 2015, On the temporal dynamics of sign production: An ERP study in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). , (1), 40-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2015.03.013; Gimeno-Martínez and Baus, 2022, Iconicity in sign language production: Task matters. , , 108166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108166) testing the influence of psycholinguistic variables and ERP mean amplitudes on signing and naming latencies. Deaf signers' signing latencies were influenced by sign iconicity in the picture signing task, and by spoken psycholinguistic variables in the word-to-sign translation task. Additionally, ERP amplitudes before response influenced signing but not translation latencies. Hearing signers' latencies, both signing and naming, were influenced by sign iconicity and word frequency, with early ERP amplitudes predicting only naming latencies. These findings highlight general and modality-specific determinants of lexical access in language production.

In this work we introduce a new tool for measuring English spelling-sound consistency, the PG Toolkit, which we use to conduct detailed analyses of pseudoword spellings that provide new insights into the nature of sublexical and lexical representations. There are several key findings: first, sound-spelling consistency measured at two different "grain sizes", phonographeme and onset/rime, each explained unique variance in pseudoword spelling. Second, lexical skill was more related to pseudoword accuracy at the onset/rime level than at the phonographeme level, and individuals who chose more consistent mappings to spell pseudowords tended to have better lexical skill. Finally, no unique contribution of consistency in the reading direction ("feedback") was found after controlling for consistency in the spelling direction. Taken together, the results validate the various measures provided by the PG Toolkit and establish new evidence that supports an interpretation of sublexical processes as operations over hierarchically-structured representations.

Although structural priming seems to rely on the same mechanisms in production and comprehension, effects are not always consistent between modalities. Methodological differences often result in different data types, namely choice data in production and reaction time data in comprehension. In a structural priming experiment with English ditransitives, we collected choice data and reaction time data in both modalities. The choice data showed priming of the DO and PO dative. The reaction times revealed priming of the PO dative. In production, PO targets were chosen faster after a PO prime than after a baseline prime. In comprehension, DO targets were read slower after a PO prime than after a baseline prime. This result can be explained from competition between alternatives during structure selection. Priming leads to facilitation of the primed structure or inhibition of the opposite structure depending on the relative frequency of structures, which may differ across modalities.

We critically examine the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH) that proposes that a deficit in procedural (as opposed to declarative) learning underlies dyslexia and other developmental disorders. We first note that the existence of dissociated learning disorders (and multiple forms for each disorder) appears incompatible with a general deficit account. Moreover, the PDH formulation appears generally underspecified in terms of predictions to be tested. A particular focus is on the conceptualization of automatization. However, there are alternative views of automaticity, and comparing these different views helps frame the body of findings on the PDH. The insufficient PDH specification led to tasks touching on different skills and selecting target groups based on general diagnostic categories. Accordingly, several recent reviews and meta-analyses reported mixed patterns of findings and reached contradictory conclusions on the PDH. We propose avenues for future research to effectively examine the role of PDH in learning and other developmental disorders.

Feature generation tasks and feature databases are important for understanding how knowledge is organized in semantic memory, as they reflect not only the kinds of information that individuals hold about objects but also how objects are conceptually represented. Traditionally, semantic norms focus on a variety of object categories and, as a result, have a small number of concepts per semantic category. Here, our main goal is to create a more fine-grained feature database exclusively for one category of objects-manipulable objects. This database contributes to the understanding of within-category, content-specific processing. To achieve this, we asked 130 participants to freely generate features for 80 manipulable objects and another group of 32 participants to generate action features for the same objects. We then compared our databases with other published semantic norms and found high similarity between them. In our databases, we calculated the similarity between objects in terms of visual, functional, encyclopaedic, and action feature types using Spearman correlation, Baker's gamma index, and cophenetic correlation. We discovered that objects were grouped in a distinctive and meaningful way according to feature type. Finally, we tested the validity of our databases by asking three groups of participants to perform a feature verification experiment while manipulating production frequency. Our results demonstrate that participants can recognize and associate the features of our databases with specific manipulable objects. Participants were faster to verify high-frequency features than low-frequency features. Overall, our data provide important insights into how we process manipulable objects and can be used to further inform cognitive and neural theories of object processing and identification.

Speaking requires the temporally coordinated planning of core linguistic information, from conceptual meaning to articulation. Recent neurophysiological results suggested that these operations involve a cascade of neural events with subsequent onset times, whilst competing evidence suggests early parallel neural activation. To test these hypotheses, we examined the sources of neuromagnetic activity recorded from 34 participants overtly naming 134 images from 4 object categories (animals, tools, foods and clothes). Within each category, word length and phonological neighbourhood density were co-varied to target phonological/phonetic processes. Multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA) searchlights in source space decoded object categories in occipitotemporal and middle temporal cortex, and phonological/phonetic variables in left inferior frontal (BA 44) and motor cortex early on. The findings suggest early activation of multiple variables due to intercorrelated properties and interactivity of processing, thus raising important questions about the representational properties of target words during the preparatory time enabling overt speaking.

