Neuropsychologia

Naming pictures from the same semantic category can interfere with subsequent word retrieval. Although the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) has been implicated in resolving this semantic interference, its causal role in this process remains unclear. Across three experiments, we investigated the contribution of the LIFG to interference resolution during blocked-cyclic naming. Experiment 1 tested whether continuous theta-burst stimulation over the LIFG increased semantic interference relative to vertex stimulation. Although the overall interference effect did not differ significantly between stimulation sites, exploratory analyses revealed an unexpected pattern based on the initial context (related vs. unrelated) with which items were named, suggesting that LIFG disruption affected retrieval of previously related items even when they were subsequently named in unrelated contexts. This observation motivated two further experiments examining the consequences of prior naming context more directly. Experiment 2 established that, without stimulation, interference observed in related blocks was no longer evident after the items were redistributed into unrelated blocks. Experiment 3 combined this design with cathodal or sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the LIFG. Planned comparisons showed that cathodal stimulation slowed naming of initially related items both within related blocks and after redistribution into unrelated blocks; corresponding comparisons for items named consistently in unrelated blocks were not significant. The similar patterns across two stimulation methods suggest that LIFG-mediated control may influence both selection under current competition and subsequent retrieval of previously competing words. These findings could be accommodated within a hybrid account in which working memory supports context-guided selection and selection-related control helps recalibrate lexical accessibility, limiting the carryover of interference into subsequent naming.

Empirical evidence from traditional inhibitory control tasks regarding inhibitory deficits in high autistic traits has been mixed, indicating that this issue remains controversial. Although sex differences are widely documented in autistic cognitive profiles, their role in inhibitory gating mechanisms remains underexplored. Given that the expression of inhibitory gating deficits may be modulated by the social versus non-social nature of stimuli, and no prior study has investigated this topic by integrating both sex differences and stimulus domain, we addressed these two questions with the attribute amnesia paradigm. We manipulated stimulus type (non-social vs. social). In Experiment 1, participants performed a location task with animal drawings as targets and were unexpectedly asked to report animal identity on a surprise trial. High autistic trait females showed significantly higher accuracy on the surprise trial than all other groups, reflecting a failure to actively filter out task-irrelevant non-social information, that is, a reduced inhibitory gating efficiency. In Experiment 2, using face stimuli and a self-vs. other-face design, this gating deficit was no longer expressed: all groups performed at chance levels on the identity judgment, regardless of autistic trait level, sex, or face type. This dissociation aligns with a dual-mechanism framework: the inhibitory gating deficit in high autistic trait females is specific to non-social stimuli and masked by camouflaging for social ones. This study demonstrates that the inhibitory gating deficit in high autistic trait females is not a global impairment but rather a stimulus-dependent one, highlighting the need to consider sex and stimulus type.

Can grammatical gender in a bilingual's first language shape gender-stereotype processing in a second language? Spanish (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals (n = 28) and English monolinguals (n = 28) completed an event-related potential (ERP) priming task in which English pronouns (SHE/HE) followed gender-stereotyped English nouns, half of which had gender-marked Spanish translation equivalents (e.g., NURSE 'enfermera/o', SURGEON 'cirujana/o'), and half unmarked translation equivalents (e.g., SINGER 'cantante', JANITOR 'conserje'). Both groups showed asymmetric stereotype priming: male pronouns elicited a larger N400 for incongruent than congruent primes, whereas female pronouns elicited a larger P300 for incongruent than congruent primes. Crucially, only bilinguals showed modulation by Spanish grammatical gender marking: the N400 effect for male pronouns was larger for primes with gender-marked than unmarked Spanish translations. These findings provide neural evidence that grammatical gender in a bilingual's first language can influence gender-stereotype processing in a second language, linking cross-linguistic activation to social cognition.

Understanding how the brain represents meaning at different levels of specificity, from general categories (bird) through combined phrases (nocturnal bird) to specific exemplars (owl), is a central question in semantic cognition and its disorders. The anterior temporal lobes (ATL) have been implicated in both activating stored conceptual representations and combining them, yet whether these two routes to conceptual content engage the ATL in the same way remains an open question. We recorded concurrent MEG-EEG from 36 participants reading 100 conceptual triads varying parametrically in specificity: general words (bird), adjective-noun phrases (nocturnal bird), and specific words (owl). Source analyses revealed a non-linear pattern in bilateral ATL (400-520ms): high-specificity concepts elicited greater activity than both low-specificity words and mid-specificity phrases. Bilateral inferior frontal cortex showed this effect with similar timing (430-630ms). N400 amplitude and ATL source activity showed a functional dissociation in their sensitivity to word frequency, ruling out a purely frequency account of the ATL and IFC effects. Results imply that accessing high-specificity concepts requires individuating stored representations among competitors, whereas phrases construct meaning through a different route. These findings extend the unified semantic hub account by revealing that computational operations within the ATL vary depending on task and stimulus demands.

