Semantic priming study of Russian aspect and resultativity

This paper reports four priming experiments, in which resultative, processual, and delimitative Russian verbs were tested. The experiments were based on the semantic decision task: the participants had to decide whether the target denoted an event / situation with a clear outcome. To assess the impact of morphological cues on the decision latencies, verbs of different morphological complexity (prefixed and unprefixed perfectives) were used. The results obtained suggest that the aspectual feature of resultativity is consistently exploited in semantic priming (processual targets were primed in two experiments), and that the morphological cues facilitate the identification of resultative targets (prefixed perfectives exhibited faster decision latencies than unprefixed perfectives). As far as the delimitative forms are concerned, a category-induction experiment was designed to investigate the subjects’ tendency to group them with resultatives or with processuals, since the delimitatives represent an in-between category. The proportion of yes/no answers confirmed that the speakers place the delimitatives between these two domains, but much closer to the processuals than to the resultatives. These findings support the distinction of boundedness vs. telicity from both the theoretical and the behavioural perspective. The fact that the resultative interpretation of the delimitatives was not ruled out completely for most verbs suggests that, when certain conditions are met (when no cognate resultative form is readily available and when the delimitative is frequent enough), the delimitative can be conceptualized as the perfective counterpart of the basic imperfective, thus taking on the prototypical perfective role (resultativity)

The role of left and right hemispheres in the comprehension of idiomatic language: an electrical neuroimaging study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The specific role of the two cerebral hemispheres in processing idiomatic language is highly debated. While some studies show the involvement of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), other data support the crucial role of right-hemispheric regions, and particularly of the middle/superior temporal area. Time-course and neural bases of literal vs. idiomatic language processing were compared. Fifteen volunteers silently read 360 idiomatic and literal Italian sentences and decided whether they were semantically related or unrelated to a following target word, while their EEGs were recorded from 128 electrodes. Word length, abstractness and frequency of use, sentence comprehensibility, familiarity and cloze probability were matched across classes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Participants responded more quickly to literal than to idiomatic sentences, probably indicating a difference in task difficulty. Occipito/temporal N2 component had a greater amplitude in response to idioms between 250-300 ms. Related swLORETA source reconstruction revealed a difference in the activation of the left fusiform gyrus (FG, BA19) and medial frontal gyri for the contrast idiomatic-minus-literal. Centroparietal N400 was much larger to idiomatic than to literal phrases (360-550 ms). The intra-cortical generators of this effect included the left and right FG, the left cingulate gyrus, the right limbic area, the right MTG (BA21) and the left middle frontal gyrus (BA46). Finally, an anterior late positivity (600-800 ms) was larger to idiomatic than literal phrases. ERPs also showed a larger right centro-parietal N400 to associated than non-associated targets (not differing as a function of sentence type), and a greater right frontal P600 to idiomatic than literal associated targets.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The data indicate bilateral involvement of both hemispheres in idiom comprehension, including the right MTG after 350 ms and the right medial frontal gyrus in the time windows 270-300 and 500-780 ms. In addition, the activation of left and right limbic regions (400-450 ms) suggests that they have a role in the emotional connotation of colourful idiomatic language. The data support the view that there is direct access to the idiomatic meaning of figurative language, not dependent on the suppression of its literal meaning, for which the LIFG was previously thought to be responsible.</p

Processing of Hand-Related Verbs Specifically Affects the Planning and Execution of Arm Reaching Movements

Even though a growing body of research has shown that the processing of action language affects the planning and execution of motor acts, several aspects of this interaction are still hotly debated. The directionality (i.e. does understanding action-related language induce a facilitation or an interference with the corresponding action?), the time course, and the nature of the interaction (i.e. under what conditions does the phenomenon occur?) are largely unclear. To further explore this topic we exploited a go/no-go paradigm in which healthy participants were required to perform arm reaching movements toward a target when verbs expressing either hand or foot actions were shown, and to refrain from moving when abstract verbs were presented. We found that reaction times (RT) and percentages of errors increased when the verb involved the same effector used to give the response. This interference occurred very early, when the interval between verb presentation and the delivery of the go signal was 50 ms, and could be elicited until this delay was about 600 ms. In addition, RTs were faster when subjects used the right arm than when they used the left arm, suggesting that action–verb understanding is left-lateralized. Furthermore, when the color of the printed verb and not its meaning was the cue for movement execution the differences between RTs and error percentages between verb categories disappeared, unequivocally indicating that the phenomenon occurs only when the semantic content of a verb has to be retrieved. These results are compatible with the theory of embodied language, which hypothesizes that comprehending verbal descriptions of actions relies on an internal simulation of the sensory–motor experience of the action, and provide a new and detailed view of the interplay between action language and motor acts

