Search

• A meta-analysis of visual world eye-tracking studies on phonological prediction. • A small and short-lived but reliable effect of phonological prediction. • The effect occurred early and not around the predictable word onset. • Listeners predict phonology as soon as possible but may not predict when it occurs. Current theories of language prediction stipulate that people can predict various types of linguistic information, including the phonological form of a highly predictable word, and some theories posit that phonological prediction plays a pivotal role in prediction-driven learning. However, a review of studies investigating phonological prediction suggests that the effect is inconsistent and small, which raises a question about its role during everyday language comprehension and language learning. Here, I conduct a meta-analysis of visual-world eye-tracking studies investigating phonological prediction with the goal of revealing the robustness and the time-course of the phonological prediction effect. The combined analysis of 20 experiments revealed a small but reliable effect of the phonological prediction effect. This effect emerged rapidly but was not closely aligned to the predictable word onset. The size of this effect depended on the target word cloze probability and depended marginally on the experiment design and the type of visual stimuli. I discuss the implications for the theories of language prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Visual-scene depictions improve sentence comprehension regardless of age. • Visual depictions improve comprehension more in situation of high task demands. • Age-related changes in comprehension tend to be modulated by individual cognitive-ability levels. Evidence for age-related declines in syntactic comprehension is mixed, often modulated by concomitant cognitive changes. Further, while older (vs. younger) adults may make greater use of semantic information for sentence comprehension, it is unclear whether this extends to visual information. We investigated whether visual-scene depictions benefit sentence comprehension in adults with varying cognitive-ability levels. 153 participants (18–70 years) listened to German relative clauses with canonical/noncanonical structure ("This is the man who follows the woman"/"...whom the woman follows") presented in isolation or alongside visual-scene depictions, and answered agent-identification questions. Visual-scene depictions facilitated comprehension, especially when individuals with lower cognitive-ability levels encountered noncanonical structures. Individual differences in cognitive ability tended to modulate age-related changes in comprehension of utterances presented in isolation. These findings indicate beneficial effects of visual information for thematic-role comprehension – especially when task demands are high – and that cognitive-ability levels may modulate age-related changes in comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated how reflexives and object pronouns in Turkish are processed in aphasia as compared to a group of unimpaired controls. We aimed to understand (i) the moment-by-moment time course of processing reflexive forms, and (ii) and overt/null object pronouns in Turkish people with aphasia (PWA). We administered two eye-movement-monitoring during-listening experiments exploring resolution of reflexive variables (Experiment 1) and object pronouns (Experiment 2) in 6 PW A and their controls (n = 26). Our findings showed that interpretation of reflexive anaphors in Turkish is variable, and PWA are employing a non-local interpretation of reflexive anaphors to tackle down referential ambiguity in the absence of an ability to integrate contextual cues. Furthermore, PWA inappropriately considered inaccessible local antecedents for object pronouns, and they encountered limitations processing discourse antecedents. We argue that anaphoric processing profiles in aphasia face strong limitations by variable interpretability of pronominal reference and PWA's inability to integrate contextual cues to disambiguate the intended antecedents. • Interpretation of reflexive anaphors in Turkish is variable. • In aphasia integrating contextual information to resolve anaphoric reference is difficult. • Turkish PWA demonstrated a strong consideration towards non-local antecedents as a processing strategy. • Turkish PWA inappropriately considered a local antecedent for object pronouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates two broad classes of language processing accounts that make predictions for sentences like "The admirer of the singer(s) apparently thinks...". Feature distortion accounts predict increased processing difficulty at the verb in sentences with a plural distractor noun (singers) while similarity-based interference accounts predict the opposite: increased difficulty in sentences with a singular distractor noun (singer). Neither of these effects was reliably observed in earlier research, and the Bayesian meta-analysis of 31 published studies reported here is almost perfectly inconclusive. An explanation may be that both effects occur simultaneously and therefore mask each other. To test this idea, we conducted three single-trial self-paced reading experiments ( N 1 = 4 , 296 , N 2 = 3 , 920 , N 3 = 3 , 559) which orthogonally manipulated agreement attraction and inhibitory interference. Surprisingly, all three experiments produced evidence for agreement attraction but none for inhibitory interference, which supports feature distortion but not similarity-based interference accounts. Experiment 4 ( N 4 = 3 , 535) tested the role of the expected task by preparing participants for a comprehension question (vs. acceptability judgment in Experiments 1–3). It showed neither agreement attraction nor inhibitory interference effects. Our findings demonstrate that agreement attraction effects can arise in grammatical sentences – contra earlier research – but also that these effects crucially depend on the task. This explains inconsistent results in prior research and supports feature distortion as the driving force behind attraction effects in grammatical sentences. • Three experiments show agreement attraction effects in grammatical sentences. • The same experiments produced no evidence for similarly-based interference. • Expt. 4 shows that agreement attraction effects crucially depend on the offline task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real-time sentence comprehension, the comprehender is often required to establish syntactic dependencies between words that are linearly distant. Major models of sentence comprehension assume that longer dependencies are more difficult to process because of working memory limitations. While the expected effect of distance on reading times (locality effect) has been robustly observed in certain constructions, such as relative clauses in English, its generalizability to a wider range of constructions has been empirically questioned. The current study proposes a new metric of syntactic distance that capitalizes on the flexible constituency of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), and argues that it offers a unified account of the locality effects. It is shown that this metric correctly predicts both the presence of the locality effect in English relative clauses and its absence in verb-final languages, without assuming language- or dependency-specific differences in the sensitivity to the locality effect. It is further shown that the CCG-based distance is a significant predictor of the self-paced reading times from an English corpus, even when other known predictors such as dependency-based locality and surprisal are taken into account. These results suggest that human sentence comprehension involves rapid integration of input words into efficiently compressed syntactic representations, and CCG is a plausible theory of the grammar that subserves this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In three experiments, we study the processing of cataphoric reflexives. • We find that readers initially process cataphoric reflexives anaphorically. • We interpret this as evidence of pressure to interpret reflexives incrementally. • Anaphoric and cataphoric reflexives show differential sensitivity to syntax. English reflexives like herself tend to associate with a structurally prominent local antecedent in online processing. However, past work has primarily investigated reflexives in canonical direct object positions. The present study investigates cataphoric reflexives in fronted wh -predicates (e.g., The mechanic that James hired predicted how annoyed with himself the insurance agent would be). Here, the reflexive is encountered in advance of its grammatical antecedent. We ask two questions. First, will readers engage an anaphoric (backwards-looking) or cataphoric (forwards-looking) search for an antecedent? Two, how similar is this process to the retrieval process for direct object reflexives? In two eye-tracking experiments, we found that readers initially interpret a cataphoric reflexive anaphorically, and tend to associate the reflexive with the more recently encountered antecedent. We propose that structural guidance for reflexive resolution occurs only when the necessary configurational syntactic information is available when the reflexive is encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The present study examined the relative contribution of bottom-up word identification and top-down sentence-level