ABSTRACT This study investigates cross-linguistic asymmetries in noun and verb production in a Hindi-English bilingual with Broca’s aphasia (RZ), focusing on the influence of task demands (narrative vs. noun naming, verb naming, repetition), morphological richness, and code-switching (frequency and type). RZ exhibited features of agrammatism in both languages, with more pronounced deficits in English. RZ showed grammatical class asymmetries in noun-verb production across tasks. He produced more verbs than nouns in Hindi in the narrative task, likely due to its rich morphology, while showing comparable noun–verb production in naming. Verb retrieval remained consistently impaired in English across tasks. RZ frequently but rigidly code-switched, mainly inserting English nouns within Hindi matrix structure and used bilingual compound verbs, suggesting a strategy to compensate for lexical deficits in Hindi and morphosyntactic challenges in English. These findings underscore the importance of language typology and task demands in shaping aphasic symptomatology in bilinguals.

ABSTRACT Previous research showed that people enumerate objects faster and more accurately when they form clusters, a phenomenon called “groupitizing”. While mainly studied visually, its dependence on vision is unclear. Congenitally blind (CB) individuals provide a critical test: if vision is essential, CB people should lack groupitizing; if not, they may apply it across modalities, potentially outperforming sighted participants. We compared CB and sighted adults on an auditory groupitizing task, based on the estimation of 5–12 pure tones presented either randomly or grouped by temporal proximity. Both groups showed lower errors and higher precision for grouped sequences, confirming that groupitizing can emerge without visual experience. Importantly, for larger numerosities, sighted individuals’ grouping benefit decreased, whereas CB participants maintained robust advantages across all set sizes. These findings suggest that groupitizing relies on amodal perceptual mechanisms and that congenital blindness may enhance auditory enumeration strategies.

ABSTRACT This study explores bimodal cross-language interactions in the context of sign language vocabulary learning. Specifically, whether such interactions occur during oral language production, and whether they extend to an oral language not directly used in the training. Across three sessions, hearing Catalan-Spanish non-signers were trained on Catalan Sign Language (LSC) signs through an associative learning task (LSC-written Catalan). Participants subsequently performed an LSC-to-Catalan prime translation task with primes written in Catalan or Spanish. The primes were either phonologically related or unrelated to the target signs via their LSC translations. Behaviourally, LSC phonologically related word primes elicited faster translations, regardless of the prime language. Conversely, the N400 ERP component showed prime language-dependent effects. N400 differences were initially limited to Catalan, the training language, and extended to Spanish by the third session. These findings highlight the dynamic interplay between oral and sign languages during early sign language learning.

ABSTRACT Hemianopic patients with visual field defects due to cerebral damage sometimes demonstrate residual visual capacities in their contralesional field, known as blindsight. Its associated subjective experience remains poorly understood. We developed a novel task for patients combining forced-choice detection and discrimination paradigms with a confidence scale to assess individual objective sensitivity and metacognitive sensitivity and efficiency, addressing the unique challenges of probing subjective experience in hemianopia, where visual nature is rarely evident. Four patients participated, revealing distinct perceptual and metacognitive profiles. One patient exhibited remarkable contralesional objective capacities and some preserved metacognition despite rarely reporting visual perception, suggesting subjective content may not reflect the stimulus itself. Concomitantly, preliminary results reveal ipsilesional metacognitive impairments in three patients despite optimal objective performance. Overall, we present the first application of state-of-the-art metacognitive measures to hemianopia, bridging perceptual and metacognitive measures to explore subjective experience, offering new insights into blindsight and the dissociation between consciousness and metacognitive processes.

ABSTRACT The cognitive underpinnings of stuttering are likely heterogeneous. Yet existing research typically focuses on testing only one or a few hypotheses and on group-level differences. Here, 12 adults who stutter (AWS) completed a comprehensive battery assessing linguistic, auditory, somatosensory, rhythmic and motor abilities supporting fluent speech. Each AWS's performance was compared with that of 20 control participants to establish individual cognitive profiles. The AWS showed heterogeneous profiles; however, all exhibited some form of orosensory tactile weakness, which, for some, was the only weakness observed. These findings demonstrate the value of individualized cognitive profiling in stuttering and suggest a stronger link between stuttering and orosensory tactile processing than previously recognized.

