Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying word retrieval and integration during sentence comprehension

O processamento das palavras é facilitado quando estas surgem numa frase com um contexto que lhes dá suporte. Porém, a natureza dos processos subjacentes a este efeito é ainda pouco clara. Numa abordagem multimodal, os estudos empíricos desta dissertação investigaram como é que os processos de acesso e integração de palavras são implementados e interagem durante a compreensão de frases, atendendo ao contexto frásico e à expectativa das palavras. Nos estudos comportamental e eletrofisiológico, observou-se uma facilitação na leitura de todas as palavras esperadas, i.e., não apenas as mais esperadas, mas também as segundas palavras mais esperadas. Os potenciais evocados mostraram que o efeito de facilitação é inicialmente restrito às palavras mais esperadas e manifesta-se mais tardiamente para as segundas palavras mais esperadas. Adicionalmente, estes efeitos não foram modelados pelas características da tarefa nem pelas capacidades dos leitores, tratando-se de um efeito robusto e consistente. O estudo de fMRI revelou padrões de ativação distintos em duas sub-regiões do córtex frontal inferior esquerdo. Na sub-região anterior, a ativação foi maior durante o processamento de frases completadas com palavras inesperadas comparativamente a palavras esperadas, apenas quando o contexto frásico era muito restritivo e ainda durante o processamento de frases com palavras esperadas em que o contexto frásico era pouco restritivo relativamente a contextos muito restritivos, sugerindo que esta região está associada ao acesso semântico de palavras. A sub-região posterior, além de apresentar resultados semelhantes aos da sub-região anterior, revelou maior ativação para frases completadas com palavras inesperadas em contextos muito restritivos comparativamente a contextos pouco restritivos. Logo, esta região parece ser recrutada em frases que promovem a ativação de várias palavras e, consequentemente, requerem um esforço adicional para selecionar e integrar a palavra alvo. Estes resultados enfatizam o papel dos mecanismos preditivos no acesso às palavras durante a compreensão de frases. Estes mecanismos ocorrem de forma serial e gradativa, são desencadeados automaticamente e são consistentes, independentemente das capacidades dos leitores. Esta evidência contribui para o desenvolvimento dos modelos de compreensão da linguagem.The processing of words is facilitated when they appear in a sentence with a supportive context. Yet, the nature of the processes underlying that effect is still unclear. In a multimodal approach, the empirical studies of this dissertation investigate how word retrieval and integration are implemented and interact during sentence comprehension, according to the sentence context and word’s expectation. In the behavioural and electrophysiological studies, the facilitation effect during sentence reading was found for all expectable candidates, i.e., not only for the most expected words, but also for the second-best words. The event-related potentials revealed that the facilitation effect is initially restricted to the most expected word, with the second-best word demonstrating a delayed effect. Additionally, the facilitation effect was not affected by task demands or readers’ abilities, showing that the effect is robust and consistent. The fMRI study showed distinct patterns of activation in subregions of the LIFG. In the anterior subregion, the expectancy effect was restricted to high constraint sentences and the expected words triggered more activation in low than in high constraint sentences, suggesting that this region is involved in lexical-semantic retrieval. The posterior subregion, besides showing similar results as the ones found in the anterior subregion, also revealed an enhanced activation for unexpected words in high constraint sentences compared with low constraint sentences. Thus, the posterior LIFG was recruited by sentences that endorsed the retrieval of multiple words and, consequently, require greater effort to select and integrate the candidate word. The findings highlight the impact of the predictive mechanisms on word retrieval during sentence comprehension. These mechanisms seem to occur in a serial and graded way, are triggered automatically and are consistent despite readers capacities. This evidence contributes to the further development of language comprehension models

Reconhecimento visual de palavras cognatas em bilingues do Português-Inglês : efeitos da sobreposição ortográfica e fonológica e do tipo de tarefa

