Verbal Production Research Articles

Feasibility of an abstract verb naming treatment for aphasia

ABSTRACT Purpose Verb production impairments in aphasia have important implications for sentence production and communication in general. Verbs with low concreteness may be especially important for certain functional uses, and yet limited data regarding their response to treatment are available. This study was designed to examine a novel behavioral treatment approach to improve low concreteness verb naming in persons with aphasia. Method Three persons with nonfluent aphasia participated in a single-subject experimental design research study examining the feasibility of the novel treatment. The treatment was based on approaches that target the verb as the central node of meaning during sentence construction. The primary outcome measure was a sentence completion probe. Effects on untreated stimuli and on general language and naming assessments were also examined. Results Results indicated some limited changes associated with the treatment for two of the participants. Treatment performance data suggested possible improvements in verb processing that were not reflected in the primary outcome measure. Modest decreases in aphasia severity were noted for two of the participants. Conclusions The findings provide further support for targeting verbal production of verbs with low concreteness in aphasia. Several lessons learned may benefit future researchers examining areas related to the topic.

Enjoy to read and enjoy to shop: An investigation on the impact of product information presentation on purchase intention in digital content marketing

Our study examines the impact of product information presentation on consumers’ purchase intention through information processing (i.e., utilitarian and hedonic browsing) in the context of digital content marketing. This study initially confirms that the combination of social-oriented text with concrete images as well as task-oriented text with abstract images yield higher congruence since verbal and visual product information presentation are under the same construable level. Given this, we have conducted an experiment with a 2 (product information presentation: social-oriented text with concrete image vs. task-oriented text with abstract image) × 2 (product type: search product vs. experience product) × 2 (gender: females vs. males) (N = 202) between-subjects design. The results reveal that social-oriented text with concrete images encourages consumers to generate more hedonic browsing, thereby, higher purchase intention. These effects are contingent on the product type and gender, where females exhibit a greater intention to buy experience products when product information is presented in social-oriented text with concrete imagery compared to task-oriented text with abstract images, which is mediated by hedonic browsing. Our findings offer insights to managers for optimizing product information presentation in the realm of digital content marketing.

Desain Media Interaktif Berbasis Android untuk Pembelajaran Qawa’id Siswa Kelas XII di Madrasah Aliyah Muhammadiyah 1 Malang

The quality of the learning component needs to be adjusted to the sophistication of today's technology. This study aims to produce an Android-based interactive media design for qawa'id learning for class XII MA students at MA Muhammadiyah 1 Malang. This research is motivated by the lack of sophisticated learning media used by educators, causing a lack of motivation to learn. This type of research is development research or Research and Development (R&D) with the ADDIE model. Data collection techniques use interviews, documentation, and questionnaires which then the data results are processed using descriptive verbal analysis techniques and product feasibility analysis. Media validation was carried out at the individual test stage with test subjects, namely IT experts, material experts, and media experts, obtaining 71% results with decent categories. A small group test to determine the level of media eligibility, conducted by an Arabic teacher and 10 students, obtained 77% results with the eligibility category. Field test to find a response to the media, with test subjects of 38 students and obtained 80% results in the good categories.

Top-Down Number Reading: Language Affects the Visual Identification of Digit Strings.

Reading numbers aloud involves visual processes that analyze the digit string and verbal processes that produce the number words. Cognitive models of number reading assume that information flows from the visual input to the verbal production processes-a feed-forward processing mode in which the verbal production depends on the visual input but not vice versa. Here, I show that information flows also in the opposite direction, from verbal production to the visual input processes. Participants read aloud briefly presented multi-digit strings in Hebrew, in which the order of words is congruent with the order of digits (21 = twenty-and-one), and in Arabic, in which the ones word precedes the tens word (one-and-twenty). The error-by-digit-position curve was affected by language: relative to Hebrew, in Arabic the error rate was slightly lower for the unit digit and slightly higher for the decade digit, indicating that in Arabic the unit digit was processed earlier and the decade digit later, in accord with the Arabic word order. This language-dependent processing order originated in the visual level and was not a verbal confound, because it persisted even when I controlled for the serial position of the decade/unit word in the verbal number by using numbers with 0 (two hundred three/two hundred thirty). I conclude that the visual analyzer's digit scanning order, decade-first or unit-first, is not fixed but affected by the language in which the number is produced-a top-down, verbal-to-visual information flow.