ABSTRACT Disorders of speech production, including stuttering, are relatively common and need to be recognized early in childhood. Despite calls for clear symptom definitions when studying stuttering in languages other than English, there is currently no standardized tool available for assessing stuttering in Arabic. The distinct differences between Arabic and English can offer insights into language-specific influences on the manifestation of disfluency. This study investigates the impact of Arabic phonological characteristics on the occurrence of stuttering in children who stutter (CWS). Speech samples were collected from 16 Arabic-speaking children. Findings indicate that words produced with stuttering tend to have greater phonological complexity than those produced fluently. A logistic regression revealed that word shape was the most influential factor in predicting stuttering. The study findings could inform the diagnosis of stuttering among Arabic-speaking populations. The findings are discussed in comparison to previous research, with particular attention to the morphophonological features of Arabic.

ABSTRACT Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome characterized by prominent language symptoms. Distinguishing between PPA variants, particularly non-fluent and logopenic variants, remains challenging. Language production is a crucial aspect of diagnosing PPA, with confrontation naming tests being commonly used. However, there are limitations to the use of confrontation naming alone and it is still unclear how confrontation naming relates to (semi-)spontaneous language production. Additionally, most studies have focused on English-speaking patients. This bias hinders a thorough understanding of PPA, as symptoms may vary across languages. In a pre-registered study, 49 Dutch-speaking individuals with PPA and 21 controls completed confrontation naming and a picture description task, from which we derived nine linguistic variables. The percentage of nouns was the only linguistic variable differentiating between the non-fluent and logopenic variants, highlighting the challenge of distinguishing these variants, also in a language other than English. We found a moderate correlation between confrontation naming and the frequency of nouns produced semi-spontaneously for the logopenic variant only. Together, these findings underscore the relevance of semi-spontaneous language production as a complement to confrontation naming for a more complete understanding of production abilities in PPA.

ABSTRACT Dyslexia is a multifaceted condition with diverse manifestations, yet assessment tools too often target limited subtypes, creating diagnostic gaps. This study examines the progression of dyslexia-related reading errors across primary school in typically developing readers, using the Mariette, a French nonsense-text reading screener. Analysis of 812 French children (grades 1–5) revealed systematic decreases in error rates with age, following distinct developmental trajectories. Regularizations of irregular words, misapplication of contextual rules and misreading of digraphs predominated in early grades, while voicing errors nearly disappeared by Grade 2. Clinical testing of the Mariette with 18 struggling readers identified specific reading errors overlooked by standard dyslexia assessments. These findings demonstrate the value of precise error analysis for understanding developmental reading patterns and tailoring targeted educational interventions. By comparing typical and clinical populations, this research advances our understanding of dyslexia’s cognitive mechanisms while advocating for more comprehensive diagnostic approaches.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the predictive role of fine motor skills (FMS) and executive functions (EFs) in adult handwriting. While the initial stages of handwriting acquisition are assumed to rely upon executive functions and fine motor skills, the two components are no longer viewed as needed in automatized, expert handwriting. Thirty-three adults were assessed on dexterity, manual praxis, working memory, inhibition and flexibility to predict handwriting speed, legibility and fluency. The results showed that FMS significantly contributed to all aspects of handwriting performance, while flexibility predicted writing speed. These findings highlight that, even at a high level of expertise and automatization, handwriting remains a skill whose performance depends on executive and fine motor control capacities. They support a predictive coding model where internal models guide movement execution and monitoring. The study questions how motor and executive impairments may disrupt handwriting performance, highlighting the need for further research into this complex motor behaviour.

Lexical retrieval is commonly studied in the context of single words, even though words are usually produced within sentences. We present a framework for investigating the interplay between lexical retrieval, argument structure, and morphology. We propose a model for the retrieval of alternating-verbs, which, in Hebrew, are morphologically marked based on argument structure. We tested 23 Hebrew-speakers with aphasia, first identifying their functional locus of impairment within a lexical retrieval model for single words, and then administering a test battery to assess their production of alternating verbs within sentences. We found that the conceptual system, the semantic lexicon, the syntactic lexicon, the phonological output lexicon, and the phonological output buffer, each plays a unique role in retrieving morphologically-complex verbs, yielding a different error pattern when impaired. These error patterns are predicted by the proposed model for retrieval of alternating verbs with their argument structure and morphology.