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Brain areas that were more activated in the repeated name compared with the pronoun condition (threshold: Z42.3, corrected cluster threshold Po0.05). Activation is shown in neurological convention (with the left side of the brain appearing on the left of the image).
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Pronouns are commonly used instead of explicitly repeating a name, and, in many cases, we comprehend language faster when pronouns are used instead of repetitive references. This is surprising because pronouns are often ambiguous, whereas repeated names provide precise reference. We used functional MRI to investigate the neural correlates of this p...
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... that showed a significant increase in signal following a repeated name compared with the use of a pronoun. The repeated name condition led to more activation in the areas around the left and right intraparietal sulcus (IPS), specifically the superior parietal lobule and the precuneus, left fusiform gyrus and left middle and inferior temporal gyri (Fig. 1). Table 2 delineates these brain regions and the related statistics. No areas were significantly more active in the pronoun condition than the repeated name condition. ...
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... Nieuwland and Martin (2017) support their theory by findings of hippocampal activation for pronouns that match a referent relative to pronouns than do not, reports of impaired referential processing in patients with hippocampal brain damage (Kurczek et al., 2013), and observations of oscillatory activity in posterior parietal and inferior frontotemporal brain regions (Nieuwland, 2014;Nieuwland & Martin, 2017). It is, however, important to note that the medial temporal activity reported by Nieuwland and Martin (2017) was not detected in other studies of pronoun processing (Almor et al., 2007;Hammer et al., 2007;Hammer et al., 2011;Li et al., 2021). This could be due to differences in the brain imaging techniques used across studies (electrophysiological versus blood flow measures) as well as the experimental contrasts (types of experimental tasks and sentences). ...
Pronouns are unique linguistic devices that allow for the expression of referential relationships. Despite their communicative utility, the neural correlates of the operations involved in reference assignment and/or resolution , are not well-understood. The present study synthesized the neuroimaging literature on pronoun processing to test extant theories of pronoun comprehension. Following the PRISMA guidelines and the best-practice recommendations for neuroimaging meta-analyses, a systematic literature search and record assessment were performed. As a result, 16 fMRI studies were included in the meta-analysis, and were coded in Scribe 3.6 for inclusion in the BrainMap database. The activation coordinates for the contrasts of interest were transformed into Talairach space and submitted to an Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analysis in GingerALE 3.0.1. The results indicated that pronoun processing had functional convergence in the left posterior middle and superior temporal gyri, potentially reflecting the retrieval, prediction and integration roles of these areas for pronoun processing.
... Behavioral studies revealed the effect of different factors such as structural, semantic, and pragmatic information during anaphor processing (Järvikivi et al., 2017;Lozano, 2018;Reali et al., 2015;Sauermann & Gagarina, 2017;Van Den Hoven & Ferstl, 2018, 2018b. Relevant event-related potential (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies also detected the neural mechanisms behind anaphor processing (Almor et al., 2007;Boiteau et al., 2014;Brodbeck et al., 2016;Brodbeck & Pylkkänen, 2017;Coopmans & Nieuwland, 2020;Hammer et al., 2011;Heinat & Klingvall, 2020;McMillan et al., 2012;Nieuwland et al., 2019). ...
... Furthermore, Nieuwland, Petersson, and Van Berkum (2007) found smaller activation in the bilateral inferior frontal and medial temporal gyrus on referential problematic sentences than referential coherent sentences, indicating that referential and semantic processing might modulate activities in common regions but in opposite directions. Moreover, Almor et al. (2007) revealed that repeated names as anaphor elicited more activation in the precuneus and temporal lobes than pronouns, indicating that repeated names evoke multiple representations that have to be integrated, which relies on brain regions related to spatial attention and perceptual integration. Besides, the engagement of the frontotemporal network was also reported in other brain imaging studies in anaphor resolution (Hammer et al., 2007;Matchin et al., 2014;McMillan et al., 2012). ...
