Integration of Word Meaning and World Knowledge in Language Comprehension

Hagoort, Peter; Hald, Lea A.; Bastiaansen, Marcel C. M.; Petersson, Karl Magnus

doi:10.1126/science.1095455

Cited by 995 publications

(966 citation statements)

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“…In other words they violated so-called 'world knowledge' about typical human actions in ecological environments. For this reasons we expected the congruent/incongruent contrast to elicit a N400 similar to the one discovered by Hagoort et al [4] for linguistically mediated pragmatic knowledge. As for earlier ERP components, we did not have specific expectations since, to our knowledge; incongruent human actions vs. congruent human actions were never previously compared in ERP investigations.…”

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confidence: 56%

“…The study of N400 behaviour has helped us to understand how meanings are accessed, stored and integrated in the lexical semantic system. It has also been demonstrated that N400 is sensitive not only to word meanings but also to violations of world knowledge learned during everyday life [4] or to semantic violations in deaf native signers [23].However, to our knowledge, the observation of linguistic components has not been applied so far to the study of gesture coding, for which it is known that there are permanent representational units in the inferior parietal and inferior frontal cortex. Indeed, apart from communicative gestures such as sign language (e.g., ASl or BSL), goal-directed gestures whose intent is not communicative are also recognized as unitary meaningful units by premotor and somatosensory mirror neurons.…”

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RP and N400 ERP components reflect semantic violations in visual processing of human actions

Proverbio

Riva

2009

Neuroscience Letters

123

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Since their discovery during the late decades of the last century, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have contributed greatly to understanding the neural bases of cognitive processes and especially of language [14], [13] and [12]. In particular, the N400 component, a large negative deflection peaking at about 400 ms over centro-parietal scalp areas, has been related to semantic integration [1] and lexical access processes [11] and [15]. It is a rather well established notion that N400 is sensitive to word frequency, class, concreteness, orthographic neighbours, close probability, semantic relatedness, contextual constraint, prototypicity (see an exhaustive review in [10]), idiomaticity [2], age of language acquisition [26] and language proficiency [27], with higher amplitudes to less familiar or expected items. N400 neural generators seem to include the left temporal cortex (both posterior (VWFA) and anterior) [24] and [21], the left inferior frontal gyrus and the angular gyrus [15]. The study of N400 behaviour has helped us to understand how meanings are accessed, stored and integrated in the lexical semantic system. It has also been demonstrated that N400 is sensitive not only to word meanings but also to violations of world knowledge learned during everyday life [4] or to semantic violations in deaf native signers [23].However, to our knowledge, the observation of linguistic components has not been applied so far to the study of gesture coding, for which it is known that there are permanent representational units in the inferior parietal and inferior frontal cortex. Indeed, apart from communicative gestures such as sign language (e.g., ASl or BSL), goal-directed gestures whose intent is not communicative are also recognized as unitary meaningful units by premotor and somatosensory mirror neurons. Indeed a left inferior parietal lesion (BA40) is associated with the inability to recognize or imitate a gesture (such as brushing teeth or flipping a coin) or to perform skilled actions (such as lighting a cigarette or making coffee), which is a deficit called apraxia (the linguistic counterpart of this might correspond to a posterior aphasia). Interestingly, an ERP study on ASL processing reported greater amplitude signals originating in the parietal cortices of native than of late signers [22]. [34] provides evidence that a fronto-parietal mirror system, including the inferior frontal gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule and superior temporal sulcus, is involved in action coding and comprehension in humans. The evidence comes from the observation that goal-directed vs. non-goal-directed actions (e.g., picking up vs. just reaching), or more salient (e.g., grasping a glass to drink) vs. less salient (e.g., grasping a glass to clean up) actions, specifically activate the mirror neuron circuits. Human data are paralleled by neurophysiological recordings of macaque mirror neuron activity showing, e.g., a differential neural coding in area F5 for grasping to eat vs. grasping to throw away. However, no clear and dir...