The Role of Communication in Teaching Swimming

"The present research study includes, in the first part, the synthesis of the literature regarding the theoretical framework of meaning construction, from information theory to the semiotics of reception and the concept of “horizon of expectation” in the reception of the teacher’s linguistic productions, and in the second part, it includes the research methodology. The results of the research identify the average frequency of responses for all situations. After the study took place resulted 6 important findings like a direct and unambiguous reading strategy for the teacher (P), a considerable loss of meaning between the teacher’s language production and the student’s reception, higher reading fluency in the GE group, reading difficulties in GT group, recognition of meaning is earlier and more relevant in GE, and the fact that verbal productions make it possible to complete sequence, a misunderstanding for GT. The conclusions reveal that the messages transmitted through verbal and non-verbal teacher-student communication are received rather by connotation than by denotation. Keywords (in English): teaching swimming, learning and teaching of swimming, communication, semiotics, linguistic productions."

Pattern-Based Target Selection for Treatment of Irregular Past Tense: A Single-Case Experimental Design for Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate difficulty inflecting irregular past tense verbs. We evaluated using phonological-based patterns (i.e., schemas) to select targets for treatment of irregular verb inflection for children with DLD. We hypothesized this approach would result in acquisition of treated verbs, generalization to untreated verbs within the same phonological schema, and increased use of correct irregular verbs in naturalistic contexts. Treatment was provided to three 7-year-old participants with DLD in the context of multiple baseline designs across behaviors and participants. Phonological schemas included vowel change, final alveolar, and dual change irregular verbs. Treatment was provided using established therapeutic approaches, including narrative generation, sentence imitation, and naturalistic play activities. Acquisition of treated and untreated targets was assessed at the beginning of sessions, and use of verbs in naturalistic contexts was observed throughout treatment sessions. Positive acquisition effects were noted for two of three participants. Generalization to untreated items occurred within and across treatment sets for two participants, whereas increases in accurate irregular verb production in naturalistic contexts were not observed. Outcomes demonstrated support for a pattern-based approach to target selection for treatment of irregular past tense verbs. One participant, who demonstrated general difficulty with the probe and treatment tasks, showed no treatment effect, suggesting that the treatment may be effective for some children with DLD. Further research is warranted to determine what factors might have influenced these variable outcomes across participants. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23671500.

The other side of the social interaction: Theory of mind impairments in people with schizophrenia are linked to other people's difficulties in understanding them.

People with schizophrenia (SZ) often present with theory of mind (ToM) deficits and with speech production deficits. While a link has been established between ToM abilities and symptoms of thought disorder, much less is known about other aspects of speech production in SZ. This is a case-control study in which 25 stable outpatients with recent-onset SZ (27.1years, 22 men) and 22 matched healthy controls (25.6years, 16 men) performed a collaborative, verbal production task with a real interaction partner. Blind raters scored how easy participants made it to understand them (Facility ratings), how interesting they were to listen to (Interest ratings) and how expressive they were (Expressivity ratings). ToM was assessed with the Combined Stories Test and Sarfati's cartoon task. Symptoms were assessed with the PANSS five-factor version. Compared to healthy controls, SZ received significantly lower ratings for all three aspects of their verbal productions (Facility, Interest and Expressivity), despite the raters being blind to group membership. Interestingly, the Facility ratings were linked to ToM performance in the SZ group, which suggest that SZ participants who have difficulties understanding others (ToM deficits) also make it harder for others to understand them. Other notable findings include a strong link between the Expressivity ratings and the Interest ratings for both groups, and significant correlations between the Facility ratings and Cognitive/Disorganisation symptoms, and between the Expressivity ratings and both Negative and Depression/Anxiety symptoms in SZ. Studying speech production during real, collaborative social interactions could help move beyond the individual approach to SZ deficits, making it possible to involve the interaction partners to promote more efficient communication for people with schizophrenia.

