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When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse
Abstract
In linguistic theories of how sentences encode meaning, a distinction is often made between the context-free rule-based combination of lexical-semantic features of the words within a sentence ("semantics"), and the contributions made by wider context ("pragmatics"). In psycholinguistics, this distinction has led to the view that listeners initially compute a local, context-independent meaning of a phrase or sentence before relating it to the wider context. An important aspect of such a two-step perspective on interpretation is that local semantics cannot initially be overruled by global contextual factors. In two spoken-language event-related potential experiments, we tested the viability of this claim by examining whether discourse context can overrule the impact of the core lexical-semantic feature animacy, considered to be an innate organizing principle of cognition. Two-step models of interpretation predict that verb-object animacy violations, as in "The girl comforted the clock," will always perturb the unfolding interpretation process, regardless of wider context. When presented in isolation, such anomalies indeed elicit a clear N400 effect, a sign of interpretive problems. However, when the anomalies were embedded in a supportive context (e.g., a girl talking to a clock about his depression), this N400 effect disappeared completely. Moreover, given a suitable discourse context (e.g., a story about an amorous peanut), animacy-violating predicates ("the peanut was in love") were actually processed more easily than canonical predicates ("the peanut was salted"). Our findings reveal that discourse context can immediately overrule local lexical-semantic violations, and therefore suggest that language comprehension does not involve an initially context-free semantic analysis.
Supplementary resources (2)
... Unlike prior work, we also study atypical animacy (Coll Ardanuy et al., 2020), where a typically inanimate object becomes animate. We draw on Nieuwland and van Berkum (2006), which measured human N400 responses in scenarios with atypically animate entities like a peanut in love. We compare LM surprisal to human N400 brain responses and find that like humans, LMs are initially surprised to encounter entities like a peanut in love, but quickly adapt, becoming less surprised. ...
... We move beyond typical animacy to atypical animacy by using LM surprisal to replicate Nieuwland and van Berkum's (2006) studies on human N400 response to atypical animacy. Contemporaneous work (Michaelov et al., 2023) replicates one of these experiments in the original Dutch. ...
... For human data, we turn to two similar studies-Nieuwland and van Berkum (2006) and Boudewyn et al. (2019)-that relied on the N400, a brain response measured via EEG that is elevated when processing semantically anomalous input. Both studies measured participants' N400 responses while they read stories where a typically inanimate entity acted as animate (Figure 2), similar in tone and content to a cartoon, or fairy-tale. ...
... DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005;Nicenboim, Vasishth, & Rösler, 2020), morpho-syntactic (e.g. Lau, Stroud, Plesch, & Phillips, 2006;Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2013;Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004), semantic (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Federmeier & Kutas, 1999;Weber, Lau, Stillerman, & Kuperberg, 2016), as well as discourse level processing (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006;Otten & Van Berkum, 2008;Rohde & Horton, 2014;Rohde, Levy, & Kehler, 2011;Scholman, Rohde, & Demberg, 2017;Schwab & Liu, 2020;Xiang & Kuperberg, 2015). A range of electrophysiological experiments have explored neural markers underlying predictive processes during the comprehension of sentences with words of varying predictability. ...
... Previous studies already shed light on the brain correlates of expectation in discourse continuation across multiple sentences guided by discourse markers, referential expressions, or logical connectives (Bonnefond et al., 2012;Bonnefond & Van der Henst, 2009;Brilmayer & Schumacher, 2021;Carter & Nieuwland, 2022;Drenhaus, Demberg, Köhne, & Delogu, 2014;Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006;Rasenberg, Rommers, & van Bergen, 2020;Scholman et al., 2017;Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005). However, these studies focused on the effects of prediction on the site of what was (or was not) predicted, that is, they investigated effects occurring after the predicted information had been presented or they investigated differences in the time frequency domain in brain activity related to prediction (e.g., Gisladottir, Bögels, & Levinson, 2018;León-Cabrera, Piai, Morís, & Rodríguez-Fornells, 2022;Lewis, Wang, & Bastiaansen, 2015;Rommers, Dickson, Norton, Wlotko, & Federmeier, 2017;Terporten, Schoffelen, Dai, Hagoort, & Kösem, 2019;Wang, Zhu, & Bastiaansen, 2012). ...
... A final observation that could be tackled by further studies is the presence of word-induced P300 effect instead of a (similarly conceivable) N400 effect, which is typically observed in case of semantic violation or low predictability. A possible reason for the absence of an N400 effect is that the ERPs in the present study were time-locked to functional words, whereas N400 effects found in language processing typically involve processing difficulty of lexical (content) words (e.g., Holcomb, Kounios, Anderson, & West, 1999;Kutas & Federmeier, 2011;Kutas & Van Petten, 1994;Lau et al., 2006;Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006). In our study, both contrasted discourse continuations (positive and negative quantifiers) are both syntactically and semantically wellformed. ...
Comprehenders are known to generate expectations about upcoming linguistic input at the sentence and discourse level. However, most previous studies on prediction focused mainly on word-induced brain activity rather than examining neural activity preceding a critical stimulus in discourse processing, where prediction actually takes place. In this EEG study, participants were presented with multiple sentences resembling a discourse including conditional sentences with either only if or if, which are characterized by different semantics, triggering stronger or weaker predictions about the possible continuation of the presented discourses, respectively. Results revealed that discourses including only if, as compared to discourses with bare if, triggered an increased predictive neural activity before the expected critical word, resembling the readiness potential. Moreover, word-induced P300 brain responses were found to be enhanced by unpredictable discourse continuations and reduced in predictable discourse continuations. Intriguingly, brain responses preceding and following the critical word were found to be correlated, which yields evidence for predictive activity modulating word-induced processing on the discourse level. These findings shed light on the predictive nature of neural processes at the discourse level, critically advancing our understanding of the functional interconnection between discourse understanding and prediction processes in brain and mind.
... Context changes expectations about upcoming wordsfollowing a story involving an anthropomorphic peanut, comprehenders expect the sentence the peanut was in love more than the peanut was salted, as indexed by N400 amplitude (Nieuwland & van Berkum, 2006). This updating of expectations has been explained using Situation Models-mental representations of a described event. ...
... We model the results of Nieuwland and van Berkum (2006) using six computational language models and three sets of word vectors, none of which have explicit situation models or semantic grounding. We find that a subset of these can fully model the effect found by Nieuwland and van Berkum (2006). Thus, at least some processing effects normally explained through situation models may not in fact require explicit situation models. ...
... Under normal circumstances, a sentence such as the peanut was in love would be highly improbable, much more so than the peanut was salted. Following the short story in (1), however, this changes (Nieuwland & van Berkum, 2006). ...
The context in which a sentence appears can drastically alter our expectations about upcoming words - for example, following a short story involving an anthropomorphic peanut, experimental participants are more likely to expect the sentence 'the peanut was in love' than 'the peanut was salted', as indexed by N400 amplitude (Nieuwland & van Berkum, 2006). This rapid and dynamic updating of comprehenders' expectations about the kind of events that a peanut may take part in based on context has been explained using the construct of Situation Models - updated mental representations of key elements of an event under discussion, in this case, the peanut protagonist. However, recent work showing that N400 amplitude can be predicted based on distributional information alone raises the question whether situation models are in fact necessary for the kinds of contextual effects observed in previous work. To investigate this question, we attempt to model the results of Nieuwland and van Berkum (2006) using six computational language models and three sets of word vectors, none of which have explicit situation models or semantic grounding. We find that the effect found by Nieuwland and van Berkum (2006) can be fully modeled by two language models and two sets of word vectors, with others showing a reduced effect. Thus, at least some processing effects normally explained through situation models may not in fact require explicit situation models.
... In comparison to a positive context, positive words in a negative context elicited N400 with greater amplitude in the central position. The N400 is associated with semantic processing, reflecting the challenge of integrating lexical elements into discourse [21]. When the emotional content of discourse aligns with that of emotional words, subsequent integration becomes more facile [15]. ...
... One plausible explanation is that verbal materials do not elicit the same level of arousal as pictorial materials [25]. Previous research has indicated that the context of a text can supersede the violation of local lexical semantics [21]. We postulate that the influence of context may be significant, obscuring the emotional effects of words or reducing the emotional impact of words in an emotional context. ...
This research utilized event-related potential (ERP) recording technology to examine the effect of emotional context on the processing of emotional information in sentences. Three types of emotion-consistent discourse materials (neutral–neutral, positive–positive and negative–negative) were constructed to specifically express neutral, positive and negative emotions, respectively. Each discourse comprised two sentences, with the emotionally significant words embedded at the penultimate position of the second sentence. Participants were asked to read these texts, respond to reading comprehension questions and the ERP amplitude induced by the emotional words was recorded. The results indicated a tripartite interaction in the N400 and Late positive component amplitudes involving emotional context, emotional words and brain hemispheres, observed in both frontal and central brain regions. Notably, there was a significant difference in response to positive words between positive and negative contexts. The findings suggest that emotional context has a substantial effect on the processing of emotional words. Positive words, in comparison to negative ones, are more influenced by emotional context, particularly in the frontal and central regions of the brain.
... However, some other studies (e.g., [3][4][5][6]15,16]) have revealed an immediate influence of a variety of discourse contexts on the local sentence-level processing, which is consistent with one-step or interactive models, such as constraint-based models (e.g., [17,18]), the cue integration model [19], and the dynamic generative framework [20]. For these models, the discourse context and the information in a local sentence are permitted to be used simultaneously (see [21] for a review). ...
