Articoli a scelta

• Beber, B.C., da Cruz, A.N. & Chaves, M.L. (2015). A behavioral study of the nature of verb production deficits in Alzheimer’s disease. Brain & Language, 149, 128–134. Abstract: Patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may experience greater difficulty with verb production than with noun production. In this study, we sought to assess the nature of verb production deficits in AD by using verb fluency and verb naming tasks. We designed two hypotheses for this verb deficit: (1) executive impairment drives the deficit; (2) semantic impairment drives the deficit. Thirty-five patients with AD and 35 matched healthy controls participated in the study. Both groups performed a verb naming task composed of 45 pictures (low-, medium-, and high-frequency subsets) and a verb fluency task (scored for total correct words and for mean word frequency). Patients with AD were equally impaired in verb naming and verb fluency, with an effect of disease severity on verb naming. Word frequency influenced verb naming, but not verb fluency, performance. Our results indicate that verb production deficits in AD seem to be driven more by semantic than by executive impairment.
• Bohn, M., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. (2016). Comprehension of iconic gestures by chimpanzees and human children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 142, 1–17. Abstract: Iconic gestures-communicative acts using hand or body movements that resemble their referent-figure prominently in theories of language evolution and development. This study contrasted the abilities of chimpanzees (N=11) and 4-year-old human children (N=24) to comprehend novel iconic gestures. Participants learned to retrieve rewards from apparatuses in two distinct locations, each requiring a different action. In the test, a human adult informed the participant where to go by miming the action needed to obtain the reward. Children used the iconic gestures (more than arbitrary gestures) to locate the reward, whereas chimpanzees did not. Some children also used arbitrary gestures in the same way, but only after they had previously shown comprehension for iconic gestures. Over time, chimpanzees learned to associate iconic gestures with the appropriate location faster than arbitrary gestures, suggesting at least some recognition of the iconicity involved. These results demonstrate the importance of iconicity in referential communication.
• Borgström, K., von Koss Torkildsen, J. & Lindgren, M. (2015). Substantial gains in word learning ability between 20 and 24 months: A longitudinal ERP study. Brain & Language, 149, 33–45. Abstract: This longitudinal ERP study investigated changes in children’s ability to map novel words to novel objects during the dynamic period of vocabulary growth between 20 and 24. months. During this four-month period the children on average tripled their productive vocabulary, an increase which was coupled with changes in the N400 effect to pseudoword-referent associations. Moreover, productive vocabulary size was related to the dynamics of semantic processing during novel word learning. In children with large productive vocabularies, the N400 amplitude was linearly reduced during the five experimental learning trials, consistent with the repetition effect typically seen in adults, while in children with smaller vocabularies the N400 attenuation did not appear until the end of the learning phase. Vocabulary size was related only to modulation of the N400 to pseudowords, not to real words. These findings demonstrate a remarkable development of fast mapping ability between 20 and 24. months.
• Bürki, A., Cheneval, P.P. & Laganaro, M. (2015). Do speakers have access to a mental syllabary? ERP comparison of high frequency and novel syllable production. Brain & Language, 150, 90–102. Abstract: The transformation of an abstract phonological code into articulation has been hypothesized to involve the retrieval of stored syllable-sized motor plans. Accordingly, gestural scores for frequently used syllables are retrieved from memory whereas gestural scores for novel and possibly low frequency syllables are assembled on-line. The present study was designed to test this hypothesis. Participants produced disyllabic pseudowords with high frequency, low frequency and non-existent (novel) initial syllables. Behavioral results revealed slower production latencies for novel than for high frequency syllables. Event-related potentials diverged in waveform amplitudes and global topographic patterns between high frequency and low frequency/novel syllables around 170 ms before the onset of articulation. These differences indicate the recruitment of different brain networks during the production of frequent and infrequent/novel syllables, in line with the hypothesis that speakers store syllabic-sized motor programs for frequent syllables and assemble these motor plans on-line for low frequency and novel syllables.