Anterior lateral prefrontal cortex (aLPFC) has been consistently implicated in retrieval monitoring and relational reasoning. However, it is unknown whether aLPFC supports a cognitive process that is common to memory retrieval and reasoning tasks. To inform this question, a first step is to ascertain whether there is, within individuals, spatial overlap in aLPFC between tasks. A prior study found overlap in activation of left aLPFC between verbal analogy and source memory retrieval tasks, using tightly matched word stimuli (Westphal et al., 2016). To assess whether this overlap in activation extends to other stimulus types and task designs, and another sensory modality, we collected fMRI data from 35 healthy young adults as they completed an associative memory retrieval task along with four variants of a relational reasoning paradigm that reliably engages left aLPFC. The reasoning tasks followed a 2 (visual/auditory modality) x 2 (spatial/featural relations) x 2 (low/high relational complexity) design. In the associative memory task, participants studied word pairs and decided whether the two words were related. At retrieval, they viewed pairs of previously seen words and judged whether the pair was Intact (words paired together at encoding) or Recombined (previously seen words recombined into new pairs). Response times were slower for Recombined vs. Intact pairs, consistent with heightened retrieval monitoring. As predicted, aLPFC was more active for Recombined than Intact pairs, as well as for the manipulation of relational complexity across the four reasoning tasks. A group-level conjunction analysis demonstrated substantial overlap between memory and reasoning manipulations in left aLPFC (Glasser parcels a47r, p47r, a10p, and p10p). Within individuals, clusters defined from the reasoning task were also sensitive to retrieval monitoring demands. Further, there was within-participant overlap in the pattern of active vertices, as measured via Dice coefficients. Bayes factor testing within each parcel of interest demonstrated greater vertex-level overlap than expected by chance, particularly in p47r. Importantly, degree of overlap varied widely among individuals, and exploratory results showed that both cluster-level activation and vertex overlap in p47r correlated with memory discriminability (d-prime). Thus, we hypothesize that neural overlap in this area reflects engagement in relational thinking during memory retrieval monitoring. Together, these results move beyond general characterizations of aLPFC function by testing whether it meets a precondition -- individual-level neural overlap across varied tasks -- of a unified neurocognitive function in support of reasoning and memory retrieval.

Statistical learning (SL) has been proposed to depend on the hippocampus, but traditional neuropsychological theories of long-term memory posit that the hippocampus is only necessary for explicit memory processes, not implicit memory processes. To reconcile these two accounts, we exposed 27 temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients to a continuous speech stream containing embedded trisyllabic words, then tested their statistical knowledge using both implicit and explicit behavioural measures. TLE patients showed impairments on two explicit measures of SL alongside intact performance on an implicit measure of SL. These results suggest that the hippocampus may only be necessary for the explicit expression, but not the initial acquisition or implicit expression, of statistical knowledge.

The vestibular system has been implicated in several aspects of self-representation, including bodily self-location, yet its role in episodic source and reality monitoring remains unclear. Moreover, symptoms of depersonalisation and derealisation (DPDR) have been associated with both vestibular dysfunction and altered source and reality monitoring. We tested whether noisy galvanic vestibular stimulation (nGVS) modulates source and reality monitoring during a word-encoding paradigm and whether this increased symptoms of DPDR. Sixty young adults (N = 30 active nGVS, N = 30 sham) encoded words that varied by context (spoken vs. imagined), agentic source (self vs. other), and valence (positive vs. threat) before completing source/reality judgments. Active nGVS reduced overall accuracy relative to sham on both reality and source monitoring. Across conditions, self-referential items were remembered with greater sensitivity compared to other-referential items, and spoken items were recalled with greater sensitivity than imagined items. We additionally show an interaction effect whereby active nGVS reduced accuracy specifically for imagined and threat-valenced items. Trait DPDR did not moderate the effects of stimulation, although higher trait DPDR was associated with a more liberal reality-monitoring response criterion. Results indicate that transient vestibular perturbation via nGVS can impair source monitoring for internalised and threatening stimuli and impairs cognitive distinctions between internally and externally generated events in general, supporting a role for vestibular input in maintaining self-other and reality boundaries in episodic memory.