How Are ‘Barack Obama’ and ‘President Elect’ Differentially Stored in the Brain? An ERP Investigation on the Processing of Proper and Common Noun Pairs

BACKGROUND:One of the most debated issues in the cognitive neuroscience of language is whether distinct semantic domains are differentially represented in the brain. Clinical studies described several anomic dissociations with no clear neuroanatomical correlate. Neuroimaging studies have shown that memory retrieval is more demanding for proper than common nouns in that the former are purely arbitrary referential expressions. In this study a semantic relatedness paradigm was devised to investigate neural processing of proper and common nouns. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:780 words (arranged in pairs of Italian nouns/adjectives and the first/last names of well known persons) were presented. Half pairs were semantically related ("Woody Allen" or "social security"), while the others were not ("Sigmund Parodi" or "judicial cream"). All items were balanced for length, frequency, familiarity and semantic relatedness. Participants were to decide about the semantic relatedness of the two items in a pair. RTs and N400 data suggest that the task was more demanding for common nouns. The LORETA neural generators for the related-unrelated contrast (for proper names) included the left fusiform gyrus, right medial temporal gyrus, limbic and parahippocampal regions, inferior parietal and inferior frontal areas, which are thought to be involved in the conjoined processing a familiar face with the relevant episodic information. Person name was more emotional and sensory vivid than common noun semantic access. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:When memory retrieval is not required, proper name access (conspecifics knowledge) is not more demanding. The neural generators of N400 to unrelated items (unknown persons and things) did not differ as a function of lexical class, thus suggesting that proper and common nouns are not treated differently as belonging to different grammatical classes

Costs and benefits of orthographic inconsistency in reading:evidence from a cross-linguistic comparison

We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, a consistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs later and it is less pronounced. This is demonstrated by larger length effects which remain significant even in older children and by larger effects of a global factor (related to speed of orthographic decoding) explaining changes of performance across ages. Our results show the importance of considering not only overall performance, but inter-individual variability and variability between conditions when interpreting cross-linguistic differences

Integrated parentheticals in quotations and free indirect discourse

Free Indirect Discourse and Quotations are introduced by a special kind of parentheticals, minimally constituted by a subject and a predicate of saying, thinking etc. I propose that these parentheticals are represented in a syntactic structure integrated with that of the reported sentence. The phrases hosting the parentheticals are projected by prosody oriented heads, i.e., heads which do not express a lexical content, but are read at the syntax-phonology interface as special instructions for realizing the peculiar intonation associated to parentheticals, the so-called comma intonation. I show that this approach offers several advantages, contributing in solving some long standing problems connected with the syntactic status of parentheticals in general.In this chapter I consider the syntactic properties of a particular kind of parentheticals, those introducing Quotations – henceforth, QU – and Free Indirect Discourse – henceforth, FID. Consider the following examples: (1) I will leave tomorrow, said John (2) The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left, thought Winston (adapted, from Orwell 1984). Example (1) is a QU structure and the parenthetical in question is said John. Example (2) is a FID construction and the parenthetical is thought Winston. As already well known, they have special properties from an interpretive, syntactic and phonological point of view. QU and FID parentheticals are alike under many points of view, even if the two constructions must be kept separate, especially with respect to the interpretation of pronouns and verbal forms. For the purposes of this work, I will in general consider them alike. Observe now the following paradigm: (3) John said that Mary left (4) John said: “Mary left” (5) Maria, said John, left. It seems to me that the most important goal for a syntactic analysis is to provide a coherent analysis of the similarities and differences among the constructions in (3)- (5). At first sight, these structures seem very much alike, both from the point of view of their meaning and their syntax – to the extent that some scholars have proposed a direct syntactic derivation (Emonds 1973; Ross 1973), for instance of (5) starting from (3). I will show here that the situation is indeed much more complex than that. In particular, in this paper I show that example (5) is closer to (4) than to (3). The approach I will develop here is an integrated view of parentheticals, complying with Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA)