constraints in facilitating the reading of text printed without between-word spacing. We compared reading of grammatically correct sentences and shuffled versions of the same words presented both with normal spacing and without spaces. We found that reading was hampered by removing sentence structure as well as by removing spaces. A significantly greater impact of sentence structure when reading unspaced text was found in probe word identification accuracies and total viewing times per word, whereas the impact of sentence structure on the probability of making a regressive eye movement was greater when reading normally spaced text. Crucially, we also found that the length of the currently fixated word determined the amplitude of forward saccades leaving that word during the reading of unspaced text. We conclude that the relative ease with which skilled readers can read unspaced text is due to a combination of an increased use of bottom-up word identification in guiding the timing and targeting of eye movements, plus an increased interactivity between word identification and sentence-level processing. Highlights • We examine how sentence-level structures facilitate reading of unspaced text. • Top-down feedback helps reading of unspaced text by facilitating word identification. • Readers can identify words in the absence of word boundary information. • Readers use word identification to guide eye movements in unspaced text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complete understanding of the predictive processing effect in sentence comprehension needs to understand both the facilitation effect of successful prediction and the cost associated with disconfirmed predictions. The current study compares the predictive processing effect across two types of contexts in Mandarin Chinese: the classifier-noun vs. verb-noun phrases, when controlling for the degree of contextual constraints and cloze probability of the target nouns across the two contexts. The two contexts showed similar N400 patterns for expected target nouns, indicative of an identical facilitation effect of confirmed contextual expectation. But in the post-N400 time window, the processing cost associated with the unexpected words differed between the two contexts. Additional differences between the two contexts were also revealed by the neural oscillation patterns obtained prior to the target noun. The differences between the classifier vs. verb contexts shed new light on the revision mechanism that deals with disconfirmed expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In everyday communication, speakers make errors and produce language in a noisy environment. Recent work suggests that comprehenders possess cognitive mechanisms for dealing with noise in the linguistic signal: a noisy-channel model. A key parameter of these models is the noise model: the comprehender's implicit model of how noise affects utterances before they are perceived. Here we examine this noise model in detail, asking whether comprehension behavior reflects a noise model that is adapted to context. We asked readers to correct sentences if they noticed errors, and manipulated context by including exposure sentences containing obvious deletions (A bystander was rescued by the fireman in the nick time.), insertions, exchanges, mixed errors, or no errors. On test sentences (The bat swung the player.), participants' corrections differed depending on the exposure condition. The results demonstrate that participants model specific types of errors and make inferences about the intentions of the speaker accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Recent treatment protocols have been successful in improving working memory (WM) in individuals with aphasia. However, the evidence to date is small and the extent to which improvements in trained tasks of WM transfer to untrained memory tasks, spoken sentence comprehension, and functional communication is yet poorly understood. To address these issues, we conducted a multiple baseline study with three German-speaking individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia. Participants practised two computerised WM tasks ( n -back with pictures and n -back with spoken words) four times a week for a month, targeting two WM processes: updating WM representations and resolving interference. All participants showed improvement on at least one measure of spoken sentence comprehension and everyday memory activities. Two of them showed improvement also on measures of WM and functional communication. Our results suggest that WM can be improved through computerised training in chronic aphasia and this can transfer to spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication in some individuals. Highlights • Working memory improved after an adaptive n -back training in three participants with chronic post-stroke aphasia. • We detected a mixed pattern of transfer of training across participants. • Outcome measures showing improvements after training included tests of spoken sentence comprehension, functional communication, and everyday memory. • Improvements in spoken sentence comprehension were maintained at six weeks after completion of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The role of short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension has been controversial; many neuropsychological studies and studies with neurologically intact individuals have revealed co-occurrence of STM/WM and sentence comprehension while other studies have found no relation between the two. The aim of this article is to revisit the association between memory capacity and sentence comprehension by systematically reviewing all relevant studies in the aphasia literature published between 1980 and June 2017. Emphasis was placed on the methods used in the eligible studies. The studies that reported data from correlation analyses exploring the relationship between sentence comprehension performance and performance on memory tasks were pooled in a group-level meta-analysis. The meta-analysis showed a correlation between the magnitude of performances on STM/WM tasks and performances on sentence comprehension tasks. Possible interpretations of this correlation are discussed. Highlights • The relationship between memory and sentence comprehension is explored. • Twenty-six studies from the aphasia literature were systematically reviewed. • Data from studies that report correlations were pooled in a group-level meta-analysis. • The meta-analysis showed a correlation between memory and sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There remains little consensus about whether there exist meaningful individual differences in syntactic processing and, if so, what explains them. We argue that this partially reflects the fact that few psycholinguistic studies of individual differences include multiple constructs, multiple measures per construct, or tests for reliable measures. Here, we replicated three major syntactic phenomena in the psycholinguistic literature: use of verb distributional statistics, difficulty of object- versus subject-extracted relative clauses, and resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities. We examine whether any individual differences in these phenomena could be predicted by language experience or general cognitive abilities (phonological ability, verbal working memory capacity, inhibitory control, and perceptual speed). We find correlations between individual differences and offline, but not online, syntactic phenomena. Condition effects on online reading time were not consistent within individuals, limiting their ability to correlate with other measures. We suggest that this might explain controversy over individual differences in language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the role of verbal short-term memory (STM) and executive function (EF) underlying semantic and syntactic interference resolution during sentence comprehension for persons with aphasia (PWA) with varying degrees of STM and EF deficits. Semantic interference was manipulated by varying the semantic plausibility of the intervening NP as subject of the verb and syntactic interference was manipulated by varying whether the NP was another subject or an object. Nine PWA were assessed on sentence reading times and on comprehension question performance. PWA showed exaggerated semantic and syntactic interference effects relative to healthy age-matched control subjects. Importantly, correlational analyses showed that while answering comprehension questions, PWA’ semantic STM capacity related to their ability to resolve semantic but not syntactic interference. In contrast, PWA’ EF abilities related to their ability to resolve syntactic but not semantic interference. Phonological STM deficits were not related to the ability to resolve either type of interference. The results for semantic interference are consistent with prior findings indicating a role for semantic but not phonological STM in sentence comprehension, specifically with regard to maintaining semantic information prior to integration. The results for syntactic interference are consistent with the recent findings suggesting that EF is critical for syntactic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of sentence comprehension must allow for the possibility of noise in the input, e.g., from speaker error, listener mishearing, or environmental noise. Consequently, semantically implausible sentences such as The girl tossed the apple the boy are often interpreted