• Cai, Z.G., Pickering, M.J., Wang, R. & Branigan, H.P. (2015). It is there whether you hear it or not: Syntactic representation of missing arguments. Cognition, 136, 255–267. Abstract: Many languages allow arguments to be omitted when they are recoverable from the context, but how do people comprehend sentences with a missing argument? We contrast a syntactically-represented account whereby people postulate a syntactic representation for the missing argument, with a syntactically-non-represented account whereby people do not postulate any syntactic representation for it. We report two structural priming experiments in Mandarin Chinese that showed that comprehension of a dative sentence with a missing direct-object argument primed the production of a full-form dative sentence (relative to an intransitive) and that it behaved similarly to a corresponding full-form dative sentence. The results suggest that people construct the same constituent structure for missing-argument sentences and full-form sentences, in accord with the syntactically-represented account. We discuss the implications for syntactic representations in language processing.
• Caplan, D., Michaud, J., Hufford, R. & Makris, N. (2016). Deficit-lesion correlations in syntactic comprehension in aphasia. Brain & Language, 152, 14–27. Abstract: The effects of lesions on syntactic comprehension were studied in thirty-one people with aphasia (PWA). Participants were tested for the ability to parse and interpret four types of syntactic structures and elements - passives, object extracted relative clauses, reflexives and pronouns - in three tasks - object manipulation, sentence picture matching with full sentence presentation and sentence picture matching with self-paced listening presentation. Accuracy, end-of-sentence RT and self-paced listening times for each word were measured. MR scans were obtained and analyzed for total lesion volume and for lesion size in 48 cortical areas. Lesion size in several areas of the left hemisphere was related to accuracy in particular sentence types in particular tasks and to self-paced listening times for critical words in particular sentence types. The results support a model of brain organization that includes areas that are specialized for the combination of particular syntactic and interpretive operations and the use of the meanings produced by those operations to accomplish task-related operations.
• Catricalà, E., Della Rosa, P.A., Plebani, V., Perani, D., Garrard, P. & Cappa, S.F. (2015). Semantic feature degradation and naming performance. Evidence from neurodegenerative disorders. Brain & Language, 147, 58–65. Abstract: The failure to name an object in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and in the semantic variant of the primary progressive aphasia (sv-PPA) has been generally attributed to semantic memory loss, with a progressive degradation of semantic features. Not all features, however, may have the same relevance in picture naming. We analyzed the relationship between picture naming performance and the loss of semantic features in patients with AD with or without naming impairment, with sv-PPA and in matched controls, assessing the role of distinctiveness, semantic relevance and feature type (sensorial versus non-sensorial) with a sentence verification task. The results showed that distinctive features with high values of semantic relevance were lost only in all patients with naming impairment. The performance on the sensorial distinctive features with high relevance was the best predictor of naming performance only in sv-PPA, while no difference between sensorial and non-sensorial features was found in AD patients.
• Dunabeitia, J.A. & Costa, A. (2015). Lying in a native and foreign language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22(4), 1124–1129. Abstract: This study explores the interaction between deceptive language and second language processing. One hundred participants were asked to produce veridical and false statements in either their first or second language. Pupil size, speech latencies, and utterance durations were analyzed. Results showed additive effects of statement veracity and the language in which these statements were produced. That is, false statements elicited larger pupil dilations and longer naming latencies compared with veridical statements, and statements in the foreign language elicited larger pupil dilations and longer speech durations and compared with first language. Importantly, these two effects did not interact, suggesting that the processing cost associated with deception is similar in a native and foreign language. The theoretical implications of these observations are discussed.