... As we discuss below, stereotypical knowledge has been shown to be processed in a different way from typical lexical semantics [22]. However, as we have reviewed above, the mode of the interplay between stereotypical knowledge in local sentences and discourse contexts has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature, though there have already been a relatively large number of studies that examined how typical lexical semantics interplays with discourse contexts (e.g., [2][3][4][6][7][8][9]15,16]). It would thus be interesting to see how stereotypical knowledge in a local sentence interacts with discourse contexts. ...
This study investigated how local gender stereotype information interacts with discourse context during Chinese discourse reading. Event-related potentials were recorded while participants read two-sentence discourses, in which the first sentence provided the discourse context that either introduced a gender stereotype-countering attitude towards roles, such as "One should strive for the target job, and getting a job should not be restricted by gender.", or was neutral. The second sentence contained the critical clause in which the stereotypical gender of the object noun (a role name) was either consistent or inconsistent with the gender specified by the head noun (a kinship term) of the subject noun phrase, as in "Li's [daughter/son] became a nurse…". The object nouns elicited a larger N400 and a larger late negativity (LN) for the inconsistent compared to the consistent conditions in the neutral contexts. Crucially, when the discourse context offered information countering gender stereotypes, both the N400 and LN effects were reversed, with the negativities being smaller for the inconsistent compared to the consistent conditions. The reversal of the N400 effects suggests that discourse contexts can immediately override the processing of gender stereotypes , and thus readers compute discourse context and local pragmatic information simultaneously during discourse reading.
... When a negated feature is explicitly mentioned or inferred in preceding sentences Orenes et al., 2014), or when negation is presented within a supportive dialogue (Dale & Duran, 2011), negative sentences tend to be processed faster relative to negative sentences presented without context. And in an ERP experiment, negations that are expected based on real-world knowledge (e.g., "with proper equipment, scuba-diving isn't very dangerous") elicited smaller N400 responses than unlicensed negations (e.g., "bulletproof vests aren't very dangerous"; Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008). ...
... While previous work has shown that contextual factors facilitate the processing of negation (Dale & Duran, 2011;Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008;Orenes et al., 2014;Wason, 1965), our findings here go further. First, by using actual language productions as the predictor of processing difficulty, our work implicates specifically pragmatic factors. ...
Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition. In more recent work, however, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting that pragmatics can modulate this difficulty. We test the pragmatic hypothesis that listeners’ processing of negation is influenced by expectations about speakers’ production of negation by directly comparing speakers and listeners in two pairs of experiments. In both experiments, speakers produce negative sentences more often when they are both relevant and informative. And in both experiments, listeners in turn are fastest to respond to sentences that they expect speakers to produce. We argue that general pragmatic principles that apply to all sentences can help explain the challenges of processing negation.
... N400 montages vary across studies (e.g., [77]). The electrode montage for investigation of the N400 component was selected based in part on the N400 context and discourse literature [78][79][80][81][82][83][84] . Fig 2 below indicates the montage of interest; all plots of the derived event-related potentials relate to this montage. ...
We report the first use of ERP measures to identify text engagement differences when reading digitally or in print. Depth of semantic encoding is key for reading comprehension, and we predicted that deeper reading of expository texts would facilitate stronger associations with subsequently-presented related words, resulting in enhanced N400 responses to unrelated probe words and a graded attenuation of the N400 to related and moderately related words. In contrast, shallow reading would produce weaker associations between probe words and text passages, resulting in enhanced N400 responses to both moderately related and unrelated words, and an attenuated response to related words. Behavioral research has shown deeper semantic encoding of text from paper than from a screen. Hence, we predicted that the N400 would index deeper reading of text passages that were presented in print, and shallower reading of texts presented digitally. Middle-school students (n = 59) read passages in digital and print formats and high-density EEG was recorded while participants completed single-word semantic judgment tasks after each passage. Following digital text presentation, the N400 response pattern to moderately-related words indicated shallow reading, tracking with responses to words that were unrelated to the text. Following print reading, the N400 responses to moderately-related words patterned instead with responses to related words, interpreted as an index of deeper reading. These findings provide evidence of differences in brain responses to texts presented in print and digital media, including deeper semantic encoding for print than digital texts.
... wenn dieser durch eine Kontextgeschichte plausibel erscheint. Nieuwland und van Berkum [10] präsentierten eine Geschichte über eine amouröse Erdnuss. In diesem Kontext wurden Sätze wie "Die Erdnuss war verliebt" sogar leichter verarbeitet als Sätze, die außerhalb der Geschichte problemlos verarbeitet werden ("Die Erdnuss war gesalzen."). ...
Zusammenfassung
Sprachliche Verarbeitungsprozesse können objektiv gemessen werden, z.B. mithilfe später Komponenten im evozierten Hirnpotenzial. Die etablierteste Komponente in diesem Forschungsbereich ist die N400-Komponente, eine Negativierung mit einem Peak bei frühestens 400ms nach Stimulusbeginn und einem zentro-parietalen Maximum. Sie spiegelt semantische Verarbeitungsprozesse wider. Ihr Vorhandensein sowie ihre zeitliche und quantitative Ausprägung lassen Rückschlüsse auf die Güte der Sprachverarbeitung zu. Somit ist sie geeignet, das Sprachverstehen von besonderen Populationsgruppen zu erfassen, z.B. um den Fortschritt im Sprachverstehen bei Nutzern von Cochlea-Implantaten (CI) zu messen. Im Folgenden wird ein Überblick über die Verwendung der N400-Komponente im Bereich der CI-Forschung gegeben. Es werden Studien mit erwachsenen CI-Nutzern vorgestellt, bei denen die N400 die Qualität des Sprachverstehens mit der elektrischen Stimulation abbildet. Darüber hinaus werden Studien mit CI-versorgten Kindern besprochen, bei denen das Auftreten der N400-Komponente den Erwerb des Wortschatzes reflektiert.
... Two models have been proposed to explain when linguistic and extralinguistic information would influence language interpretation (Hagoort & Berkum, 2007). The one-step model claims that during sentence comprehension, all available relevant information (e.g., syntax, prior discourse, and world knowledge) can be immediately used to co-determine the interpretation of a sentence (Clark, 1996;Hagoort, 2019;Hagoort et al., 2004;Jackendoff, 2002;MacDonald et al., 1994;Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006;Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995;Van Berkum et al., 2008). In contrast, the two-step model argues that the interpretation of a sentence takes place in two stages. ...
Social hierarchical information impacts language comprehension. Nevertheless, the specific process underlying the integration of linguistic and extralinguistic sources of social hierarchical information has not been identified. For example, the Chinese social hierarchical verb 赡养, /shan4yang3/, ‘support: provide for the needs and comfort of one’s elders’, only allows its Agent to have a lower social status than the Patient. Using eye-tracking, we examined the precise time course of the integration of these semantic selectional restrictions of Chinese social hierarchical verbs and extralinguistic social hierarchical information during natural reading. A 2 (Verb Type: hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical) × 2 (Social Hierarchy Sequence: match vs. mismatch) design was constructed to investigate the effect of the interaction on early and late eye-tracking measures. Thirty-two participants (15 males; age range: 18–24 years) read sentences and judged the plausibility of each sentence. The results showed that violations of semantic selectional restrictions of Chinese social hierarchical verbs induced shorter first fixation duration but longer regression path duration and longer total reading time on sentence-final nouns (NP2). These differences were absent under non-hierarchical conditions. The results suggest that a mismatch between linguistic and extralinguistic social hierarchical information is immediately detected and processed.
... Even in cases where we might expect world knowledge and contextual reasoning to be crucial, LLMs show an uncanny ability to mimic human response patterns. Nieuwland and Van Berkum (2007) show that human comprehenders show a large N400 response to implausible sentences such as 'The peanut was in love', except when they are preceded by a motivating context (e.g. a story about an animate peanut meeting an almond). The typical explanation of such a result is that comprehenders can use contextual information and world knowledge to process unlikely and otherwise implausible sentences. ...
To what extent can statistical language knowledge account for the effects of world knowledge in language comprehension? We address this question by focusing on a core aspect of language understanding: pronoun resolution. While existing studies suggest that comprehenders use world knowledge to resolve pronouns, the distributional hypothesis and its operationalization in large language models (LLMs) provide an alternative account of how purely linguistic information could drive apparent world knowledge effects. We addressed these confounds in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we found a strong effect of world knowledge plausibility (measured using a norming study) on responses to comprehension questions that probed pronoun interpretation. In experiment 2, participants were slower to read continuations that contradicted world knowledge-consistent interpretations of a pronoun, implying that comprehenders deploy world knowledge spontaneously. Both effects persisted when controlling for the predictions of GPT-3, an LLM, suggesting that pronoun interpretation is at least partly driven by knowledge about the world and not the word. We propose two potential mechanisms by which knowledge-driven pronoun resolution occurs, based on validation- and expectation-driven discourse processes. The results suggest that while distributional information may capture some aspects of world knowledge, human comprehenders likely draw on other sources unavailable to LLMs.
