247 research outputs found
A Mismatch Negativity Study of (A)Grammatical and Meaningful/less Mini- Constructions
Clinical language performance and neurophysiological correlates of language
processing were measured before and after intensive language therapy in
patients with chronic (time post stroke >1 year) post stroke aphasia (PSA). As
event-related potential (ERP) measure, the mismatch negativity (MMN) was
recorded in a distracted oddball paradigm to short spoken sentences. Critical
âdeviantâ sentence stimuli where either well-formed and meaningful, or
syntactically, or lexico-semantically incorrect. After 4 weeks of speech-
language therapy (SLT) delivered with high intensity (10.5 h per week),
clinical language assessment with the Aachen Aphasia Test battery demonstrated
significant linguistic improvements, which were accompanied by enhanced MMN
responses. More specifically, MMN amplitudes to grammatically correct and
meaningful mini-constructions and to âjabberwockyâ sentences containing a
pseudoword significantly increased after therapy. However, no therapy-related
changes in MMN responses to syntactically incorrect strings including
agreement violations were observed. While MMN increases to well-formed
meaningful strings can be explained both at the word and construction levels,
the neuroplastic change seen for âjabberwockyâ sentences suggests an
explanation in terms of constructions. The results confirm previous reports
that intensive SLT leads to improvements of linguistic skills in chronic
aphasia patients and now demonstrate that this clinical improvement is
associated with enhanced automatic brain indexes of construction processing,
although no comparable change is present for ungrammatical strings.
Furthermore, the data confirm that the language-induced MMN is a useful tool
to map functional language recovery in PSA
Syntax through the looking glass: A review on two-word linguistic processing across behavioral, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies
In recent years a growing number of studies on syntactic processing has employed basic two-word constructions (e.g., âthe treeâ) to characterize the fundamental aspects of linguistic composition. This large body of evidence allows, for the first time, to closely examine which cognitive processes and neural substrates support the combination of two syntactic units into a more complex one, mirroring the nature of combinatory operations described in theoretical linguistics. The present review comprehensively examines behavioural, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies investigating basic syntactic composition, covering more than forty years of psycho- and neuro-linguistic research. Across several paradigms, four key features of syntactic composition have emerged: (1) the rule-based and (2) automatic nature of the combinatorial process, (3) a central role of Brocaâs area and the posterior temporal lobe in representing and combining syntactic features, and (4) the reliance on efficient bottom-up integration rather than top-down prediction
Syntax through the looking glass: A review on two-word linguistic processing across behavioral, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies
In recent years a growing number of studies on syntactic processing has employed basic two-word constructions (e.g., âthe treeâ) to characterize the fundamental aspects of linguistic composition. This large body of evidence allows, for the first time, to closely examine which cognitive processes and neural substrates support the combination of two syntactic units into a more complex one, mirroring the nature of combinatory operations described in theoretical linguistics. The present review comprehensively examines behavioural, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies investigating basic syntactic composition, covering more than 40 years of psycho- and neuro-linguistic research. Across several paradigms, four key features of syntactic composition have emerged: (1) the rule-based and (2) automatic nature of the combinatorial process, (3) a central role of Brocaâs area and the posterior temporal lobe in representing and combining syntactic features, and (4) the reliance on efficient bottom-up integration rather than top-down prediction
The Automatic but Flexible and Content-Dependent Nature of Syntax
Syntactic processing has often been considered an utmost example of unconscious automatic processing. In this line, it has been demonstrated that masked words containing syntactic anomalies are processed by our brain triggering event related potential (ERP) components similar to the ones triggered by conscious syntactic anomalies, thus supporting the automatic nature of the syntactic processing. Conversely, recent evidence also points out that regardless of the level of awareness, emotional information and other relevant extralinguistic information modulate conscious syntactic processing too. These results are also in line with suggestions that, under certain circumstances, syntactic processing could also be flexible and context-dependent. However, the study of the concomitant automatic but flexible conception of syntactic parsing is very scarce. Hence, to this aim, we examined whether and how masked emotional words (positive, negative, and neutral masked adjectives) containing morphosyntactic anomalies (half of the cases) affect linguistic comprehension of an ongoing unmasked sentence that also can contain a number agreement anomaly between the noun and the verb. ERP components were observed to emotional information (EPN), masked anomalies (LAN and a weak P600), and unmasked ones (LAN/N400 and P600). Furthermore, interactions in the processing of conscious and unconscious morphosyntactic anomalies and between unconscious emotional information and conscious anomalies were detected. The findings support, on the one hand, the automatic nature of syntax, given that syntactic components LAN and P600 were observed to unconscious anomalies. On the other hand, the flexible, permeable, and context-dependent nature of the syntactic processing is also supported, since unconscious information modulated conscious syntactic components. This double nature of syntactic processing is in line with theories of automaticity, suggesting that even unconscious/automatic, syntactic processing is flexible, adaptable, and context-dependent
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The Varying Roles of Morphosyntax in Memory and Sentence Processing: Retrieval and Encoding Interference in Brazilian Portuguese
