The waveform in the time domain, spectrum in the frequency domain, and topography in the space domain of component(s) of interest are the fundamental indices in neuroscience research. Despite the application of time-frequency analysis (TFA) to extract the temporal and spectral characteristics of non-phase-locked component (NPLC) of interest simultaneously, the statistical results are not always expectedly satisfying, in that the spatial information is not considered. Complex Morlet wavelet transform is widely applied to TFA of event-related-potential (ERP) data, and mother wavelet (which should be firstly defined by center frequency and bandwidth (CFBW) before using the method to TFA of ERP data) influences the time-frequency results. In this study, an optimal set of CFBW was firstly selected from the number sets of CFBW, to further analyze for TFA of the ERP data in a cognitive experiment paradigm of emotion (Anger and Neutral) and task (Go and Nogo). Then tensor decomposition algorithm was introduced to investigate the NPLC of interest from the fourth-order tensor. Compared with the TFA results which only revealed a significant difference between Go and Nogo task condition, the tensor-based analysis showed significant interaction effect between emotion and task. Moreover, significant differences were found in both emotion and task conditions through tensor decomposition. In addition, the statistical results of TFA would be affected by the selected region of interest (ROI), whereas those of the proposed method were not subject to ROI. Hence, this study demonstrated that tensor decomposition method was effective in extracting NPLC, by considering spatial information simultaneously as the potential to explore the brain mechanisms related to experimental design.

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Multi-domain Features of the Non-phase-locked Component of Interest Extracted from ERP Data by Tensor Decomposition.

Background Athletic performance is affected by emotional state. Athletes may underperform in competition due to poor emotion regulation. Movement speed plays an important role in many competition events. Flexible control of movement speed is critical for effective athletic performance. Although behavioral evidence showed that negative emotion can influence movement speed, the nature of the relationship remains controversial. Thus, the present study investigated how negative emotion affects movement speed and the neural mechanism underlying the interaction between emotion processing and movement control. Methods The present study combined electroencephalography (EEG) technology with a cued-action task to investigate the effect of negative emotion on movement speed. In total, 21 undergraduate students were recruited for this study. Participants were asked to perform six consecutive action tasks after viewing an emotional picture. Pictures were presented in two blocks (one negative and one neutral). After the participants completed a set of tasks (neutral of negative), they were subjected to complete a 9-point self-assessment manikin scale. Participants underwent EEG while performing the tasks. Results At the behavior level, there was a significant main effect of emotional valence on movement speed, with participants exhibiting significantly slower movements in the negative emotional condition than in the neutral condition. EEG data showed increased theta oscillation and larger P1 amplitude in response to negative than to neural images suggesting that more cognitive resources were required to process negative than neutral images. EEG data also showed a larger late CNV area in the neutral condition than in the negative condition, which suggested that there was a significant decrease in brain activation during action tasks in negative emotional condition than in the neural. While the early CNV did not reveal a significant main effect of emotional valence. Conclusion The present results indicate that a negative emotion can slow movement, which is largely due to negative emotional processing consuming more resources than non-emotional processing and this interference effect mainly occurred in the late movement preparation phase.

Negative emotional state slows down movement speed: behavioral and neural evidence.

................................................................................................................................................. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................................ vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................. xiii TABLE OF TABLES ................................................................................................................................. xviii TABLE OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................................. xx LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...................................................................................................................... xxii CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 1. Heritage speaker processing ............................................................................................................... 1 2. Aims of the proposed study ................................................................................................................. 2 3. Importance of study ............................................................................................................................. 2 4. Outline of dissertation .......................................................................................................................... 3 CHAPTER II: HERITAGE SPEAKERS ........................................................................................................ 4 1. Heritage Speakers ............................................................................................................................... 4 1.1 Definition of heritage speakers ...................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Prevalence of heritage speakers ................................................................................................... 7 2. Spanish heritage speakers in US ........................................................................................................ 8 3. Empirical profile of HS language exposure and use .......................................................................... 10 3.1 Methodology ................................................................................................................................ 12 3.1.1 Participants .......................................................................................................................... 12 3.1.2 Protocol ................................................................................................................................ 12 3.1.3 Variables of interest ............................................................................................................. 13 3.2 Principal component analysis ...................................................................................................... 14 3.2.1 Rotated components ............................................................................................................ 15 3.2.2 Group comparisons .............................................................................................................. 18 3.3 Discussion ................................................................................................................................... 21 4. Present issues with the studies of heritage speakers ........................................................................ 22 4.1 Prescriptivist and monolingual comparison ............................................................................. 24 4.2 Linguistic insecurity ................................................................................................................. 25 4.3 Empirical study of linguistic insecurity ..................................................................................... 28 4.3.1 Methodology .................................................................................................................... 28 4.3.1.1 Participants .............................................................................................................. 28 4.3.1.2 Stimuli ....................................................................................................................... 29 4.3.1.3 Protocol .................................................................................................................... 31 4.3.1.4 Data analysis ............................................................................................................ 32 4.3.2 Results ............................................................................................................................. 33

