When remembering an event, not only do we recollect what happened, when and where it happened, but also how it unfolded over time. What aspects of events are encoded in memory to support this ...recollection? This question is central for understanding the nature of event memories and our reconstruction of the time passed. In this article, we investigate how the spontaneous encoding of unfamiliar animations during learning influences the recollection of how these animations unfold. Specifically, we examine two structural properties of dynamic event sequences known to modulate the amount of information encoded in memory: the perceived number of sub-events and their perceived similarity. We found that despite clock duration remaining constant, more sub-events and less similar ones led to longer recognition memory latencies, duration judgments and mental event replaying. In particular, across stimulus animations, both the perceived number of sub-events and their degree of similarity contributed to the prediction of duration judgments and the length of mental event reproductions. Results indicate that the number and nature of sub-events in a sequence modulate how we reconstruct its duration and temporal unfolding, thus suggesting that these event properties, which mediate the amount of information encoded for an event, modulate the subsequent recollection of its temporal unfolding.
•We examine distortions of temporal memory after verbal and visual encoding.•We varied stimulus exposure and recall cues (visual or verbal).•Language distorted memory only when it cued ...recollection.•Temporal distortions were explained by the density of the details recalled.
How do we represent the duration of past events that we have conceptualized through language? Prior research suggests that memory for duration depends on the segmental structure perceived at encoding. However, it remains unclear why duration memory displays characteristic distortions and whether language-mediated encoding can further distort duration memory. Here we examine these questions and specifically ask whether the amount of event information recalled relative to the stimulus duration explains temporal distortions. In several studies, participants first studied animated stimuli described by phrases implying either fast or slow motion (e.g., a mule vs car going up a road). They then mentally reproduced the stimuli from memory (as if replaying them in their minds) and verbally recalled them. We manipulated the amount of stimulus study and the type of recall cue (visual vs linguistic) to assess the role of language and information recalled on the length of mental reproductions. Results indicated that the density of the information recalled (number of details recalled per second) explained temporal distortions: higher density events were lengthened and lower density events were shortened. Moreover, language additionally lengthened or shortened duration reproductions when phrases cued the task, suggesting that episodic details and verbal conceptual features were combined during recollection rather than encoding. These results suggest that the density of the details recalled and language-mediated recollection shape memory for event duration. We argue that temporal memory distortions stem from event encoding and retrieval mechanisms. Implications of these findings for theories of time, memory and language are discussed.
Six studies investigated the relationship between production and comprehension by examining how relative clause production mechanisms influence the probabilistic information used by comprehenders to ...understand these structures. Two production experiments show that accessibility-based mechanisms that are influenced by noun animacy and verb type shape relative clause production. Two corpus studies confirm these production mechanisms in naturally occurring productions. Two comprehension studies found that nouns and verb types occurring in structures that speakers do not produce are difficult to comprehend. Specifically, the probability of producing a passive structure for a verb type in a given animacy configuration, as measured in the production and corpus studies, predicts comprehension difficulty in active structures. Results suggest that the way in which the verb roles are typically mapped onto syntactic arguments in production plays a role in comprehension. Implications for the relationship between production, comprehension and language learning are discussed.
The field of psychology of time has typically distinguished between prospective timing and retrospective duration estimation: in prospective timing, participants attend to and encode time, whereas in ...retrospective estimation, estimates are based on the memory of what happened. Prior research on prospective timing has primarily focused on attentional mechanisms to explain timing behavior, but it remains unclear the extent to which memory processes may also play a role. The present studies investigate this issue, and specifically, the role of newly learned encoded event structure. Two structural properties of dynamic event sequences were examined, which are known to modulate retrospective duration estimates: the perceived number of segments and the similarity between them. We found that when duration and episodic event content are both attended to and encoded, more segments and less similarity between them led to longer attributed durations, despite clock duration remaining constant. In contrast, when only duration is attended to, only the number of segments influenced estimated durations. These findings indicate that incidentally or intentionally encoded episodic event structure modulates prospective duration judgments. Based on these and previous findings, implications for the role of memory mechanisms on prospective paradigms are discussed.