... Context is indeed the greatest factor influencing the N400. Studies showed that the N400 is greater when words are less expected in the pragmatic context, be it intended as previous discourse (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006), world knowledge (Hagoort et al., 2004), or expectations about the speaker's identity and attitudes (Van Berkum et al., 2008). Similarly, accommodating new information in the discourse model engages the N400, along with later components, as reported for the elaboration of presupposition triggers (e.g., Domaneschi et al., 2018;Schumacher & Hung, 2012). ...
... The opposite-using counterfactuals to express real facts-would be odd; imagine saying to your own child "If only you were my child, I would have named you to be my heir". Indeed, studies have found that while violation of facts are deemed semantically anomalous, within counterfactual settings, they are deemed acceptable 38,39 . For example, Nieuwland and Van Berkum 38 discovered that the N400 effect dissipated when an ostensibly impossible event (e.g., the peanut fell in love) was contextualized within a counterfactual setting. ...
How do people represent counterfactuals? As languages differ in expressibility of counterfactuals—some languages employ explicit grammatical marking for counterfactuals while others do not—are some speakers’ representations of counterfactuals less explicit? Prior studies examining this question with Chinese speakers—a language devoid of explicit counterfactual markings—found mixed results. Here we re-examined the issue by using a more sensitive test: people’s sensitivity to detect anomalies in sentences. We asked Chinese speakers to rate the acceptability of sentences employing “ruguo (if)…jiu (then)” configuration—the typical but non-unique, non-explicit marking of counterfactuals. Critically, we varied the semantic adherence to real-world facts [factuality], with some sentences containing made-up conditions [-fact as in “If fish had legs, then…”] versus real facts [+ fact: “If dogs had legs, then…”]. If speakers represent counterfactuals clearly, they should give higher acceptability ratings to [− facts] than to [+ facts] sentences, because the ostensible point of counterfactuals is to express non-factual situations. That is, expressing a true fact under a syntactic counterfactual construction makes the sentence anomalous. Instead, we found that Chinese speakers gave the opposite ratings: factual “if…then” sentences were rated as more acceptable than non-factual ones. This suggests that Chinese speakers find the processing of counterfactuals to be more challenging than processing facts, and that their representation of counterfactuals may be less explicit. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the link between linguistic markings and cognitive representations.
... The N400 amplitude is larger (more negative) when a word is more difficult to integrate with the prior sentential context. A larger N400 amplitude is therefore observed if a word is semantically incongruent with the prior context of the sentence (Hagoort et al., 2004;Kutas and Hillyard, 1980;Nieuwland and van Berkum, 2006). Moreover, as the context provided by the sentence becomes more constraining and upcoming words become more predictable, the N400 amplitude decreases (Dambacher et al., 2006;Federmeier and Kutas, 1999;Kutas and Hillyard, 1984;Terporten et al., 2019). ...
EEG and eye-tracking provide complementary information when investigating language comprehension. Evidence that speech processing may be facilitated by speech prediction comes from the observation that a listener’s eye gaze moves towards a referent before it is mentioned if the remainder of the spoken sentence is predictable. However, changes to the trajectory of anticipatory fixations could result from a change in prediction or an attention shift. Conversely, N400 amplitudes and concurrent spectral power provide information about the ease of word processing the moment the word is perceived. In a proof-of-principle investigation, we combined EEG and eye-tracking to study linguistic prediction in naturalistic, virtual environments. We observed increased processing, reflected in theta band power, either during verb processing - when the verb was predictive of the noun - or during noun processing - when the verb was not predictive of the noun. Alpha power was higher in response to the predictive verb and unpredictable nouns. We replicated typical effects of noun congruence but not predictability on the N400 in response to the noun. Thus, the rich visual context that accompanied speech in virtual reality influenced language processing compared to previous reports, where the visual context may have facilitated processing of unpredictable nouns. Finally, anticipatory fixations were predictive of spectral power during noun processing and the proportion of anticipatory fixations could be predicted by spectral power at verb onset. Overall, we show that combining EEG and eye-tracking provides a promising new method to answer novel research questions about the prediction of upcoming linguistic input, for example, regarding the role of extralinguistic cues in prediction during language comprehension.
... First, Caffarra and Martin (2019) showed that native Spanish speakers exhibited a P600 effect for infrequent errors non-native speakers produced (subject-verb number disagreement) but not for frequent errors (gender disagreement), suggesting that the typicality of errors affects adaptation. In this case, semantic violations are far less typical than morphosyntactic and aspectual violations, thus requiring more solid evidence for the language-processing system to change the expectation (see also Nieuwland and Van Berkum 2006). ...
... Discourse context is then capable of overriding semantic features. Actually, Nieuwland and Van Berkum [105] showed that animacy violation, such as The peanut was in love, which is expected to elicit an N400 effect when presented outside a context, does not elicit incongruity effects when the preceding context is fictive and describes a singing and dancing peanut. The N400 is also involved in processing statements that are inconsistent with one's moral attitude, like for a strict Christian being presented with I think euthanasia is an acceptable course of action [106]. ...
The electrical activity of the brain while elaborating linguistic material that is pragmatically charged surfaces in three ERP components (N400, P600/LPC, and Sustained Negativity) and induced oscillatory changes. We present a qualitative, non-exhaustive, review of several empirical investigations that used EEG-based measures to investigate language processing in the pragmatic domain. Touching upon three main topics (non-literal language, discourse and conversation, and clinical populations), we present the interaction of a set of cognitive processes that exploit semantic memory or elaborate on the mental representation of the current context to derive pragmatic inferences. ERP measures provide evidence for shedding new light on longstanding debates in pragmatics (e.g., the direct vs. indirect access issue), while a pragmatic perspective provides information on the functional role of ERP components (e.g., to understand the nature of the P600 in non-syntactic contexts).Key wordsPragmaticsExperimental pragmaticsMetaphorIdiomsIronyHumorContextN400P600Sustained negativity
... They compared the Surprisal scores obtained with several Transformer NLMs and showed that most of them reproduce the same significant differences between conditions observed in humans. In Michaelov et al. (2023) the same authors used NLM Surprisal to replicate the effect of discourse context in reducing the N400 amplitude for anomalous words, using the Dutch stimuli of the experiments by Nieuwland and Van Berkum (2006). ...
... To my knowledge, the only existing paper to connect the ERP literature to category mistakes in this way is Elbourne 2016. Elbourne provides an illuminating review of a number of the experiments discussed in §(3.2) (specifically: Hagoort et al. 2004;Nieuwland and van Berkum 2006;van Berkum et al. 1999van Berkum et al. , 2003. He then makes a series of claims about these results: they are easier to reconcile with the predictions of Magidor's pragmatic account of category mistakes than with a certain type of semantic account, they support the view that candidate category mistakes are alike in kind to certain non-candidate category mistakes, and the phenomenological state elicited by candidate category mistakes is indexed by the N400 effect. ...
Occurrences of sentences that are traditionally considered category mistakes, such as ‘The red number is divisible by three’, tend to elicit a sense of oddness in assessors. In attempting to explain this oddness, existing accounts in the philosophical literature commonly claim that occurrences of such sentences are associated with a defect or phenomenology unique to the class of category mistakes. It might be thought that recent work in experimental psycholinguistics—in particular, the recording of event-related brain potentials (patterns of voltage variation in the brain)—holds the potential to shed new light on this debate. I review the relevant experimental results, before arguing that they present advocates of accounts of category mistakes with a dilemma: either the uniqueness claims should be rejected, or the experimental technique in question cannot be used to test existing accounts of category mistakes in the manner that philosophers might hope.
... Participants' local changes in cerebral blood oxygenation are measured (e.g., Nieuwland and van Berkum, 2006;Xiang & Kuperberg, 2015). ...
... Even among semantically valid sentences, statistical differences in the predictability of a given word can result in subtle differences in the magnitude of the N400 elicited (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). Moreover, the N400 elicited by an anomalous sentence can be reduced or eliminated by the presence of a preceding context that makes the sentence more understandable (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006) or by a "noisy-channel" that allows a listener to mentally-revise the anomalous word (Ryskin et al., 2021). Importantly, these semantic expectations, and their violations as evidenced by the N400, are not limited to language but extend to vision, action, and nonlinguistic sounds, to name a few (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). ...
By juxtaposing time series analyses of activity measured from a fully recurrent network undergoing disrupted processing and of activity measured from a continuous meta-cognitive report of disruption in real-time language comprehension, we present an opportunity to compare the temporal statistics of the state-space trajectories inherent to both systems. Both the recurrent network and the human language comprehension process appear to exhibit long-range temporal correlations and low entropy when processing is undisrupted and coordinated. However, when processing is disrupted and discoordinated, they both exhibit more short-range temporal correlations and higher entropy. We conclude that by measuring human language comprehension in a dense-sampling manner similar to how we analyze the networks, and analyzing the resulting data stream with nonlinear time series analysis techniques, we can obtain more insight into the temporal character of these discoordination phases than by simply marking the points in time at which they peak.
... The prevailing focus in these studies is how surprise affects learning and memory for momentary events on the scale of seconds; however, it is clear that humans can predict outcomes well beyond the upcoming moment 48 . A very non-exhaustive list of things we can make predictions about beyond the next event includes a series of upcoming stimuli 49,50 , the linguistic content of not just upcoming words [51][52][53] but paragraphs 54,55 , attributes about oneself months and years into the future [56][57][58][59] , political elections months and years into the future 60 , and the winners of upcoming sports games 61,62 and championships 63 . Given that we commonly make long-term predictions and that surprise is linked to better memory, it is worth asking whether long-term predictions resulting in errors (long-term surprises) also correlate with memory. ...