as a semantically plausible alternative (e.g., The girl tossed the apple to the boy). Previous investigations of noisy-channel comprehension have relied exclusively on paradigms with isolated sentences. Because supportive contexts alter the expectations of possible interpretations, the noisy channel framework predicts that context should encourage more inference in interpreting implausible sentences, relative to null contexts (i.e. a lack of context) or unsupportive contexts. In the present work, we tested this prediction in four types of sentence constructions: two where inference is relatively frequent (double object - prepositional object), and two where inference is rare (active-passive). We found evidence that in the two sentence types that commonly elicit inference, supportive contexts encourage noisy-channel inferences about the intended meaning of implausible sentences more than non-supportive contexts or null contexts. These results suggest that noisy-channel inference may be more pervasive in everyday language processing than previously assumed based on work with isolated sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A clinical feature of the nonfluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (naPPA) is asyntactic comprehension. Previous studies have suggested that patients with asyntactic comprehension will probably rely on heuristics, such as considering the first noun as the agent. Japanese is a subject–object–verb language with a flexible word order and overt morphology; therefore, as subject-initial word order can be reordered by a transformation termed as scrambling, the flexible word order and rich morphology in Japanese may affect the sentence comprehension deficits in naPPA. This study aims to clarify the effects of word order and morphological information, such as case particle or verb inflection, on the comprehension of Japanese sentences in naPPA. Four patients with naPPA and 14 age-matched healthy controls were tested. Sentence comprehension was assessed using picture–sentence verification tasks with semantically reversible sentences. Four different sentence types were tested: subject-initial active (agent-first), scrambled active (theme-first), subject-initial passive (theme-first), and scrambled passive (agent-first). Compared with healthy controls, all patients demonstrated lower performance accuracy for the noncanonical sentences; however, there were no significant differences in performance accuracy for the canonical sentences. For the noncanonical sentences, all patients performed at significantly above chance levels for both the subject-initial and scrambled passive sentences but performed at chance levels for the scrambled active sentences. These results indicated that patients with naPPA would not only resort to the heuristics based on word order but will also intermittently use morphological information, and the heuristics would conflict with morphological information for the scrambled active sentences, which affects sentence comprehension deficits in naPPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has explored the degree to which not-at-issue content is interpreted independently of at-issue content, or the main assertion of a sentence (AnderBois, Brasoveanu, & Henderson, 2011; Harris & Potts, 2009; Potts, 2005; Schlenker, 2010; Tonhauser, 2011; a.o.). Building on this work, psycholinguistic research has explored the hypothesis that not-at-issue content, such as appositive relative clauses, is treated distinctly from at-issue content in online processing (Dillon, Clifton, & Frazier, 2014; Syrett & Koev, 2015). In the present paper, we explore the way in which appositive relative clauses interact with their host sentences in the course of incremental sentence comprehension. In an offline acceptability judgment, we find that appositive relative clauses contribute significantly less processing difficulty when they intervene between a filler and its gap than do superficially similar restrictive relative clauses. Results from two eye-tracking-while-reading studies suggests that recently processed restrictive relative clauses interfere to a greater degree with processes of integrating the filler at its gap site than do appositive relative clauses. Our findings suggest that the degree of interference observed during sentence processing may depend on the discourse status of potentially interfering constituents. We propose that this arises because the syntactic form of not-at-issue content is rendered relatively unavailable once it has been processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There is conflicting evidence as to whether receptive language abilities of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) continue to improve into adulthood, reach a plateau in late adolescence, or even start to decline.Aim: The study aims to shed light on the question whether receptive syntactic skills change from childhood/adolescence to adulthood and provides a detailed qualitative analysis of the receptive abilities of adults with DS.Methods: 58 individuals with DS participated in the study: 31 children/adolescents (aged: 4;6-19;0 years) and 27 adults (aged: 20;8-40;3 years). They completed measures of grammar comprehension, nonverbal cognition, and phonological working memory.Results: There was no significant correlation between comprehension performance and chronological age in the overall sample. Separate correlational analyses for the subgroups of children/adolescents and adults yielded a significant positive result for the former subgroup but not for the latter. We also found significant positive correlations between grammar comprehension scores and nonverbal mental age as well as measures of phonological working memory. Qualitative analyses showed various limitations in the receptive syntactic abilities of adults with DS. Difficulties increase with sentence length and grammatical complexity, but are also apparent in simple sentences.Conclusion: The results suggest that syntactic comprehension abilities of individuals with DS continue to improve through childhood and adolescence and that thereafter a plateau is reached and maintained. Language comprehension in adults with DS is impaired for a variety of grammatical structures and receptive performance seems to be related to nonverbal cognitive abilities, phonological working memory, and grammatical complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central question regarding predictive language processing concerns the extent to which linguistic experience modulates the process. We approached this question by investigating sentence processing in advanced second language (L2) users with different native language (L1) backgrounds. Using a visual world eye tracking paradigm, we investigated to what extent L1 and L2 participants showed anticipatory eye movements to objects while listening to Dutch placement event descriptions. L2 groups differed in the degree of similarity between Dutch and their L1 with respect to placement verb semantics: German, like Dutch, specifies object position in placement verbs (put.STAND vs. put.LIE), whereas English and French typically leave position underspecified (put). Results showed that German L2 listeners, like native Dutch listeners, anticipate objects that match the verbally encoded position immediately upon encountering the verb. French/English L2 participants, however, did not show any prediction effects, despite proper understanding of Dutch placement verbs. Our findings suggest that prior experience with a specific semantic contrast in one's L1 facilitates prediction in L2, and hence adds to the evidence that linguistic experience modulates predictive sentence processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactic competence relies on a left-lateralized network converging on hubs in inferior-frontal and posterior-temporal cortices. We address the question whether anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (a-tDCS) over these hubs can modulate comprehension of sentences, whose syntactic complexity systematically varied along the factors embedding depths and canonicity. Semantic content and length of the sentences were kept identical and forced choice picture matching was required after the full sentence had been presented. We used a single-blind, within-subject, sham-controlled design, applying a-tDCS targeting left posterior tempo-parietal (TP) and left inferior frontal cortex (FC). Stimulation sites were determined by individual neuro-navigation. 20 participants were included of whom 19 entered the analysis. Results were analysed using (generalized) mixed models. In a pilot-experiment in another group of 20 participants we validated the manipulation of syntactic complexity by the two factors embedding depth and argument-order. Reaction times increased and accuracy decreased with higher embedding depth and non-canonical argument order in both experiments. Notably a-tDCS over TP enhanced sentence-to-picture matching, while FC-stimulation showed no consistent effect. Moreover, the analysis disclosed a session effect, indicating improvements of task performance especially regarding speed. We conclude that the posterior 'hub' of the neuronal network affording syntactic analysis represents a 'bottleneck', likely due to working-memory capacity and the challenges of mapping semantic to syntactic information allowing for role assignment. While this does not challenge the role of left inferior-frontal cortex for syntax processing and novel-grammar learning, the application of highly established syntactic rules during sentence comprehension may be considered optimized, thus not augmentable by a-tDCS in the uncompromised network. Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (a-tDCS) over left temporo-parietal cortex enhances comprehension of complex sentences in uncompromised young speakers. Since a-tDCS over left frontal cortex did not elicit any change, the 'bottleneck' for the understanding of complex sentences seems to be the posterior, temporo-parietal rather than the anterior inferior-frontal 'hub' of language processing. Regarding the attested role of inferior-frontal cortex in syntax processing, we suggest that its function is optimized in competent young speakers, preventing further enhancement by (facilitatory) tDCS. Results shed light on the functional anatomy of syntax processing during sentence comprehension; moreover, they open perspectives for research in the lesioned language network of people with syntactic deficits due to aphasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Visual-world eyetracking is increasingly used to investigate online language processing in normal and language impaired listeners. Tracking changes in eye movements over time also may be useful for indexing language recovery in those with language impairments. Therefore, it is critical to determine the test-retest reliability of results obtained using this method. Methods Unimpaired young adults and people with aphasia took part in two eyetracking sessions spaced about one week apart. In each session, participants completed a sentence-picture matching task in which they listened to active and passive sentences (e.g., The [ N1+Aux woman was ] [ V visiting/visited ] [ NP/PP2 (by) the man ]) and selected between two pictures with reversed thematic roles. We used intraclass correlations (ICCs) to examine the test-retest reliability of response measures (accuracy, reaction time (RT)) and online eye movements (i.e., the likelihood of fixating the target picture in each region of the sentence) in each participant group. Results In the unimpaired adults, accuracy was at ceiling (thus ICCs were not computed), with moderate ICCs for RT (i.e., 0.4–0.58) for passive sentences and low (<0.4) for actives. In individuals with aphasia, test-retest reliability was strong (0.59 < ICC < 0.75) for accuracy and excellent (>0.75) for RT for both sentence types. Similarly, for the unimpaired listeners, reliability of eye movements was moderate for passive sentences (NP/PP2 region) and low in all regions for active sentences. But, for the aphasic participant group, eye movement reliability was excellent for passive sentences (in the first second after sentence end) and strong for active sentences (V and NP/PP2 regions). Conclusion Results indicated moderate-to-low reliability for unimpaired listeners; however, reliable eye movement patterns were detected for processes specific to passive sentences (e.g., thematic reanalysis). In contrast, individuals with aphasia exhibited strong and stable performance across sentence types in response measures and online eye movements. These findings indicate that visual-world eyetracking provides a reliable measure of online sentence comprehension in aphasia, and thus may be useful for investigating sentence processing changes over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work investigates the role of semantic similarity in sentence production and comprehension. Previous research suggests that animacy and conceptual similarity of the noun concepts within complex descriptive phrases modulate structural preferences in production, and processing cost in comprehension. For example, animate-head phrases such as the girl that the boy is pulling are rare in production and more difficult to understand in comprehension. In contrast, phrases with passive clauses such as the girl being pulled by the boy are commonly produced and more easily understood, as are inanimate-head structures such as the truck the boy is pulling . In three picture-based studies, we examined the mechanisms underlying semantic similarity effects in producing and comprehending these phrases. Study 1 investigated structural preferences in production, whereas Study 2 investigated processing cost in comprehension. Study 3 used eye-tracking to examine the time-course of production processes. The results showed that semantic similarity elicited competition during phrase planning, influenced the choice of syntactic structure in production, and engendered comprehension difficulty in animate-head active configurations. Structural preferences, fixation probabilities reflecting production planning processes and comprehension cost significantly correlated with measures of conceptual similarity across the three studies. We argue that similarity-based competition modulates sentence production and comprehension processes when verbs are planned or interpreted, i.e., when event-based semantic or syntactic roles are determined. In addition to task-specific processes, we suggest that a similar and shared semantic competition mechanism underlies both production and comprehension, a view consistent with existing evidence for common brain regions recruited in both tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilinguals demonstrate benefits on non-linguistic tasks requiring cognitive control-the regulation of mental activity to resolve information-conflict during processing. This "bilingual advantage" has been attributed to the consistent management of two languages, yet it remains unknown if these benefits extend to sentence processing. In monolinguals, cognitive control helps detect and revise misinterpretations of sentence meaning. Here, we test if the bilingual advantage extends to parsing and interpretation by comparing bilinguals' and monolinguals' syntactic ambiguity resolution before and after practicing N-back, a non-syntactic cognitive-control task. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on a high-conflict but not a no-conflict version of N-back and on sentence comprehension, indicating that the advantage extends to language interpretation. Gains on N-back conflict trials also predicted comprehension improvements for ambiguous sentences, suggesting that the bilingual advantage emerges across tasks tapping shared cognitive-control procedures. Because the overall task benefits were observed for conflict and non-conflict trials, bilinguals' advantage may reflect increased cognitive flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mini-discourses like (ia) seem slightly odd compared to their counterparts containing a conjunction (ib). (i) a. Speaker A: John or Bill left. Speaker B: Sam did too. b. Speaker A: John and Bill left. Speaker B: Sam did too. One possibility is that or in Speaker A’s utterance in (ia) raises the potential Question Under Discussion (QUD) whether it was John or Bill who left and Speaker B’s reply fails to address this QUD. A different possibility is that the epistemic state of the speaker of (ia) is somewhat unlikely or uneven: the speaker knows that someone left, and that it was John or Bill, but doesn’t know which one. The results of four acceptability judgment studies confirmed that (ia) is less good or coherent than (ib) (Experiment 1), but not due to failure to address the QUD implicitly introduced by the disjunction because the penalty for disjunction persisted even in the presence of a different overt QUD (Experiment 2) and even when there was no reply to Speaker A (Experiment 3). The hypothesis that accommodating an unusual epistemic state might underlie the lower acceptability of disjunction was supported by the fact that the disjunction penalty is larger in past tense discourses than in future discourses, where partial knowledge of events is the norm (Experiment 4). The results of an eye tracking study revealed a penalty for disjunction relative to conjunction that was significantly smaller when a lead in ( I wonder if it was … ) explicitly introduced the disjunction. This interaction (connective X lead in) appeared in early measures on the disjunctive phrase itself, suggesting that the input is related to an inferred epistemic state of the speaker in a rapid and ongoing fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the meaning of others' actions involves mentally simulating those actions by oneself. Embodied theories of language espouse a prominent role for motor simulation in reading comprehension, especially when words, sentences, or narratives portray everyday actions. Inherent in these actions is the level of agency of the actor. Motor cortex activity in response to processing action verbs has been relatively well-established. What has been less explored, however, are: (1) the neural bases of determining whether an action is intentional or accidental (agency); and (2) whether agency influences level of motor simulation. This functional MRI study investigated how language and motor areas of the brain respond to sentences depicting intentional versus accidental action. 