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It has been hypothesized that the subject, at the onset of a sentence, usually determines the perspective of the reader in sentence comprehension. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural basis underlying the mental perspective shift in sentence comprehension. Participants observed an event consisting of two objects, immediately after their perspective was guided to one particular object by a spatial cue. The participants then judged whether the displayed sentence correctly described the previous event. If the subject of the sentence did not match the reader΄s predetermined perspective, then a mental perspective shift should occur. We found that the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) showed greater activation under the invalid-cue conditions requiring the mental perspective shift. The right dlPFC might therefore subserve the mental perspective shift in sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relative clause comprehension requires figuring out the role of the head noun in the relative clause. English speakers find it easier to understand relative clauses in which the head noun plays the subject role (e.g., The official who interrogated the councilman…) than those in which the head noun plays the object role (e.g., The official who the councilman interrogated…). A number of explanations have been proposed, some of which predict that the same asymmetry should hold in all languages and others of which predict that the direction of the asymmetry should vary across languages, depending on language properties. Mandarin Chinese provides an opportunity to pit different explanations against one another because it has head-final relative clauses, which helps deconfound some of the proposed explanations, but previous studies of Mandarin have produced rather mixed results. In two reading time studies in Mandarin, we find that 1) object relatives are easier to understand than subject relatives, which is the opposite pattern for English and supports the accounts that predict cross-linguistic differences, 2) it is easier to understand a relative clause whose head noun is omitted, as is allowed in Mandarin, if the sentence contains animacy cues that help disambiguate the sentences and 3) a semantic feature such as animacy contributes to similarity-based interference during sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores the issue of garden-path in the comprehension of head-final relative clauses (particularly in Chinese and Japanese). Experimental data from two self-paced reading studies in Chinese are compared, showing the existence of a main-clause garden-path effect on the object-extracted relative clause modifying the object of the matrix clause. Different approaches adopted to indicate an upcoming relative clause (and thus to avoid a potential garden-path effect) are evaluated, including using internal relative-clause markers, classifier-noun mismatches, relativization-inducing contexts and providing specific instructions on the existence and position of relative clauses in the matrix clauses. The garden-path effect associated with a relative clause can be avoided by using a classifier-noun mismatch along with a carefully constructed referential context. Experiments giving specific instructions on the existence of relative clauses can also diminish the garden-path effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study has as a central focus the role that pre-linguistic non- verbal information plays in the construction of meaning. More specifically this study explores the role that mental representations - triggered by exposure to ˵visual sentences″ - play on the understanding of written sentences describing them. Ninety-four university graduate and undergraduate students participated in this experimental study characterized by wo modalities (plausible vs. implausible) and four different conditions allowing for the matching up of each visual sentence (Image) with the written sentence (Text) describing it (or not). The results, which are meant to measure (1) the length of time that each participant took to decide whether or not the written sentence described the visual one, and (2) the number of errors that occurred during this decision making process, show that the length of time was shorter when both the visual and the written sentence were plausible. More errors occurred when the written text describing the visual sentence was implausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]