• Foucart, A., Ruiz-Tada, E. & Costa, A. (2015). How do you know I was about to say “book”? Anticipation processes affect speech processing and lexical recognition. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience, 30(6), 1–13. Abstract: Most event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that showed the role of anticipation processes during sentence processing focused on reading. However, in everyday conversation speech unfolds at higher speed; the present study examines whether comprehenders anticipate words when processing auditory sentences. In high-constrained Spanish sentences, we time-locked ERPs on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mismatched the gender of the expected nouns triggered an early (200–280 ms) and a late negativity (450–900 ms), suggesting that anticipation processes are at play also during speech processing. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that (muted) “expected” words were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than (muted) “unexpected” words, and as often as “old” words that were actually presented. These results suggest that anticipation processes allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation. The findings support a top-down view of spoken sentence comprehension
• Frazier, L. & Clifton, C.J. (2015). Without his shirt off he saved the child from almost drowning: Interpreting an uncertain input. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience, 30(6), 635–647. Abstract: Unedited speech and writing often contains errors, e.g., the blending of alternative ways of expressing a message. As a result comprehenders are faced with decisions about what the speaker may have intended, which may not be the same as the grammatically-licensed compositional interpretation of what was said. Two experiments investigated the comprehension of inputs that may have resulted from blending two syntactic forms. The results of the experiments suggest that readers and listeners tend to repair such utterances, restoring them to the presumed intended structure, and they assign the interpretation of the corrected utterance. Utterances that are repaired are expected to also be acceptable when they are easy to diagnose/repair and they are “familiar”, i.e., they correspond to natural speech errors. The results of the experiments established a continuum ranging from outright linguistic illusions with no indication that listeners and readers detected the error (the inclusion of almost in A passerby rescued a child from almost being run over by a bus.), to a majority of unblended interpretations for doubled quantifier sentences (Many students often turn in their assignments late) to only a third undoubled implicit negation (I just like the way the president looks without his shirt off.) The repair or speech error reversal account offered here is contrasted with the noisy channel approach and the good enough processing approach.
• Friesen, D.C., Chung-Fat-Yim, A. & Bialystok, E. (2016). Lexical selection differences between monolingual and bilingual listeners. Brain & Language, 152, 1–13. Abstract: Three studies are reported investigating how monolinguals and bilinguals resolve within-language competition when listening to isolated words. Participants saw two pictures that were semantically-related, phonologically-related, or unrelated and heard a word naming one of them while event-related potentials were recorded. In Studies 1 and 2, the pictures and auditory cue were presented simultaneously and the related conditions produced interference for both groups. Monolinguals showed reduced N400s to the semantically-related pairs but there was no modulation in this component by bilinguals. Study 3 inserted an interval between picture and word onset. For picture onset, both groups exhibited reduced N400s to semantically-related pictures; for word onset, both groups showed larger N400s to phonologically-related pictures. Overall, bilinguals showed less integration of related items in simultaneous (but not sequential) presentation, presumably because of interference from the activated non-English language. Thus, simple lexical selection for bilinguals includes more conflict than it does for monolinguals.
• Gámez, P.B. & Vasilyeva, M. (2015). Exploring interactions between semantic and syntactic processes: The role of animacy in syntactic priming. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 138, 15–30. Abstract: The current study addressed the relation between syntactic and semantic processes during language production in 5- and 6-year-old children. A priming paradigm was used to examine children’s production of passives in describing transitive scenes (target pictures) following exposure to the experimenter's sentences (primes). The key question was whether the tendency to repeat the syntactic form of the prime was affected by the animacy features in the prime and the target picture. In Experiment 1, children heard either passive or active primes with varied animacy configurations (e.g., animate patient/inanimate agent vs. inanimate patient/animate agent). The animacy features of the prime matched those of the target. Similar to prior studies, results showed a greater use of passives following passive, as opposed to active, primes. Critically, the difference between the two priming conditions varied as a function of animacy; it was larger when the prime and the target included an animate patient/inanimate agent than with the reversed animacy. In Experiment 2, the animacy configuration of the prime either matched or did not match that of the target. Results showed a greater likelihood of producing a passive when the target picture contained an animate patient versus an inanimate patient, and this effect was stronger when the prime had the same animacy features. The findings indicating that syntactic priming is moderated by animacy are discussed in the broader context of understanding the role of semantics in guiding the choice of syntactic structure.