Neurobiological and psychological models of learning emphasize the importance of prediction errors (surprises) for memory formation. This relationship has been shown for individual momentary surprising events; however, it is less clear whether surprise that unfolds across multiple events and timescales is also linked with better memory of those events. We asked basketball fans about their most positive and negative autobiographical memories of individual plays, games and seasons, allowing surprise measurements spanning seconds, hours and months. We used advanced analytics on National Basketball Association play-by-play data and betting odds spanning 17 seasons, more than 22,000 games and more than 5.6 million plays to compute and align the estimated surprise value of each memory. We found that surprising events were associated with better recall of positive memories on the scale of seconds and months and negative memories across all three timescales. Game and season memories could not be explained by surprise at shorter timescales, suggesting that long-term, multi-event surprise correlates with memory. These results expand notions of surprise in models of learning and reinforce its relevance in real-world domains.
... A key prerequisite to long-context understanding and generating coherent text is the ability to accurately represent entities as the discourse unfolds (Karttunen, 1976;Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1991;Heim, 2002;Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2006;Kamp et al., 2011, i.a.). For example, consider the following example in the context of a recipe: ...
Keeping track of how states and relations of entities change as a text or dialog unfolds is a key prerequisite to discourse understanding. Despite this fact, there have been few systematic investigations into the ability of large language models (LLMs) to track discourse entities. In this work, we present a task to probe to what extent a language model can infer the final state of an entity given an English description of the initial state and a series of state-changing operations. We use this task to first investigate whether Flan-T5, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 can track the state of entities, and find that only GPT-3.5 models, which have been pretrained on large amounts of code, exhibit this ability. We then investigate whether smaller models pretrained primarily on text can learn to track entities, through finetuning T5 on several training/evaluation splits. While performance degrades for more complex splits, we find that even for splits with almost no lexical overlap between training and evaluation, a finetuned model can often perform non-trivial entity tracking. Taken together, these results suggest that language models can learn to track entities but pretraining on large text corpora alone does not make this capacity surface.
... Even among semantically valid sentences, statistical differences in the predictability of a given word can result in subtle differences in the magnitude of the N400 elicited (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). Moreover, the N400 elicited by an anomalous sentence can be reduced or eliminated by the presence of a preceding context that makes the sentence more understandable (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006) or by a "noisy-channel" that allows a listener to mentally-revise the anomalous word (Ryskin et al., 2021). Importantly, these semantic expectations, and their violations as evidenced by the N400, are not limited to language but extend to vision, action, and nonlinguistic sounds, to name a few (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). ...
Welcome to a special issue of Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience focused on The Mind and The Brain: A Multiscale Interpretation of Cognitive Brain Functionality. This special issue contains six articles that come from different disciplinary perspectives and methods that themselves span a range of spatiotemporal scales for analyzing cognition and behavior. At a time when the field of cognitive science is transitioning away from the computer metaphor of the mind and toward complex interactive frameworks (Spivey, 2023), these articles serve as waypoints for how to go about building those new theories. The articles include philosophical reviews of the processes that allow for self-organization to emerge in a multiscale cognitive system (Silberstein, 2023) and how best to model such multiscale processes (Favela, 2023). They include dense-sampling measures of postural movements (Corbin et al., 2023), time series analyses of music perception (Waddington & Balasubramaniam, 2023), and recurrence quantification analysis of spoken sentence comprehension (Nguyen & Spivey, 2023). And it all culminates in a big-picture perspective on how mental activity across any and all life forms may be best understood as emerging from collective action among sub-elements interacting to form self-organized metastable cognitive structures (Falandays et al., 2023).
... Such a discussion is beyond the scope of this article; however, we would remind readers of a playful study demonstrating that just a few sentences of context can overcome the primary meanings of well-known words (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006). Participants heard stories featuring an inanimate object like that printed below while EEG data were recorded. ...
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work offers new insight into psychological understanding of lexical ambiguity through a series of simulations that capitalise on recent advances in contextual language models. These models have no grounded understanding of the meanings of words at all; they simply learn to predict words based on the surrounding context provided by other words. Yet, our analyses show that their representations capture fine-grained meaningful distinctions between unambiguous, homonymous, and polysemous words that align with lexicographic classifications and psychological theorising. These findings provide quantitative support for modern psychological conceptualisations of lexical ambiguity and raise new challenges for understanding of the way that contextual information shapes the meanings of words across different timescales.
... It takes years of guided practice, or formal instruction, for people to speak, understand, or read a language. But once fully proficient in these skills, people process speech and print automatically (see, e.g., Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006;Van Berkum, 2008). (2) Self-paced processes. ...
Social robots have limited social competences. This leads us to view them as depictions of social agents rather than actual social agents. However, people also have limited social competences. We argue that all social interaction involves the depiction of social roles and that they originate in, and are defined by, their function in accounting for failures of social competence.
... It takes years of guided practice, or formal instruction, for people to speak, understand, or read a language. But once fully proficient in these skills, people process speech and print automatically (see, e.g., Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006;Van Berkum, 2008). (2) Self-paced processes. ...
Clark and Fischer (C&F) discuss how people interact with social robots in the context of a general analysis of interaction with characters. I suggest that a consideration of aesthetic illusion would add nuance to this analysis. In addition, I illustrate how people's experiences with other depictions of characters require adjustments to C&F's claims.
... It takes years of guided practice, or formal instruction, for people to speak, understand, or read a language. But once fully proficient in these skills, people process speech and print automatically (see, e.g., Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006;Van Berkum, 2008). (2) Self-paced processes. ...
While we applaud the careful breakdown by Clark and Fischer of the representation of social robots held by the human user, we emphasise that a neurocognitive perspective is crucial to fully capture how people perceive and construe social robots at the behavioural and brain levels.
... Similar effects have been observed in other studies on reference. Negative deflections around 400 ms have been reported for manipulations of distance between anaphor and antecedent, indicating an influence of first mention and recency across multiple sentences (Streb et al., 2004), and for referential ambiguity during pronoun resolution (Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2006). Definite expressions have been shown to depend on the form of their antecedent (e.g., Swaab et al., 2004;Brilmayer and Schumacher, 2021) as well as on the degree of givenness in the context (Burkhardt, 2006). ...
Studies on pronoun resolution have mostly utilized short texts consisting of a context and a target sentence. In the current study we presented participants with nine chapters of an audio book while recording their EEG to investigate the real-time resolution of personal and demonstrative pronouns in a more naturalistic setting. The annotation of the features of the pronouns and their antecedents registered a surprising pattern: demonstrative pronouns showed an interpretive preference for subject/agent antecedents, although they are described to have an anti-subject or anti-agent preference. Given the presence of perspectival centers in the audio book, this however confirmed proposals that demonstrative pronouns are sensitive to perspectival centers. The ERP results revealed a biphasic N400-Late Positivity pattern at posterior electrodes for the demonstrative pronoun relative to the personal pronoun, thereby confirming previous findings with highly controlled stimuli. We take the observed N400 for the demonstrative pronoun as an indication for more demanding processing costs that occur due to the relative unexpectedness of this referential expression. The Late Positivity is taken to reflect the consequences of attentional reorientation: since the demonstrative pronoun indicates a possible shift in the discourse structure, it induces updating of the discourse structure. In addition to the biphasic pattern, the data showed an enhanced positivity at frontal electrode sites for the demonstrative pronoun relative to the personal pronoun. We suggest that this frontal positivity reflects self-relevant engagement and identification with the perspective holder. Our study suggests that by using naturalistic stimuli, we get one step closer to understanding the implementation of language processing in the brain during real life language processing.
A view that has been gaining prevalence over the past decade is that the human conceptual system is malleable, dynamic, context‐dependent, and task‐dependent, that is, flexible. Within the flexible conceptual representation framework, conceptual representations are constructed ad hoc, forming a different, idiosyncratic instantiation upon each occurrence. In this review, we scrutinize the neurocognitive literature to better understand the nature of this flexibility. First, we identify some key characteristics of these representations. Next, we consider how these flexible representations are constructed by addressing some of the open questions in this framework: We review the age‐old question of how to reconcile flexibility with the apparent need for shareable stable definitions to anchor meaning and come to mutual understanding, as well as some newer questions we find critical, namely, the nature of relations among flexible representations, the role of feature saliency in activation, and the viability of all‐or‐none feature activations. We suggest replacing the debate about the existence of a definitional stable core that is obligatorily activated with a question of the degree and probability of activation of the information constituting a conceptual representation. We rely on published works to suggest that (1) prior featural salience matters, (2) feature activation may be graded, and (3) Bayesian updating of prior information according to current demands offers a viable account of how flexible representations are constructed. This proposal provides a theoretical mechanism for incorporating a changing momentary context into a constructed representation, while still preserving some of the concept's constituent meaning.
Objective
This study examined the effect of context on the prediction of emotional words with varying valences. It investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the processing differences of emotion words with different valences in both predictable and unpredictable contexts. Additionally, it aimed to address the conflicting results regarding the processing time in predictive contexts reported in previous studies.
Methods
Participants were instructed to carefully read the text that included the specified emotion words. Event-related potentials elicited by emotional words were measured. To ensure that the participants can read the text carefully, 33% of the texts are followed by comprehension problems. After reading the text, the comprehension questions were answered based on the text content.