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De-centering the Monolingual: A Psychophysiological Study of Heritage Speaker Language Processing

Behavioral embodied research shows that words evoking limb-specific meanings can affect responses performed with the corresponding body part. However, no study has explored this phenomenon's neural dynamics under implicit processing conditions, let alone by disentangling its conceptual and motoric stages. Here, we examined whether the blending of hand actions and manual action verbs, relative to nonmanual action verbs and nonaction verbs, modulates electrophysiological markers of semantic integration (N400) and motor-related cortical potentials during a lexical decision task. Relative to both other categories, manual action verbs involved reduced posterior N400 amplitude and greater modulations of frontal motor-related cortical potentials. Such effects overlapped in a window of ∼380-440 msec after word presentation and ∼180 msec before response execution, revealing the possible time span in which both semantic and action-related stages reach maximal convergence. These results allow refining current models of motor-language coupling while affording new insights on embodied dynamics at large.

The Neural Blending of Words and Movement: Event-Related Potential Signatures of Semantic and Action Processes during Motor-Language Coupling.

Purpose: Previous studies in English revealed that it is easier to comprehend subject relative clauses (SRCs) compared to object relative clauses (ORCs). However, subsequent research into processing of relative clauses in typologically different languages produced conflicting results. The present study aimed to investigate relative clause processing in Turkish and to test the predictions of the accounts of relative clause processing. Method: Thirty-six Turkish adult monolinguals took part in an eye-tracking experiment. Eye movements of the participants were recorded while they read Turkish sentences with subject and object relative clauses. Results: Analyses of both comprehension scores and eye-movement measures indicated a disadvantage in processing Turkish ORCs as revealed by more comprehension errors and elevated total reading times as well as more regressions. Furthermore, a corpus analysis conducted using a balanced corpus of Turkish revealed that SRCs are more frequent than ORCs in Turkish. Conclusion: The results are discussed with respect to the predictions of the relative clause processing accounts. It is suggested that a combination of factors including syntactic structure, structural frequency and morphological information shapes and constrains processing patterns of relative clauses.

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Comprehension of Turkish Relative Clauses: Evidence from Eye-tracking and Corpus Analysis

Time-frequency (TF) analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) using Complex Morlet Wavelet Transform has been widely applied in cognitive neuroscience research. It has been widely suggested that the center frequency (fc) and bandwidth (σ) should be considered in defining the mother wavelet. However, the issue how parametric variation of fc and σ of Morlet wavelet transform exerts influence on ERPs time-frequency results has not been extensively discussed in previous research. The current study, through adopting the method of Complex Morlet Continuous Wavelet Transform (CMCWT), aims to investigate whether time-frequency results vary with different parametric settings of fc and σ. Besides, the nonnegative canonical polyadic decomposition (NCPD) is used to further confirm the differences manifested in time-frequency results. Results showed that different parametric settings may result in divergent time-frequency results, including the corresponding time-frequency representation (TFR) and topographical distribution. Furthermore, no similar components of interest were obtained from different TFR results by NCPD. The current research, through highlighting the importance of parametric setting in time-frequency analysis of ERP data, suggests that different parameters should be attempted in order to get optimal time-frequency results.