... Hammer et al. (2007) found that the mismatch in biological and syntactic gender information between pronoun and antecedent induced more activation in the superior temporal regions, suggesting that access to antecedents required more processing capacity within temporal regions. Moreover, more activation in the temporal cortex was observed by long-distance between anaphors and antecedents and referential abnormality in other studies (Almor et al., 2007;Hammer et al., 2011;McMillan et al., 2012). The memory, unification, and control model (MUC model, Hagoort, 2016) and related studies have explained that the temporal regions cortex (including angular gyrus in the parietal cortex) is responsible for the storage of different information such as phonological word forms, morphological information, word meanings, and the syntactic templates (Hagoort, 2003(Hagoort, , 2005. ...
Anaphora is an essential means of maintaining textual coherence, the phenomenon of replacing one word or phrase in the preceding part of a discourse with another. At least two crucial stages are involved in anaphor processing: bonding and resolution. The links between the anaphor and potential antecedents are established in the former stage, which would be evaluated and integrated into the latter stage. We reviewed relevant event-related potential (ERP) studies that examined the time course of anaphor processing and neural oscillation studies that explored energy changes in alpha, theta, and gamma frequency bands, which were associated with attention, working memory retrieval, and integration, respectively. The existing neuroimaging studies revealed the involvement of language processing networks and the Theory of Mind (ToM). Further research should explore the neural correlates and the effects of potential factors on anaphor processing, which could help gain a more comprehensive picture from multiple perspectives.
... Thus, high indefinite-pronoun use represents discourse occurring in a known context and referencing salient information already familiar to readers (Almor et al., 2007;Gundel et al., 1993). When the scientific context is well known to the evaluators, they are more likely to use such pronouns because there is a common understanding about its technical aspects. ...
Successfully developed academic inventions have the potential to spawn new technological domains, form the basis of thriving business ventures, and improve the well-being of society. However, evaluating whether an early-stage scientific invention truly has such potential is extremely difficult, and financially backing such inventions is highly risky. And yet, organizations and their evaluators still back some of these inventions with resources for further development. We investigate this puzzle to pinpoint how and why evaluators decide to offer resource commitments at early stages, despite the red flags raised using standard evaluation criteria. Many academic inventions need these initial resources to dispel concerns regarding their commercial feasibility, so evaluators need to take a leap of faith with their support to prematurely avoid eliminating high-potential opportunities. We tested our theory using text analysis on nearly 700 invention evaluation reports written by a university's technology transfer experts. Our results revealed that evaluators backed inventions based on their feasibility (overcoming doubt and assessing maturity) and desirability (background familiarity and scientific complexity). Using the context of the research laboratory, our study insights can be applied to many management situations in which early-stage opportunities are assessed for resource commitments under high uncertainty.
... The next day they had bruises." (Kuperberg et al., 2006). 1 Lack of coherence could also occur as a result of referentially problematic expressions, such as in cases where two antecedents are equally plausible for an anaphor (Nieuwland et al., 2007a;Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2008) or when a repeated name is used instead of a pronoun to refer back to an antecedent (Almor et al., 2007). In these situations, readers need to make anaphoric inferences to restore referential coherence. ...
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the effects of context features on the involvement of the working memory (WM) system during discourse comprehension. During the fMRI scan, participants were asked to read two-sentence discourses in which the topic of the second sentence was either maintained, or was shifted from, the topic of the first. Changes in the level of coherence between the two sentences as well as context length were also investigated across discourse items. The WM system was identified with a verbal N-back task. Analysis of the reading comprehension task revealed that within the WM system, stronger activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus corresponded with increased bridging coherence demands between sentences, while greater activation in the left inferior and middle frontal gyri, bilateral superior frontal gyri, and bilateral inferior parietal lobules corresponded with increased context length. Topic variation showed no effect on activation of the WM system. These results provide new insights into understanding how different levels of context features modulate activation of the subcomponents of the WM system and indicate a role for the left inferior frontal gyrus as a core component of the WM system supporting discourse processing.
... We observed that narrative comprehension was associated with activation of the left precuneus. Consistent with our findings, previous neuroimaging studies of sentence and narrative comprehension have shown that precuneus is involved in the establishment of coherence across sentences, narrative integration effort, and memory retrieval (AbdulSabur et al. 2014;Almor et al. 2007;Ferstl et al. 2008Ferstl et al. , 2005Ferstl and von Cramon 2007;Mar 2011;Obleser et al. 2007;Whitney et al. 2009;Xu et al. 2005). For example, (Ferstl et al. 2005) reported that the left precuneus was engaged in memory related processes of attention shifts during the recognition of narrative coherence breaks. ...
Comprehension of narratives constitutes a fundamental part of our everyday life experience. Although the neural mechanism of auditory narrative comprehension has been investigated in some studies, the neural correlates underlying this mechanism and its heritability remain poorly understood. We investigated comprehension of naturalistic speech in a large, healthy adult population (n = 429; 176/253 M/F; 22–36 years of age) consisting of 192 twin pairs (49 monozygotic and 47 dizygotic pairs) and 237 of their siblings. We used high quality functional MRI datasets from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) in which a story-based paradigm was utilized for the auditory narrative comprehension. Our results revealed that narrative comprehension was associated with activations of the classical language regions including superior temporal gyrus (STG), middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in both hemispheres, though STG and MTG were activated symmetrically and activation in IFG were left-lateralized. Our results further showed that the narrative comprehension was associated with activations in areas beyond the classical language regions, e.g. medial superior frontal gyrus (SFGmed), middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and supplementary motor area (SMA). Of subcortical structures, only the hippocampus was involved. The results of heritability analysis revealed that the oral reading recognition and picture vocabulary comprehension were significantly heritable (h² > 0.56, p < 10− 13). In addition, the extent of activation of five areas in the left hemisphere, i.e. STG, IFG pars opercularis, SFGmed, SMA, and precuneus, and one area in the right hemisphere, i.e. MFG, were significantly heritable (h² > 0.33, p < 0.0004). The current study, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to investigate auditory narrative comprehension and its heritability in a large healthy population. Referring to the excellent quality of the HCP data, our results can clarify the functional contributions of linguistic and extra-linguistic cortices during narrative comprehension.
... The superior parietal cortex in general has been associated with the manipulation of information in working memory (Koenigs, Barbey, Postle, & Grafman, 2009), processing of spatial relationships in both American and British Sign Language (Emmorey et al., 2005;MacSweeney et al., 2002), and spatial attention in general (Corbetta, Miezin, Shulman, & Petersen, 1993). The SPL, in particular, has been associated with a number of functions related to spatial attention, such as shifting spatial attention (Molenberghs, Mesulam, Peeters, & Vandenberghe, 2007), the communication of location and spatial classifiers in ASL (Emmorey, McCullough, Mehta, Ponto, & Grabowski, 2013;Emmorey et al., 2002Emmorey et al., , 2005, maintaining an internal representation of body position (Wolpert, Goodbody, & Husain, 1998), integrating audiovisual information (Molholm et al., 2006), coordinating actions in space (Segal & Petrides, 2012), completion of spatial mental tasks, such as mental mazes (Jerde et al., 2008), keeping track of referents in discourse (Almor, Smith, Bonilha, Fridriksson, & Rorden, 2007), and the representation and processing of plural entities in language comprehension (Boiteau, Bowers, Nair, & Almor, 2014). The varied functions of the SPL in spatial attentional processes are of particular interest to the present study, which was primarily a study of language, not of spatial attention. ...
... The involvement of the SPL has been demonstrated in a number of other language studies. For example, Almor et al. (2007) examined reference tracking when repeated references were established using repeated names vs. pronouns and found greater SPL activation for the repeated names. They suggested that this activation may be indicative of multiple discourse representations being created through the repetition of names and the subsequent effort required in order to track these multiple representations and integrate them into a single one (Almor et al., 2007). ...