Source and reality monitoring enable individuals to distinguish the origins of remembered information, including whether information was self- or other-generated and whether it was perceived or imagined. Although the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) have been implicated in these processes, their independent causal contributions remain unclear. We investigated whether focal transcranial direct current stimulation (f-tDCS) of the left dlPFC and left TPJ differentially modulates source and reality monitoring. One hundred participants were randomly assigned to receive anodal or sham stimulation of the left dlPFC or TPJ before completing an episodic memory task manipulating agent (self, experimenter), context (spoken, imagined), and emotional valence (positive, negative). Discrimination sensitivity (d') and response criterion (c) were examined separately. For source monitoring, stimulation interacted with context and cortical region: anodal dlPFC stimulation was associated with a greater spoken-imagined difference in self-experimenter discrimination than sham stimulation, whereas no equivalent context-dependent effect emerged following TPJ stimulation. For reality monitoring, stimulation effects also differed by cortical target, with reduced spoken-imagined discrimination following anodal relative to sham TPJ stimulation and no significant effect of dlPFC stimulation. These effects were not accompanied by corresponding stimulation effects on response criterion. Independent of stimulation, source discrimination was substantially greater for spoken than imagined information, while reality-monitoring sensitivity was enhanced for self-generated relative to experimenter-generated negative information. Together, these findings provide evidence that the dlPFC and TPJ make dissociable contributions to source and reality monitoring, while highlighting the importance of contextual and affective features in determining how the origins of memories are evaluated.

Fluent sentence production relies on the precise and timely coordination of lexical retrieval, morphosyntactic planning, and motor execution. While a left-dominant fronto-parieto-temporal network has been identified for these subcomponents of sentence production, less is known about the time course of engagement of these regions. One key issue is the extent to which the engagement of neural regions is sequential. The aim of the present study was to delineate spatiotemporal patterns of subcomponents of sentence production, namely lexical retrieval, inflection, and constituent assembly, and identify any lexical category differences (nouns versus verbs) in these processes. Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses were measured using a novel picture-icon paradigm in which verbal responses were elicited using object or action pictures followed by an icon that indicated the subcomponent sentence processes: lexical access, inflection (plurals for nouns, tense for verbs), and constituent assembly (adjective + object or pronoun + action). MEG data from twenty native English-speaking right-handed neurotypical adults was analysed for both stimulus-locked and response-locked timelines. We focused on responses in left hemisphere speech-language regions of interest (ROI): precentral gyrus (M1), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), anterior temporal lobe (ATL), posterior temporal lobe (PTL), and inferior parietal lobe (IPL). The results revealed the following: 1) early and largely simultaneous engagement of all ROIs for lexical access; 2) compared to noun lexical access, verb lexical access is associated with a larger neural response across multiple language ROIs; 3) morphosyntactic planning engaged all ROIs, showing commonalities as well as unique patterns for each morphosyntactic condition; 4) noun morphosyntax vs noun lexical access showed a larger response across multiple ROIs compared to verb morphosyntax vs verb lexical access; 5) M1 was coactivated with other ROIs early in the planning stage, suggesting simultaneity of language and motor planning. The findings support a network model of language in which the syntactic, semantic, and phonological properties of a word are bound to a single anatomically distributed representation.

Individuals vary in their ability to encode and recall new experiences, yet neural markers of memory have rarely been linked to these trait-level differences. Subsequent memory effects (SMEs) identify patterns of neural activity during encoding that predict whether an item will later be remembered or forgotten. In scalp EEG, SMEs are typically characterized by increased theta and gamma power with decreased alpha, a profile that has been interpreted as a signature of effective encoding. Here, we tested whether SMEs reflect individual differences in mnemonic ability by analyzing over 1.3 million encoding events from a large free recall dataset. At the group level, alpha suppression and theta enhancement predicted successful encoding, while gamma did not predict subsequent memory after controlling for serial position. Across individuals, better learners showed reduced SMEs in all three frequency bands. The neural contrast that defines successful encoding was therefore most pronounced among the poorest learners. These findings suggest that high-performing individuals are less reliant on phasic spectral activity for successful encoding, and that SMEs capture stable individual differences in encoding efficiency. HighlightsO_LIEEG activity during learning differentiates better from poorer learners C_LIO_LIEEG markers of successful encoding also reflect stable learning ability C_LIO_LIHigher-performing individuals show attenuated theta-alpha-gamma signatures C_LIO_LIEEG dynamics track both transient states and trait-like ability differences C_LI

