An ERP study of P600 effects elicited by semantic anomalies

Herten, M. van; Kolk, Herman; Chwilla, Dorothee J.

doi:10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.09.002

Cited by 305 publications

(306 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…This could be taken to suggest that within language comprehension, the P600 effect is not exclusively associated with syntactic analysis (cf. Kolk et al, 2003;Van Herten et al, 2005). In line with our earlier remarks, however, and on grounds of parsimony, we believe that it makes more sense to consider the possibility that in these cases, syntax somehow gets the blame as well.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 81%

“…For reasons outlined elsewhere Hagoort, 1999, see also Snijders et al, 2005), the suggestion that the P600 effect is really a P300 oddball effect (Coulson and Kutas, 1998) can most likely be put aside. However, P600-like effects have also been observed in paradigms where an N400 effect would have been more obvious (Kim and Osterhout, 2006;Kolk et al, 2003;Kuperberg et al, 2003;Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2005;Van Herten et al, 2005). This could be taken to suggest that within language comprehension, the P600 effect is not exclusively associated with syntactic analysis (cf.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The phenomenon does bear an interesting resemblance to the fact that socalled semantic reversal anomalies, such as in "For breakfast the eggs would only eat toast and jam" (Kuperberg et al, 2003), "The cat that fled from the mice ran through the room" (Kolk et al, 2003;Van Herten et al, 2005), or "The mysterious crime had been solving" (Kim and Osterhout, 2005) also elicit a P600 effect. We agree with Osterhout and colleagues (see also Osterhout et al, 2003, pp.…”

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confidence: 89%

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Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Berkum¹,

Koornneef²,

Otten³

et al. 2007

Brain Research

194

214

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The electrophysiology of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like "he did it" or "the little girl", combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough-readers and listeners also need to work out what or who is being referred to. We review our event-related brain potential research on the processes involved in establishing reference, and present a new experiment in which we examine when and how the implicit causality associated with specific interpersonal verbs affects the interpretation of a referentially ambiguous pronoun. The evidence suggests that upon encountering a singular noun or pronoun, readers and listeners immediately inspect their situation model for a suitable discourse entity, such that they can discriminate between having too many, too few, or exactly the right number of referents within at most half a second. Furthermore, our implicit causality findings indicate that a fragment like "David praised Linda because…" can immediately foreground a particular referent, to the extent that a subsequent "he" is at least initially construed as a syntactic error. In all, our brain potential findings suggest that referential processing is highly incremental, and not necessarily contingent upon the syntax. In addition, they demonstrate that we can use ERPs to relatively selectively keep track of how readers and listeners establish reference. IntroductionWords reliably mean things. In fact, something about word meaning is invariant enough to be listed in a dictionary. Here, for example, is what the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary lists for the word "girl":girl (noun): 1. a female child or young woman, especially one still at school: "Two girls showed us round the classrooms."Of course, we all know that when a word is placed in the context of other words, shades of meaning can emerge. For "girl", some of the most familiar ones are listed in the dictionary too: girl (noun): ……… 2. a daughter: "We have two girls.", "My little girl is five." 3. [usually plural] a woman worker, especially when seen as one of a group: "shop/office girls" 4. [always plural] one of a group of female friends: "I'm going out with the girls tonight.", "The girls at work gave it to me"

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 89%

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Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Berkum¹,

Koornneef²,

Otten³

et al. 2007

Brain Research

194

214

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“…When the word at which such sentences are rendered semantically anomalous has a strong lexico-semantic fit (e.g., ''eat'' in the above example), it does not elicit an N400 effect, but instead elicits a late positivity [18,21,22,49]. Because the polarity, timing, and scalp distribution of this positivity strongly resembles that of the syntax-related P600 effect (see [32] for review), it has in all abovementioned studies been taken to be an instance of the latter.…”

Section: The Late Positivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because the polarity, timing, and scalp distribution of this positivity strongly resembles that of the syntax-related P600 effect (see [32] for review), it has in all abovementioned studies been taken to be an instance of the latter. The functional account of the P600 effect that is assumed by these authors varies from thematic or syntactic reanalysis in order to obtain a plausible sentence [18,22], to a monitoring process that checks upon the veridicality of ones sentence perception [21,49].…”

Section: The Late Positivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the limits of the semantic illusion phenomenon: ERPs reveal temporary semantic change deafness in discourse comprehension

Nieuwland

Berkum

2005

Cognitive Brain Research

121

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In general, language comprehension is surprisingly reliable. Listeners very rapidly extract meaning from the unfolding speech signal, on a word-by-word basis, and usually successfully. Research on Fsemantic illusions_ however suggests that under certain conditions, people fail to notice that the linguistic input simply doesn't make sense. In the current event-related brain potentials (ERP) study, we examined whether listeners would, under such conditions, spontaneously detect an anomaly in which a human character central to the story at hand (e.g., ''a tourist'') was suddenly replaced by an inanimate object (e.g., ''a suitcase''). Because this replacement introduced a very powerful coherence break, we expected listeners to immediately notice the anomaly and generate the standard ERP effect associated with incoherent language, the N400 effect. However, instead of the standard N400 effect, anomalous words elicited a positive ERP effect from about 500 -600 ms onwards. The absence of an N400 effect suggests that subjects did not immediately notice the anomaly, and that for a few hundred milliseconds the comprehension system has converged on an apparently coherent but factually incorrect interpretation. The presence of the later ERP effect indicates that subjects were processing for comprehension and did ultimately detect the anomaly. Therefore, we take the absence of a regular N400 effect as the online manifestation of a temporary semantic illusion. Our results also show that even attentive listeners sometimes fail to notice a radical change in the nature of a story character, and therefore suggest a case of short-lived Fsemantic change deafness_ in language comprehension. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Theme: Neural basis of behavior Topic: Cognition

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Sentence Processing and Interpretation in Monolinguals and Bilinguals

Traxler

Hoversten

2017

The Handbook of Psycholinguistics

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An ERP study of P600 effects elicited by semantic anomalies

Cited by 305 publications

References 46 publications

Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Testing the limits of the semantic illusion phenomenon: ERPs reveal temporary semantic change deafness in discourse comprehension

Sentence Processing and Interpretation in Monolinguals and Bilinguals

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