On the incrementality of pragmatic processing: An ERP investigation of informativeness and pragmatic abilities

In two event-related potential (ERP) experiments, we determined to what extent Grice’s maxim of informativeness as well as pragmatic ability contributes to the incremental build-up of sentence meaning, by examining the impact of underinformative versus informative scalar statements (e.g. “Some people have lungs/pets, and…”) on the N400 event-related potential (ERP), an electrophysiological index of semantic processing. In Experiment 1, only pragmatically skilled participants (as indexed by the Autism Quotient Communication subscale) showed a larger N400 to underinformative statements. In Experiment 2, this effect disappeared when the critical words were unfocused so that the local underinformativeness went unnoticed (e.g., “Some people have lungs that…”). Our results suggest that, while pragmatic scalar meaning can incrementally contribute to sentence comprehension, this contribution is dependent on contextual factors, whether these are derived from individual pragmatic abilities or the overall experimental context

Foreign body in scrotum following a boat engine blast accident

Male genital injuries, demand prompt management to prevent long-term  sexual and psychological damage. Injuries to the scrotum and contents may produce impaired fertility.We report our experience in diagnosing and managing a case of a foreign body in the scrotum following a boat engine blast accident. This case report highlights the need for a good history and thorough general examination to establish the mechanism of injury in order to distinguish between an embedded penetrating projectile injury and an injury with an exit wound. Prompt surgical exploration with hematoma evacuation limits complications.Keywords: Blast Injury, Scrotal Haematoma, Ischaemia, Laceration, Penetrating injur

Why the A/AN prediction effect may be hard to replicate:A rebuttal to Delong, Urbach, and Kutas

In our recent publication “How robust are prediction effects in language comprehension? Failure to replicate article-elicited N400 effects” (Ito, Martin, & Nieuwland, 2016a), we report two experiments which failed to replicate existing ERP evidence for prediction as reported in C. D. Martin et al. (2013), whose study resembled DeLong, Urbach, and Kutas (2005; from hereon DUK05). DeLong, Urbach, and Kutas (2017; from hereon, DUK17) recently published a commentary which depicts our publication as a case of poor scholarship that makes “no substantive contribution to the literature on what factors may matter for prediction and when.” DUK17 warn that the readers of our work “will be led into serious error.” In this rebuttal, we first present evidence that is inconsistent with the arguments of DUK17 regarding our own experiments, and then we briefly discuss other indications why it might be hard to observe and thus replicate the a/an prediction effect

Definitely saw it coming? The dual nature of the pre-nominal prediction effect

Acknowledgements We thank Birgit Knudsen for help with EEG data collection and Elise van Wonderen for help with norming data collection. JR was partially supported by NWO Veni grant 275-89-032. We thank Tamara Swaab and two anonymous reviewers for providing helpful feedback on a previous draft of this manuscript. All materials associated with the current article are available on OSF at https://osf.io/6drcy/. For the analyses and plots, we used the following packages for R (R Core Team, 2018): “brms” (Bürkner, 2017), “lme4” (Bates et al., 2014), “simr” (Green & MacLeod, 2016), “ggplot2” (Wickham, 2016), “dplyr” (Wickham, François, Henry & Müller, 2019), “patchwork” (Pederson, 2020), “emmeans” (Lenth, 2019).Peer reviewedPostprin

Great expectations: Specific lexical anticipation influences the processing of spoken language

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recently several studies have shown that people use contextual information to make predictions about the rest of the sentence or story as the text unfolds. Using event related potentials (ERPs) we tested whether these on-line predictions are based on a message-level representation of the discourse or on simple automatic activation by individual words. Subjects heard short stories that were highly constraining for one specific noun, or stories that were not specifically predictive but contained the same prime words as the predictive stories. To test whether listeners make specific predictions critical nouns were preceded by an adjective that was inflected according to, or in contrast with, the gender of the expected noun.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>When the message of the preceding discourse was predictive, adjectives with an unexpected gender inflection evoked a negative deflection over right-frontal electrodes between 300 and 600 ms. This effect was not present in the prime control context, indicating that the prediction mismatch does not hinge on word-based priming but is based on the actual message of the discourse.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>When listening to a constraining discourse people rapidly make very specific predictions about the remainder of the story, as the story unfolds. These predictions are not simply based on word-based automatic activation, but take into account the actual message of the discourse.</p