Metodi quantitativi nell’analisi dell’acquisizione delle strutture tempo-aspettuali

In questo lavoro, ci concentriamo in modo particolare sui risultati concernenti la semantica e morfologia verbale. I dati etichettati sono stati sottoposti a due tipi di analisi: 1. un’analisi estensiva di carattere statistico, mirante a far emergere le correlazioni tra le diverse categorie semantiche (sul piano del tempo, dell’aspetto e dell’azionalità) e le categorie morfologiche via via acquisite dai tre apprendenti, ovviamente in rapporto al comportamento degli adulti interagenti. 2. un’analisi computazionale condotta sui verbi più frequenti per ciascuna classe azionale attraverso l’applicazione di Multi-dimensional Scaling (MDS) e Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) (Kohonen 1997). Attraverso il MDS è possibile ottenere una visione sinottica delle modalità secondo le quali verbi appartenenti a classi azionali diverse si dispongono in uno spazio multidimensionale di variabili quantitative, che registrano distribuzioni di tratti morfologici e sintattici. Le SOMs sono un modello neurale non-supervisionato, che consente invece di simulare il processo dinamico di formazione di proto-classi azionali che emergono dalle correlazioni statistiche presenti nell’input linguistico

Decomposing metaphor processing at the cognitive and neural level through functional magnetic resonance imaging

Prior neuroimaging studies on metaphor comprehension have tended to focus on the role of the right hemisphere, without reaching consensus and leaving aside the functional architecture of this process. The present work aimed to break down metaphor comprehension into its functional components. The study rationale is two-fold: on the one hand, the large-scale network model as emerging in cognitive neuroscience led us to a consideration of metaphor as supported by a distributed and bilateral network; on the other hand, we based on the accounts of figurative language put forward in pragmatics and cognitive science to postulate a decomposition of such a network into multiple sub-systems. During scanning, participants implicitly processed metaphorical (familiar and unfamiliar) and non-metaphorical passages, while being explicitly involved in an adjective matching task to be performed after reading the target passages. Several regions showed greater activity to metaphors as compared to non-metaphors, including left and right inferior frontal gyrus, right superior temporal gyrus, left angular gyrus, and anterior cingulate. This pattern of activations, markedly bilateral, can be decomposed into circumscribed functional sub-systems mediating different aspects of metaphor resolution, as foreseen in the pragmatic and cognitive literature: (a) the conceptual/pragmatic machinery in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and in the left angular gyrus, which supports the integration of linguistic material and world knowledge in context; (b) the attentional component in the anterior cingulate and prefrontal areas, which is set to monitor and filter for the relevant aspects of context and for the appropriate meanings; (c) the Theory of Mind system along the right superior temporal sulcus, which deals with the recognition of speakers' communicative intentions and is more extensively activated by unfamiliar metaphors. The results have several implications for the field of neuropragmatics, especially on the neuropsychological side and on the right hemisphere hypothesis. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Tense and Aspect in L3 Interlanguage. The Effect of Lexical Aspect and Discourse Grounding on the Development of Tense and Aspect Marking in L3 Italian

This study presents the results of analyses carried out on written narra- tives (N = 103), collected from university learners of L3 Italian, designed to exam- ine the effect of lexical aspect and discourse grounding on past tense marking in L3 Italian. The analyses reveal that, contrary to the predictions of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis and the Discourse Hypothesis, these two factors do not reach their high- est degree of influence during early stages of language acquisition. The interlan- guage of low proficiency learners does not show the effects of lexical aspect or discourse grounding. On the contrary, the effect of both lexical aspect and discourse grounding increases with higher proficiency