/pdf/effect-of-parametric-variation-of-center-frequency-and-yloc3l72xf.pdf

Effect of Parametric Variation of Center Frequency and Bandwidth of Morlet Wavelet Transform on Time-Frequency Analysis of Event-Related Potentials

Embodiment theories argue that language comprehension involves activating specific sensory-motor systems in the brain. Previous research performed in English and other Indo-European languages suggests that, when compared to compatible sentences referring to the same actions performed sequentially (e.g. 'After cleaning the wound he unrolled the bandage'), incompatible sentences describing two manual actions performed simultaneously by an agent (e.g. 'While cleaning the wound he unrolled the bandage') were worse understood and increased the event-related potentials (ERPs) component N400. The present ERP research aims to further investigate brain response to motor compatibility in native Mandarin speakers. The Chinese experimental sentences described two manual actions either in incongruent conditions marked by the Chinese parallel structure … … ('yibian…yibian…'/'while… while…') or congruent conditions marked by the sequential structure … … ('xian…ranhou…'/'firstly… then…'). The last action clause elicited larger fronto-central N400 in the incongruent condition, which reveals that there are semantic embodiment effects on the comprehension of Mandarin manual action language.

Embodiment Effect on the Comprehension of Mandarin Manual Action Language: An ERP Study.

The processing of relative clauses receives much concern from linguists. The finding that object relatives are easier to process than subject relatives in Chinese challenges the notion that subject relative clauses are preferred universally. A large body of literature provides theories related to sentence processing mechanisms for native speakers but leaves one area relatively untouched: how bilinguals process sentences. This study is designed to examine the case where the individuals with a Chinese L1 language background process subject-extracted subject relative clauses (SS) and subject-extracted object relative clauses (SO) by using eventrelated potentials (ERPs) to probe into the real-time language processing and presents a direct manifestation of brain activity. The findings from this study support the subject relative clause preference due to the strong influence of English relative clause markedness and bilinguals’ relative lower working memory capacity.

An ERP Study in English Relative Clause Processing by Chinese-English Bilinguals*

For fMRI time series analysis, an important challenge is to overcome the potential delay between hemodynamic response signal and cognitive stimuli signal, namely the same frequency but different phase (SFDP) problem. In this paper, a novel space affine matching feature is presented by introducing the time domain and frequency domain features. The time domain feature is used to discern different stimuli, while the frequency domain feature to eliminate the delay. And then we propose a space affine matching (SAM) algorithm to match fMRI time series by our affine feature, in which a normal vector is estimated using gradient descent to explore the time series matching optimally. The experimental results illustrate that the SAM algorithm is insensitive to the delay between the hemodynamic response signal and the cognitive stimuli signal. Our approach significantly outperforms GLM method while there exists the delay. The approach can help us solve the SFDP problem in fMRI time series matching and thus of great promise to reveal brain dynamics.

A Space Affine Matching Approach to fMRI Time Series Analysis

Language is a powerful vehicle for expressing emotions, although the process by which words acquire their emotional meaning remains poorly understood. This study investigates how words acquire emotional meanings using two types of associative contexts: faces and sentences. To this end, participants were exposed topseudowords repeatedly paired either with faces or with sentences expressing the emotions of disgust, sadness, or neutrality. We examined participants’ acquisition of meanings by testing them in both within-modality (e.g., learning pseudowords with faces and testing them with a new set of faces with the target expressions) and cross-modality generalization tasks (e.g. learning pseudowords with faces and testing them with sentences). Results in the generalization tests showed that the participants in the Face Group acquired disgust and neutral meanings better than participants in the Sentence Group. In turn, participants in the Sentence Group acquired the meaning of sadness better than their counterparts in the Face Group, but this advantage was only manifested in the cross-modality test with faces. We conclude that both contexts are effective for acquiring the emotional meaning of words, although acquisition with faces is more versatile or generalizable.

https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/psicolj-2021-0004

Huili Wang

Papers

Effect of Parametric Variation of Center Frequency and Bandwidth of Morlet Wavelet Transform on Time-Frequency Analysis of Event-Related Potentials

Embodiment Effect on the Comprehension of Mandarin Manual Action Language: An ERP Study.

An ERP Study in English Relative Clause Processing by Chinese-English Bilinguals*

A Space Affine Matching Approach to fMRI Time Series Analysis

Learning new words’ emotional meanings in the contexts of faces and sentences