Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

Nieuwland, Mante S.; Martin, Andrea E.; Carreiras, Manuel

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2013.04.005

Cited by 29 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Although syntactic deficits are more often associated with the AN component, later-occurring negativities resembling the N400 component have been found for morphosyntactic violations (e.g., [48, 69]). As such, recent work has suggested that the dominance of the N400 or the P600 component provides insight into the competition between two interactive processing “streams” [29, 52, 77].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural patterns elicited by sentence processing uniquely characterize typical development, SLI recovery, and SLI persistence

Haebig

Weber

Leonard

et al. 2017

J Neurodevelop Disord

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BackgroundA substantial amount of work has examined language abilities in young children with specific language impairment (SLI); however, our understanding of the developmental trajectory of language impairment is limited. Along with studying the behavioral changes that occur across development, it is important to examine the neural indices of language processing for children with different language trajectories. The current study sought to examine behavioral and neural bases of language processing in adolescents showing three different trajectories: those with normal language development (NL), those exhibiting persistent SLI (SLI-Persistent), and those with a history of SLI who appear to have recovered (SLI-Recovered).MethodsThrough a sentence judgment task, we examined semantic and syntactic processing. Adolescents judged whether or not each sentence was semantically and syntactically correct. Stimuli consisted of naturally spoken sentences that were either correct, contained a semantic verb error, or contained a syntactic verb agreement error. Verb agreement errors consisted of omission and commission violations of the third-person singular -s. Behavioral button-press responses and electroencephalographic recordings were collected. Behavioral judgments and mean amplitude of the N400 and P600 components were examined.ResultsAdolescents in the SLI-Persistent group had lower sentence judgment accuracy overall, relative to the NL and SLI-Recovered groups. Accuracy in judging omission and commission syntactic errors were marginally different, with marginally lower accuracy for commission errors. All groups demonstrated an N400 component elicited by semantic violations. However, adolescents in the SLI-Persistent group demonstrated a less robust P600 component for syntactic violations. Furthermore, adolescents in the SLI-Recovered group exhibited a similar neural profile to the NL group for the semantic and syntactic omission violations. However, a unique profile with initial negativity was observed in the SLI-Recovered group in the commission violation condition.ConclusionsAdolescents with persistent language impairment continue to demonstrate delays in language processing at the behavioral and neural levels. Conversely, the adolescents in the SLI-Recovered group appear to have made gains in language processing skills to overcome their initial impairments. However, our findings suggest that the adolescents in the SLI-Recovered group may have compensatory processing strategies for some aspects of language, as evidenced by a unique event-related potential profile.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural patterns elicited by sentence processing uniquely characterize typical development, SLI recovery, and SLI persistence

Haebig

Weber

Leonard

et al. 2017

J Neurodevelop Disord

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“…Nieuwland et al (2013) found that ungrammatical superfluous case marking on inanimate direct objects gave rise to a P600 effect compared to a grammatical condition, which is commonly observed with syntactic violations, but that ungrammatical missing markers on animate direct objects led to an N400 effect as compared to grammatical marking, which is commonly taken as an indicator of semantic difficulty in sentence comprehension. This outcome thus demonstrates the multifaceted nature of DOM in L1 Spanish and demonstrates the importance of semantic principles with animate objects in particular.…”

Section: Case Marking In Spanishmentioning

confidence: 96%

The processing of case in near-native Spanish

Jegerski

2015

Second Language Research

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This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among native speakers of Spanish, which probably reflects linguistic differences in the two types of case. In addition, the overall outcome of two experiments shows that second language (L2) processing can integrate case information, but that, unlike with native processing, attention to a case marker may depend on the presence of a preverbal clitic as an additional cue to the types of postverbal arguments that might occur in a stimulus. Specifically, L2 readers showed no sensitivity to differential object marking with a in the absence of clitics in the first experiment, with stimuli such as Verónica visita al/el presidente todos los meses 'Veronica visits the [ACC/NOM] president every month', but the L2 readers in the second experiment showed native-like sensitivity to the same marker when the object it marked was doubled by the clitic lo, as in Verónica lo visita al/el presidente todos los meses. With indirect objects, on the other hand, sensitivity to case markers was native-like in both experiments, although indirect objects were also always doubled by the preverbal clitic le. The apparent first language / second language contrast suggests differences in processing strategy, whereby non-native processing of morphosyntax may rely more on the predictability of forms than does native processing.

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“…Most ERP research on animacy processing has used the N400 (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980), an ERP component strongly associated with semantic retrieval and integration processes (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011;Van Berkum, 2009). For example, words that meet the animacy requirements or preferences imposed by the preceding context elicit smaller N400 amplitudes than words that do not, suggesting a processing advantage for words that meet animacy restrictions or preferences (e.g., Nieuwland, Martin, & Carreiras, 2013;Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2005Paczynski & Kuperberg, 2012). Sentence-initial animate nouns elicit smaller N400s than appropriately matched inanimate nouns (Weckerly & Kutas, 1999), a finding that is consistent with the tendency of English speakers to start sentences with animate entities (e.g., Branigan, Pickering, & Tanaka, 2008; see also Clark, 1965), and which therefore leads to a preference for sentence-initial animate nouns in listeners and readers.…”

Section: Effects Of Animacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Concurrent use of animacy and event-knowledge during comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials

Vega-Mendoza¹,

Pickering²,

Nieuwland³

2017

Preprint

Self Cite

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In two ERP experiments, we investigated whether readers prioritize animacy over real-world event-knowledge during sentence comprehension. We used the paradigm of Paczynski and Kuperberg (2012), who argued that animacy is prioritized based on the observations that the ‘related anomaly effect’ (reduced N400s for context-related anomalous words compared to unrelated words) does not occur for animacy violations, and that animacy violations but not relatedness violations elicit P600 effects. Participants read passive sentences with plausible agents (e.g., The prescription for the mental disorder was written by the psychiatrist) or implausible agents that varied in animacy and semantic relatedness (schizophrenic/guard/pill/fence). In Experiment 1 (with a plausibility judgment task), plausible sentences elicited smaller N400s relative to all types of implausible sentences. Moreover, animate words elicited smaller N400s than inanimate words, and related words elicited smaller N400s than unrelated words. Crucially, at the P600 time-window, we observed more positive ERPs for animate than inanimate words and for related than unrelated words at anterior regions. In Experiment 2 (with no judgment task), we observed an N400 effect with animacy violations, but no other effects. Taken together, the results of our experiments fail to support a prioritized role of animacy information over real-world event-knowledge, but they support an interactive, constraint-based view on incremental semantic processing.

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Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

Cited by 29 publications

References 52 publications

Neural patterns elicited by sentence processing uniquely characterize typical development, SLI recovery, and SLI persistence

Neural patterns elicited by sentence processing uniquely characterize typical development, SLI recovery, and SLI persistence

The processing of case in near-native Spanish

Concurrent use of animacy and event-knowledge during comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials

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