25 healthy adults read a series of sentences in the MRI scanner and determined whether the actions described were accidental or intentional. The main results include: (1) left hemisphere language areas (left inferior frontal gyrus, LIFG; left superior temporal gyrus, LSTG), premotor cortex (PM), and presupplementary motor area (pSMA) were strongly activated by both sentence types; (2) processing accidental action, relative to intentional action, elicited greater activity in LIFG, medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and left amygdala; no statistically significant activity was found in the opposite contrast; and (3) greater percent signal change was observed in LIFG while processing accidental action and in right precentral gyrus for intentional action. The results of this study support language and motor region involvement in action sentence comprehension in accordance with embodiment theories. Additionally, it provides new insight into the linguistic, integrative, and emotional demands of comprehending accidental action, its underlying neural circuitry, and its relationship to intentionality bias: the predisposition to ascribe purpose to action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior structural imaging studies found initial evidence for the link between structural gray matter changes and the development of language performance in children. However, previous studies generally only focused on sentence comprehension. Therefore, little is known about the relationship between structural properties of brain regions relevant to sentence processing and more specific cognitive abilities underlying complex sentence comprehension. In this study, whole-brain magnetic resonance images from 59 children between 5 and 8 years were assessed. Scores on a standardized sentence comprehension test determined grammatical proficiency of our participants. A confirmatory factory analysis corroborated a grammar-relevant and a verbal working memory-relevant factor underlying the measured performance. Voxel-based morphometry of gray matter revealed that while children's ability to assign thematic roles is positively correlated with gray matter probability (GMP) in the left inferior temporal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus, verbal working memory-related performance is positively correlated with GMP in the left parietal operculum extending into the posterior superior temporal gyrus. Since these areas are known to be differentially engaged in adults’ complex sentence processing, our data suggest a specific correspondence between children's GMP in language-relevant brain regions and differential cognitive abilities that guide their sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated how pragmatic information is integrated during L2 sentence comprehension. We put forward that the differences often observed between L1 and L2 sentence processing may reflect differences on how various types of information are used to process a sentence, and not necessarily differences between native and non-native linguistic systems. Based on the idea that when a cue is missing or distorted, one relies more on other cues available, we hypothesised that late bilinguals favour the cues that they master during sentence processing. To verify this hypothesis we investigated whether late bilinguals take the speaker's identity (inferred by the voice) into account when incrementally processing speech and whether this affects their online interpretation of the sentence. To do so, we adapted Van Berkum, J.J.A., Van den Brink, D., Tesink, C.M.J.Y., Kos, M., Hagoort, P., 2008. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 20(4), 580–591, study in which sentences with either semantic violations or pragmatic inconsistencies were presented. While both the native and the non-native groups showed a similar response to semantic violations (N400), their response to speakers’ inconsistencies slightly diverged; late bilinguals showed a positivity much earlier than native speakers (LPP). These results suggest that, like native speakers, late bilinguals process semantic and pragmatic information incrementally; however, what seems to differ between L1 and L2 processing is the time-course of the different processes. We propose that this difference may originate from late bilinguals’ sensitivity to pragmatic information and/or their ability to efficiently make use of the information provided by the sentence context to generate expectations in relation to pragmatic information during L2 sentence comprehension. In other words, late bilinguals may rely more on speaker identity than native speakers when they face semantic integration difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have found that English speakers experience attraction effects when comprehending subject–verb agreement, showing eased processing of ungrammatical sentences that contain a syntactically unlicensed but number-matching noun. In four self-paced reading experiments we examine whether attraction effects also occur in Spanish, a language where agreement morphology is richer and functionally more significant. We find that despite having a richer morphology, Spanish speakers show reliable attraction effects in comprehension, and that these effects are strikingly similar to those previously found in English in their magnitude and distributional profile. Further, we use distributional analyses to argue that cue-based memory retrieval is used as an error-driven mechanism in comprehension. We suggest that cross-linguistic similarities in agreement attraction result from speakers deploying repair or error-driven mechanisms uniformly across languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of hand-action representations evoked during language comprehension was investigated using a variant of the visual–world paradigm in which eye fixations were monitored while subjects viewed a screen displaying four hand postures and listened to sentences describing an actor using or lifting a manipulable object. Displayed postures were related to either a functional (using) or volumetric (lifting) interaction with an object that matched or did not match the object mentioned in the sentence. Subjects were instructed to select the hand posture that matched the action described in the sentence. Even before the manipulable object was mentioned in the sentence, some sentence contexts allowed subjects to infer the object's identity and the type of action performed with it and eye fixations immediately favored the corresponding hand posture. This effect was assumed to be the result of ongoing motor or perceptual imagery in which the action described in the sentence was mentally simulated. In addition, the hand posture related to the manipulable object mentioned in a sentence, but not related to the described action (e.g., a writing posture in the context of a sentence that describes lifting, but not using, a pencil), was favored over other hand postures not related to the object. This effect was attributed to motor resonance arising from conceptual processing of the manipulable object, without regard to the remainder of the sentence context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent experimental studies have shown that people code time in terms of a mental timeline which typically runs from left to right or from back to front. Determining the cognitive function of this mental timeline for language processing, however, is still an unsettled issue. Whereas the studies of Ulrich and Maienborn (2010) and Ulrich et al. (2012) argue against an automatic activation of the mental timeline for the interpretation of tense and temporal adverbials at sentence level, Sell and Kaschak (2011) observe an automatic activation for the processing of past- and future-related sentences in small stories. The present paper reports the results of three experiments which examine the processing of sentences with retrospective and prospective verbs (e.g., to remember , to regret vs. to expect , to announce ) in present tense, which locate a second, embedded event in the past or the future. When temporal information was task-relevant, a space–time congruency effect emerged (Experiment 1). This suggests that the mental timeline is not only linked to overtly deictic linguistic material but may also be construed in a more intricate way through the compositional construction of sentence meaning. The congruency effect disappeared, however, when temporal information was task-irrelevant (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that the mental timeline is not functionally involved in the cognitive processing of these especially demanding two-event sentences. The results of the present study support the conclusion that the relevant factor driving an automatic activation of the mental timeline is not the number of linguistically expressed events, but might rather be the number of sentential units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phonological properties of the words in a sentence have been shown to affect processing fluency and comprehension. However, the exact role of phonology in sentence comprehension remains unclear. If constituents are stored in working memory during routine processing and accessed through their phonological code, phonological information may exert a pervasive influence on post-lexical comprehension processes such as retrieval for thematic integration. On the other hand, if access to constituents in memory during parsing is guided primarily by syntactic and semantic information, the parser should be isolated from phonologically based effects. In two self-paced reading experiments, we tested whether phonological overlap between distractors and a retrieval target caused retrieval interference during thematic integration. We found that phonological overlap creates difficulty during the initial encoding of the filler, but there was no evidence that phonological overlap caused later interference when the filler was retrieved for thematic integration. Despite effects at encoding, phonological interference did not have a detrimental effect on comprehension. These results suggest that phonological information is not used as a retrieval cue during routine dependency construction in incremental sentence processing. We conclude by considering the potential importance of phonology in parsing under conditions of extraordinary syntactic and/or semantic interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Difficulties in sentence processing have been reported in patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), which may be due to impairment in primary syntactic abilities or short-term memory. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between overt sentence production (SP) and comprehension (SC) with short-term memory performance in MCI. Cognitively healthy elderly (n = 34), amnestic MCI (aMCI,n = 22), non-amnestic MCI (naMCI,n = 45), and Alzheimer's disease (AD,n = 18) patients were asked to complete tests of constrained SP and oral SC. We tested the association between performance in SP and SC with memory tasks and performed a qualitative analysis of the frequency and type of errors in SC. Our results showed that there were no intergroup differences in SC and SP performances. SC scores were associated with delayed recall for words in the naMCI group (p = 0.003), and immediate (p = 0.001) and delayed recall for shapes (p = 0.031) in AD. There were no predictors for NAT scores in any group. In conclusion, the three groups performed similarly in SC and SP tasks. Short-term memory was not associated with performance in the SP task. There was an association between performance in the SC task and verbal memory in naMCI and non-verbal memory in AD; the latter may reflect visuospatial processing demands embedded in the SC task. • We examined the relationship between overt sentence production and sentence comprehension and short-term memory in MCI and AD. • MCI patients did not present difficulties in sentence comprehension and sentence production constrained tasks. • Sentence comprehension was associated with verbal short-term memory in naMCI and non-verbal short-term memory in AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments used event-related potentials to examine the processing consequences of gender-mismatching pronouns (e.g., “The aunt found out that he had won the lottery”), which have been shown to elicit P600 effects when judged as syntactically anomalous ( Osterhout & Mobley, 1995 ). In each experiment, mismatching pronouns elicited a sustained, frontal negative shift (Nref) compared to matching pronouns: when participants were instructed to posit a new referent for mismatching pronouns (Experiment 1), and without this instruction (Experiments 2 and 3). In Experiments 1 and 2, the observed Nref was robust only in individuals with higher reading span scores. In Experiment 1, participants with lower reading span showed P600 effects instead, consistent with an attempt at coreferential interpretation despite gender mismatch. The results from the experiments combined suggest that, in absence of an acceptability judgment task, people are more likely to interpret mismatching pronouns as referring to an unknown, unheralded antecedent than as a grammatically anomalous anaphor for a given antecedent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In -coordinated clauses, the second conjunct elicits faster reading times when it parallels (vs. does not parallel) the first in constituent order. This paper examined whether such parallelism facilitation results from simple constituent order priming from the first to the second clause, or whether it can be modulated through the linguistic context (the conjunction and clausal relations). Three eye-tracking experiments on German assessed this issue by manipulating conjunction meaning and type within subjects (resemblance: 'and' vs. adversative: 'but' or 'while'; coordinating: 'and' and 'but'; subordinating: 'while'), and by varying the clausal relations between experiments. Clausal parallelism facilitation was reduced when syntactic dependence of the clauses from a superordinate verb reinforced their coherence, and semantic expectations for 'but' and 'while' were violated through the parallel constituent order and thematic role relations of noun phrases. By contrast, it was not reduced when the same expectations were satisfied through other sentence constituents (temporally contrastive adverbs) and when the coordination involved matrix clauses. The contextual modulation of parallelism facilitation rules out simple priming as the only underlying mechanism. The observed facilitation rather reflects compositional processing of the coordinands and the conjunction in the linguistic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Van Petten and Luka's (2012, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 83(2), 176-190) literature survey of late positive ERP components elicited by more or less predictable words during sentence processing led them to propose two topographically and functionally distinct positivities: a parietal one associated with semantically incongruent words related to semantic reanalysis and a frontal one with unknown significance associated with congruent but lexically unpredicted words. With the goal of testing this hypothesis within a single set of experimental materials and participants, we report results from two ERP studies: Experiment 1, a post-hoc analysis of a dataset that varied on dimensions of both cloze probability (predictability) and plausibility, and Experiment 2, a follow-up study in which these factors were manipulated in a controlled fashion. In both studies, we observed distinct post-N400 positivities: a more anterior one to plausible, but not anomalous, low cloze probability sentence medial words, and a more posterior one to semantically anomalous sentence continuations. Taken together with an observed canonical cloze-modulated N400, these dual positivities indicate a dissociation between brain processes relating to written words' sentential predictability versus plausibility, clearly an important distinction for any viable neural or psycholinguistic model of written sentence processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: Agrammatic speakers have problems with grammatical encoding and decoding. However, not all syntactic processes are equally problematic: present time reference, who questions, and reflexives can be processed by narrow syntax alone and are relatively spared compared to past time reference, which questions, and personal pronouns, respectively. The latter need additional access to discourse and information structures to link to their referent outside the clause (Avrutin, 2006). Linguistic processing that requires discourse-linking is difficult for agrammatic individuals: verb morphology with reference to the past is more difficult than with reference to the present (Bastiaanse et al., 2011). The same holds for which questions compared to who questions and for pronouns compared to reflexives (Avrutin, 2006). These results have been reported independently for different populations in different languages. The current study, for the first time, tested all conditions within the same population. Aims: We had two aims with the current study. First, we wanted to investigate whether discourse-linking is the common denominator of the deficits in time reference, wh questions, and object pronouns. Second, we aimed to compare the comprehension of discourse-linked elements in people with agrammatic and fluent aphasia. Methods and procedures: Three sentence-picture-matching tasks were administered to 10 agrammatic, 10 fluent aphasic, and 10 non-brain-damaged Russian speakers (NBDs): (1) the Test for Assessing Reference of Time (TART) for present imperfective (reference to present) and past perfective (reference to past), (2) the Wh Extraction Assessment Tool (WHEAT) for which and who subject questions, and (3) the Reflexive-Pronoun Test (RePro) for reflexive and pronominal reference. Outcomes and results: NBDs scored at ceiling and significantly higher than the aphasic participants. We found an overall effect of discourse-linking in the TART and WHEAT for the agrammatic speakers, and in all three tests for the fluent speakers. Scores on the RePro were at ceiling. Conclusions: The results are in line with the prediction that problems that individuals with agrammatic and fluent aphasia experience when comprehending sentences that contain verbs with past time reference, which question words and pronouns are caused by the fact that these elements involve discourse linking. The effect is not specific to agrammatism, although it may result from different underlying disorders in agrammatic and fluent aphasia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Children with SLI show both sentence comprehension and lexical processing problems. [•] We assess the impact of lexical frequency on their sentence comprehension performances. [•] Sentence comprehension was more affected by lexical frequency in SLI than in controls. [•] Similar impacts of grammar complexity and sentence length were observed in all groups. [•] Lexical processing difficulties affect sentence comprehension performances in SLI. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Two experiments showed effects of thematic orders in reading Chinese relatives. [•] Consistency of thematic role orders in contexts and in relatives was manipulated. [•] Object relatives read faster after contexts with consistent thematic orders. [•] Chinese relative clause comprehension is sensitive to the order of thematic roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although syntactic complexity has been investigated across dozens of studies, the available data still greatly underdetermine relevant theories of processing difficulty. Memory-based and expectation-based theories make opposite predictions regarding fine-grained time course of processing difficulty in syntactically constrained contexts, and each class of theory receives support from results on some constructions in some languages. Here we report four self-paced reading experiments on the online comprehension of Russian relative clauses together with related corpus studies, taking advantage of Russian’s flexible word order to disentangle predictions of competing theories. We find support for key predictions of memory-based theories in reading times at RC verbs, and for key predictions of expectation-based theories in processing difficulty at RC-initial accusative noun phrase (NP) objects, which corpus data suggest should be highly unexpected. These results suggest that a complete theory of syntactic complexity must integrate insights from both expectation-based and memory-based theories. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Real-time lexical interpretation in sentences is measured in adolescents with SLI. [•] Adolescents with SLI and typical peers are equally fast to predict the expected ending. [•] The SLI group uses a different strategy to interpret less-likely meanings in real-time. [•] Results are consistent with SLI deficits in lexical activation and not speed of processing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Language comprehenders can mentally simulate perceptual and motor features of scenes they hear or read about (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). Recent research shows that these simulations adopt a particular perspective (Borghi, Glenberg, & Kaschak, 2004; Brunyé, Ditman, Mahoney, Augustyn, & Taylor, 2009). Moreover, features of utterances influence the perspective that comprehenders are led to adopt. For instance, language about you primes a participant visual perspective, while third person he and she prime an observer perspective. But what role does perspectival mental simulation play in the comprehension of person? On the one hand, the different perspectives adopted during language understanding could be necessary for successfully determining the meaning of an utterance. However, current empirical evidence is also compatible with the possibility that adopting a perspective in mental simulation is not essential to comprehending who did what to whom. If the latter is the case, then we should be able to find cases where language comprehenders understand who did what to whom without measurably performing mental simulation from a particular perspective. A candidate language that might display such a case is Japanese, where grammatical subject pronouns can be omitted when the subject is inferable from context. We replicated a previously used method for assessing perspectival mental simulation during language comprehension, but tailored it to Japanese. The results showed that when pronouns were present, like in English, sentences facilitated identification of an image matching the proposed perspective associated with the mentioned pronoun. This replicated the previous finding for English. But when the subject pronoun was omitted, so that the sentence did not explicitly mention the subject, there was no such effect. Nonetheless, native comprehenders of Japanese automatically and easily tracked who the subjects of the sentences with omitted subjects were. Together, these findings suggest that while grammatical person modulates visual perspective in mental simulation, visual perspective is not necessary for successful identification and representation of event participants. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The processing of grammatical and semantic relationships is important in sentence comprehension. Although previous studies have demonstrated brain activities during grammatical and semantic processing in declarative sentences, functional MRI (fMRI) evidence related to these processes in wh-questions is largely unavailable. In Japanese wh-questions, a wh-phrase is grammatically associated with the closest particle, and a sentential subject is semantically associated with the verb. These features in Japanese wh-questions enable us to make grammatical or semantic anomalies without adding other words or morphemes in the violation paradigm. According to this advantage of Japanese wh-questions, this fMRI study investigated the brain activities in Japanese native speakers during grammatical and semantic processing of wh-questions to judge whether or not presented sentences were natural Japanese sentences (naturalness decision task). Three types of wh-questions were presented: correct, grammatically anomalous, and semantically anomalous conditions. This study yielded three main findings. First, activity in the left inferior parietal lobule was greater during processing of grammatically anomalous than correct or semantically anomalous wh-questions. Second, activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus was greater during processing of semantically anomalous than correct or grammatically anomalous wh-questions. Finally, significant correlations were identified between activities in the left inferior parietal lobule and the left inferior frontal gyrus during grammatically anomalous and semantically anomalous wh-questions. These findings suggest that the left inferior parietal and inferior frontal regions have differential contributions to the processing of grammatical and semantic relationships in wh-question sentences, and that the interaction between these regions could be essential in the comprehension of wh-questions by combining the grammatical process with the semantic process. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We report and compare results from the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) in three languages in a multilingual individual with a fluent primary progressive aphasia (PPA): Greek, English, and Czech. Our participant, SG, is a 60-year-old male who shows focal atrophy of the left temporal and parietal lobes typical of PPA. He is highly educated and holds a full-time job in computer maintenance. He has relative preservation of memory and appropriate social behavior, and he carries out most activities of daily living, including driving, without assistance. Prior to his illness he was highly proficient, in speaking/hearing as well as reading/writing, in Greek (both the local, sociolinguistically ‘low’ variety of Cypriot Greek and the ‘high’ Standard Modern Greek), English, and Czech. All languages were used on a daily basis for different environments (such as home, work, and travel). Assessment on the BAT across languages reveals difficulties with auditory comprehension for complex items, semantic interpretation, and (morpho)syntactic operations, but generally preserved repetition, reading, and writing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We investigated the association between yes/no sentence comprehension and dysfunction in anterior and posterior left-hemisphere cortical regions in acute stroke patients. More specifically, we manipulated whether questions were Nonreversible (e.g., Are limes sour?) or Reversible (e.g., Is a horse larger than a dog?) to investigate the regions associated with semantic and syntactic processing. In addition, we administered lexical tasks (i.e., Picture-Word Verification, Picture Naming) to help determine the extent to which deficits in sentence processing were related to deficits in lexical processing. We found that errors on the lexical tasks were associated with ischemia in posterior-temporal Brodmann Areas (BA 21, 22, 37) and inferior parietal regions (BA 39, 40). Nonreversible question comprehension was associated with volume of tissue dysfunction, while Reversible question comprehension was associated with posterior regions (BA 39, 40) as well as one anterior region (BA 6). We conclude that deficits in Nonreversible questions required extensive dysfunction that affected language processing across multiple levels, while Reversible question comprehension was associated with regions involved in semantics as well as working memory that indirectly influenced syntactic processing. Overall, this suggests that yes/no question comprehension relies on multiple regions and that the importance of certain regions increases in relation to semantic, phonological, and syntactic complexity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Parkinson’s disease has been found to impair comprehension of complex sentences. Here we follow up on earlier findings that sentences describing two successive events in the form of “Before B, A” are understood worse by Parkinson patients than sentences in the form of “After A, B”. Before-initial sentences express events in an order inconsistent with their actual order of occurrence and therefore require additional computations during comprehension. In a behavioral study we tested whether 28 German Parkinson patients reading ‘before’- and ‘after’-initial sentences correctly understood the sequence of events. A second functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated 16 different patients who read sentences while in the scanner. The behavioral