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Psicologia (área de especialização em Psicologia Experimental)O processamento diferencial de palavras cognatas (CG) e não-cognatas (NCG) tem sido alvo de inúmeras investigações, pois este tipo de palavras constituem uma ferramenta muito valiosa para o estudo da organização e funcionamento da memória bilingue. Existem duas propostas teóricas centrais na explicação da vantagem no processamento observado para palavras CG vs. NCG: a proposta léxicomorfológica (Davis et al., 2010), que defende que há uma representação distinta das palavras cognatas na memória bilingue, enquanto a proposta sublexical salienta que a vantagem ocorre devido à semelhança semântica e às semelhanças formais (ortográficas e fonológicas) existentes entre as palavras CG (Dijkstra, Miwa, Brummelhuis, Sappelli, & Baayen, 2010). Neste trabalho examinou-se o impacto da sobreposição ortográfica e fonológica no reconhecimento visual de palavras CG. Com este intuito selecionou-se um conjunto de 192 palavras inglesas, sendo 96 CG e 96 NCG. As palavras CG foram divididas de forma ortogonal em quatro grupos consoante o grau de sobreposição ortográfica e fonológica existente entre a palavra em inglesa e a sua tradução equivalente em português europeu. Um segundo objetivo do trabalho foi avaliar o impacto do tipo de tarefa no reconhecimento visual de palavras. Assim realizaram-se dois estudos, no primeiro recorreu-se a uma tarefa de leitura silenciosa (N = 28), no segundo a uma tarefa de decisão lexical (N = 22). As duas tarefas foram combinadas com o paradigma de primação mascarada. No primeiro estudo os resultados mostraram tempos de resposta maiores para palavras CG vs. NCG, que não houve efeito de primação de tradução, e que o grau de semelhança formal não modulou o padrão de resultados. No segundo estudo os resultados mostraram um padrão inverso, isto é, menores tempos de resposta para palavras CG vs. NCG (apenas na percentagem de erros), efeito de primação de tradução para as palavras CG e NCG (de maior magnitude para as palavras CG) e que o grau de partilha formal, ortográfica e fonológica, influenciou a magnitude do efeito de primação de tradução (maiores magnitudes para as palavras CG O+F- e O-F+). Os dados obtidos mostram que tanto o tipo de tarefa como a sobreposição ortográfica e fonológica influenciam o reconhecimento visual de palavras, portanto, são consistentes com os postulados da hipótese sublexical (Dijkstra et al., 2010).The differential processing of cognate (CG) and non-cognate (NCG) words has been the subject of numerous investigations because such words are a very valuable tool for studying the organization and functioning of bilingual memory. There are two central theoretical proposals that explain the processing advantage for CG vs. NCG: the lexical-morphological proposal (Davis et al., 2010), which claims that there is a distinct representation of cognate words in bilingual memory, while the sublexical proposal supports that the advantage is due to semantic and formal (orthographic and phonological) similarity between the GC words (Dijkstra, Miwa, Brummelhuis, Sappelli, & Baayen, 2010). In this study we examined the impact of orthographic and phonological overlap in visual recognition of words CG. For this purpose we selected a set of 192 English words, 96 CG and 96 NCG. The CG words were divided orthogonally into four groups according to the degree of orthographic and phonological overlap between the English word and its translation equivalent in European Portuguese. The second objective of this work was to evaluate the impact of the type of task in the visual recognition of words. Therefore, two studies have been designed, the first with a silent reading task (N = 28), the second with a lexical decision task (N = 22). The two tasks were combined with the masked priming paradigm. In the first study the results showed response times higher for GC vs NCG words, absence of priming effect, and revealed that the degree of formal similarity did not modulated the results. In the second study the results showed an inverse pattern with shorter response times to GC vs. NCG words (only in the percentage of errors), a translation priming effect for CG and NCG words (larger magnitudes for the CG words) and that the degree of formal overlap, orthographic and phonological, influences the magnitude of the translation priming effect (larger magnitudes for the O+F- and O-F + CG words). These data show that both the type of task and the orthographic and phonological overlap influence the visual recognition of words, therefore, are consistent with the postulates of the hypothesis sublexical (Dijkstra et al., 2010)

Free associate norms for 139 European Portuguese words for children from different age groups