• Goucha, T. & Friederici, A.D. (2015). The language skeleton after dissecting meaning: A functional segregation within Broca’s Area. NeuroImage, 114, 294–302. Abstract: Broca’s area is proposed as a crucial brain area for linguistic computations. Language processing goes beyond word-level processing, also implying the integration of meaningful information (semantics) with the underlying structural skeleton (syntax). There is an on-going debate about the specialisation of the subregions of Broca's area-Brodmann areas (BA) 44 and 45-regarding the latter aspects. Here, we tested if syntactic information is specifically processed in BA 44, whereas BA 45 is mainly recruited for semantic processing. We contrasted conditions with sentence structure against conditions with random order in two fMRI experiments. Besides, in order to disentangle these processes, we systematically removed the amount of semantic information available in the stimuli. This was achieved in Experiment 1 by replacing meaningful words (content words) by pseudowords. Within real word conditions we found broad activation in the left hemisphere, including the inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44/45/47), the anterior temporal lobe and posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) and sulcus (pSTS). For pseudowords we found a similar activation pattern, still involving BA 45. Among the pseudowords in Experiment 1, we kept those word elements that convey meaning like un- in unhappy or -hood in brotherhood (i.e. derivational morphology). In Experiment 2 we tested whether the activation in BA 45 was due to their presence. We therefore further removed derivational morphology, only leaving word elements that determine syntactic structure (i.e. inflectional morphology, e.g. the verb ending -s in he paints). Now, in the absence of all semantic cues, including derivational morphology, only BA 44 was active. Additional analyses showed a selective responsiveness of this area to syntax-relevant cues. These findings confirm BA 44 as a core area for the processing of pure syntactic information. This furthermore suggests that the brain represents structural and meaningful aspects of language separately.
• Gould, L., McKibben, T., Ekstrand, C., Lorentz, E. & Borowsky, R. (2015). The beat goes on: the effect of rhythm on reading aloud. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience, 31, 1–15. Abstract: The central aim of this experiment was to explore the connection between rhythm and reading processes by examining whether reading aloud is affected by the presentation of a rhythmic prime that was either congruent or incongruent with the syllabic stress of the target letter string. The targets were words that placed the stress on either the first or second syllable (practice vs. police), as well as their corresponding pseudohomophones (PHs) (praktis vs. poleese). The results demonstrated that naming reaction times were faster for PHs when the rhythmic prime was congruent with the syllabic stress, and slower when the rhythmic prime was incongruent. These results are taken to suggest that PHs showed a larger effect given that they must be phonetically decoded. The congruency by stimulus type interaction suggests that their effects reflect at least one common stage of processing, namely grapheme to phoneme translation. In general, these results indicate that a rhythmic prime matched to the syllabic stress of a letter string that requires phonetic decoding aids sublexical reading processes, which has important implications for allowing models of reading to account for rhythm processes. The current paradigm may also reveal potential remedial applications for treating speech deficits in patient populations, such as Parkinson’s disease, stuttering, aphasia, and dyslexia.
• Häberling, I.S., Steinemann, A. & Corballis, M.C. (2016). Cerebral asymmetry for language: Comparing production with comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 80, 17–23. Abstract: Although left-hemispheric damage can impair both the production and comprehension of language, it has been claimed that comprehension is more bilaterally represented than is production. A variant of this theme is based on the theory that different aspects of language are processed by a dorsal stream, responsible for mapping words to articulation, and a ventral stream for processing input for meaning. Some have claimed that the dorsal stream is left-hemispheric, while the ventral stream is bilaterally organized. We used fMRI to record activation while left- and right-handed participants performed covert word-generation task and judged whether word pairs were synonyms. Regions of interest were Broca’s area as part of the dorsal stream and the superior and middle temporal gyri as part of the ventral stream. Laterality indices showed equal left-hemispheric lateralization in Broca's area for word generation and both Broca's area and temporal lobe for the synonym judgments. Handedness influenced laterality equally in each area and task, with right-handers showing stronger left-hemispheric dominance than left-handers. Although our findings provide no evidence that asymmetry is more pronounced for production than for comprehension, correlations between the tasks and regions of interest support the view that lateralization in the temporal lobe depends on feedback influences from frontal regions.
• Hautala, J. & Loberg, O. (2015). Breaking down the word length effect on readers’ eye movements. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience, 30(8), 993–1007. Abstract: Previous research on the effect of word length on reading confounded the number of letters (NrL) in a word with its spatial width. Consequently, the extent to which visuospatial and attentional-linguistic processes contribute to the word length effect on parafoveal and foveal vision in reading and dyslexia is unknown. Scholars recently suggested that visual crowding is an important factor for determining an individual’s reading speed in fluent and dyslexic reading. We studied whether the NrL or the spatial width of target words affects fixation duration and saccadic measures in natural reading in fluent and dysfluent readers of a transparent orthography. Participants read natural sentences presented in a proportional font that contained spatially narrow and wide four- to seven-letter target words. The participants looked at spatially narrow words overall for a longer duration partially due to more frequent regressions, which showed that crowding can disrupt word recognition during normal reading. In addition, reliable NrL effects on fixation duration suggest that letters are important attentional units during reading. Saccadic measures including relative landing position, refixation and skipping probability were strongly affected by spatial width and slightly affected by the NrL, which suggests that saccadic programming and parafoveal processing of upcoming words are limited by visual acuity more than by attentional factors. The dysfluent readers overall had longer fixation durations for words but did not show larger crowding or NrL effects.
