People possess significant knowledge about how real-world events typically unfold. Such event-related semantic memory connects action and object knowledge, is essential for multiple stages of ...language processing, and may be impaired in neurological conditions like aphasia. However, current assessments are not well designed for measuring this knowledge. This study presents and tests a novel measure of event-related semantic memory. Task-performance data were collected from unimpaired adults across the lifespan and a sample of stroke survivors with aphasia. Individuals with aphasia also completed measures of language processing and action-/object-related semantic memory, to establish the novel measure's convergent validity. Results demonstrate that performance on the event-knowledge measure correlated with action and object semantic-memory measures and was also associated with a broader range of language-processing performance than other semantic-memory measures. These findings suggest that the novel measure can be used to detect the presence and impact of event-knowledge impairments in neurological conditions.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The information theoretic principle of rational adaptation predicts that individuals with aphasia adapt to their language impairments by relying more heavily on comparatively unimpaired ...non-linguistic knowledge to communicate. This prediction was examined by assessing the extent to which adults with chronic aphasia due to left-hemisphere stroke rely more on conceptual rather than lexical information during verb retrieval, as compared to age-matched neurotypical controls. A primed verb naming task examined the degree of facilitation each participant group received from either conceptual event-related or lexical collocate cues, compared to unrelated baseline cues. The results provide evidence that adults with aphasia received amplified facilitation from conceptual cues compared to controls, whereas healthy controls received greater facilitation from lexical cues. This indicates that adaptation to alternative and relatively unimpaired information may facilitate successful word retrieval in aphasia. Implications for models of rational adaptation and clinical neurorehabilitation are discussed.
This paper reports the results of five experiments designed to investigate the effects of referential processing on sentence complexity. Gibson (
Cognition,
68 (1998) 1) suggested that sentence ...complexity is related to the locality of integrations between dependent syntactic heads, and that an appropriate measure of locality is the number of new discourse referents intervening between the endpoints of those integrations. The experiments in this paper test, modify and extend Gibson's (1998) claims. Each experiment manipulated noun phrases (NPs) in the subject positions of object-extracted relative clauses in order to determine how different types of NPs affected sentence complexity. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 used questionnaires to gauge sentence complexity, whereas Experiments 4 and 5 used self-paced reading. The results from Experiments 1, 2, 4 and 5 suggest that the complexity of the experimental items was more closely related to the Givenness status of the embedded subject in the Givenness Hierarchy than to whether the embedded subject was old or new to the discourse. Experiment 3 compared materials in which a quantifier was rotated through subject positions of a nested relative clause structure. The results of this experiment support a discourse-processing-based distance metric for computing locality and provide evidence against a pure similarity-based account of structural complexity such as proposed by Bever (Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis of linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.),
Cognition and the development of language (pp. 279–362). New York: Wiley).
Plausibility violations resulting in impossible scenarios lead to earlier and longer lasting eye movement disruption than violations resulting in highly unlikely scenarios (
K. Rayner, T. Warren, B. ...J. Juhasz, & S. P. Liversedge, 2004
;
T. Warren & K. McConnell, 2007
). This could reflect either differences in the timing of availability of different kinds of information (e.g., selectional restrictions, world knowledge, and context) or differences in their relative power to guide semantic interpretation. The authors investigated eye movements to possible and impossible events in real-world and fantasy contexts to determine when contextual information influences detection of impossibility cued by a semantic mismatch between a verb and an argument. Gaze durations on a target word were longer to impossible events independent of context. However, a measure of the time elapsed from first fixating the target word to moving past it showed disruption only in the real-world context. These results suggest that contextual information did not eliminate initial disruption but moderated it quickly thereafter.
The Effect of Plausibility on Eye Movements in Reading Rayner, Keith; Warren, Tessa; Juhasz, Barbara J ...
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition,
11/2004, Letnik:
30, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences describing events in which an individual performed an action with an implement. The noun phrase arguments of the verbs in the sentences ...were such that when thematic assignment occurred at the critical target word, the sentence was plausible (likely theme), implausible (unlikely theme), or anomalous (an inappropriate theme). Whereas the target word in the anomalous condition provided evidence of immediate disruption, the effect of the target word in the implausible condition was considerably delayed. The results thus indicate that when a word is anomalous, it has an immediate effect on eye movements, but that the effect of implausibility is not as immediate.
Wrap-up effects in reading have traditionally been thought to reflect increased processing associated with intra- and inter-clause integration (Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). A theory of ...reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. Psychological Review,87(4), 329–354; Rayner, K., Kambe, G., & Duffy, S. A. (2000). The effect of clause wrap-up on eye movements during reading. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,53A(4), 1061–1080; cf. Hirotani, M., Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (2006). Punctuation and intonation effects on clause and sentence wrap-up: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language,54, 425–443). We report an eye-tracking experiment with a strong manipulation of integrative complexity at a critical word that was either sentence-final, ended a comma-marked clause, or was not comma-marked. Although both complexity and punctuation had reliable effects, they did not interact in any eye-movement measure. These results as well as simulations using the E–Z Reader model of eye-movement control (Reichle, E. D., Warren, T., & McConnell, K. (2009). Using E–Z Reader to model the effects of higher-level language processing on eye movements during reading. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,16(1), 1–20) suggest that traditional accounts of clause wrap-up are incomplete.
Does the language comprehension system resolve ambiguities for single- and multiple-word units similarly? We investigate this question by examining whether two constructs with robust effects on ...ambiguous word processing – meaning relatedness and meaning dominance – have similar influences on idiom processing. Eye tracking showed that: (1) idioms with more related figurative and literal meanings were read faster, paralleling findings for ambiguous words, and (2) meaning relatedness and meaning dominance interacted to drive eye movements on idioms just as they do on polysemous ambiguous words. These findings are consistent with a language comprehension system that resolves ambiguities similarly regardless of literality or the number of words in the unit.
The disruption that occurs in response to reading about implausible events in unambiguous sentences can be informative about the time course of semantic interpretation (e.g., Hagoort, Hald, ...Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004; Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006; Warren & McConnell, 2007). Two eye-tracking studies used implausible sentences to investigate whether local factors like the structural relationships and the distance between words cueing a plausibility violation influence how quickly those words are integrated into a global semantic interpretation. Experiment 1 suggested that eye-movement disruption was unaffected by the number of words intervening between the words cueing the implausibility. Experiment 2 demonstrated that eye-movement disruption to implausibility occurred along the same time course regardless of whether the words cueing the implausibility were in a theta-assigning relation or not. These results suggest that these local structural factors do not influence how quickly new words are integrated into a semantic representation, but rather the global event representation determines the time course over which implausibility is detected.
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