scholarly journals The role of the l-IPS in the comprehension of reversible and irreversible sentences: an rTMS study

2020 ◽  
Vol 225 (8) ◽  
pp. 2403-2414
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Vercesi ◽  
Prerana Sabnis ◽  
Chiara Finocchiaro ◽  
Luigi Cattaneo ◽  
Elena Tonolli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Performance Accuracy ◽  
Thematic Relations ◽  
First Pass ◽  
Stimulation Of

Abstract Thematic roles can be seen as semantic labels assigned to who/what is taking part in the event denoted by a verb. Encoding thematic relations is crucial for sentence interpretation since it relies on both syntactic and semantic aspects. In previous studies, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the left inferior intraparietal sulcus (l-IPS) selectively influenced performance accuracy on reversible passive (but not active) sentences. The effect was attributed to the fact that in these sentences the assignment of the agent and theme roles requires re-analysis of the first-pass sentence parsing. To evaluate the role of reversibility and non-canonical word order (passive voice) on the effect, rTMS was applied over l-IPS during a sentence comprehension task that included reversible and irreversible, active and passive sentences. Participants were asked to identify who/what was performing the action or who/what the action was being performed on. Stimulation of the l-IPS increased response time on reversible passive sentences but not on reversible active sentences. Importantly, no effect was found on irreversible sentences, irrespective of sentence diathesis. Results suggest that neither reversibility nor sentence diathesis alone are responsible for the effect and that the effect is likely to be triggered/constrained by a combination of semantic reversibility and non-canonical word order. Combined with the results of previous studies, and irrespective of the specific role of each feature, these findings support the view that the l-IPS is critically involved in the assignment of thematic roles in reversible sentences.

Comprehension of Reversible Sentences in Specifically Language-Impaired Children

1990 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather K. J. van der Lely ◽  
Margaret Harris
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Vocabulary Test ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Language Impaired ◽  
Impaired Children ◽  
Very High

This study investigated comprehension of reversible sentences in specifically language-impaired (SLI) children. Two experiments, using different paradigms, were undertaken. In Experiment 1, 14 SLI children (aged 4:10–7:10) were compared with children matched on chronological age and language age (LA). Subjects acted out 36 semantically reversible sentences that varied in thematic content (transitives, locatives, and datives) and in the order of thematic roles (canonical and noncanonical). The SLI children performed at a significantly lower level than both control groups. In Experiment 2, the same sentences were presented using a picture-pointing task. A single word vocabulary test preceded the test sentences to assess semantic knowledge of the predicates. Sixteen SLI children were compared with language age controls. No significant differences were found between the performance of the two groups on the vocabulary test, and in general, the results of Experiment 2 supported those of Experiment 1. Analysis of individual children's error patterns identified qualitative differences between the SLI children and the LA controls. The majority of SLI children had a very high proportion of word order errors. The proportion of word order errors of the SLI children, unlike those of the LA controls, was unrelated to language age. These findings are considered in relation to the processes involved in sentence comprehension.

scholarly journals SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF THETA ROLES OF VERBS IN THE MAH MERI LANGUAGE

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Maisarah Maisarah ◽  
Kais Amir Kadhim ◽  
Zahid Ali Veesar
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Endangered Languages ◽  
Verb Phrase ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Thematic Relations ◽  
Theta Role

The Mah Meri language, one of the severely endangered languages of Malaysia, is facing the threat of extinction. In order to save valuable information of this language, this paper focuses on one of its aspects, the Theta Roles in relation to the verbs. Using Radford’s (1997 & 2009) theory of Theta Roles, this study analyzes and explores the verb phrase of Mah Meri. The main objective of this study is to establish the Theta Roles in relation to verbs in the Mah Meri language. In order to fully understand the verb structures, the morphological entities of affixes such as prefixes and suffixes are studied. Moreover, the word order of the sentential constructions are also analyzed according to active and passive forms. These are done in tandem with analyzing the pronouns in relation to the placement of verbs in a Mah Meri sentential construction. It is found that Theta Roles are present in the data except for the Theta Role Recipient. However, this is not due to the lack of the Theta Role of Recipient in the Mah Meri language; rather it is due to the limitation of the scope in this study as data is analyzed based on the interviews only. On the other hand, the Theta Role of Agent is clearly evident in the Mah Meri language.Keywords: Mah Meri Language, Argument Structure, Theta Roles, Thematic Relations

Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children's comprehension of relative clauses

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
EVAN KIDD ◽  
ANGEL CHAN ◽  
JOIE CHIU
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
Error Analyses ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Subject And Object