• Havas, V., Gabarrós, A., Juncadella, M., Rifa-Ros, X., Plans, G., Acebes, J.J., … Rodríguez-Fornells, A. (2015). Electrical stimulation mapping of nouns and verbs in Broca’s area. Brain & Language, 145-146, 53–63. Abstract: Electric stimulation mapping (ESM) is frequently used during brain surgery to localise higher cognitive functions to avoid post-chirurgical disabilities. Experiments with brain imaging techniques and neuropsychological studies showed differences in the cortical representation and processing of nouns and verbs. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether electric stimulation in specific sites in the frontal cortex disrupted noun and verb production selectively. We found that most of the stimulated areas showed disruption of both verbs and nouns at the inferior frontal gyrus. However, when selective effects were obtained, verbs were more prone to disruption than nouns with important individual differences. The overall results indicate that selective impairments can be observed at inferior and middle frontal regions and the action naming task seems to be more suitable to avoid post-chirurgical language disabilities, as it shows a greater sensitivity to disruption with ESM than the classical object naming task.
• Ito, A., Corley, M., Pickering, M.J., Martin, A.E. & Nieuwland, M.S. (2016). Predicting form and meaning: Evidence from brain potentials. Journal of Memory & Language, 86, 157–171. Abstract: We used ERPs to investigate the pre-activation of form and meaning in language comprehension. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., “. The student is going to the library to borrow a. . .”), followed by a word that was predictable (book), form-related (hook) or semantically related (page) to the predictable word, or unrelated (sofa). At a 500. ms SOA (Experiment 1), semantically related words, but not form-related words, elicited a reduced N400 compared to unrelated words. At a 700. ms SOA (Experiment 2), semantically related words and form-related words elicited reduced N400 effects, but the effect for form-related words occurred in very high-cloze sentences only. At both SOAs, form-related words elicited an enhanced, post-N400 posterior positivity (Late Positive Component effect). The N400 effects suggest that readers can pre-activate meaning and form information for highly predictable words, but form pre-activation is more limited than meaning pre-activation. The post-N400 LPC effect suggests that participants detected the form similarity between expected and encountered input. Pre-activation of word forms crucially depends upon the time that readers have to make predictions, in line with production-based accounts of linguistic prediction.
• Jager, B. & Cleland, A.A. (2016). Polysemy Advantage with Abstract But Not Concrete Words. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 45, 143–156. Abstract: It is a robust finding that ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous words. More recent studies (e.g., Rodd et al. in J Mem Lang 46:245-266, 2002) now indicate that this ambiguity advantage may in reality be a polysemy advantage: caused by related senses (polysemy) rather than unrelated meanings (homonymy). We report two lexical decision studies that investigated the effects of polysemy with new word sets. In both studies, polysemy was factorially manipulated while homonymy was controlled for. In Experiment 1, where the stimulus set consisted solely of concrete nouns, there was no effect of polysemy. However, in Experiment 2, where the stimulus set consisted of a mix of abstract nouns, verbs, and adjectives, there was a significant polysemy advantage. Together, these two studies strongly suggest that polysemy affects abstract but not concrete nouns. In addition, they rule out several alternative explanations for these polysemy effects, e.g., sense dominance, age-of-acquisition, familiarity, and semantic diversity.
• Kush, D., Johns, C.L. & Van Dyke, J.A. (2015). Identifying the role of phonology in sentence-level reading. Journal of Memory & Language, 79-80, 18–29. Abstract: 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.