Results
The study revealed that the N400 amplitude elicited by an unpredictable context was greater than that elicited by a predictable context. Additionally, the N400 amplitude triggered by positive emotion words was larger than that triggered by negative emotion words. However, there was no significant difference in late positive component amplitude observed between contextual prediction and emotional word valence.
Conclusion
The present study suggests that predictive processing takes place at an intermediate stage of speech processing, approximately 400 ms after stimulus onset. Furthermore, the presence of a predictive context enhances the processing of emotional information. Notably, brain activity is more pronounced during the processing of positive emotional stimuli compared to negative emotional stimuli. Additionally, the facilitative effect of a predictable context diminishes in the advanced phase of Chinese speech comprehension.
Human language offers a variety of ways to create meaning, one of which is referring to entities, objects, or events in the world. One such meaning maker is understanding to whom or to what a pronoun in a discourse refers to. To understand a pronoun, the brain must access matching entities or concepts that have been encoded in memory from previous linguistic context. Models of language processing propose that internally stored linguistic concepts, accessed via exogenous cues such as phonological input of a word, are represented as (a)synchronous activities across a population of neurons active at specific frequency bands. Converging evidence suggests that delta band activity (1–3 Hz) is involved in temporal and representational integration during sentence processing. Moreover, recent advances in the neurobiology of memory suggest that recollection engages neural dynamics similar to those which occurred during memory encoding. Integrating from these two research lines, we here tested the hypothesis that neural dynamic patterns, especially in delta frequency range, underlying referential meaning representation, would be reinstated during pronoun resolution. By leveraging neural decoding techniques (i.e., representation similarity analysis) on a magnetoencephalogram data set acquired during a naturalistic story-listening task, we provide evidence that delta-band activity underlies referential meaning representation. Our findings suggest that, during spoken language comprehension, endogenous linguistic representations such as referential concepts may be proactively retrieved and represented via activation of their underlying dynamic neural patterns.
Inferences are an indicator of a greater reading comprehension, as they imply a combination of implicit and explicit information that usually combines a textual representation with background knowledge of the reader. The aim of this study is to explore the costs and benefits of the time course of inferences in university students with reading comprehension difficulties at 3 stages during a narration. The method used was the event-related potential (ERP) technique in order to register the brain activity of 63 teaching program students while they read familiar, less-familiar and neutral stories. Results show a slow negativity potential component with greater negativity in words coming from familiar contexts when compared to less familiar and neutral ones in the first locus; an N400 component and a Post-N400 component in the second locus, reflecting greater negativity in familiar contexts when compared to less-familiar ones; and, lastly, through the use of a lexical decision task, FN400 and N400 components were found in the third locus, especially for pseudowords. These results are interpreted as a preferably bottom-up processing, which is characterized by lexical access difficulties in less-skilled readers.
Este estudo investiga, particularmente, o mapeamento antecipado do referente de um DP complexo, apresentando uma oração relativa preposicionada com para, ou seja, com papel temático de beneficiário. Explora-se a contribuição que o tipo de estratégia relativa utilizada (padrão ou cortadora) pode trazer para a antecipação do referente, dada a possibilidade de integração incremental de informação contextual visual e linguística precedente. Em um experimento de seleção de imagem, aplicado a 41 participantes, falantes cultos de português do Brasil, a ser reportado, apresentaram-se contextos visuais e linguísticos auditivos prévios em que um personagem participa de dois eventos distintos (um evento apresentado com verbo bitransitivo e um evento apresentado com verbo transitivo), envolvendo coparticipantes distintas. Busca-se verificar em que medida o uso, na sentença-teste auditiva, que segue os preâmbulos discursivos e visuais, de uma estratégia padrão da língua, na qual a preposição aparece precedendo o pronome relativo, poderia favorecer a antecipação do referente do DP complexo, em comparação à estratégia cortadora, em que a preposição não está presente. Empregou-se uma tarefa de correspondência sentença-gravura na qual a acurácia e o tempo de resposta foram considerados como variáveis dependentes. Ademais, objetivou-se verificar a influência de conhecimento de norma padrão e de memória de trabalho verbal no desempenho da tarefa. Solicita-se que tentem clicar o mais rápido possível na imagem descrita pela sentença contendo a relativa. Nossos resultados não indicaram uma vantagem do uso da relativa padrão sobre a cortadora para a antecipação do referente do DP complexo. No entanto, a acurácia da seleção da imagem foi significativamente melhor para esse tipo de relativa. Melhor desempenho no teste normativo e no teste de reading span foi associado a TRs mais rápidos e maior acurácia na relativa cortadora. Fatores que parecem influenciar esse quadro são complexidade da estrutura relativa, possível ambiguidade da relativa cortadora e a sensibilidade limitada do teste para flagrar essa possível antecipação.
We test predictions from the language emergent perspective on verbal working memory that lexico-syntactic constraints should support both item and order memory. In natural language, long-term knowledge of lexico-syntactic patterns involving part of speech, verb biases, and noun animacy support language comprehension and production. In three experiments, participants were presented with randomly generated dative-like sentences or lists in which part of speech, verb biases, and animacy of a single word were manipulated. Participants were more likely to recall words in the correct position when presented with a verb over a noun in the verb position, a good dative verb over an intransitive verb in the verb position, and an animate noun over an inanimate noun in the subject noun position. These results demonstrate that interactions between words and their context in the form of lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory.
Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events ( The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher ). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events ( The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny ). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events.
Individual Differences in Anaphora Resolution: Language and cognitive effects explores anaphora resolution from different perspectives, and investigates various aspects of the phenomenon, as contributions include research protocols that combine old and new experimental methodologies as well as theoretical and empirical approaches. A central theme across volume contributions are the multiple linguistic and extralinguistic factors that constrain anaphora resolution, its processing and acquisition by a variety of populations (children and adults, monolinguals, bilinguals and second language learners) as well as the mechanisms underlying anaphora resolution. Anaphora resolution constitutes an ideal environment to test the interaction between domain-general cognitive systems and domain-specific linguistic sub-routines, since variability in referential preferences is not related to binding constraints (an integral part of syntax per se) but is closely tied to processing (functional constraints) modulated by the integration of discourse-filtered information.
Semantic memory encompasses one's knowledge about the world. Distributional semantic models, which construct vector spaces with embedded words, are a proposed framework for understanding the representational structure of human semantic knowledge. Unlike some classic semantic models, distributional semantic models lack a mechanism for specifying the properties of concepts, which raises questions regarding their utility for a general theory of semantic knowledge. Here, we develop a computational model of a binary semantic classification task, in which participants judged target words for the referent's size or animacy. We created a family of models, evaluating multiple distributional semantic models, and mechanisms for performing the classification. The most successful model constructed two composite representations for each extreme of the decision axis (e.g., one averaging together representations of characteristically big things and another of characteristically small things). Next, the target item was compared to each composite representation, allowing the model to classify more than 1,500 words with human‐range performance and to predict response times. We propose that when making a decision on a binary semantic classification task, humans use task prompts to retrieve instances representative of the extremes on that semantic dimension and compare the probe to those instances. This proposal is consistent with the principles of the instance theory of semantic memory.
We report the first use of ERP measures to identify text engagement differences when reading digitally or in print. Depth of semantic encoding is key for reading comprehension, and we predicted that deeper reading of expository texts would facilitate stronger associations with subsequently-presented related words, resulting in enhanced N400 responses to unrelated probe words and a graded attenuation of the N400 to related and moderately related words. In contrast, shallow reading would produce weaker associations between probe words and text passages, resulting in enhanced N400 responses to both moderately related and unrelated words, and an attenuated response to related words. Behavioral research has shown deeper semantic encoding of text from paper than from a screen. Hence, we predicted that the N400 would index deeper reading of text passages that were presented in print, and shallower reading of texts presented digitally.
Middle-school students ( n = 59) read passages in digital and print formats and high-density EEG was recorded while participants completed single-word semantic judgment tasks after each passage. Following digital text reading, the N400 response pattern anticipated for shallow reading was observed. Following print reading, the N400 response pattern expected for deeper reading was observed for related and unrelated words, although mean amplitude differences between related and moderately related probe words did not reach significance. These findings provide evidence of differences in brain responses to texts presented in print and digital media, including deeper semantic encoding for print than digital texts.
Animacy is an intrinsic semantic property of words referring to living things. A long line of evidence shows that words with animate referents require lower processing costs during word recognition than words with inanimate referents, leading among others to a decreased N400 amplitude in reaction to animate relative to inanimate objects. In the current study, we use this animacy effect to provide evidence for access to the semantic properties of constituents in German noun-noun compounds. While morphological decomposition of noun-noun compounds is well-researched and illustrated by the robust influence of lexical constituent properties like constituent length and frequency, findings for semantic decomposition are less clear in the current literature. By manipulating the animacy of compound modifiers and heads, we are able to manipulate the relative ease of lexical access strictly due to intrinsic semantic properties of the constituents. Our results show additive effects of constituent animacy, with a higher number of animate constituents leading to gradually attenuated N400 amplitudes. We discuss the implications of our findings for current models of complex word recognition, as well as stimulus construction practices in psycho-and neurolinguistic research.