Early verb production in Nungon.

This brief research report presents a comparison of the early verb productions of four children acquiring the Papuan language Nungon as a first language. A previous case study examined only verb productions of the child TO; these are now compared with those from three other children, studied from ages 1;1-2;7 (non-dense corpus; one child, AB) and ages 2;4-2;7 (dense corpora; two children, MK and MF). Two of the most striking features of TO's early verb productions are shown to be outliers relative to the other three children: her 'root nominals' stage and her delayed near future tense production. Neither of these is transparently linked to patterns in her parents' child-directed speech. The other children also display differing strategies into language production. The dense corpus is beneficial for catching tokens of less-frequent inflections, but the frequent long recording sessions may be difficult for at least one child to tolerate.

Translation and Adaptation of the English Story Retell Procedure to Portuguese: A Preliminary Study.

The comprehension and production of connected language are essential for effective communication. However, few assessment and intervention programs requiring connected language have been made available in Brazilian Portuguese. One connected language sampling procedure, the Story Retell Procedure (SRP), has been widely studied in English and primarily for people with aphasia. The SRP employs 12 stories, whose individual plots are quite different and still equivalent in terms of verbal productivity measures. The first objective of this study was to present the translation and adaptation of the SRP stories into Portuguese and to determine whether the translations are similar to English stories. The second objective was to analyze a small group of healthy adults' responses to this assessment, thus observing whether the retellings of the SRP story forms in Portuguese would be similar to each other in the number of words, information units (IUs), and propositions - as demonstrated in English. This preliminary study translated and adapted into Portuguese, the 12 original English SRP stories. Only small cultural adaptations were made, preserving the essential content of the stories. The stories were then presented to 14 healthy adults, and the participants' retellings from each story were compared to the other stories regarding the number of words, IUs, and propositions. Few differences were found in the retellings considering the variables analyzed. Particularly, the retells of Gasolina (Gas), Biblioteca (Library), Empréstimo (Loan), Sanduíche (Sandwich), Futebol (Baseball), and Multas (Ticket) were not significantly different in the three aspects investigated in this study (percentages of words, IUs, and propositions). The SRP stories adapted to Portuguese, despite having a quite close number of words, IUs, and propositions to those in the original stories, did not result in retellings with similar number of words, IUs, or propositions across stories. Nonetheless, the parameters analyzed were not significantly different among the majority of the stories, and some were nearly identical. This study identified the SRP stories that can be equivalently used in assessment, reassessment, and possibly in the rehabilitation of patients with communication disorders. Likewise, differences must be considered when the stories are used with pathological populations.

Lexical-semantic properties of verbs and nouns used in conversation by people with Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is accompanied by language impairments and communicative breakdowns. Research into language processing by people with AD (pwAD) has focused largely on production of nouns in isolation. However, impairments are consistently found in verb production at word and sentence levels, and comparatively little is known about word use by pwAD in conversation. This study investigated differences between pwAD and cognitively healthy controls in conversational use of nouns, verbs, and pronouns. Speech samples produced by 12 pwAD and 12 controls for the Carolinas Conversations Collection were analysed for noun, verb and pronoun counts and ratios, lexical diversity overall and among nouns and verbs, copula use, and frequencies and ages of acquisition (AoA) of nouns and verbs produced. pwAD used fewer nouns and a narrower range of words than controls, exhibiting signs of increased reliance on pronouns and decreased noun diversity. Age affected noun frequencies differently within each group-pwAD produced nouns of lower frequencies with age, while controls produced nouns of higher frequencies. pwAD produced nouns of higher AoA than controls. Verb use differed little by group. These findings highlight the need to account for differences between nouns and verbs, including in frequency, AoA, proportion of all words spoken, and context-dependent processing demands, when drawing conclusions on language use by pwAD. They also suggest potential for communicative interventions targeting contextual use of both nouns and verbs.