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RP and N400 ERP components reflect semantic violations in visual processing of human actions

Proverbio

Riva

2009

Neuroscience Letters

123

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“…Both experiments yielded N400 effects that are interpreted to reflect postlexical integration processes, in particular the difficulty of integrating sentence-final words into the preceding context (Friederici, 2002;Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, and Petersson, 2004;Kutas, and Van Petten, 1994). The different magnitude of the N400 between semantic and phonological errors in Experiment 2 suggests an additional difference in lexical processing (Besson et al, 1992;Praamstra et al, 1994;Radeau et al, 1995Radeau et al, , 1998Rugg, 1990;Van Petten, and Luka, 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

Event-related brain potentials during the monitoring of speech errors

et al. 2009

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a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f oWhen we perceive speech, our goal is to extract the meaning of the verbal message which includes semantic processing. However, how deeply do we process speech in different situations? In two experiments, native Dutch participants heard spoken sentences describing simultaneously presented pictures. Sentences either correctly described the pictures or contained an anomalous final word (i.e. a semantically or phonologically incongruent word). In the first experiment, spoken sentences were task-irrelevant and both anomalous conditions elicited similar centro-parietal N400s that were larger in amplitude than the N400 for the correct condition. In the second experiment, we ensured that participants processed the same stimuli semantically. In an early time window, we found similar phonological mismatch negativities for both anomalous conditions compared to the correct condition. These negativities were followed by an N400 that was larger for semantic than phonological errors. Together, these data suggest that we process speech semantically, even if the speech is task-irrelevant. Once listeners allocate more cognitive resources to the processing of speech, we suggest that they make predictions for upcoming words, presumably by means of the production system and an internal monitoring loop, to facilitate lexical processing of the perceived speech.

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“…Extensive research in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience has shown that the amplitude of this ERP component is directly influenced by inconsistencies of local and contextual information (e.g. Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004;Van Berkum, Zwitserlood, Hagoort, & Brown, 2003), as well as the degree of plausibility for the overall message (DeLong, Quante, & Kutas, 2014). For example, typical N400 responses to local semantic anomalies (e.g.…”

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Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Ferguson

Cane

2015

Brain Research

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Recent empirical research suggests that understanding a counterfactual event (e.g. 'If Josie had revised, she would have passed her exams') activates mental representations of both the factual and counterfactual versions of events. However, it remains unclear when readers switch between these models during comprehension, and whether representing multiple 'worlds' is cognitively effortful. This paper reports two ERP studies where participants read contexts that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, followed by a second sentence describing a consequence of this event.Critically, this sentence included a noun that was either consistent or inconsistent with the preceding context, and either included a modal verb to indicate reference to the counterfactualworld or not (thus referring to the factual-world). Experiment 2 used adapted versions of the materials used in Experiment 1 to examine the degree to which representing multiple versions of a counterfactual situation makes heavy demands on cognitive resources by measuring individuals' working memory capacity. Results showed that when reference to the counterfactual-world was maintained by the ongoing discourse, readers correctly interpreted events according to the counterfactual-world (i.e. showed larger N400 for inconsistent than consistent words). In contrast, when cues referred back to the factual-world, readers showed no difference between consistent and inconsistent critical words, suggesting that they simultaneously compared information against both possible worlds. These results support previous dualrepresentation accounts for counterfactuals, and provide new evidence that linguistic cues can guide the reader in selecting which world model to evaluate incoming information against.Crucially, we reveal evidence that maintaining and updating a hypothetical model over time relies upon the availability of cognitive resources.

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Integration of Word Meaning and World Knowledge in Language Comprehension

Cited by 995 publications

References 17 publications

RP and N400 ERP components reflect semantic violations in visual processing of human actions

RP and N400 ERP components reflect semantic violations in visual processing of human actions

Event-related brain potentials during the monitoring of speech errors

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

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