study revealed that ‘before’ sentences were misunderstood with regard to the temporal sequence of events in 53% (controls 6.5%). The imaging study demonstrated a functional network of the caudate nucleus, middle frontal gyrus, medial superior frontal gyrus, parietal lobule and inferior temporal gyrus. This network was dynamically modulated for ‘before’ compared to ‘after’ sentences in healthy controls but not in Parkinson patients. The current results suggest that the additional computations required for ‘before’ sentences are supported by a network with the caudate nucleus as a central element. This network was compromised in Parkinson patients. We propose that dysfunction of the caudate nucleus networks underlies Parkinson patients’ difficulty in dealing with complex sentence structures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In traditional theories of language comprehension, syntactic and semantic processing are inextricably linked. This assumption has been challenged by the ‘Semantic Illusion Effect’ found in studies using Event Related brain Potentials. Semantically anomalous sentences did not produce the expected increase in N400 amplitude but rather one in P600 amplitude. To explain these findings, complex models have been devised in which an independent semantic processing stream can arrive at a sentence interpretation that may differ from the interpretation prescribed by the syntactic structure of the sentence. We review five such multi-stream models and argue that they do not account for the full range of relevant results because they assume that the amplitude of the N400 indexes some form of semantic integration. Based on recent evidence we argue that N400 amplitude might reflect the retrieval of lexical information from memory. On this view, the absence of an N400-effect in Semantic Illusion sentences can be explained in terms of priming. Furthermore, we suggest that semantic integration, which has previously been linked to the N400 component, might be reflected in the P600 instead. When combined, these functional interpretations result in a single-stream account of language processing that can explain all of the Semantic Illusion data. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Although sentences are thought to be generally easier to process when given information precedes new information, closer examination reveals that these preferences only manifest within some syntactic structures. Here, we examine the consequences of the relative ordering of given and new information (information structure) for the on-line comprehension of prepositional-object (PO) and double-object (DO) dative sentences. Experiment 1 demonstrated using self-paced reading that the on-line comprehension of DO structures, but not PO structures, is more difficult with new-before-given information structure. Experiment 2 assessed the comprehension of dative sentences with animate themes to evaluate two potential sources of this interaction: information-structural constraints encoded within syntactic representations (argument structure hypothesis) vs. word-to-word contingency statistics (linear position hypothesis). Despite experiment-wise differences in word-to-word contingency statistics, the interaction between syntactic structure and information structure persisted in Experiment 2. Taken together, these results suggest that syntactic representations can include information-structural constraints on their arguments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word–word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word–word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more computationally complex than projective dependencies; hence, it is of natural interest to investigate whether there are any processing costs specific to non-projective dependencies, and whether factors known to influence processing of projective dependencies also affect non-projective dependency processing. We report three self-paced reading studies, together with corpus and sentence completion studies, investigating the comprehension difficulty associated with the non-projective dependencies created by the extraposition of relative clauses in English. We find that extraposition over either verbs or prepositional phrases creates comprehension difficulty, and that this difficulty is consistent with probabilistic syntactic expectations estimated from corpora. Furthermore, we find that manipulating the expectation that a given noun will have a postmodifying relative clause can modulate and even neutralize the difficulty associated with extraposition. Our experiments rule out accounts based purely on derivational complexity and/or dependency locality in terms of linear positioning. Our results demonstrate that comprehenders maintain probabilistic syntactic expectations that persist beyond projective-dependency structures, and suggest that it may be possible to explain observed patterns of comprehension difficulty associated with extraposition entirely through probabilistic expectations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Non-adjacent dependencies are thought to be more costly to process than sentences wherein dependents immediately follow or precede what they depend on. In English locality effects have been revealed, while in languages with rich case marking (German and Hindi) sentence final structures show anti-locality-effects. The motivation of the current study is to test whether locality effects can be directly applied to a typologically different language than those investigated so far. Hungarian is a “topic prominent” language; it permits a variation of possible word sequencing for semantic reasons, including SVO word order. Hungarian also has a rich morphological system (e.g., rich case system) and postpositions to indicate grammatical functions. In the present ERP study, Hungarian subject–verb dependencies were compared by manipulating the mismatch of number agreement between the sentence''s initial noun phrase and the sentence''s final intransitive verb as well as the complexity of the intervening sentence material, interrupting the dependencies. Possible lexical class and frequency or cloze-probability effects for the first two words of the intervening sentence material were revealed when used separate baseline for each word, while at the third word of the intervening material as well as at the main verb ERPs were not modulated by complexity but at the verb ERPs were enhanced by grammaticality. Ungrammatical sentences enlarged the amplitude of both LAN and P600 components at the main verb. These results are in line with studies suggesting that the retrieval of the first element of a dependency is not influenced by distance from the second element, as the first element is directly accessible when needed for integration (e.g., McElree, 2000). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A recent ERP study on Chinese demonstrated dissociable neural responses to semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy (Zhou et al., 2010). However, it is unclear whether such findings are restricted to a non-case marked language that relies heavily on word order and semantic information for the construction of sentence representation. This study aimed to further investigate, in a case-marked language, how semantic processes in a hierarchical structure take place during sentence reading. We used German sentences with the structure “subject noun+verb+article/determiner+adjective+object noun+prepositional phrase”, in which the object noun was constrained either at the lower level by the adjective or at the higher level by the verb, and manipulated the semantic congruency between the adjective and the object noun and/or between the verb and the object noun. EEGs were recorded while participants read sentences and judged for their semantic acceptability. Compared with correct sentences, a biphasic pattern of an N400 effect followed by a late positivity effect was observed on the object noun for sentences with either lower- or higher-level mismatch or with double mismatches. Both the N400 effect and the late positivity (P600) effect were larger for the double mismatch condition than for either of the single mismatch conditions. These findings demonstrate cross-language mechanisms for processing multiple semantic constraints at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during sentence comprehension. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Research on written language comprehension has generally assumed that the phonological properties of a word have little effect on sentence comprehension beyond the processes of word recognition. Two experiments investigated this assumption. Participants silently read relative clauses in which two pairs of words either did or did not have a high degree of phonological overlap. Participants were slower reading and less accurate comprehending the overlap sentences compared to the non-overlapping controls, even though sentences were matched for plausibility and differed by only two words across overlap conditions. A comparison across experiments showed that the overlap effects were larger in the more difficult object relative than in subject relative sentences. The reading patterns showed that phonological representations affect not only memory for recently encountered sentences but also the developing sentence interpretation during on-line processing. Implications for theories of sentence processing and memory are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]