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- Volume 8, Issue, 2013
The Mental Lexicon - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2013
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2013
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Syntactic context effects in visual word recognition: An MEG study
Author(s): Tal Linzen, Alec Marantz and Liina Pylkkänenpp.: 117–139 (23)More LessWords are typically encountered in the context of a sentence. Recent studies suggest that the contexts in which a word typically appears can affect the way it is recognized in isolation. We distinguish two types of context: collocational, involving specific lexical items, and syntactic, involving abstract syntactic structures. We investigate the effects of syntactic context using the distribution that verbs induce over the syntactic category of their complements (subcategorization frames). Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data was recorded while participants performed a lexical decision task. Verbs with low-entropy subcategorization distributions, in which most of the probability mass is concentrated on a handful of syntactic categories, elicited increased activity in the left anterior temporal lobe, a brain region associated with combinatory processing. Collocational context did not modulate neural activity, but had an effect on reaction times. These results indicate that both collocational and syntactic contextual factors affect word recognition, even in isolation.
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Aligning mispronounced words to meaning: Evidence from ERP and reaction time studies
Author(s): Adam Charles Roberts, Allison Wetterlin and Aditi Lahiripp.: 140–163 (24)More LessMany models have been proposed to account for the role that the mental lexicon plays in the initial stages of speech perception. One fundamental disparity between these models is how speech is phonologically represented in the mental lexicon. Theories range from full specification and representation of all phonological information to sparse specification. We report on two perception experiments using context independent mispronunciations (i.e. mispronunciations not governed by phonological rules) to test the predictions of the two most divergent models. Models assuming full specification and storage of all phonological information (e.g. exemplar models) predict symmetric acceptance or rejection of mispronunciations that only differ from real words in place of articulation of the medial consonant (*temor-tenor, *inage-image). Models assuming that only contrasting phonological information is stored (as in FUL) predict asymmetric patterns of acceptance, i.e. mispronunciations with medial coronal consonants will be better tolerated (*temor) than mispronunciations with medial labial or velar consonants. Results of two experiments using lexical decision with semantic priming in British English reveal an asymmetry in the acceptance of mispronunciations for coronal vs. noncoronal consonants. Both reaction time latencies as well as N400 amplitudes exhibit asymmetries, supporting the notion of abstract asymmetric lexical representation.
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The lexical representation of word stress in Russian: Evidence from event-related potentials
Author(s): Janina Molczanow, Ulrike Domahs, Johannes Knaus and Richard Wiesepp.: 164–194 (31)More LessThis paper explores the processing of metrical structure in Russian, a language with free lexical stress. According to the existing theoretical accounts, not all Russian stems are specified for accent in the lexicon. The present study employs event-related potentials (ERPs) to find evidence to support the underlying distinction into accented and unaccented stem types. The results of two EEG experiments using a stress violation paradigm reveal that Russian listeners are highly sensitive to changes of metrical structure and that prosodic manipulations may impede lexical retrieval. In the first experiment, in which the stimuli were not given prior to auditory presentation, metrical violations evoked a pronounced N400 effect for all stem types, and a late positivity for one of the stem types, indicating a difference in stress processing. In the second experiment in which the stimuli were visually introduced before auditory presentation, stress shifts to the second syllable induced late positive component (LPC) indicating an ease in the evaluation of the metrical form. Overall, the present findings partially support the division into lexically specified and unspecified Russian accent types. In addition, the results show a strong correlation between the patterning of ERP components and the direction of stress shift, suggesting a trochee to be the default foot type in Russian.
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Recovery from anomia following Semantic Feature Analysis: Therapy-induced neuroplasticity relies upon a circuit involving motor and language processing areas
Author(s): Edith Durand and Ana Inès Ansaldopp.: 195–215 (21)More LessOur previous work (Marcotte et al., 2012) reported neurofunctional changes associated with recovery from anomia following Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) in a group of participants with moderate to severe chronic anomia, providing evidence of therapy-induced neuroplasticity in chronic aphasia. The activation patterns observed concurrently with the recovery of naming suggest that SFA triggers the recruitment of an alternative pathway involving the left precentral gyrus and the left inferior parietal lobule, both of which are part of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS). SFA’s potential role in triggering the recruitment of the MNS is discussed, in line with Embodied Cognition Theory and other theoretical frameworks opening a window on aphasia therapy issues and the intricate links between motor and language processing.
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ERPs and task effects in the auditory processing of gender agreement and semantics in French
Author(s): Phaedra Royle, John E. Drury and Karsten Steinhauerpp.: 216–244 (29)More LessWe investigated task effects on violation ERP responses to Noun-Adjective gender mismatches and lexical/conceptual semantic mismatches in a combined auditory/visual paradigm in French. Participants listened to sentences while viewing pictures of objects. This paradigm was designed to investigate language processing in special populations (e.g., children) who may not be able to read or to provide stable behavioural judgment data. Our main goal was to determine how ERP responses to our target violations might differ depending on whether participants performed a judgment task (Task) versus listening for comprehension (No-Task). Characterizing the influence of the presence versus absence of judgment tasks on violation ERP responses allows us to meaningfully interpret data obtained using this paradigm without a behavioural task and relate them to judgment-based paradigms in the ERP literature. We replicated previously observed ERP patterns for semantic and gender mismatches, and found that the task especially affected the later P600 component.
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Eye-tracking and ERPs in multi-word expression research: A state-of-the-art review of the method and findings
Author(s): Anna Siyanova-Chanturiapp.: 245–268 (24)More LessIn recent years, there has been growing interest in the mechanisms that underlie online processing (comprehension and production) of units above the word level, known as multi-word expressions (MWEs). MWEs are a heterogeneous family of expressions that vary greatly in their linguistic properties but are perceived as highly conventional by native speakers. Extensive behavioural research has demonstrated that, due to their frequency and predictability, MWEs are processed differently from novel strings of language. At the very least, MWEs have been shown to be processed faster than matched control phrases. However, behavioural measures are limited in what they can tell us about MWE processing in the brain above and beyond the speed of processing. The present paper argues in favour of two powerful psycho- and neurolinguistic techniques — eye-tracking and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) — and presents a case for why these techniques are particularly suited for the investigation of phrasal frequency and predictive linguistic mechanisms. A number of studies that have drawn on these methods in their exploration of MWEs are reviewed, with a particular emphasis on the unique role of the method and its ability to tap into the underlying mechanisms implicated in MWE processing. It is argued that the two techniques complement, rather than duplicate each other, providing an ever richer account of the (psycho)linguistic phenomenon that MWEs are.
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