Mirko Grimaldi

University of Salento, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici - Department of Humanities, Faculty Member

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Papers by Mirko Grimaldi

Visual attention during L1 and L2 sounds perception: an eye-tracking study

ExLing 2010: Proceedings of 3rd Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics,

Visual information affects speech perception as demonstrated by the McGurk effect (McGurk & McDon... more Visual information affects speech perception as demonstrated by the McGurk effect (McGurk & McDonald, 1976): when audio /ba/ is dubbed with a visual /ga/, what is perceived is /da/. This study aims at observing how visual information, intended as articulatory orofacial movements, is processed by eye, i.e., if gaze is related to articulatory information processing. The results indicate that visual attentional resources seem to be higher during multisensory (AV) than unisensory (A; V) presentation. Probably, higher visual attentional resources are needed to integrate inputs coming from different sources. Moreover, audiovisual speech perception seems to be similar across languages (e.g., Chen & Massaro, 2004) and not language-specific (Ghazanfar et al., 2005).

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The Phonetics of Speech Production and Medical Research

The production of speech requires the interplay of a number of cognitive and motoric activities, ... more The production of speech requires the interplay of a number of cognitive and motoric activities, which make it an interesting object of study from both a linguistic and a medical point of view. In this paper, we discuss, first, the features and domain of application of the most used technologies in linguistic research on speech production, focusing on those that have been applied to medicine. Second, we offer an insight into the main results that have been obtained so far in studying dysarthria in Italian Parkinson's Disease, as an example of the interdisciplinary, experimental research at the border between linguistics and medicine.

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Perceptual And Ultrasound Articulatory Training Effects On English L2 Vowels Production By Italian Learners

The American English contrast /ɑ-ʌ/ (cop-cup) is difficult to be produced by Italian learners sin... more The American English contrast /ɑ-ʌ/ (cop-cup) is difficult to be produced by Italian learners since they realize L2-/ɑ-ʌ/ as L1-/ɔ-a/ respectively, due to differences in phonetic-phonological systems and also in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules. In this paper, we try to answer the following research questions: Can a short training improve the production of English /ɑ-ʌ/ by Italian learners? Is a perceptual training better than an articulatory (ultrasound - US) training? Thus, we compare a perceptual training with an US articulatory one to observe: 1) the effects of short trainings on L2-/ɑ-ʌ/ productions; 2) if the US articulatory training improves the pronunciation better than the perceptual training. In this pilot study, 9 Salento-Italian monolingual adults participated: 3 subjects performed a 1-hour perceptual training (ES-P); 3 subjects performed a 1-hour US training (ES-US); and 3 control subjects did not receive any training (CS). Verbal instructions about the phonetic pro...

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Evidence from Asymmetries Between Acoustic and Chimeric Sounds

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Literary halo : ERP correlates of poetic metaphor

Introduction. Most of the existing neurophysiological literature on metaphors comprehension focus... more Introduction. Most of the existing neurophysiological literature on metaphors comprehension focuses on the processing conventional metaphors (Coulson & Van Petten 2002) or generic novel metaphors (Tartter et al. 2002, Lai et al. 2009). Except for a few studies including poetic metaphors in Hebrew (Arzouan et al. 2007, Faust & Mashal 2007), no extensive neurophysiological investigation on the processing of poetic metaphors has been carried out. Important theoretical insights have recently been offered by Relevance Theory in the framework of a general deflationary account of metaphor (Sperber & Wilson 2008): while not deviating from a normal use of language, poetic metaphors are likely to be more taxing due to the mass of weak implicatures involved in their comprehension (Pilkington 2000). Starting from the hypothesis that the literary feature has a crucial impact on processing, this study explores the cognitive costs associated with poetic metaphor comprehension through an ERP experi...

The rhythms of language: an overview of linguistic processes and neural oscillations

For the last decades neuroscientists have grown interest in the analysis of the rhythmic activity... more For the last decades neuroscientists have grown interest in the analysis of the rhythmic activity of the brain synchronized at temporal and spatial level. These neural oscillations, grouped by their frequency, have been proposed to govern all cognitive processes. In the field of the neurobiology of language, considerable research has linked speech processing and language comprehension to neural oscillations. On one hand, neural rhythmic activity is thought to synchronize to relevant spectral information of speech on three-time scales – which physically reflect phoneme, syllable and phrase processing. On the other hand, syntactic and semantic processing is subserved by faster oscillatory patterns not necessarily related to the acoustic properties of speech. For each linguistic process, this article summarizes the neural oscillations involved. Further evidence comes from studies on language-related pathologies.

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Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2018

Alla scoperta dei “segreti” del Centro di Ricerca Interdisciplinare sul Linguaggio

Acquisizione delle vocali L2 dell’inglese americano da parte di apprendenti italofoni: un confronto tra training percettivo e training articolatorio con ecografo

Lingue e Linguaggi, 2021

La realizzazione del contrasto vocalico dell’inglese americano /ɑ-ʌ/ (es. cop-cup ) da parte di a... more La realizzazione del contrasto vocalico dell’inglese americano /ɑ-ʌ/ (es. cop-cup ) da parte di apprendenti italofoni risulta essere particolarmente difficile in produzione, poiche le differenze fonetiche-fonologiche dei due sistemi linguistici e le regole di conversione grafema-fonema fanno si che gli apprendenti italofoni realizzino il contrasto L2-/ɑ-ʌ/ utilizzando le vocali native /ɔ-a/ rispettivamente. Lo scopo di questo studio e quello di osservare se un breve training possa aiutare gli apprendenti italofoni a migliorare la produzione delle vocali non native /ɑ-ʌ/. In particolare, si effettuera un confronto tra un training percettivo e un training articolatorio, effettuato con l’utilizzo di un ecografo, al fine di osservare: 1) gli effetti di entrambi i training sulla realizzazione del contrasto L2 /ɑ-ʌ/; e 2) se il training articolatorio comporti risultati migliori rispetto a quello percettivo. Allo studio hanno partecipato nove studentesse salentine che sono state suddivise,...

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L’efficacia dell’istruzione scolastica nell’apprendimento fonetico-fonologico della L2: prospettive d’indagine e applicazioni didattiche

– This work aims to develop a critical analysis of the processes characterizing the L2 phonetic-p... more – This work aims to develop a critical analysis of the processes characterizing the L2 phonetic-phonological learning in classroom. I start discussing how children brains are early warped by native language and what this early warping implies for second language acquisition in adults. Then, the most important models developed by cross-linguistic studies to explain the L2 perception and production process and the variables influencing the perceptual and pronunciation L2 abilities in adults are discussed. This perspective is also examined at the light of the recent neurocognitive studies that showed how the inputs received by learners in classroom are not sufficient to reactivate the auditory sensibility to L2 sounds. These findings suggest that classroom acquisition is a fairly impoverished context for L2 learning and that targeted training of L2 speech sounds may be necessary to allow for changes in processing of L2 speech contrasts at an early, automatic level (as it happens for children acquiring their native languages). Also, the more promising typologies of training are examined. I conclude the work sketching a didactic proposal that might be developed to improve the efficacy of the phonetic-phonological classroom teaching practices from the university to the kindergarten level.

Is a neural theory of language possible? Issues from an interdisciplinary perspective

Curatela della Issue n.

Articulatory grounding of southern salentino harmony processes

Interspeech 2010, 2010

Southern Salentino has a harmony process, where the stressed mid vowels /' n/ are raised to mid-h... more Southern Salentino has a harmony process, where the stressed mid vowels /' n/ are raised to mid-high vowels /e, o/ when followed by-i or-u. We studied this process by combining acoustic analyses with ultrasound tongue imaging. The main result of our study is that the Southern Salentino harmonic adjustments in height, which are acoustically manifested in the differentiation of F1, are articulatorily correlated with tongue root advancement when the process is triggered by-i and with tongue body raising when the process is triggered by-u. We propose a phonological analysis of the process based on these findings.

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Processing of /i/ and /u/ in Italian cochlear-implant children: a behavioral and neurophysiologic study

Interspeech 2013, 2013

Cochlear implants partially restore auditory sensation in individuals affected by severe to profo... more Cochlear implants partially restore auditory sensation in individuals affected by severe to profound hearing loss. We investigated vowel detection, identification, and discrimination in a group of congenitally-deafened, unilaterally-implanted, Italian children and in a group of age-matched controls, by combining behavioral and neurophysiologic measures. Comparable vowel identification and discrimination performance emerged for cochlear-implant and normalhearing children at the behavioral level. At the neurophysiologic level, on the other hand, cochlear-implant children appeared to lag behind their age-matched normalhearing peers for vowel detection and identification, but not for vowel discrimination. Length of cochlear implant use significantly affected vowel processing at the neurophysiologic level, although not systematically.

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Salento Italian listeners' perception of American English vowels

Interspeech 2013, 2013

The present study investigates Salento Italian (SI) listeners' initial state in the perception of... more The present study investigates Salento Italian (SI) listeners' initial state in the perception of American English (AE) vowels. Results of categorization and discrimination tasks are discussed in terms of the Perceptual Assimilation Model [1] and the Second Language Linguistic Perception model (L2LP; [2]). Further, the categorization results are compared to those of the Peruvian Spanish (PS) listeners in [3] to test the L2LP acoustic hypothesis, according to which the acoustic differences between the five SI and PS vowels will lead to different categorizations of AE vowels. Predictions of differential perceptual development across listener groups are provided.

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Electrophysiological evidence of phonemotopic representations of vowels in the primary and secondary auditory cortex

Cortex, 2019

This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the ad... more This is a PDF file of an article that has undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but it is not yet the definitive version of record. This version will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review before it is published in its final form, but we are providing this version to give early visibility of the article. Please note that, during the production process, errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

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All in thirty milliseconds: EEG evidence of hierarchical and asymmetric phonological encoding of vowels

How the brain encodes the speech acoustic signal into phonological representations (distinctive f... more How the brain encodes the speech acoustic signal into phonological representations (distinctive features) is a fundamental question for the neurobiology of language. Whether this process is characterized by tonotopic maps in primary or secondary auditory areas, with bilateral or leftward activity, remains a long-standing challenge. Magnetoencephalographic and ECoG studies have previously failed to show hierarchical and asymmetric hints for speech processing. We employed high-density electroencephalography to map the Salento Italian vowel system onto cortical sources using the N1 auditory evoked component. We found evidence that the N1 is characterized by hierarchical and asymmetric indexes structuring vowels representation. We identified them with two N1 subcomponents: the typical N1 (N1a) peaking at 125-135 ms and localized in the primary auditory cortex bilaterally with a tangential distribution and a late phase of the N1 (N1b) peaking at 145-155 ms and localized in the left super...

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Time Course and Neurophysiological Underpinnings of Metaphor in Literary Context

Discourse Processes, 2018

ABSTRACT Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metapho... more ABSTRACT Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of comprehending metaphors from Italian poems and novels (e.g., grass of velvet), presented in their original context, as compared with literal expressions (e.g., throne of velvet). Results evidence a more negative ERP response for metaphors, unfolding in an N400 followed by a sustained negativity over frontal sites, suggesting a long-lasting effort in elaborating figurative meanings. Whereas the N400 might be indicative of lexical/semantic processes typical of metaphors and amplified by the literary context, the sustained negativity might reflect the manipulation of multiple meanings in working memory, possibly responsible for the poetic effect. Interestingly, the late negativity effect is driven by familiarity, with a more negative response for those metaphors that are less familiar. These findings offer material to discuss ideas put forward in pragmatics, literary studies, and cognitive neuroscience of literature, like the condensation of weak implicatures, the foregrounding, and the relation between a metaphor and its context.

Assessing the position tracking reliability of Carstens’ AG500 and AG501 electromagnetic articulographs during constrained movements and speech tasks

Speech Communication, 2018

The goal of this study is to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the reliability of the AG501... more The goal of this study is to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the reliability of the AG501 Electromagnetic Articulograph (Carstens Medizinelektronik GmbH) and to compare it with the previous model, the AG500, which is still widely used in the 3D recording of articulatory movements. To explore and test the spatial accuracy of the articulographs in various areas of the recording volume, controlled sensor positions at fixed locations and along circular trajectories as well as movements of articulators of the speaker"s vocal tract during speech production tasks were tracked and analysed. It is well known that the AG500 trajectories are affected by perturbations which: (i) depend on the position of the sensors/subject within the recording volume and (ii) randomly occur along repetitions of the same sound in the same recording area. This study has shown that these issues do not affect the newer AG501, which not only performs according to the manufacturer"s claim of 0.3 mm dynamical accuracy within a 20-cm-wide spherical region inside the recording volume, but also performs well outside. Furthermore, while the AG500 shows perturbed trajectories in some instances, the AG501 consistently shows accurate results in reproducing the displacements of consonantal and vocalic gestures for the tested speech tasks. Our findings reveal that the AG501 is more stable and significantly more accurate than the previous model, the AG500, which, in turn, performs reasonably well only in specific limited conditions.

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Electroencephalographic evidence of vowels computation and representation in human auditory cortex

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2016

By exploiting the N1 component of the auditory event related potentials we aimed to measure and l... more By exploiting the N1 component of the auditory event related potentials we aimed to measure and localize the processing involving the spectro-temporal and the abstract featural representation. We investigated the electroencephalography patterns of 11 Salento Italian speakers discriminating their native five stressed vowels [i, e, a, ɔ, u]. Findings showed two distinct N1 sub-components: the N1a peaking at 125–135 ms, localized in the bilateral primary auditory cortex (BA41), and the N1b peaking at 145–155 ms, localized in the superior temporal gyrus (BA22) with a strong leftward lateralization. Crucially, while high vowels elicited higher amplitudes than non-high vowels both in the N1a and N1b, back vowels generated later responses than non-back vowels in the N1b only. Overall, these findings suggest a hierarchical processing where from the N1a to the N1b the acoustic analysis shift progressively toward the computation and representation of phonological features.

Vowels and Consonants in the Brain: Evidence from Magnetoencephalographic Studies on the N1m in Normal-Hearing Listeners

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

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Mirko Grimaldi

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