Biology subjects

Fairs, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Fairs, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Congruent brain signatures specific to speech sounds in fronto-temporal cortex during language production and understanding.

In this fMRI study we investigated whether language production and understanding recruit the same phoneme-specific networks. We did so by comparing the brains response to different phoneme categories in minimal pairs: Bilabial-initial words (e.g., monkey) were contrasted to alveolar-initial words (e.g., donkey) in 37 participants performing both language production and comprehension tasks. Region-of-Interest analyses showed that the same sensorimotor networks were activated across the language modalities. In motor regions, word production and comprehension elicited the same phoneme-specific topographical activity patterns, with stronger haemodynamic activations for alveolar-initial words in the tongue cortex and stronger activations for bilabial-initial words in the lip cortex. In the posterior and middle superior temporal cortex, production and comprehension likewise resulted in similar activity patterns, with enhanced activations to alveolar-compared to bilabial-initial words. These results disagree with the classical separation between language production and understanding in neurobiological models of language, and instead advocate for a cortical organization where the same phoneme-specific acoustic-and-articulatory representations carry production and comprehension.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

A Fungal Spore Calendar for England: Analysis of 13 years of Daily Concentrations at Leicester, UK

BackgroundFungal respiratory allergy is believed to affect up to 30% of hayfever sufferers and up to 70% of severe asthmatics in the UK, however trends in fungal spore seasonality are not well described. Information about seasonal trends would help allergists determine sources of fungal sensitisation and aid disease management. MethodDaily monitoring was carried out at Leicester from 2007 to 2020 using a Burkard volumetric spore trap. Fungal spore concentrations were analysed by microscopy, identifying 23 morphologically distinct taxa. Daily average concentrations were calculated as spores/m3 of air sampled and a 90% method used to determine the spore seasons. ResultsThirteen years of data were used to develop a fungal spore calendar for the nine most abundant spore types identified; Alternaria, Cladosporium, Didymella, Leptosphaeria, Sporobolomyces, Tilletiopsis and Ustilago plus the wider groupings of Aspergillus/Penicillium type and coloured basidiospores. All have been implicated in fungal allergy. We observed long seasons for, Cladosporium, Sporobolomyces and Tilletiopsis, beginning in late spring and ending in late autumn. In contrast Ustilago and the highly allergenic Alternaria showed relatively short seasons, spanning summer and early autumn. Temperature and precipitation were the main meteorological factors related to spore concentration with wind speed appearing to have little influence. Over the study period, there was a reducing trend for total spore concentrations, driven by a reduction in "wet weather" spores, in line with a reduction in precipitation. Conversely, the "dry weather" spores of Alternaria and Cladosporium demonstrated an increasing trend. ConclusionWe present an aeroallergen calendar to provide readily accessible information to patients, healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical companies on exposure concentrations over the year in central England and potentially more widely across the UK. More research on allergenic thresholds would enhance the clinical usefulness of aeroallergen calendars.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

The same ultra-rapid parallel brain dynamics underpin the production and perception of speech.

The temporal dynamics by which linguistic information becomes available is one of the key properties to understand how language is organised in the brain. An unresolved debate between different brain language models is whether words, the building blocks of language, are activated in a sequential or parallel manner. In this study we approached this issue from a novel perspective by directly comparing the time course of word component activation in speech production versus perception. In an overt object naming task and a passive listening task we analysed with mixed linear models at the single-trial level the event-related brain potentials elicited by the same lexico-semantic and phonological word knowledge in the two language modalities. Results revealed that both word components manifested simultaneously as early as 75 ms after stimulus onset in production and perception; differences between the language modalities only became apparent after 300 ms of processing. The data provide evidence for ultra-rapid parallel dynamics of language processing and are interpreted within a neural assembly framework where words recruit the same integrated cell assemblies across production and perception. These word assemblies ignite early on in parallel and only later on reverberate in a behaviour-specific manner.

neuroscience↗