Learning about the Meanings of Ambiguous Words: Evidence from a Word-Meaning Priming Paradigm with Short Narratives

Fluent language comprehension requires readers and listeners to rapidly select an appropriate meaning for each word that they encounter. This meaning selection process is particularly challenging when low-frequency (subordinate) word meanings are used (e.g. the “river bank” meaning of “bank”). Recent word-meaning priming experiments show that recent experience can help to make subordinate word meanings more readily available, and thereby reduce the difficulty in accessing these meanings. One limitation of previous word-meaning priming experiments is that participants encounter the ambiguous words within a list of unconnected single sentences in which each ambiguous word is strongly disambiguated by words within the prime sentence. The current web-based study (N=51) extends this work to replicate word-meaning priming using short 3-sentence narratives as primes in which relatively weak contextual cues in sentence 1 serve to disambiguate a target ambiguous word that occurs in sentence 3. The results from the subsequent word-association test task confirmed that following a short delay (digit span) task the primed (subordinate) meanings were more readily available compared with an unprimed control. This work represents an important first step in moving the word-meaning priming paradigm towards materials that more reflect the varied ways in which ambiguous words are used within natural language.

An investigation of behavioural and electrophysiological markers of integration in learning of novel names for novel concepts

The Complementary Learning Systems model of word learning proposes that newly learned words that have been integrated into semantic memory can interact with familiar words during lexical selection. The study reported here is the first to examine how behavioural markers of integration map onto electrophysiological markers of integration in a version of the semantic priming paradigm that is assumed to rely primarily on automatic semantic processing. 71 young healthy adults learned novel names for two sets of novel concepts, one set on each of two consecutive days. Learning was followed by a continuous primed lexical decision task with EEG measures.The behavioural data was analysed with Bayesian Linear Mixed Effects models, while, for the electrophysiological data, two types of analyses were conducted: Bayesian Distributional Regression models were used to analyse mean amplitude in two pre-defined spatiotemporal windows (N400 and LPC), whereas the Mass Univariate analysis was run to explore other time points and regions. We found evidence against priming effects in either spatiotemporal window or in the behavioural data. Nonetheless, there was evidence for differential processing of the novel names depending on the length of the consolidation period (0-day vs 1-day). We take these findings to indicate that neither the 0-day nor the 1-day consolidation period was sufficient for integration in our study and that, 24 hours after exposure to novel words, the system still relies on episodic memory to distinguish between these novel words (learned 24h ago), those learned more recently and those that haven’t been seen before.

Testing the automaticity of syntax using masked visual priming

Language comprehension proceeds at a very fast pace. It is argued that context influences the speed of language comprehension by providing informative cues for the correct processing of the incoming linguistic input. Priming studies investigating the role of context in language processing have shown that humans quickly recognise target words that share orthographic, morphological, or semantic information with their preceding primes. How syntactic information influences the processing of incoming words is however less known. Early syntactic priming studies reported faster recognition for noun and verb targets (e.g., apple or sing) following primes with which they form grammatical phrases or sentences (the apple, he sings). The studies however leave open a number of questions about the reported effect, including the degree of automaticity of syntactic priming, the facilitative versus inhibitory nature, and the specific mechanism underlying the priming effect—that is, the type of syntactic information primed on the target word. Here we employed a masked syntactic priming paradigm in four behavioural experiments in German language to test whether masked primes automatically facilitate the categorization of nouns and verbs presented as flashing visual words. Overall, we found robust syntactic priming effects with masked primes—thus suggesting high automaticity of the process—but only when verbs were morpho-syntactically marked (er kau-t; he chew-s). Furthermore, we found that, compared to baseline, primes slow down target categorisation when the relationship between prime and target is syntactically incorrect, rather than speeding it up when the prime-target relationship is syntactically correct. This argues in favour of an inhibitory nature of syntactic priming. Overall, the data indicate that humans automatically extract abstract syntactic features from word categories as flashing visual words, which has an impact on the speed of successful language processing during language comprehension.