Evaluating the Personal Narrative Skills of Monolingual Turkish-Speaking 7- and 10-Year-Old Children with Typical Development through Global TALES: A Pilot Study

Introduction: Studies on personal narratives are rare in Turkey and there is no standard protocol for eliciting them. The aim of this small-scale study was to translate the Global TALES Protocol into Turkish, with cultural adaptations, and to present the results regarding its usability for two different age-groups of 7- and 10-year-old school children. We investigated narrative skills in terms of verbal productivity (number of utterances, total number of words), syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance), and semantic diversity (number of different words). In addition, group comparisons were made in terms of the participants’ gender and age. Methods: A total of 20 children, 10 from each age-group (7;0–7;11 and 10;0–10;11) participated in the study. All children were monolingual Turkish-speaking children with typical development. Participants were recruited through personal and/or social networks. All personal narratives were gathered via online connections (Zoom). Results: Descriptive statistics were used to describe the children’s performance, and the analysis of group differences was made separately according to age and gender. All children produced narratives in response to the six protocol prompts. In addition, the number of children who did not require the scripted follow-up prompts was higher than those needing a scripted follow-up prompt to produce a response. No statistically significant group differences were found in terms of gender and age on any of the measurements. Conclusion: The results from this small-scale investigation showed that the translated version of the Global TALES Protocol was effective in eliciting personal narratives from Turkish-speaking children. We concluded that there is no need to change the directions or give additional guidance or prompts to the children. Future studies with larger samples are needed to confirm these findings.

Visual Heuristics for Verb Production: Testing a Deep-Learning Model With Experiments in Japanese.

Tense/aspect morphology on verbs is often thought to depend on event features like telicity, but it is not known how speakers identify these features in visual scenes. To examine this question, we asked Japanese speakers to describe computer-generated animations of simple actions with variation in visual features related to telicity. Experiments with adults and children found that they could use goal information in the animations to select appropriate past and progressive verb forms. They also produced a large number of different verb forms. To explain these findings, a deep-learning model of verb production from visual input was created that could produce a human-like distribution of verb forms. It was able to use visual cues to select appropriate tense/aspect morphology. The model predicted that video duration would be related to verb complexity, and past tense production would increase when it received the endpoint as input. These predictions were confirmed in a third study with Japanese adults. This work suggests that verb production could be tightly linked to visual heuristics that support the understanding of events.

Personal Narratives of 10-Year-Old Children in Iceland: Verbal Productivity, Word Diversity, and Topics

Introduction: The feasibility of using a standard protocol, labelled as the Global TALES, to elicit personal stories was tested across 10 different countries between 2019 and 2021. Personal narratives have not been investigated in Iceland in a similar way. The aim was to explore personal narratives of monolingual children in Iceland by using the Global TALES (2018) protocol to investigate verbal productivity, semantic diversity, and narrative topics. Methods: Twenty-seven children (ages 9; 8–10; 9) with typical language development produced personal stories in response to six emotion-based prompts contained in the protocol. The children were interviewed by using the Zoom platform because of COVID restrictions. Children’s spoken language was analysed for total number of utterances (TNU), total number of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), mean length of utterances in words (MLUw), and proportion of words with grammatical errors. The narrative topics were coded and documented. Results: The spoken language measures showed that there was a large individual variability within the group on all metrics examined. The mean TNU was 62.1 (SD 20.2) utterances, the mean for TNW was 546 (SD 219) words, the mean for NDW was 206 (SD 62) words, and the MLUw was 8.6 (SD 1.5) words in an utterance. Despite the variability in spoken language performance, around 70–75% of the participants produced TNU, TNW, NDW, and MLUw within +/− 1 SD from the mean. The topics of the stories were most frequently related to personal achievement or relationships with the family or friends. Conclusion: The Global TALES (2018) protocol can be used to elicit personal stories in 10-year-old children in Iceland. The results related to verbal productivity and the topics of interest were in line with previous studies around the world.

