Resumo: Este trabalho trata da cronologia computacional no processamento de sentenças. Recentes pesquisas com potenciais bioelétricos relacionados a eventos (ERPs), usando frases com papéis temáticos invertidos sob a luz da Teoria da Ilusão Semântica, desafiam o pressuposto de que os processos sintático-semânticos estejam acoplados. Através de dois experimentos (voz ativa e passiva) testamos sentenças com papel temático invertido em três condições. Reestabelecemos uma correspondência direta entre modelos Sintaxe-Primeiro e o processamento de sentenças on-line, relacionando-os com recentes descobertas neurofisiológicas de que há duas vias de processamento, a via ventral, para palavras e itens coordenados e, a dorsal, para estruturas hierárquicas. Encontramos evidências em favor do modelo SintaxePrimeiro. Os potencias N400 e P600 parecem ser modulados pela assimetria sujeito-objeto, refletindo, respectivamente, a concatenação do argumento interno ao verbo e a integração do argumento externo.
Palavras-chave:Sintaxe-semântica; Linguística; Neurociência da Linguagem; EEG/ERPs, Metodologia ExperimentalAbstract: This paper is about the computational chronology of sentence processing. Using rolereverse sentences, recent ERPs studies, in light of Semantic Illusion Theory, have challenged the assumption that syntactic-semantic processes are coupled. We ran two ERP experiments (active and passive voice) using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in role-reversed sentences in three conditions, trying to reestablish a direct correspondence between syntax-first models and on-line sentence processing and relating them to new neurophysiological findings of two processing pathways, a ventral and a dorsal, the first for words and coordinated items and the second for hierarchical structures. We found evidence in favor of a syntax-first account. The N400 and P600 appear to be modulated by the subject-object asymmetry, reflecting, respectively, the merge of the internal argument with the verb and, the integration of the external argument. : http://dx.doi. org/10.15448/1984-7726.2015.3.18411 Este artigo está licenciado sob forma de uma licença Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0 Internacional, que permite uso irrestrito, distribuição e reprodução em qualquer meio, desde que a publicação original seja corretamente citada.
RESUMO Objetivo Verificar os benefícios do Treinamento de Memória de Trabalho em DVD para idosos. Método Participaram do estudo 16 voluntários com idade superior a 60 anos (média etária de 67,43 anos) sem queixas de perda auditiva, problemas neurológicos ou psiquiátricos, avaliados inicialmente com o MEEM e posteriormente com a avaliação específica para memória de trabalho. Em seguida, os quatro participantes que não tinham disponibilidade para comparecer à Universidade formaram o grupo controle e os doze restantes foram incluídos no grupo experimental. O grupo experimental foi exposto aos três DVDs que compõem o primeiro conjunto de exercícios e reavaliado com o teste específico para memória de trabalho em intervalos regulares. O grupo controle também foi submetido às reavaliações nos mesmos períodos do grupo experimental. Resultados Enquanto o grupo controle não apresentou qualquer alteração nas avaliações, o desempenho no teste de memória do grupo experimental melhorou significativamente após a apresentação dos DVDs. Além disso, o grupo experimental relatou os benefícios do treinamento para suas atividades cotidianas. Conclusão O estudo demonstra os benefícios do Treinamento de Memória de Trabalho em DVD para idosos, que se revela uma ferramenta promissora para novos estudos longitudinais com populações maiores.
Hierarchical or indirect recursion can be found in different domains of human language and thus, it has been claimed to be the only part of language that is specific to humans (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). However, in the past decade, both the claims that, recursion is the central component of the “narrow faculty of language” and that, it should be present in all languages have been the object of intense debate (cf. Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005; Everett, 2005). This debate triggered the exploration of new frontiers in the examination of embedded structures, which have been examined in acquisition and in processing and have been shown to be implemented through a wide array of linguistic resources in different languages. This paper presents an acoustic description and a neuro-psycholinguistic analysis (ERP/EEG) of an uncommon cognitive device to embed relative clauses. It is implemented in Karajá, a Macro-Je language spoken in Central Brazil, which uses pitch accent to signal relativization: (i) [tori do‟rode] „the white man arrived‟ versus (ii) [tori doro‟de] „the white man who arrived‟, first described in Ribeiro as stress shift (2006). The major interest in studying this phenomenon is because in Karajá, more than structuring envelopes for acts of speech, prosody codes directly onto the central syntactic algorithm of recursion. We found evidence in favor of a stronger facilitation to process a coordinated structure than a recursive structure. We found smaller RTs and amplitudes in the EEG related to the coordinated conditions versus the embedding conditions. Also, it seems that even though embedding is harder to launch, hierarchical structuring makes it easier to process in the third embedding, when comprehenders learn they are in an embedding mode. Coordination, on the other hand, being a default, is easier to launch, but it seems to become progressively harder as it does not benefit from hierarchical structuring.
An interesting fact about language cognition is that stimulation involving incongruence in the merge operation between verb and complement has often been related to a negative event-related potential (ERP) of augmented amplitude and latency of ca. 400 ms -the N 400 . Using an automatic ERP latency and amplitude estimator to facilitate the recognition of waves with a low signal-to-noise ratio, the objective of the present study was to study the N 400 statistically in 24 volunteers. Stimulation consisted of 80 experimental sentences (40 congruous and 40 incongruous), generated in Brazilian Portuguese, involving two distinct local verb-argument combinations (nominal object and pronominal object series). For each volunteer, the EEG was simultaneously acquired at 20 derivations, topographically localized according to the 10-20 International System. A computerized routine for automatic N 400 -peak marking (based on the ascendant zero-cross of the first waveform derivative) was applied to the estimated individual ERP waveform for congruous and incongruous sentences in both series for all ERP topographic derivations. Peak-to-peak N 400 amplitude was significantly augmented (P < 0.05; one-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test) due to incongruence in derivations F 3 , T 3 , C 3 , C z , T 5 , P 3 , P z , and P 4 for nominal object series and in P 3 , P z and P 4 for pronominal object series. The results also indicated high inter-individual variability in ERP waveforms, suggesting that the usual procedure of grand averaging might not be considered a generally adequate approach. Hence, signal processing statistical techniques should be applied in neurolinguistic ERP studies allowing waveform analysis with low signal-to-noise ratio.
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