• Lacombe, J., Jolicoeur, P., Grimault, S., Pineault, J. & Joubert, S. (2015). Neural changes associated with semantic processing in healthy aging despite intact behavioral performance. Brain & Language, 149, 118–127. Abstract: Semantic memory recruits an extensive neural network including the left inferior prefrontal cortex (IPC) and the left temporoparietal region, which are involved in semantic control processes, as well as the anterior temporal lobe region (ATL) which is considered to be involved in processing semantic information at a central level. However, little is known about the underlying neuronal integrity of the semantic network in normal aging. Young and older healthy adults carried out a semantic judgment task while their cortical activity was recorded using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Despite equivalent behavioral performance, young adults activated the left IPC to a greater extent than older adults, while the latter group recruited the temporoparietal region bilaterally and the left ATL to a greater extent than younger adults. Results indicate that significant neuronal changes occur in normal aging, mainly in regions underlying semantic control processes, despite an apparent stability in performance at the behavioral level.
• Luke, S.G. & Christianson, K. (2015). Predicting inflectional morphology from context. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience, 30, 1–14. Abstract: The present studies investigated the influence of the semantic and syntactic predictability of an inflectional morpheme on word recognition and morphological processing. In two eye-tracking experiments, we examined the effect of syntactic and semantic context on the processing of letter transpositions in inflected words. Participants experienced greater and earlier disruption from cross-morpheme letter transpositions when target verbs appeared in a context that syntactically predicted the presence of a past-tense suffix. Further, internal transpositions caused greater and earlier disruption even in monomorphemic verbs when syntactic context created an expectation of morphological complexity. No effect of semantic predictability was observed, potentially because the semantic manipulation was insufficiently strong. The results reveal that syntactic contexts typical of most English sentences can lead readers to make predictions about the morphological structure of upcoming words.
• Marno, H., Langus, A., Omidbeigi, M., Asaadi, S., Seyed-Allaei, S. & Nespor, M. (2015). A new perspective on word order preferences: the availability of a lexicon triggers the use of SVO word order. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1–8. Abstract: Word orders are not distributed equally: SOV and SVO are the most prevalent among the world’s languages. While there is a consensus that SOV might be the “default” order in human languages, the factors that trigger the preference for SVO are still a matter of debate. Here we provide a new perspective on word order preferences that emphasizes the role of a lexicon. We propose that while there is a tendency to favor SOV in the case of improvised communication, the exposure to a shared lexicon makes it possible to liberate sufficient cognitive resources to use syntax. Consequently SVO, the more efficient word order to express syntactic relations, emerges. To test this hypothesis, we taught Italian (SVO) and Persian (SOV) speakers a set of gestures and later asked them to describe simple events. Confirming our prediction, results showed that in both groups a consistent use of SVO emerged after acquiring a stable gesture repertoire.
• Meltzer-Asscher, A., Mack, J.E., Barbieri, E. & Thompson, C.K. (2015). How the brain processes different dimensions of argument structure complexity: Evidence from fMRI. Brain & Language, 142, 65–75. Abstract: Verbs are central to sentence processing, as they encode argument structure (AS) information, i.e., information about the syntax and interpretation of the phrases accompanying them. The behavioral and neural correlates of AS processing have primarily been investigated in sentence-level tasks, requiring both verb processing and verb-argument integration. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated AS processing using a lexical decision task requiring only verb processing. We examined three aspects of AS complexity: number of thematic roles, number of thematic options, and mapping (non)canonicity (unaccusative vs. unergative and transitive verbs). Increased number of thematic roles elicited greater activation in the left posterior perisylvian regions claimed to support access to stored AS representations. However, the number of thematic options had no neural effects. Further, unaccusative verbs elicited longer response times and increased activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus, reflecting the processing cost of unaccusative verbs and, more generally, supporting the role of the IFG in noncanonical argument mapping.