Cue-based retrieval models have largely been adopted as a description of how linguistic content is retrieved from memory. Under this framework, a retrieval cue is projected at the site of a dependency and matched with its target using a parallel matching procedure (e.g., Van Dyke and Lewis, 2003). Although this is a highly efficient mechanism, retrieval difficulties occur when there are multiple items stored in memory that serve as potential matches for the retrieval cue(s), which is known as similarity-based interference (SBI). Several studies have demonstrated that a wide variety of linguistic information can generate SBI effects, but the theory of what serves as a retrieval cue is still relatively unknown (Van Dyke and Johns, 2012). Moreover, recent empirical evidence has proposed the similarity-based interference can arise from another source: the encoding mechanism (e.g., Villata et al., 2018). Three hypotheses are addressed regarding three potential retrieval mechanisms: (1) a retrieval mechanism that only relies on cues relevant to the dependency being resolved, (2) one that is sensitive to all of the features overlapping between a target and distractor(s), or (3) a mechanism that is primarily sensitive to relevant features but produces additive interference effects for irrelevant features. Moreover, a fourth hypothesis investigates if similarity-based interference also arises from the encoding mechanism. In an attempt to disentangle whether sentence processing disruptions occur as a result of retrieval mechanism (1) + encoding interference or due to one of the other mechanisms, 7 self-paced reading experiments were conducted on Brazilian Portuguese. In all of the studies, number was a relevant feature for the resolution of the grammatical dependency (subject-verb dependency in relative clauses or wh-remnant-correlate pairing in sluices) and gender features varied in their relevance. The rationale behind using these dependencies and features was to test whether syntactically relevant features produced stronger interference effects than irrelevant features and to propose why these results differed. Any findings that showed that irrelevant feature (gender) matches caused reading time slowdowns or decreased comprehension question accuracy before the retrieval site were interpreted as encoding interference.Although results vary across studies, the findings in this thesis provide the most support for a combination of retrieval (mechanism 1) and encoding interference. Although the other two retrieval mechanisms cannot be completely ruled out at this time, the evidence that gender produces earlier and weaker effects reminiscent of encoding interference and that number produced interference reflective of retrieval interference are novel
The Role of Formulaic Language in the Creation of Grammar
Research in the field of Formulaic Language has shown it to be a very diverse phenomenon in both the form it takes and the functions it performs (e.g., Erma and Warren, 2000; Wray, 2002). The proposal made by Sinclair (1991) states that language as a system is organized according to two principles, the idiom principle\u27, which includes the use of all multi-word prefabricated sequences, and \u27the open choice principle,\u27 which covers word-for-word operations. Formulaic language is the embodiment of the idiom principle and constitutes the core of linguistic structure. Therefore, it must be subjected to scientific scrutiny from the variety of perspectives \u2013 typological, psycholinguistic, socio-pragmatic, and language acquisition. This dissertation reports on the percentage of formulaic sequences - prefabs - in spoken and written Russian; the distribution of prefab types across two spoken and four written genres, and their interaction with non-prefabricated language and the impact that prefabs have on the structure of a particular language type. Russian is the language typologically and structurally different from English. The main structural difference between English and Russian is that the Russian language has a free word order, wide inflectional system to code grammatical relations, and a satellite verb system. I hypothesize that these structural differences influence the quantity and the nature of formulaic sequences used in the language, the nature of alternation of prefabricated and non-prefabricated strings, and the preference of the speakers for one rather than the other aforementioned principles. The method applied in the analysis of Russian prefabs is developed by Erman and Warren (2000) and originally was applied to the analysis of the English texts. This dissertation seeks to address a methodological issue of applying this method to typologically different languages. It has been argued (Garcia and Florimon van Putte, 1989) that the fixedness of the English word order contributes to the co-occurrence of elements and the formation of formulaic sequences in English. In this case, formulaic language becomes a language-specific tendency pertaining to English, and not a universal mechanism for language storage, processing, production and use. The findings support the usage-based approaches driven by forces resulting from the frequency of use, discourse and communicative functions, grounded in the fine balance between the economy principle and the power of language creativity. The results of the study are used to draw implications for language processing and language modeling. As we continue to perfect the methods of identification, classification and analysis of formulaic sequences, we will be in a better position to describe not only the amount but the nature of formulaic language, its interaction with non-formulas, and the impact this alternation has on the linguistic structure as a whole. The current study investigates the nature of formulaic language in a free word order language. We seek to apply the method of identification, classification and analysis of prefabs, its interaction with each other and with non-formulaic language, as well as the estimation of choices made in producing spoken and written language. My dissertation results suggest that a free word order language uses at least as many prefabs as a fixed word order language. On average, in a free word order language like Russian 65% of spoken and 58% of written language is composed of multiword formulaic sequences. The results strengthen the hypothesis that the idiom principle is a mechanism of global linguistic organization and processing. The proportion and distribution or prefabs is less affected by language type than by spoken written medium distinction and genre variation. In addition, the results show that prefabs are frozen structures not amicable to standard syntactic transformations even in a free word order language. The results support the dual system of language processing, i.e., holistic and analytic, present in a free word order language
Semantic radical consistency and character transparency effects in Chinese: an ERP study
BACKGROUND: This event-related potential (ERP) study aims to investigate the representation and temporal dynamics of Chinese orthography-to-semantics mappings by simultaneously manipulating character transparency and semantic radical consistency. Character components, referred to as radicals, make up the building blocks used dur...postprin
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