Previous studies have emphasized the critical role of the prefrontal cortex in cognitive estimation and theory of mind, however, none of them has questioned the possible role of cognitive estimation processes in understanding the mental states of others. In this study, we compared 30 patients with focal prefrontal cortex damage and 30 control subjects matched by gender, age, and education level on their performances on a cognitive estimation task and two tasks assessing theory of mind: the "Faux-Pas" task and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task. The results showed that patients were significantly impaired compared with control subjects on both abilities of cognitive estimation and theory of mind. Moreover, regression analyses showed that performance on theory of mind was predicted by the scores on cognitive estimation. Finally, using voxel-based lesion analysis, we identified a partially common bilaterally distributed prefrontal network involved in both these domains centred within the ventral and dorsomedial areas with extension to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Reading is a complex process involving multiple stages. An impairment in any of these stages may cause distinct types of reading deficits- distinct types of dyslexia. We describe the Malabi, a screener to identify deficits in various orthographic, lexical, and sublexical components of the reading process in French. The Malabi utilizes stimuli that are sensitive to different forms of dyslexia, including "attentional dyslexia", as it is traditionally refered to, characterized by letter-to-word binding impairments leading to letter migrations between words (e.g., "bar cat" misread as "bat car"), and "letter-position dyslexia", resulting in letter transpositions within words (e.g., "destiny" misread as "density"). After collecting reading error norms from 138 French middle-school students, we analyzed error types of 16 students with developmental dyslexia. We identified three selective cases of attentional dyslexia and one case of letter-position dyslexia. Further tests confirmed our diagnosis and demonstrate, for the first time, how these dyslexias are manifested in French. These results underscore the significance of recognizing and discussing the existence of multiple dyslexias, both in research contexts when selecting participants for dyslexia studies, and in practical settings where educators and practitioners work with students to develop personalized support. The test and supporting materials are available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/3pgzb/).

Separable input and output phonological working memory (WM) capacities have been proposed, with the input capacity supporting speech recognition and the output capacity supporting production. We examined the role of input vs. output phonological WM in narrative production, examining speech rate and pronoun ratio - two measures with prior evidence of a relation to phonological WM. For speech rate, a case series approach with individuals with aphasia found no significant independent contribution of input or output phonological WM capacity after controlling for single-word production. For pronoun ratio, there was some suggestion of a role for input phonological WM. Thus, neither finding supported a specific role for an output phonological buffer in speech production. In contrast, two cases demonstrating dissociations between input and output phonological WM capacities provided suggestive evidence of predicted differences in narrative production, though follow-up research is needed. Implications for case series vs. case study approaches are discussed.

We present a case study detailing cognitive performance, functional neuroimaging, and effects of a hypothesis-driven treatment in a 10-year-old girl diagnosed with complete, isolated corpus callosum agenesis. Despite having average overall intellectual abilities, the girl exhibited profound surface dyslexia and dysgraphia. Spelling treatment significantly and persistently improved her spelling of trained irregular words, and this improvement generalized to reading accuracy and speed of trained words. Diffusion weighted imaging revealed strengthened intrahemispheric white matter connectivity of the left temporal cortex after treatment and identified interhemispheric connectivity between the occipital lobes, likely facilitated by a pathway crossing the midline via the posterior commissure. This case underlines the corpus callosum's critical role in lexical reading and writing. It demonstrates that spelling treatment may enhance interhemispheric connectivity in corpus callosum agenesis through alternative pathways, boosting the development of a more efficient functional organization of the visual word form area within the left temporo-occipital cortex.

Although it is generally assumed that face recognition relies on holistic processing, whether face recognition deficits observed in Developmental Prosopagnosics (DPs) can be explained by impaired holistic processing is currently under debate. The mixed findings from past studies could be the consequence of DP's heterogeneous deficit nature and the use of different measures of holistic processing-the inversion, part-whole, and composite tasks-which showed a poor association among each other. The present study aimed to gain further insight into the role of holistic processing in DPs. Groups of DPs and neurotypicals completed three tests measuring holistic face processing and non-face objects (i.e., Navon task). At a group level, DPs showed (1) diminished, but not absent, inversion and part-whole effects, (2) comparable magnitudes of the composite face effect and (3) global precedence effect in the Navon task. However, single-case analyses showed that these holistic processing deficits in DPs are .

The exploration of naming error patterns in aphasia provides insights into the cognitive processes underlying naming performance. We investigated how semantic and phonological abilities correlate and how they influence naming performance in aphasia. Data from 296 individuals with aphasia, drawn from the Moss Aphasia Psycholinguistics Project Database, were analyzed using a structural equation model. The model incorporated latent variables for semantics and phonology and manifest variables for naming accuracy and error patterns. There was a moderate positive correlation between semantics and phonology after controlling for overall aphasia severity. Both semantic and phonological abilities influenced naming accuracy. Semantic abilities negatively related to semantic, mixed, unrelated errors, and no responses. Interestingly, phonology positively affected semantic errors. Additionally, phonological abilities negatively related to each of phonological and neologism errors. These results highlight the role of semantic and phonological skills on naming performance in aphasia and reveal a relationship between these cognitive processes.

