scholarly journals Time-Course of Motor Involvement in Literal and Metaphoric Action Sentence Processing: A TMS Study

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Reilly ◽  
Olivia Howerton ◽  
Rutvik H. Desai
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Action Sentence

Processing gender stereotypes in dementia patients and older healthy adults: a self-paced reading study

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Müller-Feldmeth ◽  
Katharina Ahnefeld ◽  
Adriana Hanulíková
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Healthy Adults ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Healthy Older Adults ◽  
Dementia Patients ◽  
Age Related

AbstractWe used self-paced reading to examine whether stereotypical associations of verbs with women or men as prototypical agents (e.g. the craftsman knits a sweater) are activated during sentence processing in dementia patients and healthy older adults. Effects of stereotypical knowledge on language processing have frequently been observed in young adults, but little is known about age-related changes in the activation and integration of stereotypical information. While syntactic processing may remain intact, semantic capacities are often affected in dementia. Since inferences based on gender stereotypes draw on social and world knowledge, access to stereotype information may also be affected in dementia patients. Results from dementia patients (n = 9, average age 86.6) and healthy older adults (n = 14, average age 79.5) showed slower reading times and less accuracy in comprehension scores for dementia patients compared to the control group. While activation of stereotypical associations of verbs was visible in both groups, they differed with respect to the time-course of processing. The effect of stereotypes on comprehension accuracy was visible for healthy adults only. The evidence from reading times suggests that older adults with and without dementia engage stereotypical inferences during reading, which is in line with research on young adults.

The Unfolding of Cognitive Effort During Sentence Processing: Pupillometric Evidence From People With and Without Aphasia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Laura Roche Chapman ◽  
Brooke Hallowell
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Time Windows ◽  
Cognitive Effort ◽  
Task Engagement ◽  
The Body ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Language Deficits ◽  
Pupillary Responses

Purpose: Arousal and cognitive effort are relevant yet often overlooked components of attention during language processing. Pupillometry can be used to provide a psychophysiological index of arousal and cognitive effort. Given that much is unknown regarding the relationship between cognition and language deficits seen in people with aphasia (PWA), pupillometry may be uniquely suited to explore those relationships. The purpose of this study was to examine arousal and the time course of the allocation of cognitive effort related to sentence processing in people with and without aphasia. Method: Nineteen PWA and age- and education-matched control participants listened to relatively easy (subject-relative) and relatively difficult (object-relative) sentences and were required to answer occasional comprehension questions. Tonic and phasic pupillary responses were used to index arousal and the unfolding of cognitive effort, respectively, while sentences were processed. Group differences in tonic and phasic responses were examined. Results: Group differences were observed for both tonic and phasic responses. PWA exhibited greater overall arousal throughout the task compared with controls, as evidenced by larger tonic pupil responses. Controls exhibited more effort (greater phasic responses) for difficult compared with easy sentences; PWA did not. Group differences in phasic responses were apparent during end-of-sentence and postsentence time windows. Conclusions: Results indicate that the attentional state of PWA in this study was not consistently supportive of adequate task engagement. PWA in our sample may have relatively limited attentional capacity or may have challenges with allocating existing capacity in ways that support adequate task engagement and performance. This work adds to the body of evidence supporting the validity of pupillometric tasks for the study of aphasia and contributes to a better understanding of the nature of language deficits in aphasia. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16959376

Time-Course of Grammatical Processing in Deaf Readers: An Eye-Movement Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-364
Author(s):  
Nadina Gómez-Merino ◽  
Inmaculada Fajardo ◽  
Antonio Ferrer ◽  
Barbara Arfé
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Word Reading ◽  
Incongruent Condition ◽  
Target Area ◽  
Deaf Students ◽  
Cascading Effect ◽  
Syntactic Skills ◽  
Deaf Readers ◽  
First Pass

Abstract Twenty participants who were deaf and 20 chronological age-matched participants with typical hearing (TH) (mean age: 12 years) were asked to judge the correctness of written sentences with or without a grammatically incongruent word while their eye movements were registered. TH participants outperformed deaf participants in grammaticality judgment accuracy. For both groups, First Pass and Total Fixation Times of target words in correct trials were significantly longer in the incongruent condition than in the congruent one. However, whereas TH students showed longer First Pass in the target area than deaf students across congruity conditions, deaf students made more fixations than their TH controls. Syntactic skills, vocabulary, and word reading speeds (measured with additional tests) were significantly lower in deaf students but only syntactic skills were systematically associated to the time-course of congruity processing. These results suggest that syntactic skills could have a cascading effect in sentence processing for deaf readers.