The present study presents normative ratings of free association for 139 European Portuguese (EP) words for 8-, 10- and 12-year-old children attending the 3rd, 5th and 7th grades of elementary and middle school in Portugal. For each word, five indices are presented: a) the percentage of associates, b) the strength of the first associate, c) the strength of the second associate, d) the distance between the first and the second associates and e) the percentage of idiosyncratic responses. Additionally, grade-level frequency values for each word from the ESCOLEX database (Soares et al., in press) are also provided. As expected, the results revealed developmental changes in the knowledge organization of children, ocurring at the age of 9-10 (5th grade) and remaining stable in 11-12 year-old children (7th grade). Specifically, we observed a decrease in the percentage of associates and idiosyncratic responses as well as an increase in the strength of the first and the second associate from the 3rd grade to the 5th grade. Moreover, the comparative analysis with the previous work of Carneiro, Albuquerque, Fernandes, & Esteves (2004) on EP and Macizo, Gómez-Ariza, & Bajo (2000) on Spanish for a subset of common words (16 and 58, respectively) shows that the present norms fit well with previous EP data but differ from Spanish data. The normative values can be downloaded at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases or at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.This work is part of the research projects “Bilingual semantic processing: a study with cognate words by using different learning methods” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104671/2008) and “Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A software program for deriving objective and subjective psycholinguistic indices for European Portuguese words” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104679/2008), funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and by Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) through the European programs Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional (QREN) and Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade (COMPETE). The authors thank Pedro Macizo for allowing us to use their normative data for 58 Spanish words with the purpose of comparison with the EP data. We also thank Isabel Padrón and Álvaro Iriarte for helping us with the classification of children’s responses as a function of syntagmatic–paradigmatic typology

Adaptation of the international affective picture system (IAPS) for european portuguese

This study presents the results of the adaptation of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008) for European Portuguese (EP). Following the original procedure of Lang et al. (1995-2008), 2,000 native speakers of EP rated the 1,182 pictures of the last version of the IAPS set on the three affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance, using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). Results showed that the normative values of the IAPS for EP are properly distributed in the affective space of valence and arousal, showing the typical boomerang-shaped distribution observed in previous studies. Results also points to important differences in the way Portuguese females and males react to affective pictures that should be taken into consideration when planning and conducting research with Portuguese samples. Furthermore, the results from the cross-cultural comparisons between the EP ratings and the ratings from the American (Lang et al., 2008), Spanish (Moltó et al., 1999; Vila et al., 2001), Brazilian (Lasaitis et al., 2008; Ribeiro et al., 2005), Belgium (Verschuere et al., 2001), Chilean (Dufey et al., 2011; Silva, 2011), Indian (Lohani et al., 2013) and Bosnian-Herzegovina (Drače et al., 2013) standardizations, showed that in spite of the fact that IAPS stimuli elicited affective responses that are similar across countries and cultures (at least in Western cultures), there are differences in the way Portuguese individuals react to IAPS pictures that strongly recommends the use of the normative values presented in this work. They can be downloaded as a supplemental archive at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental or at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases.Ana Paula Soares is also Director of the Human Cognition Laboratory (HCL) of the School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal, and the Main Researcher of the Research Group of Psycholinguistics (RGP) hosted at the HCL. This work is part of the research project “Procura Palavras (P-Pal): A software program for deriving objective and subjective psycholinguistic indices for European Portuguese words” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104679/2008), funded by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia), and FEDER (Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional) through the European programs QREN (Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional), and COMPETE (Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade). It was also supported by Grant PTDC/PSI-PCL/116626/2010 from FCT and FEDER (Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional) through the European programs QREN (Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional), and COMPETE (Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade), awarded to A.P.P.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Characterisation of microbial attack on archaeological bone

As part of an EU funded project to investigate the factors influencing bone preservation in the archaeological record, more than 250 bones from 41 archaeological sites in five countries spanning four climatic regions were studied for diagenetic alteration. Sites were selected to cover a range of environmental conditions and archaeological contexts. Microscopic and physical (mercury intrusion porosimetry) analyses of these bones revealed that the majority (68%) had suffered microbial attack. Furthermore, significant differences were found between animal and human bone in both the state of preservation and the type of microbial attack present. These differences in preservation might result from differences in early taphonomy of the bones. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved