Lexical access and selection of contextually appropriate meaning for ambiguous words

Ihara, Atsushi; Hayakawa, Tomoe; Wei, Qiang; Munetsuna, Shinji; Fujimaki, Norio

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.07.047

Cited by 37 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 74 publications

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“…An inhibition process is responsible for reducing the activation of unsuited knowledge (Debruille et al 2008). For example, the presentation of a lexically ambiguous word (i.e., an instance of two or moremeanings being mapped onto identical phonological forms in the mental lexicon) has been shown to unconsciously trigger the activation of all of that word's lexical meanings, even when the previous context is compatible with only one of them (Ihara et al 2007). As a consequence, inhibition, which yields the selective activation of the appropriate meaning, must occur.…”

Section: Erps For Inhibition Between 400 and 800 Msmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-Related Brain Potentials in the Study of Inhibition: Cognitive Control, Source Localization and Age-Related Modulations

et al. 2014

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In the previous fifteen years, a variety of experimental paradigms and methods have been employed to study inhibition. In the current review, we analyze studies that have used the high temporal resolution of the event-related potential (ERP) technique to identify the temporal course of inhibition to understand the various processes that contribute to inhibition. ERP studies with a focus on normal aging are specifically analyzed because they contribute to a deeper understanding of inhibition. Three time windows are proposed to organize the ERP data collected using inhibition paradigms: the 200 ms period following stimulus onset; the period between 200 and 400 ms after stimulus onset; and the period between 400 and 800 ms after stimulus onset. In the first 200 ms, ERP inhibition research has primarily focused on N1 and P1 as the ERP components associated with inhibition. The inhibitory processing in the second time window has been associated with the N2 and P3 ERP components. Finally, in the third time window, inhibition has primarily been associated with the N400 and N450 ERP components. Source localization studies are analyzed to examine 2 the association between the inhibition processes that are indexed by the ERP components and their functional brain areas. Inhibition can be organized in a complex functional structure that is not constrained to a specific time point but, rather, extends its activity through different time windows. This review characterizes inhibition as a set of processes rather than a unitary process.

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Section: Erps For Inhibition Between 400 and 800 Msmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-Related Brain Potentials in the Study of Inhibition: Cognitive Control, Source Localization and Age-Related Modulations

et al. 2014

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“…However, our prior work (Lee & Federmeier, 2009), buttressed by neuroimaging findings (Gennari, MacDonald, Postle, & Seidenberg, 2007;Ihara, Hayakawa, Wei, Munetsuna, & Fujimaki, 2007;Rodd, Davis, & Johnsrude, 2005;Zempleni, Renken, Hoeks, Hoogduin, & Stowe, 2007), indicates that multiple neural mechanisms are involved in ambiguity resolution, and that the nature of the information provided by different types of context is important for determining when and how these mechanisms are recruited. The current study was designed to examine whether normal aging imposes differential effects on these subsystems, and, more specifically, to test the hypothesis that the more controlled, topdown, frontal mechanisms important for resolving ambiguity under difficult selection conditions would be more affected by advancing age than the mechanisms used to resolve ambiguity in the presence of biasing semantic supports.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential age effects on lexical ambiguity resolution mechanisms

Federmeier¹,

Lee²

2010

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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Multiple neurocognitive subsystems are involved in resolving lexical ambiguity under different circumstances. We examined how processing in these subsystems changes with normal aging by comparing ERP responses to homographs and unambiguous words completing congruent sentences (with both semantic and syntactic contextual information) or syntactic prose (syntactic information only). Like young adults in prior work, older adults elicited more negative N400s to homographs in congruent sentences, suggesting mismatch between the context and residual activation of the contextually-irrelevant sense. However, the frontal negativity seen in young adults to homographs in syntactically well-defined but semantically neutral contexts was absent in older adults as a group, suggesting decline in recruiting additional neural resources to aid difficult semantic selection. A subset of older adults with high verbal fluency maintained a young-like effect pattern.Human language is difficult in part because it consists of inherently arbitrary pairings between forms and meanings. Moreover, a single form is oftentimes associated with multiple interpretations. For example, 'watch' can refer to a timing device or an action of observing. One of the challenges of human language processing is therefore to solve these ubiquitous one-to-many mapping problems in the face of time pressure, using (when possible) a variety of contextual constraints such as lexical associations, syntactic structure, and message-level semantic information.Aging is usually associated with cognitive as well as biological decline. However, it has been shown that different aspects of cerebral and cognitive aging take place along multiple trajectories. For example, frontal lobe regions undergo more age-related deterioration than other brain areas in terms of volume (Raz et al., 2005), amount of grey and white matter (Moseley, 2002;Resnick, Pham, Kraut, Zonderman, & Davatzikos, 2003), and white matter integrity (Head et al., 2004;Sullivan & Pfefferbaum, 2006). Similar disproportional agerelated changes are also found across cognitive domains: in particular, executive/controlled processes (which are usually considered to be frontally mediated), as opposed to stimulusdriven ones, tend to be more affected by age (DiGirolamo et al., 2001;Foster, Black, Buck, & Bronskill, 1997; Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999;Jonides et al., 2000;Vanderaspoilden, Adam, Van Der Linden, & Morais, 2007).Differential age effects have also been observed within the specific domain of language processing. Overall, language has been described as a facet of cognitive processing that is (Burke & Peters, 1986;Howard, 1980;Park et al., 2002;Stern, Prather, Swinney, & Zurif, 1991). However, in fact, some aspects of language abilities are better preserved than others. On the one hand, there is ample evidence that word-related knowledge and the ability to link perceptual word forms to meaning remains relatively intact across the lifespan. For example, it has been shown that, across adulthood, vocabulary ...

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“…We shall explain the practical issues affecting the use of epoch filters by illustrating an analysis of the ERF of an actual semantic priming experiment (Ihara et al, 2007). In typical semantic priming experiments, a pair of words (prime and target) is sequentially presented to a subject and a task (e.g., button-pressing) is required to be performed only on the target word.…”

Section: Actual Erf Analysis With Epoch Filtersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fifty-one orientation-fixed dipoles are used for building the leadfield matrix and 12 dipoles (Dipoles 1-12) out of the 51 are selected. Note that these 12 dipole activities showed conditional differences (Ihara et al, 2007). Each of these 12 dipoles belongs to one of six regions of interest (ROIs) (right-side , Fig.…”

Section: Semantic Priming Erfmentioning

confidence: 99%