When the Truth Is Not Too Hard to Handle: An Event-Related Potential Study on the Pragmatics of Negation

Our brains rapidly map incoming language onto what we hold to be true. Yet there are claims that such integration and verification processes are delayed in sentences containing negation words like not. However, studies have often confounded whether a statement is true and whether it is a natural thing to say during normal communication. In an event-related potential (ERP) experiment, we aimed to disentangle effects of truth value and pragmatic licensing on the comprehension of affirmative and negated real-world statements. As in affirmative sentences, false words elicited a larger N400 ERP than did true words in pragmatically licensed negated sentences (e.g., “In moderation, drinking red wine isn't bad/good…”), whereas true and false words elicited similar responses in unlicensed negated sentences (e.g., “A baby bunny's fur isn't very hard/soft…”). These results suggest that negation poses no principled obstacle for readers to immediately relate incoming words to what they hold to be true

Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

The animacy distinction is deeply rooted in the language faculty. A key example is differential object marking, the phenomenon where animate sentential objects receive specific marking. We used event-related potentials to examine the neural processing consequences of case-marking violations on animate and inanimate direct objects in Spanish. Inanimate objects with incorrect prepositional case marker ‘a’ (‘al suelo’) elicited a P600 effect compared to unmarked objects, consistent with previous literature. However, animate objects without the required prepositional case marker (‘el obispo’) only elicited an N400 effect compared to marked objects. This novel finding, an exclusive N400 modulation by a straightforward grammatical rule violation, does not follow from extant neurocognitive models of sentence processing, and mirrors unexpected “semantic P600” effects for thematically problematic sentences. These results may reflect animacy asymmetry in competition for argument prominence: following the article, thematic interpretation difficulties are elicited only by unexpectedly animate objects

Ab initio Pseudopotential Plane-wave Calculations of the Electronic Structure of YBa_2Cu_3O_7

We present an ab initio pseudopotential local density functional calculation for stoichiometric high-Tc cuprate YBa_2Cu_3O_7 using the plane-wave basis set. We have overcome well-known difficulties in applying pseudopotential methods to first-row elements, transition metals, and rare-earth materials by carefully generating norm-conserving pseudopotentials with excellent transferability and employing an extremely efficient iterative diagonalization scheme optimized for our purpose. The self-consistent band structures, the total and site-projected densities of states, the partial charges and their symmetry-decompositions, and some characteristic charge densities near E_f are presented. We compare our results with various existing (F)LAPW and (F)LMTO calculations and establish that the ab initio pseudopotential method is competitive with other methods in studying the electronic structure of such complicated materials as high-Tc cuprates. [8 postscript files in uuencoded compressed form]Comment: 14 pages, RevTeX v3.0, 8 figures (appended in postscript file), SNUTP 94-8

Magnetic polarons in weakly doped high-Tc superconductors

We consider a spin Hamiltonian describing $d$-$d$ exchange interactions between localized spins $d$ of a finite antiferromagnet as well as $p$-$d$ interactions between a conducting hole ($p$) and localized spins. The spin Hamiltonian is solved numerically with use of Lanczos method of diagonalization. We conclude that $p$-$d$ exchange interaction leads to localization of magnetic polarons. Quantum fluctuations of the antiferromagnet strengthen this effect and make the formation of polarons localized in one site possible even for weak $p$-$d$ coupling. Total energy calculations, including the kinetic energy, do not change essentially the phase diagram of magnetic polarons formation. For parameters reasonable for high-$T_c$ superconductors either a polaron localized on one lattice cell or a small ferron can form. For reasonable values of the dielectric function and $p$-$d$ coupling, the contributions of magnetic and phonon terms in the formation of a polaron in weakly doped high-$T_c$ materials are comparable.Comment: revised, revtex-4, 12 pages 8 eps figure