• Peter, M., Chang, F., Pine, J.M., Blything, R. & Rowland, C.F. (2015). When and how do children develop knowledge of verb argument structure? Evidence from verb bias effects in a structural priming task. Journal of Memory & Language, 81, 1–15. Abstract: In this study, we investigated when children develop adult-like verb-structure links, and examined two mechanisms, associative and error-based learning, that might explain how these verb-structure links are learned. Using structural priming, we tested children’s and adults' ability to use verb-structure links in production in three ways; by manipulating: (1) verb overlap between prime and target, (2) target verb bias, and (3) prime verb bias. Children (aged 3-4 and 5-6. years old) and adults heard and produced double object dative (DOD) and prepositional object dative (PD) primes with DOD- and PD-biased verbs. Although all age groups showed significant evidence of structural priming, only adults showed increased priming when there was verb overlap between prime and target sentences (the lexical boost). The effect of target verb bias also grew with development. Critically, however, the effect of prime verb bias on the size of the priming effect (prime surprisal) was larger in children than in adults, suggesting that verb-structure links are present at the earliest age tested. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that children begin to acquire knowledge about verb-argument structure preferences early in acquisition, but that the ability to use adult-like verb bias in production gradually improves over development. We also argue that this pattern of results is best explained by a learning model that uses an error-based learning mechanism.
• Proverbio, A.M., Gabaro, V., Orlandi, A. & Zani, A. (2015). Semantic brain areas are involved in gesture comprehension: An electrical neuroimaging study. Brain & Language, 147, 30–40. Abstract: While the mechanism of sign language comprehension in deaf people has been widely investigated, little is known about the neural underpinnings of spontaneous gesture comprehension in healthy speakers. Bioelectrical responses to 800 pictures of actors showing common Italian gestures (e.g., emblems, deictic or iconic gestures) were recorded in 14 persons. Stimuli were selected from a wider corpus of 1122 gestures. Half of the pictures were preceded by an incongruent description. ERPs were recorded from 128 sites while participants decided whether the stimulus was congruent. Congruent pictures elicited a posterior P300 followed by late positivity, while incongruent gestures elicited an anterior N400 response. N400 generators were investigated with swLORETA reconstruction. Processing of congruent gestures activated face- and body-related visual areas (e.g., BA19, BA37, BA22), the left angular gyrus, mirror fronto/parietal areas. The incongruent-congruent contrast particularly stimulated linguistic and semantic brain areas, such as the left medial and the superior temporal lobe.
• Sung, J.E. (2015). Age-related changes in sentence production abilities and their relation to working- memory capacity: Evidence from a verb-final language. PLoS ONE, 10(4), 1–13. Abstract: This study investigated the best predictor to capture age-related changes in passive-sentence production using a constrained sentence-production paradigm and explored the role of working-memory capacity in relation to the task demands of the sentence-production tasks. A total of 60 participants participated in the study ranging in age from 21 to 86. All were administered a syntactic-priming and a sentence-completion task under either canonical or noncanonical word-order conditions. Age was significantly and negatively correlated with sentence-production tasks, and the most demanding condition with a noncanonical word order under the syntactic priming paradigm was the best predictor of aging. Working-memory capacity was significantly and positively correlated with all conditions, but the significant correlation remained only for the most demanding condition (the priming task with a noncanonical word order) after controlling for age. Sentence-production abilities were vulnerable to aging, and these effects manifested most clearly when the task demands were high enough to tax individuals’ cognitive capacity. Working-memory capacity partially accounted for age-related changes in sentence-production abilities.
• Tanner, D. & Bulkes, N.Z. (2015). Cues, quantification, and agreement in language comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22, 1753–1763. Abstract: We investigated factors that affect the comprehension of subject–verb agreement in English, using quantification as a window into the relationship between morphosyntactic processes in language production and comprehension. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical verbs, in which the plurality of the subject noun phrase was either doubly marked (via overt plural quantification and morphological marking on the noun) or singly marked (via only plural morphology on the noun). Both acceptability judgments and the ERP data showed heightened sensitivity to agreement violations when quantification provided an additional cue to the grammatical number of the subject noun phrase, over and above plural morphology. This is consistent with models of grammatical comprehension that emphasize feature prediction in tandem with cue-based memory retrieval. Our results additionally contrast with those of prior studies that showed no effects of plural quantification on agreement in language production. These findings therefore highlight some nontrivial divergences in the cues and mechanisms supporting morphosyntactic processing in language production and comprehension.