Working memory (WM) is often assumed to play a stronger role in mental operations than in pure storage. However, much of the evidence comes from tasks using novel stimuli requiring active maintenance. Everyday cognition, in contrast, often involves operating on information retrieved from long-term memory (LTM), which may not always require sustained WM storage. Moreover, prior evidence for enhanced WM involvement relies on univariate measures, which cannot separate procedural demands of operations from representational strength of operation-relevant items. Here, we used EEG to test how WM supports mental operations on LTM. First, participants studied color-position associations. Then, on each trial, a color cue prompted retrieval of its associated position, followed by a novel position. Across blocks, participants either performed a mental operation to compute the positions' spatial midpoint or judged whether the probe matched one of the memory positions. Representations of task type and memory position were assessed using MVPA and inverted encoding models on alpha-band power, respectively. Task type was decoded throughout the trial, reflecting persistent task-set representations. In contrast, LTM position was represented in WM more strongly for integration than recognition early in the retention and operation periods, but these differences were transient. These findings challenge the view that mental operations inherently demand enhanced WM engagement: when information is available in LTM, increased WM involvement is transient, not sustained.

The Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), located in ventral occipitotemporal cortex, plays a critical role in skilled reading. Researchers have theorized that the VWFA develops in its specific anatomical location due to the convergence of major white matter tracts and proximity to functionally similar regions. This suggests that precise anatomical positioning may be crucial for optimal VWFA function. Previous research has identified several functional differences in this region between typical and struggling readers (i.e. dyslexia): struggling readers show weaker text-selective responses and often exhibit a smaller or even absent VWFA. However, it remains unexplored whether the precise anatomical location of this region also differs between typical and struggling readers. We tested whether VWFA anatomy differs between children with and without dyslexia (N=87). Participants completed a functional localizer, which we used to manually define the VWFA in each individuals native anatomy. We examined whether: (1) VWFA anatomical location relates to reading ability, (2) children with dyslexia show greater variability in VWFA location compared to typical readers, and (3) VWFA location with respect to white matter tracts relates to reading ability. Results reveal that, despite being smaller in children with dyslexia, there is no relationship between VWFA location and reading ability. Specifically, individual VWFA location relative to anatomy, relative to others VWFAs, and relative to white matter tracts, is not related to reading ability. These findings suggest that while the VWFAs general anatomy may be facilitated by development, its precise location remains stable and unrelated to reading proficiency.

The coordination of sensory processing and working memory (WM) is fundamental to cognition. Spatial organization of sensory processing and WM is known to be broadly distributed across the cortex, but finer-scale organization at the interfaces between these functions remains understudied. Although the notion of sharp parcellations of cortex into distinct functional modules dominates the field, a growing body of works support graded changes in function and anatomy in some cortical zones. Based on this and potential advantages of gradient organizational structure in frontal cortex, we hypothesized that sensory-WM interfaces in the frontal cortex are gradient-like, not boundary-like. We examined twenty bilateral cortical regions that participate in visual/auditory WM tasks. In five frontal cortical regions, group-level WM activation overlapped with sensory drive, but was spatially shifted. We compared subject-level (N=20) boundary and gradient models of change in function. Strong individual-level evidence for sensory-WM gradients was observed in pre-supplementary motor area, ventral premotor cortex, and anterior insula in both modalities and in dorsal premotor cortex for visual WM. Conversely, dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex yielded mixed results, favored distinct WM and sensory regions in the left hemisphere, and gave some evidence for gradients in the right hemisphere. These results provide evidence that sensory and WM regions in frontal cortex are largely not distinct with sharp boundaries at their interfaces but instead bleed into each other to form local rostral-caudal sensory-WM gradients. We speculate these gradients may allow efficient interfacing between sensory and WM representations, and/or fine-grained, task-dependent shifting between bottom-up sensory and top-down influences.

Understanding how native speakers and second language (L2) learners process language differently is fundamental to theories of language acquisition, comprehension, and use. A central debate in this literature concerns the inconsistent findings in emotional prosody processing between native speakers and L2 learners, partly attributable to stimulus lexicality: some studies use real words, whereas others use pseudowords. To resolve this discrepancy, we measured fMRI responses in 15 native speakers and 15 L2 learners while they listened to Mandarin real-word and pseudoword stimuli. Both groups engaged in overlapping auditory, cognitive, and affective regions, including the auditory cortex, inferior frontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, and the temporoparietal junction. However, the two groups showed distinct responses depending on lexicality: native speakers showed stronger recruitment of temporal regions for pseudowords, whereas L2 learners showed greater frontoparietal activation for real words. These patterns were consistent across positive and negative prosody conditions. Furthermore, among L2 learners, higher proficiency was associated with greater frontal activation for real words, but not pseudowords. Together, these findings demonstrate that the differences between native speakers and L2 learners depend critically on stimulus lexicality, highlighting the role of lexicality in bilingual emotion processing.