The current study investigated the role of cross-linguistic influence in Cantonese–English bilingual children's comprehension of subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (RCs). Twenty simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children (Mage= 8;11, SD = 2;6) and 20 vocabulary-matched Cantonese monolingual children (Mage= 6;4, SD = 1;3) completed a test of Cantonese RC comprehension. The bilingual children also completed a test of English RC comprehension. The results showed that, whereas the monolingual children were equally competent on subject and object RCs, the bilingual children performed significantly better on subject RCs. Error analyses suggested that the bilingual children were most often correctly assigning thematic roles in object RCs, but were incorrectly choosing the RC subject as the head referent. This pervasive error was interpreted to be due to the fact that both Cantonese and English have canonical SVO word order, which creates competition with structures that compete with an object RC analysis.

scholarly journals Information Structure and Word Order Canonicity in the Comprehension of Spanish Texts: An Eye-Tracking Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina A. Gattei ◽  
Luis A. París ◽  
Diego E. Shalom
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Total Reading Time ◽  
Pragmatic Motivation

Word order alternation has been described as one of the most productive information structure markers and discourse organizers across languages. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that word order is a crucial cue for argument interpretation. Previous studies about Spanish sentence comprehension have shown greater difficulty to parse sentences that present a word order that does not respect the order of participants of the verb's lexico-semantic structure, irrespective to whether the sentences follow the canonical word order of the language or not. This difficulty has been accounted as the cognitive cost related to the miscomputation of prominence status of the argument that precedes the verb. Nonetheless, the authors only analyzed the use of alternative word orders in isolated sentences, leaving aside the pragmatic motivation of word order alternation. By means of an eye-tracking task, the current study provides further evidence about the role of information structure for the comprehension of sentences with alternative word order and verb type, and sheds light on the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We analyzed both “early” and “late” eye-movement measures as well as accuracy and response times to comprehension questions. Results showed an overall influence of information structure reflected in a modulation of late eye-movement measures as well as offline measures like total reading time and questions response time. However, effects related to the miscomputation of prominence status did not fade away when sentences were preceded by a context that led to non-canonical word order of constituents, showing that prominence computation is a core mechanism for argument interpretation, even in sentences preceded by context.

scholarly journals Syntax and processing in Seediq: an event-related potential study

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 395-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masataka Yano ◽  
Keiyu Niikuni ◽  
Hajime Ono ◽  
Manami Sato ◽  
Apay Ai-yu Tang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Processing Load ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
Austronesian Language ◽  
Basic Word ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Processing Difficulty

AbstractIn many languages with subject-before-object as a syntactically basic word order, transitive sentences in which the subject precedes the object have been reported to have a processing advantage over those in which the subject follows the object in sentence comprehension. Three sources can be considered to account for this advantage, namely, syntactic complexity (filler-gap dependency), conceptual accessibility (the order of thematic roles), and pragmatic requirement. To examine the effect of these factors on the processing of simple transitive sentences, the present study conducted two event-related potential experiments in Seediq, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, by manipulating word orders (basic VOS vs. non-basic SVO), the order of thematic roles (actor vs. goal voice), and discourse factors (presence/absence of visual context). The results showed that, compared to VOS, SVO incurred a greater processing load (reflected by a P600) when there was no supportive context, irrespective of voice alternation; however, SVO did not incur a greater processing load when there was supportive context and the discourse requirement was satisfied. We interpreted these results as evidence that the processing difficulty of the non-basic word order in Seediq is associated with a discourse-level processing difficulty.

Speech and Span: Working Memory Capacity Impacts the Use of Animacy but Not of World Knowledge during Spoken Sentence Comprehension

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 2886-2898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroko Nakano ◽  
Clifford Saron ◽  
Tamara Y. Swaab
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
N400 Effect ◽  
Thematic Relations ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
On Line

We present results from a study demonstrating that high- and low-span listeners show qualitatively different brain responses when comprehending simple active sentences. Participants listened to naturally produced sentences in three conditions in which the plausibility of thematic relations was manipulated, for instance: The dog(1)/The poet(2)/The box(3) is biting the mailman. Event-related potentials were recorded to the first noun, the verb, and the second noun in all three conditions. In (2), the thematic relations between the words in the sentence are less expected given our world knowledge, and this resulted in an N400 effect of semantic processing difficulty to the second noun for both high- and low-span subjects. In (3), the inanimate first noun cannot be the agent of the verb. Only high-span subjects showed an effect of animacy on the sentence-initial nouns, evident from a larger anterior negative shift to inanimate than animate nouns. Furthermore, to the thematically violated verbs (3), low-span subjects showed an N400, whereas high-span subjects generated a P600. We suggest that this P600 effect to the thematically violated verb may be related to processing costs resulting from a conflict between the provisional thematic roles assigned as a function of the inanimate sentence-initial noun, and the actual (animate) agent required by the verb. We further argue that low-span subjects lag behind those with high span in their use of animacy, but not real-world knowledge in the on-line computation of thematic roles in spoken language comprehension.