scholarly journals A facilitating role for the primary motor cortex in action sentence processing

2018 ◽  
Vol 336 ◽  
pp. 244-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melody Courson ◽  
Joël Macoir ◽  
Pascale Tremblay
Keyword(s):  
Motor Cortex ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Primary Motor Cortex ◽  
Action Sentence

Brain Oscillations during Spoken Sentence Processing

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 1149-1164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela Peña ◽  
Lucia Melloni
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Temporal Integration ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Gamma Band ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Band Power ◽  
Gamma Power

Spoken sentence comprehension relies on rapid and effortless temporal integration of speech units displayed at different rates. Temporal integration refers to how chunks of information perceived at different time scales are linked together by the listener in mapping speech sounds onto meaning. The neural implementation of this integration remains unclear. This study explores the role of short and long windows of integration in accessing meaning from long samples of speech. In a cross-linguistic study, we explore the time course of oscillatory brain activity between 1 and 100 Hz, recorded using EEG, during the processing of native and foreign languages. We compare oscillatory responses in a group of Italian and Spanish native speakers while they attentively listen to Italian, Japanese, and Spanish utterances, played either forward or backward. The results show that both groups of participants display a significant increase in gamma band power (55–75 Hz) only when they listen to their native language played forward. The increase in gamma power starts around 1000 msec after the onset of the utterance and decreases by its end, resembling the time course of access to meaning during speech perception. In contrast, changes in low-frequency power show similar patterns for both native and foreign languages. We propose that gamma band power reflects a temporal binding phenomenon concerning the coordination of neural assemblies involved in accessing meaning of long samples of speech.

Grammatical predictors for fMRI time-courses

2019 ◽  
pp. 159-173
Author(s):  
Jixing Li ◽  
John Hale
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Temporal Region ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Word Sequence ◽  
Time Courses ◽  
Wernicke’S Area ◽  
Processing Effort ◽  
The Brain

This study examines several different time-series formalizations of sentence-processing effort, as regards their ability to predict the observed fMRI time-course in regions of the brain. These regressors formalize cognitive theories of language processing involving phrase structure parsing, memory burden, lexical meaning, and other factors such as word sequence probabilities. The results suggest that even in the presence of these covariates, a predictor based on minimalist grammars significantly improves a regression model of the BOLD signal in a posterior temporal region, roughly corresponding to Wernicke’s area.

The Immediate Effect of Pragmatic Plausibility in Reanalysis: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroaki Oishi
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Processing Load ◽  
N400 Effect ◽  
Brain Potentials ◽  
Revision Process ◽  
Structural Revision ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Reading Study ◽  
Existing Structure

AbstractPrevious studies on reanalysis in sentence processing have shown that the processing load of reanalysis increases in proportion to the difficulty in revising the existing structure. The present study, on the other hand, argues that the processing load of reanalysis also increases when the pragmatic plausibility of the interpretation of the revised structure turns out to be pragmatically less plausible. This paper reports the results of two experiments: The results of Experiment 1 (a self-paced reading study) indicate that the pragmatically less plausible interpretation of the revised structure immediately affects the processing load of the reanalysis. Experiment 2 further addresses the issue of the immediate impact of the effect of the pragmatic plausibility by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results revealed that a large N400 effect was observed at the pragmatically less plausible words, while the response to the effect of the structural revision resulted in a P600 effect. Furthermore, we found the nearly perfect linear summation between the N400 and P600 effects, suggesting that the difficulty in the pragmatic integration process did not affect the difficulty in the structural revision process. In addition, we found that the onset of the P600 effect reflecting the cost of revising the existing structure was relatively earlier than that of the N400 effect reflecting the pragmatic implausibility. The present study provides us with some implications for a theory of reanalysis and consideration of the time course of reanalysis.

HD-tDCS Over Motor Cortex Facilitates Figurative and Literal Action Sentence Processing

2021 ◽  
pp. 107955
Author(s):  
Karim Johari ◽  
Nicholas Riccardi ◽  
Svetlana Malyutina ◽  
Mirage Modi ◽  
Rutvik H. Desai
Keyword(s):  
Motor Cortex ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Action Sentence
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document