The N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP) is the most widely used brain signal in research on semantic processing. It has been discovered now more than 30 years ago, in 1980, as a larger negativity for semantically incongruent sentence continuations such as “I take my coffee with cream and dog” (as compared to congruent continuations such as “sugar”). The N400 has meanwhile been shown to be modulated by a very wide variety of lexical and semantic variables and has taught us a lot about how meaning is processed in language and beyond. This chapter reviews the literature on the N400 component including its relationship to the subsequent P600 component and discusses implications for the neurocognition of semantic processing.Key wordsN400P600Semantic processingMeaningLanguage
Neural oscillations have emerged as a paradigm of reference for EEG and MEG research. In this chapter, we highlight some the possibilities and limits of modelling the dynamics of complex stimulus perception as being shaped by internal oscillators. The reader is introduced to the main physiological tenets underpinning the use of neural oscillations in cognitive neuroscience. The concepts of entrainment and neural tracking are illustrated with particular reference to speech and language processes.Key wordsNeural oscillationsNeural entrainmentCortical trackingSynchronySpeechLanguage
The relative contributions of superior temporal vs. inferior frontal and parietal networks to recognition of speech in a background of competing speech remain unclear, although the contributions themselves are well established. Here, we use fMRI with spectrotemporal modulation transfer function (ST-MTF) modeling to examine the speech information represented in temporal vs. frontoparietal networks for two speech recognition tasks with and without a competing talker. Specifically, 31 listeners completed two versions of a three-alternative forced choice competing speech task: "Unison" and "Competing", in which a female (target) and a male (competing) talker uttered identical or different phrases, respectively. Spectrotemporal modulation filtering (i.e., acoustic distortion) was applied to the two-talker mixtures and ST-MTF models were generated to predict brain activation from differences in spectrotemporal-modulation distortion on each trial. Three cortical networks were identified based on differential patterns of ST-MTF predictions and the resultant ST-MTF weights across conditions (Unison, Competing): a bilateral superior temporal (S-T) network, a frontoparietal (F-P) network, and a network distributed across cortical midline regions and the angular gyrus (M-AG). The S-T network and the M-AG network responded primarily to spectrotemporal cues associated with speech intelligibility, regardless of condition, but the S-T network responded to a greater range of temporal modulations suggesting a more acoustically driven response. The F-P network responded to the absence of intelligibility-related cues in both conditions, but also to the absence (presence) of target-talker (competing-talker) vocal pitch in the Competing condition, suggesting a generalized response to signal degradation. Task performance was best predicted by activation in the S-T and F-P networks, but in opposite directions (S-T: more activation = better performance; F-P: vice versa). Moreover, S-T network predictions were entirely ST-MTF mediated while F-P network predictions were ST-MTF mediated only in the Unison condition, suggesting an influence from non-acoustic sources (e.g., informational masking) in the Competing condition. Activation in the M-AG network was weakly positively correlated with performance and this relation was entirely superseded by those in the S-T and F-P networks. Regarding contributions to speech recognition, we conclude: (a) superior temporal regions play a bottom-up, perceptual role that is not qualitatively dependent on the presence of competing speech; (b) frontoparietal regions play a top-down role that is modulated by competing speech and scales with listening effort; and (c) performance ultimately relies on dynamic interactions between these networks, with ancillary contributions from networks not involved in speech processing per se (e.g., the M-AG network).
The impact of cognitive styles preference and of achievement motivation on the intensity of barrier perception in on-line learning was tested on 234 university students sample. We administered a set of 4 questionaires: On-line learning barrier perception questionnaire (OLB), Achievement motivation questionnaire (DMV), Category width questionaire (C-W)and Cognitive style index questionnaire (CSI). The research results don’t indicate statistically significant correlations between the achievement motivation and online learning perception. The results also show very low correlation between cognitive styles: the analytic-intuitive and category width cognitive styles and online learning barrier perceptions. The results indicate that students perceive the limited opportunities to communicate with classmates and the teacher as a potential barrier to online learning. Students also perceived the typically text based study materials and online activities as potential barriers to learning. Based, on the results, the authors proposed core principles for online pedagogy.
Kľúčové slová / Key words: e-learning, online štúdium, kognitívny štýl, motivácia k
výkonu, bariéry pri štúdiu
The process of sentence comprehension must allow for the possibility of noise in the input, e.g., from speaker error, listener mishearing, or environmental noise. Consequently, semantically implausible sentences such as The girl tossed the apple the boy are often interpreted as a semantically plausible alternative (e.g., The girl tossed the apple to the boy). Previous investigations of noisy-channel comprehension have relied exclusively on paradigms with isolated sentences. Because supportive contexts alter the expectations of possible interpretations, the noisy channel framework predicts that context should encourage more inference in interpreting implausible sentences, relative to null contexts (i.e. a lack of context) or unsupportive contexts. In the present work, we tested this prediction in four types of sentence constructions: two where inference is relatively frequent (double object - prepositional object), and two where inference is rare (active-passive). We found evidence that in the two sentence types that commonly elicit inference, supportive contexts encourage noisy-channel inferences about the intended meaning of implausible sentences more than non-supportive contexts or null contexts. These results suggest that noisy-channel inference may be more pervasive in everyday language processing than previously assumed based on work with isolated sentences.
How to transfer the semantic information in a sentence to a computable numerical embedding form is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. An informative universal sentence embedding can greatly promote subsequent natural language processing tasks. However, unlike universal word embeddings, a widely accepted general-purpose sentence embedding technique has not been developed. This survey summarizes the current universal sentence-embedding methods, categorizes them into four groups from a linguistic view, and ultimately analyzes their reported performance. Sentence embeddings trained from words in a bottom-up manner are observed to have different, nearly opposite, performance patterns in downstream tasks compared to those trained from logical relationships between sentences. By comparing differences of training schemes in and between groups, we analyze possible essential reasons for different performance patterns. We additionally collect incentive strategies handling sentences from other models and propose potentially inspiring future research directions.
Studying human behavior in the light of evolutionary theory involves studying the comparative evolutionary history of behaviors (phylogeny), the psychological machinery that generates them (mechanisms), and the adaptive value of that machinery in past reproductive competition (natural selection). To show the value of a phylogenetic perspective, I consider the ethology of emotional expression and the cladistics of primate social systems. For psychological mechanisms, I review evidence for a pan-human set of conceptual building blocks, including innate concepts of things, space, and time, of number, of logic, of natural history, and of "other minds" and social life, which can be combined to generate a vast array of culture-specific concepts. For natural selection, I discuss the sexual selection of sex differences and similarities, and the social selection of moral sentiments and group psychology.
Summer 2021 Humor Webinar (sponsored by the International Society for Humor Studies [ISHS]): http://www.humorstudies.org/
June 18, 2021: Humor as a Personality Characteristic (Presenters & Panelists Jennifer Hofmann j.hofmann@psychologie.uzh.ch , Tracey Platt, Willibald Ruch, Sonja Heintz, Konstantine Edelmann, René Proyer, and Kay Brauer)
This Webinar is sponsored by the International Society for Humor Studies. Please check out the following link: http://www.humorstudies.org/ .
On another note, Alleen and Don Nilsen’s The Language of Humor (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is hot off the press. We have developed a PowerPoint to accompany each of the twenty-five chapters of the book as follows:
Chapter 1: Introduction & Humor Theories
Chapter 2: Humor in Anthropology & Ethnic Studies
Chapter 3: Humor in Art
Chapter 4: Humor in Business
Chapter 5: Humor in Computer Science
Chapter 6: Humor in Education
Chapter 7: Humor in Gender Studies
Chapter 8a: Humor in Geography I (International Humor: Books, Conferences and Organizations)
Chapter 8b: Humor in Geography II (International Humor: Examples and Discussion)
Chapter 9: Humor in Gerontology
Chapter 10: Humor in History
Chapter 11: Humor in Journalism
Chapter 12: Humor in Law
Chapter 13: Humor in Linguistics
Chapter 14: Humor in Literature
Chapter 15: Humor in Medicine and Health
Chapter 16: Humor in Music
Chapter 17: Humor in Names and Naming
Chapter 18: Humor in the Performing Arts
Chapter 19: Humor in Philosophy
Chapter 20: Humor in Physical Education
Chapter 21: Humor in Politics
Chapter 22: Humor in Psychology
Chapter 23: Humor in Religion
Chapter 24: Humor in Rhetoric and Composition
Chapter 25: Humor in Sociology
We’re sending you a PowerPoint indicating how humor is important to your particular discipline. Please let us know if you would like to receive any of our other humor-related PowerPoints (see above). Thanks. Don and Alleen Nilsen don.nilsen@asu.edu alleen.nilsen@asu.edu .
Mediated priming (e.g., from LION to STRIPES via TIGER) is predicted by spreading activation models but only by some integration models. The goal of the present research was to localize mediated priming by assessing two-step priming effects on N400 and reaction times (RT). We propose that the N400 priming effect mainly reflects integration processes but, in contrast with RT, does not reflect spreading activation. The results show that RT and N400 effects can dissociate. In a standard lexical decision task, we found mediated priming for N400 but not for RT. When a lexical decision to both the prime and the target was required, mediated priming was observed for both measures, but the RT effect was not influenced by list composition, whereas the N400 effect was. We conclude that two qualitatively different processes underlie the two types of mediated priming. A process of “global integration” yields an N400 effect, whereas an RT effect is evoked by spreading activation.