Can static Rorschach stimuli perceived as in motion affect corticospinal excitability?

It has been proposed that seeing human movement or activity (M), while trying to say what the static Rorschach inkblot design look like, is accompanied by Mirror Neuron System (MNS)-like mirroring activity in the brain. The present study aimed to investigate whether the Rorschach cards eliciting M responses could affect the excitability of the motor cortex by recording motor evoked potentials (MEPs) elicited by single-pulse TMS over the primary motor cortex (M1). We hypothesized that Rorschach inkblot stimuli triggering the viewer's experience of human movement would increase corticospinal excitability. Twenty-one healthy volunteers (15 women) participated in the preliminary experiment, while another different sample of twenty-two healthy participants (11 women) ranging in age from 21 to 41 years was enrolled in the main experiment. Our results showed that the Rorschach cards known to be associated with a high number of M responses elicited human movement both as automatic internal sensations and as verbal production of responses involving human movement. However, contrary to our hypothesis, the reported internal feeling of human movement had no corresponding physiological counterpart, as the amplitude of MEPs did not increase. Possible and innovative explanations for the involvement of bottom-up and top-down processes were provided.

The Economics of Cognitive Negligence

The essence of the decision-making mechanism of rational individuals in economics is to ensure the balance between benefits and costs. The benefit received from a decision is expected to be higher than its cost. It is so in cognitive activities. Any cognitive practice may require effort, expenses, and time-use to some extent. However, the actors do not always do all they can. A significant reason for not using cognitive abilities adequately in verbal, written, and visual information production is the individuals’ not wholly bearing the negative consequences of their cognitive actions. Such a cognitive attitude differs from similar notions of rational ignorance, rational inattention, and mental laziness. This paper introduces a new concept, cognitive negligence, that refers to the tendency of individuals to avoid the cost and maximize benefits in cognitive activities by making an implicit or explicit cost-benefit analysis. The paper presents why and how cognitive negligence emerges. It defines the factors affecting it, such as the position of the actor, perception of importance, context or type of activity, time of action, social distance, and the diversity of the audience. Its relationship with lying, distortion, and critical thinking is discussed. Finally, the consequences of cognitive negligence are evaluated.

Semantic Aspects of Verb Production in Various Discourse Tasks in People With Nonfluent Aphasia.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how people with nonfluent aphasia produce semantically weighted verbs compared to people without aphasia, as well as how a discourse elicitation task affects verb production in people with nonfluent aphasia and people without aphasia. This study included 30 people with nonfluent aphasia and 32 age-matched people without aphasia from AphasiaBank. Language samples of five different discourse tasks were obtained and coded for heavy, light, and be-copular verbs. The number of verbs per utterance and the proportion of heavy, light, and be-copular verbs were compared between groups and between tasks. People with nonfluent aphasia showed a similar proportion of heavy verbs but reduced verbs per utterance and proportion of light verbs compared to people without aphasia. With regard to discourse task effects, we found a trend for a higher proportion of heavy verbs in sequential picture descriptions, and a higher proportion of be-copular verbs and lower proportion of heavy verbs for a recount compared to other tasks in people without aphasia. The discourse task effects were minimally found in people with nonfluent aphasia. Our results suggest that people with nonfluent aphasia present with relatively preserved heavy verb production but with impaired production of light verbs in discourse. In addition, it appears that discourse tasks do not significantly influence the type of verbs produced by people with nonfluent aphasia possibly due to the floor effects and wide range of individual variability. This study is a preliminary effort to evaluate methodological factors that impact verb production; future studies are needed to develop a framework for clinical decision making when selecting a discourse elicitation task for people with aphasia.

Сognitive Functioning in Patients with the Phenomenon of Anhedonia in the Framework of Affective Pathology and Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Background: anhedonia is a transdiagnostic psychopathological phenomenon, which is assessed as “core” for several diseases at once — first of all schizophrenic and affective spectrum disorders. The problem of clinical features differentiation and identification of anhedonia’s neurobiological mechanisms in the structure of the affective and schizophrenic spectrum disorders is still topical and far from being resolved.The aim of the study: to compare the relationship between the features of neurocognitive functioning and the manifestations of anhedonia among patients with disorders of the schizophrenic and affective spectra.Patients: the sample consisted of 40 patients including 17 patients with schizophrenic spectrum disorders (ICD-10 diagnosis codes F20.01, F20.02, F21.3, F21.4, F25.0, F25.1) and 23 patients with affective disorders (ICD-10 diagnosis code F33, F31).Methods: clinical, psychometric, experimental psychological and statistical.Results: patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders show lower scores on pleasure anticipation ability and ability to experience pleasure in the social sphere. The affective spectrum group showed a correlation between anticipatory anhedonia and phonetic verbal fluency (r = –0.487; p < 0.01). There was also a correlation between immediate pleasure experience and errors in the Rey figure test (r = –0.349; p < 0.05). Social anhedonia in these patients was associated with phonetic verbal fluency productivity (r = –0.509; p < 0.01) and performance in visual fluency productivity (r = –0.473; p < 0.01). Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders had a correlation between anticipatory anhedonia and the Color-Word Interference Test (r = –0.329; p < 0.05) and the Rey Complex Figure Test (r = –0.307; p < 0.05). Consummatory anhedonia was correlated with verbal fluency test (r = –0.511; p < 0.01) and the Rey Complex Figure Test (r = –0.417; p < 0.01). Social anhedonia was correlated with Color-Word Interference Test (r = –0.656; p < 0.01), verbal fluency (r = –0.523; p < 0.01), and story description (r = –0.421; p < 0.01).Conclusion: manifestations of different parameters of anhedonia demonstrate the differences in schizophrenia and affective spectrum disorders. Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders have greater difficulties in anticipating pleasure and experiencing pleasure in the social sphere. The ability to anticipate pleasure may be associated with executive function, while the ability to experience pleasure immediately may be associated with memory function. Social anhedonia affects a wide range of cognitive functions.

Assessment of verb and sentence processing deficits in stroke-induced aphasia: the Italian version of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS-I)

ABSTRACT Background The Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS) assesses verb and sentence production and comprehension in aphasia. Results from the original English version and from its adaptation to German have shown that the NAVS is able to capture effects of verb-argument structure (VAS) complexity (i.e., lower accuracy for two- and three-argument vs. one-argument verbs) and syntactic complexity (i.e., lower accuracy for non-canonical vs. canonical sentences) in both agrammatic participants and individuals with fluent forms of aphasia. The NAVS has been recently adapted to Italian (NAVS-I) and tested on a group of healthy participants, with results showing longer reaction times to complex vs. simple verbs and sentences. Aims The present study aimed to test the ability of NAVS-I to i) capture verb/sentence production and comprehension deficits in Italian-speaking individuals with agrammatism or with fluent aphasia, and ii) differentiate individuals with aphasia from healthy age-matched participants, with the overall goal to validate its use in clinical practice. Methods & Procedures Forty-four healthy participants and 28 individuals with aphasia (10 with agrammatic speech production) were administered the NAVS-I, which includes tasks assessing production and comprehension of verbs requiring one, two or three arguments, as well as production and comprehension of canonical and non-canonical sentences. Outcomes & Results On the Verb Naming Task (VNT), better production of one- (vs. two- and three-) argument verbs was found in the agrammatic group, whereas, verb production in the fluent group was solely predicted by word length and imageability. No effects of argument optionality (i.e., greater difficulty for optionally transitive verbs than for 1-argument verbs) were found. Sentence-level tasks found no differences between the agrammatic and the fluent group in production or comprehension of both canonical and non-canonical sentences; rather, sentence comprehension accuracy was predicted by demographic variables and by aphasia severity. At the individual level, performance on the NAVS-I was significantly different from that of healthy speakers in 26/28 patients. Conclusions Data show that the NAVS-I is able to capture effects of argument structure complexity in verb production, and effects of syntactic complexity in sentence production and comprehension. In addition, our results point to verb production as the task with greater capability to differentiate agrammatism from other (fluent) forms of aphasia. The study provides support for the use of the NAVS-I in the diagnosis of aphasia, as it is able to detect language deficits at the individual level, even in participants with mild (residual) forms of aphasia.

Mapping cortical activations underlying covert and overt language production using high-density diffuse optical tomography

Gold standard neuroimaging modalities such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and more recently electrocorticography (ECoG) have provided profound insights regarding the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of language, but they are limited in applications involving naturalistic language production especially in developing brains, during face-to-face dialogues, or as a brain-computer interface. High-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT) provides high-fidelity mapping of human brain function with comparable spatial resolution to that of fMRI but in a silent and open scanning environment similar to real-life social scenarios. Therefore, HD-DOT has potential to be used in naturalistic settings where other neuroimaging modalities are limited. While HD-DOT has been previously validated against fMRI for mapping the neural correlates underlying language comprehension and covert (i.e., “silent”) language production, HD-DOT has not yet been established for mapping the cortical responses to overt (i.e., “out loud”) language production. In this study, we assessed the brain regions supporting a simple hierarchy of language tasks: silent reading of single words, covert production of verbs, and overt production of verbs in normal hearing right-handed native English speakers (n = 33). First, we found that HD-DOT brain mapping is resilient to movement associated with overt speaking. Second, we observed that HD-DOT is sensitive to key activations and deactivations in brain function underlying the perception and naturalistic production of language. Specifically, statistically significant results were observed that show recruitment of regions in occipital, temporal, motor, and prefrontal cortices across all three tasks after performing stringent cluster-extent based thresholding. Our findings lay the foundation for future HD-DOT studies of imaging naturalistic language comprehension and production during real-life social interactions and for broader applications such as presurgical language assessment and brain-machine interfaces.

Green or Greenwashed? Examining Whether and When Consumers Are Able to Identify Greenwashing

In today's market, both companies and consumers face the challenge of navigating the pitfalls of greenwashing when it comes to a myriad of new and existing green products. This study examines consumer perceptions of such products and questions whether they can accurately identify greenwashing. Failure to do so could undermine a market for genuinely green products and have potentially detrimental effects on society and the environment. Drawing on categorization theory, consumers may categorize a new product as either honestly green, greenwashed, or regular based on prior knowledge of different green cues. We tested this ability using fictitious cleaning products in a within-subject experiment (N = 174) conducted in Germany and found that consumers often fall for greenwashing when asked solely about their purchase intentions. It seems that only when the participants are asked about the perceived greenness and greenwashing of the products are they able to spot the differences inherent to the green products. This research makes two academic contributions. First, our results extend the literature on consumer perceptions of green(washed) verbal and visual product cues. Second, we provide initial evidence against the implicit assumption in the greenwashing and green advertising literature that consumers can distinguish between greenwashed and honestly green products. Our findings provide potential guidance for practitioners in communicating sustainable product improvements without creating an impression of greenwashing. At the same time, this research may inform public policy regarding further measures needed to help consumers unmask greenwashing in purchase contexts.