... For example, Almor et al. (2007) examined reference tracking when repeated references were established using repeated names vs. pronouns and found greater SPL activation for the repeated names. They suggested that this activation may be indicative of multiple discourse representations being created through the repetition of names and the subsequent effort required in order to track these multiple representations and integrate them into a single one (Almor et al., 2007). Boiteau et al. (2014) found activation of the SPL for the maintenance and processing of multiple referents vs. a plural entity, again suggesting that the SPL plays a role in keeping track and integrating multiple linguistic representations. ...
It is commonly held that language is largely lateralized to the left hemisphere in most individuals, whereas spatial processing is associated with right hemisphere regions. In recent years, a number of neuroimaging studies have yielded conflicting results regarding the role of language and spatial processing areas in processing language about space (e.g., Carpenter, Just, Keller, Eddy, & Thulborn, 1999; Damasio et al., 2001). In the present study, we used sparse scanning event‐related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of spatial language, that is; language used to communicate the spatial relationship of one object to another. During scanning, participants listened to sentences about object relationships that were either spatial or non-spatial in nature (color or size relationships). Sentences describing spatial relationships elicited more activation in the superior parietal lobule and precuneus bilaterally in comparison to sentences describing size or color relationships. Activation of the precuneus suggests that spatial sentences elicit spatial-mental imagery, while the activation of the SPL suggests sentences containing spatial language involve integration of two distinct sets of information – linguistic and spatial.
... Pointing gestures and indications of motion trajectory are used by signers and speakers alike to facilitate production and comprehension (Emmorey, 1999;Kalagher & Yu, 2006;Liddell, 2003;McNeill & Pedelty, 1995;So et al., 2009). When a discourse contains multiple entities (such as an agent and a patient) that need to be stored for subsequent reference, regions of the brain involved in spatial processing may be recruited to maintain the discourse model (Almor, Smith, Bonhila, Fridriksson, & Rorden, 2007;Boiteau, Bowers, Nair, & Almor, 2014). When accessing such entities, manual motor effectors would in turn be primed. ...
A number of studies have shown a relationship between comprehending transitive sentences and spatial processing (e.g., Chatterjee, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(2), 55-61, 2001), in which there is an advantage for responding to images that depict the agent of an action to the left of the patient. Boiteau and Almor (Cognitive Science, 2016) demonstrated that a similar effect is found for pure linguistic information, such that after reading a sentence, identifying a word that had appeared earlier as the agent is faster on the left than on the right, but only for left-hand responses. In this study, we examined the role of lateralized manual motor processes in this effect and found that such spatial effects occur even when only the responses, but not the stimuli, have a spatial dimension. In support of the specific role of manual motor processes, we found a response-space effect with manual but not with pedal responses. Our results support an effector-specific (as opposed to an effector-general) hypothesis: Manual responses showed spatial effects compatible with those in previous research, whereas pedal responses did not. This is consistent with theoretical and empirical work arguing that the hands are generally involved with, and perhaps more sensitive to, linguistic information.
... Philosophers, on the other hand, have focused on the development of a theory of descriptions, being primarily concerned with the relation between denoting phrases and the truth value of the propositions to which they belong (Russell, 1905;Strawson, 1950). Finally, drawing upon linguistic and philosophic research and making use of a variety of experimental paradigms, cognitive scientists and psycholinguists have addressed issues such as the processing cost associated with nominal expressions (Almor, 1999) and the brain circuits that are used to track nominal discourse referents (e.g., Almor et al., 2007). ...
Definite and indefinite descriptions are argued to signal referent familiarity (Heim, 1982). Indefinite descriptions typically serve the purpose of introducing new discourse referents, while definite descriptions are normally used to refer to given and unique discourse referents. Experimental psycholinguistic studies (Cunha Lima, 2004, 2013; Schumacher, 2009; Schleuchter, Williams, and Lau, 2015) have found, crucially, that indefinite descriptions do not introduce new referents in and of themselves and that definiteness marking does not have an immediate impact on reference resolution. To test the generality of these findings, we conducted three visual-world eye-tracking studies that examined the time-course of definite and indefinite reference resolution in English discourses. Taken together, the results show that definite and indefinite descriptions are not immediately interpreted as indexing linguistic familiarity and discourse novelty as language users process these descriptions, and that (in)definiteness reference resolution is subject to an economy principle operating in reference resolution that interacts with grammatical complexity and pragmatic felicitousness as sentences unfold over time.
... Together, these results highlight the parietal lobe as possibly relevant for referential language processing, since it is the only region that was reliably affected by all three contrasts. Almor et al. (2007) suggested that parietal involvement in referential processing could reflect recruitment of circuits originally devoted to perceptual organization, tracking multiple objects in space, for keeping track of multiple discourse referents. This connection is particularly relevant for our design, which used visuo-spatial referential domains, and predicts that reference resolution should be associated with parietal activity. ...
... Allen and Fortin, 2013). A similar parallel has been suggested to account for the observation that superior parietal areas are involved in processing discourses with multiple referents (Almor et al., 2007;Boiteau et al., 2014). This dual function hypothesis is also consistent with lesion evidence, since lesions of retrosplenial cortex can lead to severe general episodic memory deficits, as well as topographical disorientation, a navigation deficit despite intact landmark recognition (Maguire, 2001). ...
... Together with results cited in the Introduction, our results suggest a cortical division of labor during reference resolution. While our results associate parietal cortex with tracking referents on a basic level, in line with the results of Boiteau et al. (2014) and Almor et al. (2007), frontal lobe activity seems to be associated with higher order decision making processes in non-trivial referential situations such as referential ambiguity (Nieuwland et al., 2007b;McMillan et al., 2012). ...
A critical component of comprehending language in context is identifying the entities that individual linguistic expressions refer to. While previous research has shown that language comprehenders resolve reference quickly and incrementally, little is currently known about the neural basis of successful reference resolution. Using source localized MEG, we provide evidence across 3 experiments and 2 languages that successful reference resolution in simple visual displays is associated with increased activation in medial parietal lobe. In each trial, participants saw a simple visual display containing three object which constituted the referential domain. Target referential expressions were embedded in questions about the displays. By varying the displays, we manipulated referential status while keeping the linguistic expression constant. Follow-up experiments addressed potential interactions of reference resolution with linguistic predictiveness and pragmatic plausibility. Notably, we replicated the effect in Arabic, a language that differs in a structurally informative way from English while keeping referential aspects parallel to our two English studies. Distributed minimum norm estimates of MEG data consistently indicated that reference resolution is associated with increased activity in the medial parietal lobe. With one exception the timing of the onset of the medial parietal response fell into a mid-latency time-window at 350–500 ms after the onset of the resolving word. Through concurrent EEG recordings on a subset of subjects we also describe the EEG topography of the effect of reference resolution, which makes the result available for comparison with a larger existing literature. Our results extend previous reports that medial parietal lobe is involved in referential language processing, indicating that it is relevant for reference resolution to individual referents, and suggest avenues for future research.
... From a post hoc perspective, they are thus consistent with the assumption of predicting " what " (i.e., type of referential form used) in regard to referent tracking. The observation of activation differences in left ventral occipitotemporal regions in this context is also in line with previous observations of increased activation in these regions, and specifically the left FFG, for repeated names in discourse, as opposed to names referred to by a pronoun upon remention (Almor et al., 2007). Nevertheless, future research will need to explore why this contrast engendered activation in regions that form part of the ventral visual rather than auditory stream, despite the use of auditory story stimuli. ...
Significance statement:
Language is the most powerful communicative medium available to humans. Nevertheless, we lack an understanding of the neurobiological basis of language processing in natural contexts: it is not clear how the human brain processes linguistic input within the rich contextual environments of our everyday language experience. This fMRI study provides the first demonstration that, in natural stories, predictions concerning the probability of remention of a protagonist at a later point are processed in the dorsal auditory stream. Results are congruent with a hierarchical predictive coding architecture assuming temporal receptive windows of increasing length from auditory to higher-order cortices. Accordingly, language processing in rich contextual settings can be explained via domain-general, neurobiological mechanisms of information processing in the human brain.