Sentence production and comprehension both draw on linguistic knowledge, but current research is unclear on whether these fundamental language tasks involve similar or distinct competitive processes. ...Previous studies suggest that production and comprehension may involve similar conflict resolution processes, but that production may additionally recruit motor-related conflict not necessarily present in comprehension. To examine these possibilities, we combined an experimental animacy-driven manipulation eliciting difficulty in separate production and comprehension tasks with an examination of how this manipulation interacted with individual variability in motor-related and lexicosemantic conflict resolution performance beyond vocabulary measures. We reasoned that a different pattern of interactions for production and comprehension would point to distinct processes across these tasks, whereas interactions with the same individual performance task would indicate similar conflict-related processes. We found that beyond a significant role of vocabulary, only a measure of context-dependent lexical ambiguity resolution interacted with the animacy manipulation in the production and the comprehension task. These findings suggest a role for linguistic knowledge and similar lexically driven competitive processes in both sentence production and comprehension. Alongside current computational models, these results raise the possibility that despite different task demands, some production and comprehension competitive processes are not entirely distinct from one another nor separable from lexical knowledge. Implications for current views on the relationship between sentence production and comprehension are discussed.
► We examine how animacy, competition and language-specific constraints shape production. ► Descriptions of entities in three languages show variability in structural preferences. ► Production ...preferences depend on animacy and similarity between the described entities. ► Similarity-based competition influences various stages of production processes.
This work investigates production preferences in different languages. Specifically, it examines how animacy, competition processes, and language-specific constraints shape speakers’ choices of structure. English, Spanish and Serbian speakers were presented with depicted events in which either an animate or inanimate entity was acted upon by an agent. Questions about the affected participant in these events prompted the production of relative clauses identifying these entities (e.g., the bag the woman is punching). Results indicated that in English, animacy plays a strong role in determining the choice of passive structures. In contrast, it plays a less prominent role in Spanish and Serbian structure choices, where more active structures were produced to varying degrees. Critically, the semantic similarity between the agent and the patient of the event correlated with the omission of the agent in all languages, indicating that competition resulted in the agent’s inhibition. Similarity also correlated with different functional choices in Spanish. The results suggest that similarity-based competition may influence various stages of production planning but its manifestations are constrained by language-specific grammatical options. Implications for models of sentence production and the relationship between production and comprehension are discussed.
Perceiving speech while performing another task is a common challenge in everyday life. How the brain controls resource allocation during speech perception remains poorly understood. Using functional ...magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the effect of cognitive load on speech perception by examining brain responses of participants performing a phoneme discrimination task and a visual working memory task simultaneously. The visual task involved holding either a single meaningless image in working memory (low cognitive load) or four different images (high cognitive load). Performing the speech task under high load, compared to low load, resulted in decreased activity in pSTG/pMTG and increased activity in visual occipital cortex and two regions known to contribute to visual attention regulation—the superior parietal lobule (SPL) and the paracingulate and anterior cingulate gyrus (PaCG, ACG). Critically, activity in PaCG/ACG was correlated with performance in the visual task and with activity in pSTG/pMTG: Increased activity in PaCG/ACG was observed for individuals with poorer visual performance and with decreased activity in pSTG/pMTG. Moreover, activity in a pSTG/pMTG seed region showed psychophysiological interactions with areas of the PaCG/ACG, with stronger interaction in the high-load than the low-load condition. These findings show that the acoustic analysis of speech is affected by the demands of a concurrent visual task and that the PaCG/ACG plays a role in allocating cognitive resources to concurrent auditory and visual information.
•Participants discriminated speech sounds while performing a visual working-memory task.•BOLD responses in pSTG/pMTG and PaCG/ACG were affected by the complexity of the memory task.•Acoustic analysis in pSTG/pMTG is modulated by cognitive load.•PaCG/ACG regulates resource allocation during divided attention.
•Animacy induces difficulty in phrase production and comprehension across ages.•The animacy effects vary with age and backward digit span (BDS) only in production.•BDS development interacts with ...phrase planning from late childhood to adolescence.•Language development varies with task difficulty calling for more general theories.