Cue validity in Hebrew sentence comprehension

1988 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey L. Sokolov
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Cue Validity ◽  
Study Word ◽  
Increased Sensitivity ◽  
Actual Strength ◽  
Older Subjects ◽  
Positive Correlations

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the degree to which cue validity, as estimated from textual analyses, predicts the actual strength of grammatical cues as they are used by speakers of Hebrew. An experiment was conducted to determine the differential strengths of the linguistic cues employed by Hebrew speakers when assigning the role of patient in sentences. Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects 4, 5, 7, and 9 years old, as well as adults, were tested using a sentence-picture verification task. Six cues were included in the study: word order, the accusative object marker, the reflexive noun phrase and three verbal derivations. By presenting subjects with sentences which set these cues in competition with one another, a measure of the strength of each cue was obtained. The results of a regression analysis revealed strong positive correlations between estimated cue validities and actual cue strengths for all but the youngest age groups. These results were interpreted as suggesting that cue validity is highly predictive of actual cue strengths. In addition, the strengths of the six cues varied as a function of the subject's age. Two additional factors were hypothesized to account for the performance of the older subjects: increased sensitivity to the reliability of cues and discourse-based constraints.

Stimulation of Ca(2+)-dependent exocytosis of the sperm acrosome by cAMP acting downstream of phospholipase A2

Reproduction ◽  
2000 ◽  
pp. 57-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Garde ◽  
ER Roldan
Keyword(s):  
Arachidonic Acid ◽  
Phospholipase A2 ◽  
Phospholipase C ◽  
Phosphodiesterase Inhibitors ◽  
Dibutyryl Camp ◽  
Camp Phosphodiesterase ◽  
Ram Sperm ◽  
Camp Formation ◽  
Stimulation Of

Spermatozoa undergo exocytosis in response to agonists that induce Ca2+ influx and, in turn, activation of phosphoinositidase C, phospholipase C, phospholipase A2, and cAMP formation. Since the role of cAMP downstream of Ca2+ influx is unknown, this study investigated whether cAMP modulates phospholipase C or phospholipase A2 using a ram sperm model stimulated with A23187 and Ca2+. Exposure to dibutyryl-cAMP, phosphodiesterase inhibitors or forskolin resulted in enhancement of exocytosis. However, the effect was not due to stimulation of phospholipase C or phospholipase A2: in spermatozoa prelabelled with [3H]palmitic acid or [14C]arachidonic acid, these reagents did not enhance [3H]diacylglycerol formation or [14C]arachidonic acid release. Spermatozoa were treated with the phospholipase A2 inhibitor aristolochic acid, and dibutyryl-cAMP to test whether cAMP acts downstream of phospholipase A2. Under these conditions, exocytosis did not occur in response to A23187 and Ca2+. However, inclusion of dibutyryl-cAMP and the phospholipase A2 metabolite lysophosphatidylcholine did result in exocytosis (at an extent similar to that seen when cells were treated with A23187/Ca2+ and without the inhibitor). Inclusion of lysophosphatidylcholine alone, without dibutyryl-cAMP, enhanced exocytosis to a lesser extent, demonstrating that cAMP requires a phospholipase A2 metabolite to stimulate the final stages of exocytosis. These results indicate that cAMP may act downstream of phospholipase A2, exerting a regulatory role in the exocytosis triggered by physiological agonists.

THEMATIC ROLE ASSIGNMENT IN ENGLISH SENTENCES: A QUICK GLANCE AT AN INTERFACE BETWEEN SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eni Maharsi
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
Thematic Role ◽  
Role Assignment

This paper examines the role of elements of English sentences by employing the approach ofthematic role assignment. The emphasis is on how the positioning of words and phrases insyntactic structure helps determine the roles that the referents of NPs play in the situationdescribed by the sentences. The results reveal that the position of an NP’s determines itsthematic role and. There is a relevance between deep syntactic structure and the assignmentof thematic roles for every NP in the sentence.

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