Readers routinely draw inferences with remarkable efficiency and seemingly little cognitive effort. The present study was designed to explore different types of inferences during the course of reading, and the potential effects of differing levels of working memory capacity on the likelihood that inferences would be made. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from five scalp sites while participants read 90 paragraphs, composed of 60 experimental paragraphs and 30 filler paragraphs. Each experimental paragraph was four sentences long, and the final sentence stated explicitly the inference that readers did or did not make. There were four types of experimental paragraphs: (1) Bridging inference, (2) Elaborative inference, (3) Word-Based Priming control, and (4) No Inference control. Participants were tested using the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) Reading Span Task and categorized as having low or high working memory capacity. The average peaks of the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (EM) were used as a measure of semantic priming and integration, such that the lower the N400 was in response to the explicitly stated inference concept, the more likely it was that the reader made the inference. Results indicate that readers with high working memory capacity made both bridging (necessary) and elaborative (optional) inferences during reading, whereas readers with low working memory capacity made only bridging inferences during reading. We interpret the findings within the framework of the Capacity Constrained Comprehension model of Just and Carpenter (1992).
Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.
review . . . methods and data in the domain of the electrophysiology of psycholinguistics / aimed at the psycholinguist who wants to better understand experimental reports in which ERPs [event-related brain potentials] are the primary dependent measure and/or [those] who may wish to use ERPs to address certain psycholinguistic questions / concerned with the representation and timing of language processes at both psychological and physiological levels that has yielded the data that were reviewed
general description of the electroencephalogram and event-related brain potentials / why use ERPs to study language / overview of language-sensitive components / biological factors / psycholinguistic factors (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Nine experiments involving young adults (
N = 525) tested the roles of local (sentence) and global (discourse) contexts on lexical processing. Contextual material was presented auditorily, and naming times for the last (visually presented) word were collected. Experiment 1 tested the local contexts alone and found facilitation of naming latencies when local contexts were related to the target word. Subsequent experiments, using varying baseline conditions, found that globally related material affected naming latency in all cases, whereas the same locally related material that was used in the first study now had no facilitation effect. The globally related material had an immediate effect on naming times. The authors argue that the results are inconsistent with associatively based models and with various hybrid models of context effects and that a discourse-based model best accounts for the data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article investigates whether expectations about discourse genre influence the process and products of text comprehension. Ss read texts either with a literary story or with a news story as the purported genre. Subsequently, they verified statements pertaining to the texts. Two experiments demonstrated that Ss reading under a literary perspective had longer reading times, better memory for surface information, and a poorer memory for situational information than those reading under a news perspective. Regression analyses of reading times produced findings that were consistent with the memory data. The results support the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of a text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The word-by-word time-course of spoken language understanding was investigated in two experiments, focussing simultaneously on word-recognition (local) processes and on structural and interpretative (global) processes. Both experiments used three word-monitoring tasks, which varied the description under which the word-target was monitored for (phonetic, semantic, or both) and three different prose contexts (normal, semantically anomalous, and scrambled), as well as distributing word-targets across nine word-positions in the test-sentences. The presence or absence of a context sentence, varied across the two experiments, allowed an estimate of between-sentence effects on local and global processes. The combined results, presenting a detailed picture of the temporal structuring of these various processes, provided evidence for an on-line interactive language processing theory, in which lexical, structural (syntactic), and interpretative knowledge sources communicate and interact during processing in an optimally efficient and accurate manner.
This article reviews research on the use of situation models in language comprehension and memory retrieval over the past 15 years. Situation models are integrated mental representations of a described state of affairs. Significant progress has been made in the scientific understanding of how situation models are involved in language comprehension and memory retrieval. Much of this research focuses on establishing the existence of situation models, often by using tasks that assess one dimension of a situation model. However, the authors argue that the time has now come for researchers to begin to take the multidimensionality of situation models seriously. The authors offer a theoretical framework and some methodological observations that may help researchers to tackle this issue.
The construction of word meanings in a discourse context was conceptualized as a process of sense activation, sense selection,
and sense elaboration. In three experiments, subjects read texts presented by a rapid serial visual procedure and performed
a lexical decision on visually presented targets that followed ambiguous prime words. When the target was a word, it was either
an associate of the prime word, a probable inference suggested by the discourse, or an unrelated word. For associates, lexical
decisions that related to either the appropriate or the inappropriate sense of the ambiguous word were generally facilitated
at short (200-400 msec) prime-target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). At longer SOAs, responses were faster to appropriate
than to inappropriate associates. For the thematic inferences, there was no difference between these (appropriate) inferences
and (inappropriate) control words at short SOAs. At long SOAs (1,000 and 1,500 msec), however, inference words were facilitated.
The results are interpreted as consistent with a model of lexical processing in which sense activation functions independently
of context. Discourse context effects, whether on sense selection (suppression of inappropriate associates) or on sense elaboration
(creation of inferences), are seen as postlexical.
In contrast to expectation-based, predictive views of discourse comprehension, a model is developed in which the initial processing is strictly bottom-up. Word meanings are activated, propositions are formed, and inferences and elaborations are produced without regard to the discourse context. However, a network of interrelated items is created in this manner, which can be integrated into a coherent structure through a spreading activation process. Data concerning the time course of word identification in a discourse context are examined. A simulation of arithmetic word-problem understanding provides a plausible account for some well-known phenomena in this area.
Human speech consists of a nearly continuous stream of auditory input, so that the semantic message formed by combinations of words must be analyzed as the input continues. The minimum duration signal necessary to identify a set of words was established via the gating technique: Subjects were asked to identify (or guess) words after hearing only the initial 50, 100, or 150 ms, etc. Results showed that most words were identified before their acoustic offset: Average word duration was 600 ms, but identification accuracy was close to 90% after 350 ms of input. The isolation points established in the gating experiment were compared to the time course of semantic integration evident in event‐related brain potentials (ERPs). The gated words were used as congruous and incongruous sentence completions (in their full‐duration versions). Differential ERP responses to contextually appropriate and inappropriate words were observed by 200 ms after word onset, before the acoustic signal was sufficient to uniquely identify the words. These results indicate that semantic integration can begin to operate with only partial, incomplete information about word identity. If time allows, the talk will also describe similarities and differences between the semantic processing of words and environmental sounds.
Previous research on the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) has dealt primarily with measuring the degree of expectancy on the part of the reader as a result of the context within a sentence. Research has shown that when the final word in a sentence is unexpected or incoherent, a greater N400 amplitude is elicited than if the final word is expected or coherent within the context of the sentence. The present study investigated whether the N400 component is sensitive to global, as well as local, semantic expectancy. Global coherence refers to the ease with which subjects can relate the current proposition they are reading with theme-related ideas. In the present study, the effect of global coherence on event-related brain potentials was tested using four titled and untitled paragraphs (Bransford & Johnson, 1972; Dooling & Lachman, 1971), presented one word at a time. These paragraphs are noncoherent, and are made coherent only with the presentation of a title. The EEG was recorded in response to every word in all four paragraphs. We found an increase in N400 amplitude in response to the words in the Untitled paragraphs relative to the Titled paragraphs, indicating that global coherence does affect the N400. In addition, subjects in the Titled group showed an enhanced P1-N1 component relative to the Untitled group suggesting that the presence of global coherence allows greater attention to be allocated to early visual processing of words.
The results of 4 experiments, which involved 239 college students, indicate that the presence of a connective such as
because increases the activation level of the 1st clause when placed between 2 clauses of a sentence. Immediately after reading 2 clauses that were either linked or not linked by a connective, Ss judged whether a probe word had been mentioned in 1 of the clauses. The recognition probe times to the verb from the 1st statement were faster when a connective had conjoined the statements than when the statements constituted 2 separate sentences. Exp 2 indicated that the reactivation of the 1st clause occurred at the end of the 2nd statement but not at the beginning of the 2nd statement. The results of Exp 3 revealed that the reactivation effect occurred for related statement pairs but not for unrelated statement pairs. Exp 4 showed that the reactivation effect also generalized to the connective
although. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Readers′ gaze durations are longer on biased homographs (those having one highly dominant meaning) than on unambiguous control words when the preceding context instantiates the homograph′s subordinate meaning. In two experiments, we attempted to eliminate this subordinate bias effect by increasing the contextual bias in favor of the homograph′s subordinate meaning. In both experiments, subjects′ eye movements were recorded as they read target sentences containing biased homographs in which immediate prior context instantiated the subordinate meaning of the word. In the first experiment, subjects were familiarized with the subordinate sense of the critical homograph via a paired-associate task prior to reading the target sentence. In the second experiment, the target sentence formed the last line of an extended passage whose global discourse biased the subordinate meaning of the critical homograph. In addition, the presence or absence of a prior instance of the critical homograph (instantiated in its subordinate sense) at an earlier location in the passage was manipulated. In neither experiment did the increase in contextual bias result in a reduction of the subordinate bias effect. We argue that these results are inconsistent with a selective account of lexical access.