Some animacy configurations elicit parallel semantic interference in adult production and comprehension; for example, phrases with similar animate nouns like the man that the girl is hugging are more difficult than phrases like the doll that the girl is hugging. Yet little is known about how this interference manifests in development, particularly, beyond early childhood. Because frontal brain maturation and cognitive control improvements are known to occur across late childhood and adolescence, we investigated (a) how animacy-induced difficulty in production and comprehension vary with age throughout this period and (b) whether control processes reflected in the backward digit span (BDS) test uniquely explained these differences besides other language measures. In separate tasks, participants (8- to 15-year-old children; N = 91) heard auditory descriptions of depicted characters, produced characters’ descriptions, and completed BDS, vocabulary, and reading experience tests. Results indicated that, as in adults, animacy modulated performance in production and comprehension across all ages. The animacy modulation interacted with age in production but not in comprehension, suggesting age-related animacy differences in production but relatively stable differences in comprehension despite processing speed improvements. Importantly, these age-related production differences were also modulated by the BDS scores; only participants with higher BDS scores displayed age-related animacy differences. Together, these results indicate that comprehension and production develop at different rates and that the development of BDS performance interacts with age-dependent changes in sentence planning from late childhood to adolescence. More generally, the study highlights tasks’ disparities to be explained by cognitive and developmental models of language.
•The time course of lexical ambiguity resolution was examined with MEG.•High-ambiguity words disambiguated by minimal contexts (to bowl vs. the bowl) were compared to low-ambiguity controls.•LIFG and ...LPMTG showed early (∼100 ms) context-by-ambiguity interactions, suggesting controlled retrieval.•Both sites showed later interactions and ambiguity effects, suggesting a role in disambiguation.•Distinct functions previously attributed to these regions play out at different time points.
An MEG study investigated the role of context in semantic interpretation by examining the comprehension of ambiguous words in contexts leading to different interpretations. We compared high-ambiguity words in minimally different contexts (to bowl, the bowl) to low-ambiguity counterparts (the tray, to flog). Whole brain beamforming revealed the engagement of left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (LPMTG). Points of interest analyses showed that both these sites showed a stronger response to verb-contexts by 200 ms post-stimulus and displayed overlapping ambiguity effects that were sustained from 300 ms onwards. The effect of context was stronger for high-ambiguity words than for low-ambiguity words at several different time points, including within the first 100 ms post-stimulus. Unlike LIFG, LPMTG also showed stronger responses to verb than noun contexts in low-ambiguity trials. We argue that different functional roles previously attributed to LIFG and LPMTG are in fact played out at different periods during processing.
Despite much interest in language production and comprehension mechanisms, little is known about the relationship between the two. Previous research suggests that linguistic knowledge is shared ...across these tasks and that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) may be commonly recruited. However, it remains unclear the extent to which production and comprehension share competition mechanisms. Here we investigate this issue and specifically examine competition in determining the event roles in a sentence (agent or affected participant). We used both behavioral and fMRI methods and compared the reading and production of high- and low-competition sentences, specifically targeting LIFG. We found that activity in pars opercularis (PO), independently identified by a competition-driven localizer, was modulated by competition in both tasks. Psychophysiological interaction analyses seeded in PO revealed task-specific networks: In comprehension, PO only interacted with the posterior temporal lobe, whereas in production, it interacted with a large network including hippocampal, posterior temporal, medial frontal and subcortical structures. Production and comprehension therefore recruit partially distinct functional networks but share competitive processes within fronto-temporal regions. We argue that these common regions store long-term linguistic associations and compute their higher-order contingencies, but competition in production ignites a larger neural network implementing planning, as required by task demands.
•We investigate competition in sentence production and comprehension targeting LIFG.•Behavioral results strongly support the presence of competition in both tasks.•Competition modulates a Stroop-defined region in pars opercularis (PO) in both tasks.•PPI analyses reveal that production engages a larger network interacting with PO.•Competitive production and comprehension share a fronto-temporal network.
PDF
