Cortical tracking, the synchronization of brain activity to linguistic rhythms is a well-established phenomenon. However, its nature has been heavily contested: Is it purely epiphenomenal or does it play a fundamental role in speech comprehension? Previous research has used intelligibility manipulations to examine this topic. Here, we instead varied listeners\' language comprehension skills while keeping the auditory stimulus constant. To do so, we tested 22 native English speakers and 22 Spanish/Catalan bilinguals learning English as a second language (SL) in an EEG cortical entrainment experiment and correlated the responses with the magnitude of the N400 component of a semantic comprehension task. As expected, native listeners effectively tracked sentential, phrasal, and syllabic linguistic structures. In contrast, SL listeners exhibited limitations in tracking sentential structures but successfully tracked phrasal and syllabic rhythms. Importantly, the amplitude of the neural entrainment correlated with the amplitude of the detection of semantic incongruities in SLs, showing a direct connection between tracking and the ability to understand speech. Together, these findings shed light on the interplay between language comprehension and cortical tracking, to identify neural entrainment as a fundamental principle for speech comprehension.

We present a case of a single left hemisphere temporal-parietal stroke with subacute global aphasia and severe verbal apraxia and moderate dysphagia. The patient underwent a combined transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and language stimulation with Virtual Reality Rehabilitation System (VRRS). Patient was treated in a 1-h session, for 5 days a week, for 4 consecutive weeks. After treatment, evident improvements in the comprehension of oral and written language, swallowing abilities, and caregiver burden were detected. Power spectrum analysis of EEG data revealed significant enhancements of θ, α, and β waves from baseline to follow-up. These preliminary results seem to confirm the reliability of the tDCS translational application in conjunction with computer-based cognitive treatment for language disorders in a patient with stroke-induced aphasia.

Here we present a case of a native Greek male patient who presented clinically with sudden onset pure word deafness after an ischemic stroke in the temporoparietal region of the right hemisphere, but who had suffered an ischemic stroke 9 years previously in an adjacent area of the left hemisphere, causing aphasic symptoms which resolved quickly and almost completely. What makes this case interesting and novel is that it is the first case describing a patient whose ventral language comprehension circuit did not reorganize successfully due to damage of the adjacent right hemisphere language areas at a subsequent time.

Previous research showed that sensorimotor information affects the perception of properties associated with implied perceptual context during language comprehension. Three experiments addressed a novel question of whether perceptual context may contribute to a simulation of information about such out-of-sight objects as cast shadows. In Experiment 1, participants read a sentence that implied a particular shadow cast on a target (blinds vs. an open window) and then verified the picture of the object onto which a shadow was cast. Responses were faster when the shadow of blinds cast on the object matched that implied by the sentence. However, the data did not show the same matching effect for pictures with cast shadows from an open window. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found that verification times for pictures with no cast shadows were faster when preceded by an \"open window\" sentence, thus suggesting that reading the sentence does not elicit a visual simulation of any specific shadow. Experiment 3 showed that the objects superimposed with a cast shadow of the blinds and blinds themselves were verified faster after reading a \"blinds\" sentence. However, the results of an order analysis showed the temporal stability of the \"blinds shadows\" effect, but the disappearance of the \"blinds\" effect in the second half of the data. We conclude that the results are compatible, to a lesser or greater extent, with multiple accounts, and discuss our findings in the context of a mental imagery view, a mental simulation view, and an amodal representation view.

In neurocognitive research on language, the processing principles of the system at hand are usually assumed to be relatively invariant. However, research on attention, memory, decision-making, and social judgment has shown that mood can substantially modulate how the brain processes information. For example, in a bad mood, people typically have a narrower focus of attention and rely less on heuristics. In the face of such pervasive mood effects elsewhere in the brain, it seems unlikely that language processing would remain untouched. In an EEG experiment, we manipulated the mood of participants just before they read texts that confirmed or disconfirmed verb-based expectations about who would be talked about next (e.g., that \"David praised Linda because … \" would continue about Linda, not David), or that respected or violated a syntactic agreement rule (e.g., \"The boys turns\"). ERPs showed that mood had little effect on syntactic parsing, but did substantially affect referential anticipation: whereas readers anticipated information about a specific person when they were in a good mood, a bad mood completely abolished such anticipation. A behavioral follow-up experiment suggested that a bad mood did not interfere with verb-based expectations per se, but prevented readers from using that information rapidly enough to predict upcoming reference on the fly, as the sentence unfolds. In all, our results reveal that background mood, a rather unobtrusive affective state, selectively changes a crucial aspect of real-time language processing. This observation fits well with other observed interactions between language processing and affect (emotions, preferences, attitudes, mood), and more generally testifies to the importance of studying \"cold\" cognitive functions in relation to \"hot\" aspects of the brain.