Speakers sometimes make word production errors, such as mistakenly saying instead of flamingo. This study explored which properties of an error influence the likelihood of its selection over the target word. Analysing real-word errors in speeded picture naming, we investigated whether, relative to the target, naming errors were more typical representatives of the semantic category, were associated with more semantic features, and/or were semantically more closely related to the target than its near semantic neighbours were on average. Results indicated that naming errors tended to be more typical category representatives and possess more semantic features than the targets. Moreover, while not being the closest semantic neighbours, errors were largely near semantic neighbours of the targets. These findings suggest that typicality, number of semantic features, and semantic similarity govern activation levels in the production system, and we discuss possible mechanisms underlying these effects in the context of word production theories.

There is converging evidence that performance on visual search tasks, often assessed with cancellation tasks, is associated with performance on reading tasks. However, results have been inconsistent across studies dealing with developmental dyslexia. One limitation of previous research is that accuracy, rather than search strategies, was assessed. The present study is the first to investigate visual search strategies during a cancellation task in developmental dyslexia. Here, 24 dyslexic and 33 non-dyslexic children were included. Difficulties in visual search accuracy and organization were highlighted in the dyslexic group compared to the non-dyslexic group. Visual search patterns were also different if dyslexic children had more difficulties in the lexical or the sublexical reading route. While several questions remain to be addressed regarding the influence of other visual attentional processes on the relationship between visual search and reading, this study supports the use of visual search tasks in dyslexia assessment.

How does cognitive inhibition influence speaking? The Stroop effect is a classic demonstration of the interference between reading and color naming. We used a novel variant of the Stroop task to measure whether this interference impacts not only the response speed, but also the acoustic properties of speech. Speakers named the color of words in three categories: congruent (e.g., written in red), color-incongruent (e.g., written in red), and vowel-incongruent - those with partial phonological overlap with their color (e.g., written in red, in green, and in blue). Our primary aim was to identify any effect of the distractor vowel on the acoustics of the target vowel. Participants were no slower to respond on vowel-incongruent trials, but formant trajectories tended to show a bias away from the distractor vowel, consistent with a phenomenon of that increases contrast between confusable alternatives.

We report on two types of developmental surface dysgraphia. One type, exhibited by 8 participants, is , which involves an impairment in the orthographic output lexicon, leading to nonword phonologically-plausible misspellings. The other type, shown by 3 participants, is . In this type, the orthographic output lexicon is disconnected from the semantic system and from the phonological input lexicon, but still contributes to spelling via support to the orthographic output buffer, resulting in mainly lexical phonologically-plausible misspellings (writing as "bee" but not "bea").The specific localization of the impairment in spelling, in the lexicon or in its connections, allowed us to examine the question of one or two orthographic lexicons; four participants who had a deficit in the orthographic output lexicon itself in writing had intact orthographic-input-lexicon in reading. They made surface errors in writing but not in reading the same words, supporting separate input and output orthographic lexicons.

Being able to empathise with others is a crucial ability in everyday life. However, this does not usually entail feeling the pain of others in our own bodies. For individuals with mirror-sensory synaesthesia (MSS), however, this form of empathic embodiment is a common feature. Our study investigates the empathic ability of adults who experience MSS using a video-based empathy task. We found that MSS participants did not differ from controls on emotion identification and affective empathy; however, they showed higher affect sharing (degree to which their affect matches what they attribute to others) than controls. This finding indicates difficulties with self-other distinction, which our data shows results in fewer signs of prosocial behaviour. Our findings are in line with the self-other control theory of MSS and highlight how the use of appropriate empathy measures can contribute to our understanding of this important socio-affective ability, both in typical and atypical populations.

The Gerken lab has shown that infants are able to learn sound patterns that obligate local sequential dependencies that are no longer readily accessible to adults. The Goffman lab has shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) exhibit deficits in learning sequential dependencies that influence the acquisition of words and grammar, as well as other types of domain general sequences. Thus, DLD appears to be an impaired ability to detect and deploy sequential dependencies over multiple domains. We meld these two lines of research to propose a novel account in which sequential dependency learning is required for many phonological and morphosyntactic patterns in natural language and is also central to the language and domain general deficits that are attested in DLD. However, patterns that are not dependent on sequential dependencies but rather on networks of stored forms are learnable by children with DLD as well as by adults.

Visual imagery has a close overlapping relationship with visual perception. Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome marked by early impairments in visuospatial processing and visual object recognition. We asked whether PCA would therefore also be marked by deficits in visual imagery, tested using objective forced-choice questionnaires, and whether imagery deficits would be selective for certain properties. We recruited four patients with PCA and a patient with integrative visual agnosia due to bilateral occipitotemporal strokes for comparison. We administered a test battery probing imagery for object shape, size, colour lightness, hue, upper-case letters, lower-case letters, word shape, letter construction, and faces. All subjects showed significant impairments in visual imagery, with imagery for lower-case letters most likely to be spared. We conclude that PCA subjects can show severe deficits in visual imagery. Further work is needed to establish how frequently this occurs and how early it can be found.