Mindfulness Meditation Improves Musical Aesthetic Emotion Processing in Young Adults

This study explored the behavioral and neural correlates of mindfulness meditation improvement in musical aesthetic emotion processing (MAEP) in young adults, using the revised across-modal priming paradigm. Sixty-two participants were selected from 652 college students who assessed their mindfulness traits using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). According to the 27% ratio of the high and low total scores, participants were divided into two subgroups: high trait group (n =31) and low trait group (n =31). Participants underwent facial recognition and emotional arousal tasks while listening to music, and simultaneously recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). The N400, P3, and late positive component (LPC) were investigated. The behavioral results showed that mindfulness meditation improved executive control abilities in emotional face processing and effectively regulated the emotional arousal of repeated listening to familiar music among young adults. These improvements were associated with positive changes in key neural signatures of facial recognition (smaller P3 and larger LPC effects) and emotional arousal (smaller N400 and larger LPC effects). Our results show that P3, N400, and LPC are important neural markers for the improvement of executive control and regulating emotional arousal in musical aesthetic emotion processing, providing new evidence for exploring attention training and emotional processing. We revised the affecting priming paradigm and E-prime 3.0 procedure to fulfill the simultaneous measurement of music listening and experimental tasks and provide a new experimental paradigm to simultaneously detect the behavioral and neural correlates of mindfulness-based musical aesthetic processing.

EXPRESS: Consonant and vowel transpositions effects during reading development: a study on Italian children and adults

Recently, Colombo, Spinelli, and Lupker (2020), using a masked transposed letter (TL) priming paradigm, investigated whether consonant/vowel (CV) status is important early in orthographic processing. In four experiments with Italian and English adults, they found equivalent TL priming effects for CC, CV, and VC transpositions. Here, we investigated that question with younger readers (age 7 to 10) and adults, as well as whether masked TL priming effects might have a phonological basis. That is, because young children are likely to use phonological recoding in reading, the question was whether they would show TL priming that is affected by CV status. In Experiment 1, target words were preceded by primes in which two letters (either CV, VC, or CC) were transposed versus substituted (SL). We found significant TL priming effects, with an increasing developmental trend, but, again, no letter type by priming interaction. In Experiment 2 the transpositions/substitutions involved only pairs of vowels with those vowels having either diphthong or hiatus status. The difference between these vowel clusters is only phonological, thus the question was would TL priming interact with this factor. TL priming was again found with an increasing trend with age, but there was no vowel cluster by priming interaction. There was, however, an overall vowel cluster effect (slower responding to words with hiatuses) which decreased with age. The results suggest that TL priming only taps the orthographic level, and that CV status only becomes important at a later phonological level.

Reactivation of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin

Intransitives can be classified into two subclasses: unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, the difference between unaccusatives and unergatives lies in where the single argument is generated in the underlying syntactic structure. Subjects of unaccusative verbs are base-generated in the object position and moved to the subject positions. Subjects of unergative verbs, however, are external and thus are not resulted from arguments moving from the object position. If the Unaccusative Hypothesis is correct, a trace is left at the original place for unaccusative verbs when movement occurs but no trace for unergative verbs. Friedmann et al. (2008) used the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm to examine the Unaccusative Hypothesis but their results could only lend limited support for the Unaccusative Hypothesis. Since the argument of Mandarin unaccusative verbs can occur preverbally and postverbally, it offers us a balanced testing ground to re-examine reactivation during sentence comprehension. Results of the current study lend support for the Unaccusative Hypothesis. When the argument occurred preverbally, a V-shaped line was observed. An inverted V-shaped line was observed when the argument occurred postverbally. For unergative verbs, the line showed a decay of reactivation.