Second language (L2) processing engages both language-specific and domain-general control systems, yet how these systems vary with L2 proficiency remains unclear. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine neural activity during L2 English processing in Korean-English (K-E) bilinguals across three proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced). Participants performed rhyme and spelling judgement tasks manipulating orthographic-phonological conflict. Behaviourally, conflict conditions reduced accuracy, with proficiency effects observed selectively in the rhyme task. fMRI results showed that conflict processing recruited frontoparietal control regions, including inferior frontal and parietal cortices, accompanied by deactivation in default mode network regions. Critically, proficiency-related effects differed by task. During rhyme judgement, advanced bilinguals showed greater activation in the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG) and cerebellum, whereas intermediate bilinguals exhibited greater recruitment of the left middle orbital gyrus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. During spelling judgement, advanced bilinguals showed greater thalamic activation alongside greater deactivation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Activity in the left SMG and cerebellum was positively associated with L2 reading score, and cerebellar activity was also associated with rhyme-task performance, whereas right DLPFC activity was negatively associated with the scores. These findings suggest that increasing L2 proficiency is associated less with altered recruitment of core reading regions than with task-specific shifts in the balance between phonological-specialized, subcortical attentional, and domain-general control systems supporting L2 processing.

Chinese is one of the living languages with the highest homophone densities, making homophone processing a critical component of language comprehension and orthographic decoding, as well as an ideal model for examining its cognitive mechanisms. This study assessed mono- and bi-character homophone selection function in 129 Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking participants, including 66 cognitively healthy individuals, 17 with semantic variant (sv) primary progressive aphasia (PPA), 23 with the nonfluent/agrammatic variant (nfv) PPA, and 23 with the logopenic variant (lv) PPA. All PPA variants showed impairment in homophone selection, with most significant deficits in svPPA and lvPPA. ROC analyses demonstrated its strong diagnostic utility for distinguishing PPA from controls. Voxel-based morphometry revealed that homophone performance correlated with gray-matter volume in left anterior and inferior temporal regions, with variant-specific patterns observed. These findings described the potential role of homophone selection in diagnosing PPA syndrome in Chinese speakers, illuminate crosslinguistic influences on language impairment in PPA, and provide novel insights into the cognitive processing of homophones.

One of the central tensions in memory research is whether consistency or differentiation across events is beneficial for remembering. While theoretical models posit that the hippocampal subfield CA1 subserves both types of computations, it remains unclear how it can simultaneously express both in service of recognition memory. Here, we contrasted the two prominent functions of CA1: reinstatement (consistency) and novelty processing (differentiation) to address this gap. To this end, we analysed the Natural Scenes Dataset featuring eight participants who completed a continuous recognition memory task spanning 41 separate days with 213,000 trials in total. We calculated reinstatement and novelty indices for each image and then examined the degree to which these reflected successful memory encoding. We found that CA1 showed evidence for encoding-related reinstatement as well as for novelty processing even after controlling for each other. Reinstatement was specific to retrieving the initial representation during the first retrieval attempt and did not extend to other forms of reinstatement. Exploratory analyses additionally identified reinstatement in CA3, which exhibited different response profiles compared to CA1. Our work thus highlights that computations of consistency as well as differentiation can be orthogonal signals contributing independently to memory success and can simultaneously co-exist within the same region of the hippocampus.

