Coercion and Compositionality

Baggio, Giosué; Choma, Travis; Lambalgen, Michiel van; Hagoort, Peter

doi:10.1162/jocn.2009.21303

Cited by 78 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 48 publications

(71 reference statements)

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“…However, a number of previous studies using sentence contexts have reported N400 effects of semantic integration difficulty when cloze probability was relatively well-matched [23,24,25,26,67,68,69]. Although in each individual case one might argue that predictability or association was not perfectly controlled, taken together the results lend support to the idea that integration difficulty does modulate the N400 to some extent.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 61%

A Direct Comparison of N400 Effects of Predictability and Incongruity in Adjective-Noun Combination

et al. 2016

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*Previous work has shown that the N400 ERP component is elicited by all words, whether presented in isolation or in structured contexts, and that its amplitude is modulated by semantic association and contextual predictability. What is less clear is the extent to which the N400 response is modulated by semantic incongruity when predictability is held constant. In the current study we examine N400 modulation associated with independent manipulations of predictability and congruity in an adjective-noun paradigm that allows us to precisely control predictability through corpus counts. Our results demonstrate small N400 effects of semantic congruity (yellow bag vs. innocent bag), and much more robust N400 effects of predictability (runny nose vs. dainty nose) under the same conditions. These data argue against unitary N400 theories according to which N400 effects of both predictability and incongruity reflect a common process such as degree of integration difficulty, as large N400 effects of predictability were observed in the absence of large N400 effects of incongruity. However, the data are consistent with some versions of unitary 'facilitated access' N400 theories, as well as multiple-generator accounts according to which the N400 can be independently modulated by facilitated conceptual/lexical access (as with predictability) and integration difficulty (as with incongruity, perhaps to a greater extent in full sentential contexts).

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 61%

A Direct Comparison of N400 Effects of Predictability and Incongruity in Adjective-Noun Combination

et al. 2016

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“…Perhaps the observed effect is more sustained because the processes that are involved in defeasible reasoning are more demanding than in a "discourse-N400" paradigm. In a recent study, Baggio, Choma, van Lambalgen, and Hagoort (2010) found a similar sustained central negativity for coercion verbs such as to begin in "The journalist began the article before his coffee break" compared to "The journalist wrote the article before his coffee break." The first sentence requires the reader to infer what is actually meant by began.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…Thus, coercion verbs involve some semantic enrichment, which seems to require additional processing. Baggio et al (2010) suggest that the sustained central negativity-or "N400-like shift"-they observed may be associated with more complex, inference-driven integration of information into a semantic representation. In a similar way, the observed sustained negativity in the present study could also reflect more complex, inference-driven interpretive processes, resulting in a sustained N400-like effect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Reasoning with Exceptions: An Event-related Brain Potentials Study

Pijnacker

Geurts

Lambalgen³

et al. 2011

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Abstract■ Defeasible inferences are inferences that can be revised in the light of new information. Although defeasible inferences are pervasive in everyday communication, little is known about how and when they are processed by the brain. This study examined the electrophysiological signature of defeasible reasoning using a modified version of the suppression task. Participants were presented with conditional inferences (of the type "if p, then q; p, therefore q") that were preceded by a congruent or a disabling context. The disabling context contained a possible exception or precondition that prevented people from drawing the conclusion. Acceptability of the conclusion was indeed lower in the disabling condition compared to the congruent condition. Further, we found a large sustained negativity at the conclusion of the disabling condition relative to the congruent condition, which started around 250 msec and was persistent throughout the entire epoch.Possible accounts for the observed effect are discussed. ■

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“…Psycholinguistic studies, using a variety of experimental paradigms, report that combining an entity-denoting complement with a coercion verb (John began the book) engenders more processing cost than combining it with a non-coercion verb (John read/wrote the book) during real-time comprehension (Baggio et al 2010;Frisson and McElree 2008;Katsika et al 2012;Lapata et al 2003;McElree et al 2001McElree et al , 2006Pickering et al 2005Pickering et al , 2006Scheepers et al 2004Scheepers et al , 2008Traxler et al 2002Traxler et al , 2005. On the neurolinguistic side, it has been found that the complement coercion effect recruits three distinct cortical regions: Wernicke's area (Piñango et al 2001), ventro-medial 1 The term coercion is widely used to describe diverse phenomena in which it appears that interpretations are derived despite apparent semantic incongruity or mismatch between the combining expressions.…”

Section: The Complement Coercion Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complement Coercion as the Processing of Aspectual Verbs: Evidence from Self-paced Reading and fMRI

Lai

Lacadie

Constable

et al. 2017

Language, Cognition, and Mind

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The so-called coercion verbs have been taken to select for an event as their complement, and to coerce an entity-denoting complement into an event as a resolution to the predictable type mismatch. This process is reported to manifest as additional processing cost that unpredictably has been associated with more than one cortical recruitment locus. Recent work has challenged the traditional view showing that the processing effect is observed only for aspectual verbs (e.g., begin) but not psychological verbs (e.g., enjoy) (Katsika et al. 2012), and that contra the traditional assumption aspectual verbs not only select for events but also for entity-denoting complements (Piñango and Deo 2015). Here, we test the hypothesis that aspectual verbs require their complement to be conceptualized as a structured individual. These verbs encode a set of functions that allow the construal of the structured individual as an axis along a dimension (e.g. spatial, eventive) afforded by the complement. The processing cost associated with the composition of the "coercion configuration" (animate subject + aspectual verb + entity-denoting complement) emerges from (A) exhaustive retrieval of the verbs' lexical functions and (B) resolution of dimension ambiguity. Results from a self-paced reading and an fMRI experiment confirm that processing aspectual-verb sentences is more costly than psychological-verb counterparts, and that consistently with previous findings, comprehension is associated with both a Wernicke's area and a left inferior frontal cortex activation. Crucially, this activation pattern tracks the necessary exhaustive lexical retrieval of the functions at the verb (Wernicke's area) and the subsequent ambiguity resolution of the dimension at the complement (LIFG) required for the interpretation of the aspectual-verb utterance.

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Coercion and Compositionality

Cited by 78 publications

References 48 publications

A Direct Comparison of N400 Effects of Predictability and Incongruity in Adjective-Noun Combination

A Direct Comparison of N400 Effects of Predictability and Incongruity in Adjective-Noun Combination

Reasoning with Exceptions: An Event-related Brain Potentials Study

Complement Coercion as the Processing of Aspectual Verbs: Evidence from Self-paced Reading and fMRI

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