Semantic relation priming is not constituent-specific: Evidence from ERP

It is humankind's unique wisdom to compose a limited number of words together through specific rules to convey endless information. Researchers have found that this composition process also plays a vital role in the comprehension of compounds. The specific manifestation is relation priming; that is, the previously used relation will promote subsequent word processing using the same relation. This priming phenomenon is bound to morpheme repetition (modifier or head). This study combines a self-paced priming paradigm with electrophysiological technology to explore whether relation priming will occur without sharing morphemes and its time course. We found that relation priming can occur independently of morpheme-repetition, which shows an independent representation of relation information. And it has been activated at a very early stage (about 200ms). As the word processing progresses, this activation gradually strengthens, indicating that the relation's role is slowly increasing in the process of compound word recognition. It may first be used as a kind of context information to help determine the constituent morphemes' meaning. After the meaning access of the constituent morphemes, they begin to play a role in the semantic composition process. This study uses electrophysiological technology to precisely describe the representation of relation and its time course for the first time. Which gives us a deeper understanding of the relation priming process, and at the same time, sheds light on the meaning construction process of compounds.

Observer Dependent Biases of Quantum Randomness

Quantum mechanics (QM) proposes that a quantum system measurement does not register a pre-existing reality but rather establishes reality from the superposition of potential states. Measurement reduces the quantum state according to a probability function, the Born rule, realizing one of the potential states. Consequently, a classical reality is observed. The strict randomness of the measurement outcome is well-documented (and theoretically predicted) and implies a strict indeterminacy in the physical world’s fundamental constituents. Wolfgang Pauli, with Carl Gustav Jung, extended the QM framework to measurement outcomes that are meaningfully related to human observers, providing a psychophysical theory of quantum state reductions. The Pauli-Jung model (PJM) proposes the existence of observer influences on quantum measurement outcomes rooted in the observer’s unconscious mind. The correlations between quantum state reductions and (un)conscious states of observers derived from the PJM and its mathematical reformulation within the model of pragmatic information (MPI) were empirically tested. In all studies, a subliminal priming paradigm was used to induce a biased likelihood for specific quantum measurement outcomes (i.e., a higher probability of positive picture presentations; Studies 1 and 2) or more pronounced oscillations of the evidence than expected by chance for such an effect (Studies 3 and 4). The replicability of these effects was also tested. Although Study 1 found strong initial evidence for such effects, later replications (Studies 2 to 4) showed no deviations from the Born rule. The results thus align with standard QM, arguing against the incompleteness of standard QM in psychophysical settings like those established in the studies. However, although no positive evidence exists for the PJM and the MPI, the data do not entirely falsify the model’s validity.

Can Masked Emotion-Laden Words Prime Emotion-Label Words? An ERP Test on the Mediated Account

The present event-related potential (ERP) study explored whether masked emotion-laden words could facilitate the processing of both emotion-label words and emotion-laden words in a valence judgment task. The results revealed that emotion-laden words as primes failed to influence target emotion-label word processing, whereas emotion-laden words facilitated target emotion-laden words in the congruent condition. Specifically, decreased late positivity complex (LPC) was elicited by emotion-laden words primed by emotion-laden words of the same valence than those primed by emotion-laden words of different valence. Nevertheless, no difference was observed for emotion-label words as targets. These findings supported the mediated account that claimed emotion-laden words engendered emotion via the mediation of emotion-label words and hypothesized that emotion-laden words could not prime emotion-label words in the masked priming paradigm. Moreover, this study provided additional evidence showing the distinction between emotion-laden words and emotion-label words.

Language dominance affects auditory translation priming in heritage speakers

Late second language (L2) learners show translation priming from the first language to the second (L1-L2), while L2-L1 effects are inconsistent. Typically, late L2 learners are both less dominant in the L2 and acquire the L2 after the L1, making the relative contribution of language dominance and order of acquisition in these results unclear. Here, Cantonese heritage and native speakers are tested in an auditory translation priming paradigm. As heritage speakers first learn Cantonese (L1) but later become more dominant in English (L2), this profile allows for the potential dissociation of dominance and order of acquisition in translation priming. If order of acquisition is the primary factor, stronger priming is expected to occur in the L1-L2 (Cantonese-English) direction; however, if dominance plays a stronger role, priming is expected to occur in the L2-L1 (English-Cantonese) direction. Native speakers showed stronger L1-L2 priming, consistent with previous findings, while heritage speakers showed priming in both directions, but stronger L2-L1 priming. The current results suggest that language dominance is a primary factor in explaining auditory translation priming results and that order of acquisition also plays a role in bilingual lexical processing.