• Torreira, F., Bögels, S. & Levinson, S.C. (2015). Breathing for answering: The time course of response planning in conversation. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1–11. Abstract: We investigate the timing of pre-answer inbreaths in order to shed light on the time course of response planning and execution in conversational turn-taking. Using acoustic and inductive plethysmography recordings of seven dyadic conversations in Dutch, we show that pre-answer inbreaths in conversation typically begin briefly after the end of questions. We also show that the presence of a pre-answer inbreath usually co-occurs with substantially delayed answers, with a modal latency of 576 vs. 100 ms for answers not preceded by an inbreath. Based on previously reported minimal latencies for internal intercostal activation and the production of speech sounds, we propose that vocal responses, either in the form of a pre-utterance inbreath or of speech proper when an inbreath is not produced, are typically launched in reaction to information present in the last portion of the interlocutor’s turn. We also show that short responses are usually made on residual breath, while longer responses are more often preceded by an inbreath. This relation of inbreaths to answer length suggests that by the time an inbreath is launched, typically during the last few hundred milliseconds of the question, the length of the answer is often prepared to some extent. Together, our findings are consistent with a two-stage model of response planning in conversational turn-taking: early planning of content often carried out in overlap with the incoming turn, and late launching of articulation based on the identification of turn-final cues.
• Traxler, M.J. (2014). Priming of early closure: evidence for the lexical boost during sentence comprehension. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience, 30, 1–13. Abstract: Two self-paced reading experiments investigated priming in sentences containing ‘early’ vs.  ‘late closure’ ambiguities. Early closure sentences impose relatively large processing costs at the point of syntactic disambiguation. The current study investigated a possible way to reduce processing costs. Target sentences were temporarily ambiguous and were disambiguated towards either the preferred  ‘late’ closure analysis or the dispreferred  ‘early’ closure analysis. Each target sentence was preceded by a prime that was either structurally identical or that required a different syntactic analysis. In Experiment 1, all the prime sentences shared the same critical verb as the target. In Experiment 2, verb repetition was eliminated by reorganising the stimuli from Experiment 1. In Experiment 1, processing of the disambiguating verb was facilitated when an ‘early’ closure target sentence followed an  ‘early’ closure prime. In Experiment 2, there were no significant priming effects, although an overall difference in processing time favoured  ‘late closure’ targets. Combined analyses verified that the pattern of results in Experiment 1 differed significantly from Experiment 2. These experiments provide the first indication that ‘early’ closure analyses can be primed and that such priming is more robust when a critical verb appears in both the prime and the target sentence. The results add to the body of data indicating a ‘lexical boost’ for syntactic priming effects during comprehension. They have implications for theories of syntactic representation and processing.
• Vuksanović, J., Bjekić, J. & Radivojević, N. (2014). Grammatical Gender and Mental Representation of Object: The Case of Musical Instruments. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 1–15. Abstract: A body of research shows that grammatical gender, although an arbitrary category, is viewed as the system with its own meaning. However, the question remains to what extent does grammatical gender influence shaping our notions about objects when both verbal and visual information are available. Two experiments were conducted. The results obtained in Experiment 1 have shown that grammatical gender as a linguistic property of the pseudo-nouns used as names for musical instruments significantly affects people’s representations about these instruments. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to examine how the representation of musical instruments will be shaped in the presence of both language and visual information. The results indicate that the co-existence of linguistic and visual information results in formation of concepts about selected instruments by all available information from both sources, thus suggesting that grammatical gender influences nonverbal concepts' forming, but has no privileged status in the matter.
• Warren, T., Milburn, E., Patson, N.D. & Walsh Dickey, M. (2015). Comprehending the impossible: what role do selectional restriction violations play? Language, Cognition & Neuroscience, 3798, 1–8. Abstract: To elucidate how different kinds of knowledge are used during comprehension, readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read sentences that were: plausible, impossible because of a selectional restriction violation (SRV) or impossible because of a violation of general world knowledge. Eye movements on the pre-critical, critical, and post-critical words evidenced disruption in the SRV condition compared to the other two conditions. These findings suggest that disruption associated with reading about impossible events is not directly determined by how impossible the event seems. Rather, the relationship between the verb and arguments in the sentence seems to matter. These findings are the strongest evidence to date that processing effects associated with selectional restrictions can dissociate from those associated with general world knowledge about events.

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