Ferreira and Clifton (1986, Experiment 1) found that readers experienced equal difficulty with temporarily ambiguous reduced relatives clauses when the first noun was animate (e.g., "The defendant examined by the lawyer was . . .") and when it was inanimate and thus an unlikely Agent (e.g., "The evidence examined . . ."). This data pattern suggested that a verb′s semantic constraints do not affect initial syntactic ambiguity resolution. We repeated the experiment using: (1) inanimate noun/verb combinations that did not easily permit a main clause continuation, (2) a baseline condition with morphologically unambiguous verbs (e.g., "stolen"), (3) a homogeneous set of disambiguating prepositional phrases, and (4) a display in which all of the critical regions were presented on the same line of text. In two eye-movement experiments, animacy had immediate effects on ambiguity resolution: only animate nouns showed clear signs of difficulty. Post-hoc regression analyses revealed that what little processing difficulty readers had with the inanimate nouns varied with the semantic fit of individual noun/verb combinations: items with strong semantic fit showed no processing difficulty compared to unambiguous controls, whereas items with weak semantic fit showed a pattern of processing difficulty which was similar to Ferreira and Clifton (1986). The results are interpreted within the framework of an evidential (constraint-based) approach to ambiguity resolution. Analyses of reading times also suggested that the millisecond per character correction for region length is problematic, especially for small scoring regions. An alternative transformation is suggested.
Previous research on the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) has dealt primarily with measuring the degree of expectancy on the part of the reader as a result of the context within a sentence. Research has shown that when the final word in a sentence is unexpected or incoherent, a greater N400 amplitude is elicited than if the final word is expected or coherent within the context of the sentence. The present study investigated whether the N400 component is sensitive to global, as well as local, semantic expectancy. Global coherence refers to the ease with which subjects can relate the current proposition they are reading with theme-related ideas. In the present study, the effect of global coherence on event-related brain potentials was tested using four titled and untitled paragraphs (Bransford & Johnson, 1972; Dooling & Lachman, 1971), presented one word at a time. These paragraphs are noncoherent, and are made coherent only with the presentation of a title. The EEG was recorded in response to every word in all four paragraphs. We found an increase in N400 amplitude in response to the words in the Untitled paragraphs relative to the Titled paragraphs, indicating that global coherence does affect the N400. In addition, subjects in the Titled group showed an enhanced P1-N1 component relative to the Untitled group suggesting that the presence of global coherence allows greater attention to be allocated to early visual processing of words.
Language comprehension requires the activation, coordination, and integration of different kinds of linguistic knowledge. This chapter focuses on the processing of syntactic and semantic information during sentence comprehension, and reviews research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), positron emission tomography (PET), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The ERP data provide evidence for a number of qualitatively distinct components that can be linked to distinct aspects of language understand- ing. In particular, the separation of meaning and structure in language is associated with different ERP profiles, providing a basic neurobiological constraint for models of comprehension. PET and fMRI research on sentence-level processing is at present quite limited. The data clearly implicate the left peri- sylvian area as critical for syntactic processing, as well as for as- pects of higher-order semantic processing. The emerging picture indicates that sets of areas need to be distinguished,
The subject of this book is the event-related brain potential (ERP) and its use in studies of cognitive processing in human Ss. Our principal motivation for putting the book together is to draw attention to the considerable corpus of research that uses the ERP approach to address issues relevant to present-day cognitive psychology.
The first 2 chapters include a review of ERP methodology and the concept of an ERP component, as well as an account of the rationale for the use of ERPs in cognitive psychology, the advantages this brings over the employment exclusively of behavioural indices of processing, and the major difficulties that afflict the interpretation of ERP data. . . . Subsequent chapters review ERP work in 4 areas—attention, mental chronometry, memory, and language—that are both central to the concerns of human experimental and cognitive psychology and which have been the subject of significant ERP research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Excerpts available on Google Books.
The Puzzle of Language Use: How Do We Ever Understand Each Other?Pragmatics as the Application of Conversational Principles to Sentence MeaningsThe Process of Reasoning: How Do Hearers ever Manage to Choose the Right Interpretation?The Interaction between Linguistic Processing and General ProcessingSummary
Introduction: What Is the Animate-Inanimate Distinction and Why Is It Important?What Knowledge About Animacy Is Present in Infancy?What Are the Developmental Paths by Which this Knowledge Becomes Enriched Over Time?How Does an Animacy Distinction Inform Other Aspects of Cognitive Development?Summary and Conclusions
References
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate how and when a semantic factor (animacy) affects the early analysis of a difficult syntactic structure, namely, object relative sentences. We contrasted electrophysiological and behavioral responses to two object relative types that were syntactically and lexically identical and varied only in the order of the component animate and inanimate nouns [Inanimate (Animate) vs. Animate (Inanimate)]. ERPs were recorded from 40 subjects to each word of 30 I(A) and 30 A(I) sentences that occurred randomly among a set of various other sentence types read for comprehension. ERP effects to the early noun animacy manipulation were observed beginning with the initial noun and extending past the main clause verbs. We interpret the timing and multitude of electrophysiological effects, including the N400, P600, and left-anterior negativity, as evidence that both semantic and syntactic, and perhaps other types of information, are used early during structural analysis and message-level computations as needed for comprehension.
According to the multistage model of figurative language understanding, literal meanings must be developed before figurative meanings. Although the model implies that figurative understanding should take longer than literal understanding, Kemper (1981) reported that figuratively biased proverbs were processed more quickly than literalized proverbs. By contrast, in the present study the results from six experiments yielded the opposite conclusion. These results support the multistage model and the conceptual base theory of proverb comprehension (Honeck, 1997; Honeck & Temple, 1994; Honeck, Voegtle, Dorfmueller, & Hoffman, 1980) which incorporates it. Discrepancies between studies that have examined the multistage model may crucially depend on methodological factors such as type of experimental design, materials, and, as apparent in the present case, the task and dependent measure used.
Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they inspected a semi-realistic visual scene showing a boy, a cake, and various distractor objects. Whilst viewing this scene, they heard sentences such as ‘the boy will move the cake’ or ‘the boy will eat the cake’. The cake was the only edible object portrayed in the scene. In each of two experiments, the onset of saccadic eye movements to the target object (the cake) was significantly later in the move condition than in the eat condition; saccades to the target were launched after the onset of the spoken word cake in the move condition, but before its onset in the eat condition. The results suggest that information at the verb can be used to restrict the domain within the context to which subsequent reference will be made by the (as yet unencountered) post-verbal grammatical object. The data support a hypothesis in which sentence processing is driven by the predictive relationships between verbs, their syntactic arguments, and the real-world contexts in which they occur.
While much work has been done investigating the role of context in the incremental processing of syntactic indeterminacies, relatively little is known about online semantic interpretation. The experiments in this article made use of the eye-tracking paradigm with spoken language and visual contexts in order to examine how, and when listeners make use of contextually-defined contrast in interpreting simple prenominal adjectives. Experiment 1 focused on intersective adjectives. Experiment 1A provided further evidence that intersective adjectives are processed incrementally. Experiment 1B compared response times to follow instructions such as ‘Pick up the blue comb ’ under conditions where there were two blue objects (e.g. a blue pen and a blue comb), but only one of these objects had a contrasting member in the display. Responses were faster to objects with a contrasting member, establishing that the listeners initially assume a contrastive interpretation for intersective adjectives. Experiments 2 and 3 focused on vague scalar adjectives examining the time course with which listeners establish contrast for scalar adjectives such as tall using information provided by the head noun (e.g. glass) and information provided by the visual context. Use of head-based information was
Cognitive grammar takes a nonstandard view of linguistic semantics and grammatical structure. Meaning is equated with conceptualization. Semantic structures are characterized relative to cognitive domains, and derive their value by construing the content of these domains in a specific fashion. Grammar is not a distinct level of linguistic representation, but reduces instead to the structuring and symbolization of conceptual content. All grammatical units are symbolic: Basic categories (e.g., noun and verb) are held to be nationally definable, and grammatical rules are analyzed as symbolic units that are both complex and schematic. These concepts permit a revealing account of grammatical composition with notable descriptive advantages.
This paper evaluates the psychological status of literal meaning. Most linguistic and philosophical theories assume that sentences have well-specified literal meanings which represent the meaning of a sentence independent of context. Recent debate on this issue has centered on whether literal meaning can be equated with context-free meaning, or whether a sentence's literal meaning is determined only given a set of background assumptions. Neither of these positions meet the demands of a psychological theory of language understanding. Sentences do not have well-defined literal meanings, regardless of whether these are determined in light of a set of background assumptions. Moreover, the putative literal meanings of sentences do not contribute in systematic ways toward the understanding of speakers' utterance meanings. These observations suggest that the distinctions between literal and metaphoric meanings, and between semantics and pragmatics, have little psychological validity.
In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals' communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.'s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky's conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility.
We claim that the animate and inanimate conceptual categories represent evolutionarily adapted domain-specific knowledge systems that are subserved by distinct neural mechanisms, thereby allowing for their selective impairment in conditions of brain damage. On this view, (some of) the category-specific deficits that have recently been reported in the cognitive neuropsychological literature - for example, the selective damage or sparing of knowledge about animals - are truly categorical effects. Here, we articulate and defend this thesis against the dominant, reductionist theory of category-specific deficits, which holds that the categorical nature of the deficits is the result of selective damage to noncategorically organized visual or functional semantic subsystems. On the latter view, the sensory/functional dimension provides the fundamental organizing principle of the semantic system. Since, according to the latter theory, sensory and functional properties are differentially important in determining the meaning of the members of different semantic categories, selective damage to the visual or the functional semantic subsystem will result in a category-like deficit. A review of the literature and the results of a new case of category-specific deficit will show that the domain-specific knowledge framework provides a better account of category-specific deficits than the sensory/functional dichotomy theory.