Syntax processing impairment is a defining feature of primary progressive aphasia (PPA), particularly in the nonfluent/agrammatic variant. However, current models are derived largely from Indo-European languages, and it remains unclear whether the cognitive and neuroanatomical mechanisms of syntax processing generalize to Chinese, an analytic, pro-drop language that encodes grammatical relationships primarily through word order and function words rather than inflectional morphology. Participants were recruited from the international Chinese Language Assessment in PPA cohort and included 64 individuals with PPA (19 logopenic, 15 nonfluent/agrammatic, 15 semantic, and 15 unclassifiable/mixed) and 60 cognitively healthy controls. Participants completed sentence comprehension and production tasks with systematically manipulated syntactic features. Item-level linguistic determinants were examined using ridge regression, diagnostic performance using receiver operating characteristic analyses, and neuroanatomical correlates using voxel-based morphometry of structural MRI. Performance on sentence comprehension and production was influenced by grammatical and lexical features. Subject-relative clauses, passive constructions, a higher proportion of function words, longer character length, and greater lexical content were associated with poorer performance among participants with PPA. Sentence comprehension was impaired in the logopenic, nonfluent/agrammatic, and semantic variants, even when isolated to the syntactic component of the sentence comprehension task. Similarly, sentence production was impaired across all PPA variants (all P < 0.01 versus controls). No significant differences were observed among PPA variants. Adjusted receiver operating characteristic analyses demonstrated high discrimination between each PPA variant and controls, with areas under the curve ranging from 0.87 to 0.97 for sentence comprehension-syntax and from 0.91 to 0.97 for sentence production. However, pairwise comparisons showed no significant differences in discriminative performance among PPA variants after correction for multiple comparisons. Both sentence comprehension-syntax and sentence production showed associations with semantic and repetition measures in addition to motor speech measures. Voxel-based morphometry showed that higher sentence comprehension-syntax scores were associated with greater grey matter volume in left frontotemporal and cingulate regions, whereas higher sentence production scores were additionally associated with greater gray matter volume in frontostriatal structures, including the caudate, putamen, and thalamus. Syntactic processing impairment in Chinese-speaking individuals with PPA extends beyond the nonfluent/agrammatic variant and is associated with distributed frontotemporal and frontostriatal regions, as well as lexical-semantic and auditory verbal short term memory mechanisms. These findings suggest that the cognitive and neural manifestations of syntactic impairment may be shaped by language-specific typological properties, underscoring the need for linguistically informed approaches to the assessment and interpretation of PPA.

Humans routinely encounter speech in languages they have never heard, yet how the brain responds to such input and whether bilingual experience shapes this response remains unknown. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and temporal response function (TRF) modeling to examine cortical tracking of the speech envelope in 24 English-monolingual and 24 English-Mandarin bilingual adults. Participants listened to naturally produced continuous speech in three languages: English (familiar to all), Mandarin (familiar to bilinguals only), and Vietnamese (unfamiliar to all). We report two main findings. First, both monolinguals and bilinguals showed enhanced cortical tracking for unfamiliar relative to familiar languages, evidenced by higher EEG prediction accuracy (PA). Monolinguals showed enhanced tracking for both Mandarin and Vietnamese, whereas bilinguals showed enhancement only for Vietnamese, consistent with Mandarin being a familiar language for this group. This finding suggests that enhanced cortical encoding of unfamiliar speech is a general property of the listening brain, not a signature of listening to a non-native language or reduced language proficiency. Second, bilinguals strikingly showed stronger cortical tracking than monolinguals overall, in both PA and TRF peak weights, with the TRF peak weight advantage present across all three languages, suggesting a difference in how bilingual experience shapes the neural encoding of speech. These findings have implications for understanding how the brain navigates the linguistic diversity of everyday life in an increasingly global, multilingual world.

Amongst all the objects we encounter, tools are unique because they are tightly linked to predictable actions. Neuroimaging studies have reported selective responses in occipitotemporal and parietal cortices when viewing pictures of tools or hands. Whether these responses contain information about specific tool-use actions (e.g., rotation for keys), and whether such information shares a neural format with action execution, remains unclear. Here, we used fMRI and multivoxel pattern analysis to ask whether specific actions associated with viewed tools could be decoded and whether action-specific information generalised across viewing and acting. Participants (N=18; 11 females) viewed tool pictures and, in separate runs, pantomimed tool-use actions in response to tool names. Familiar tools differed in their associated action (rotate or squeeze) but were matched for grip type. Viewing tool pictures elicited tool-use action information in lateral occipitotemporal cortex (LOTC), parietal cortex, and even somatosensory cortex. Notably, hand-selective LOTC was the only region in which action decoding exceeded tool-identity decoding during both viewing and pantomime, suggesting sensitivity to learned relationships between objects and characteristic hand actions. However, neither region-of-interest nor whole-brain searchlight analyses yielded reliable cross-task decoding. Thus, although overlapping cortical regions contained information about tool-use actions during perception and production, we found no evidence that this information was represented in a shared multivoxel format. These findings suggest that seeing familiar tools evokes distributed information about their associated actions and sensory consequences, but that such information may be expressed in task-dependent formats rather than simply reinstating the neural patterns engaged during action production.