What Can Neuroimaging Research Tell Us About Inference Generation during Text Comprehension?

Virtue, Sandra; Sundermeier, Brian A.

doi:10.1111/lnc3.12193

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In the following discussion, I consider both of these together-sometimes under the umbrella term electrophysiology, which typically includes both electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography, and which distinguishes these methods from haemodynamic methods (such as functional magnetic resonance imaging) which have substantially different properties. 2 For similar challenges in the application of haemodynamic neuroscientific methods to research on other kinds of inferences, see Virtue and Sundermeier (2016). 3 In this study, I will continue to refer to these enriched meanings, such as 'some but not all', as 'implicatures' or 'inferences' when discussing research that tests when and how such meanings are realised.…”

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confidence: 99%

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What can electrophysiology tell us about the cognitive processing of scalar implicatures?

Politzer-Ahles

2020

Language and Linguist. Compass

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One of the most widely studied phenomena in neuropragmatics-the study of how the brain derives context-and speaker-based aspects of meaning-is scalar implicature. A scalar implicature is the interpretation of a proposition like Some of the students failed as meaning that a stronger proposition (Not all of the students failed) is not true. While scalar implicatures have been a significant object of study for decades, in recent years there has been an explosion of experiments investigating them using neuroscientific methods, particularly electroencephalography. Much of this research aims to identify neural substrates of comprehending scalar implicatures. Here, I review the extant findings and argue that the most of these studies have not directly observed neural correlates of scalar implicatures; rather, they have mostly observed downstream and/or domain-general processes that happen to be related to implicatures, but not uniquely so. I argue that an instrumental approach to neuroscience-one that treats brain components not as objects of research in of themselves, but as tools for learning about pragmatics-would be a valuable addition to this emerging field. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 2 For similar challenges in the application of haemodynamic neuroscientific methods to research on other kinds of inferences, see Virtue and Sundermeier (2016). …”

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What can electrophysiology tell us about the cognitive processing of scalar implicatures?

Politzer-Ahles

2020

Language and Linguist. Compass

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“…This search generated 986 articles in the Web of Science database and 734 articles in the PubMed database. In order to avoid omission, we additionally considered the studies in the relevant meta-analyses (Prado et al, 2011;Yang et al, 2019;Wertheim and Ragni, 2020) and reviews (e.g., Barbey and Patterson, 2011;Virtue and Sundermeier, 2016;Brascamp et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018), and the studies that cited those meta-analyses and reviews.…”

Section: Elaborative Inferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Neural Correlates of Causal Inferences in Discourse Understanding and Logical Problem-Solving: A Meta-Analysis Study

Feng

Wang

Liu

et al. 2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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In discourse comprehension, we need to draw inferences to make sense of discourse. Previous neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural correlates of causal inferences in discourse understanding. However, these findings have been divergent, and how these types of inferences are related to causal inferences in logical problem-solving remains unclear. Using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach, the current meta-analysis analyzed 19 experiments on causal inferences in discourse understanding and 20 experiments on those in logical problem-solving to identify the neural correlates of these two cognitive processes and their shared and distinct neural correlates. We found that causal inferences in discourse comprehension recruited a left-lateralized frontotemporal brain system, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and the bilateral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), while causal inferences in logical problem-solving engaged a nonoverlapping brain system in the frontal and parietal cortex, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the bilateral middle frontal gyri, the dorsal MPFC, and the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL). Furthermore, the pattern similarity analyses showed that causal inferences in discourse understanding were primarily related to the terms about language processing and theory-of-mind processing. Both types of inferences were found to be related to the terms about memory and executive function. These findings suggest that causal inferences in discourse understanding recruit distinct neural bases from those in logical problem-solving and rely more on semantic knowledge and social interaction experiences.

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What Can Neuroimaging Research Tell Us About Inference Generation during Text Comprehension?

Cited by 2 publications

References 48 publications

What can electrophysiology tell us about the cognitive processing of scalar implicatures?

What can electrophysiology tell us about the cognitive processing of scalar implicatures?

Neural Correlates of Causal Inferences in Discourse Understanding and Logical Problem-Solving: A Meta-Analysis Study

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