Lexical integration: Sequential effects of syntactic and semantic information

Both semantic and syntactic context constraints can influence word processing at the level of lexical integration. In event-related brain potentials (ERPs), semantic integration is reflected by a negativity around 400 msec (N400), whereas phrase structure assignment and syntactic integration are assumed to be reflected by an early left anterior negativity and a late positivity (P600), respectively. An ERP study is presented in which participants read different types of sentences whose terminal verb was either congruent with the preceding context or incongruent due to a phrase structure violation, a semantic violation, or both. The main finding was that only the pure semantic violation condition, but not the combined semantic and syntactic violation condition, elicited a large N400. The two conditions containing phrase structure violations were predominantly characterized by a P600. Both semantic violation conditions, moreover, displayed a late negativity around 700 msec that overlapped with the P600 in the double violation condition. The absence of an N400 effect for elements that are syntactically as well as semantically incongruent with prior context suggests an early influence of phrase structure information on processes of lexical-semantic integration. The present data are discussed in comparison to previous ERP findings, and a new view of lexical integration processes is proposed.     

基于语义错觉效应的句子加工探索

“语义错觉效应”是指读者在加工某些语义违例句子时,会暂时性地产生语义合理错觉,而只有通过继续加工或者再加工才能辨别出错误的现象,在脑电成分上表现为没有出现N400效应,却出现P600效应。“语义错觉效应”对传统的句子加工理论模型以及N400和P600的特异性功能意义提出了质疑。研究者在讨论此效应的基础上提出了多个句子加工模型,各模型对语义和句法加工的过程进行了探索,对语义和句法通道的关系做出了新的阐述,并对N400和P600的功能意义做出了新的解读。目前研究对N400功能的解释存在语义整合观和词汇激活观的分歧,而对P600功能的解释则从传统的句法功能转换到了更宽泛的加工过程。未来研究应关注词汇语义关系和跨语言差异,以期进一步揭示句子加工的认知及神经机制。     

Reconstructing from a degraded trace: A study of sentence repetition in agrammatism

Six agrammatic aphasics repeated simple active and passive voice sentences, varying in degree of semantic constraint: plausible, reversible, and implausible. Frequency of correct response was not sensitive to this semantic manipulation, but error pattern was. In general, errors to plausible targets consisted of relatively inconsequential transformation of the open or closed class vocabulary, while errors to implausible targets implicated a change of syntactic voice. In making these errors, the patients displayed evidence of productive control of the passive morphology and a degree of sensitivity to the syntactic and thematic consequences consequences of passive voice. The repetition errors did not transform the surface order of the major lexical items. The results are interpreted as evidence for a sentence memory trace that preserves, minimally, the major grammatical roles of the target sentence and that serves as input to a reconstructive process that is biased toward the production of semantically plausible sentences.     

Conflict and surrender during sentence processing: an ERP study of syntax-semantics interaction

Recent ERP studies report that implausible verb-argument combinations can elicit a centro-parietal P600 effect (e.g., "The hearty meal was devouring …"; Kim & Osterhout, 2005). Such eliciting conditions do not involve outright syntactic anomaly, deviating from previous reports of P600. Kim and Osterhout (2005) attributed such P600 effects to structural reprocessing that occurs when syntactic cues fail to support a semantically attractive interpretation ('meal' as the Agent of 'devouring') and the syntactic cues are overwhelmed; the sentence is therefore perceived as syntactically ill-formed. The current study replicated such findings and also found that altering the syntactic cues in such situations of syntax-semantics conflict (e.g., "The hearty meal would devour …") affects the conflict's outcome. P600s were eliminated when sentences contained syntactic cues that required multiple morphosyntactic steps to "repair". These sentences elicited a broad, left-anterior negativity at 300-600ms (LAN). We interpret the reduction in P600 amplitude in terms of "resistance" of syntactic cues to reprocessing. We speculate that the LAN may be generated by difficulty retrieving an analysis that satisfies both syntactic and semantic cues, which results when syntactic cues are strong enough to resist opposing semantic cues. This pattern of effects is consistent with partially independent but highly interactive syntactic and semantic processing streams, which often operate collaboratively but can compete for influence over interpretation.     

The role of verb argument structure in sentence processing: Distinguishing between syntactic and semantic effects

This paper describes an ongoing research program designed to investigate how syntactic and semantic aspects of lexical information become available to the sentence processing system. The two experiments described here distinguished between syntactic and semantic representations by using cross-modal naming and lexical decision in a new way. The relationship between the main verb and the probe word was varied such that the probe word met either the syntactic criteria to be an argument, the semantic criteria, neither, or both the syntactic and semantic criteria. Lexical decision times were sensitive to both syntactic and semantic congruity, while naming times were sensitive only to syntactic congruity. The two tasks were then used to investigate syntactic and semantic representations when verb argument structure was ambiguous. Subcategorized structures were constructed without regard for biasing context, but the contextually inappropriate thematic frame was ruled out while the inappropriate syntactic frame was still available.     

The role of animacy and thematic relationships in processing active English sentences: evidence from event-related potentials

Recent event-related potential studies report a P600 effect to incongruous verbs preceded by semantically associated inanimate noun-phrase (NP) arguments, e.g., "eat" in "At breakfast the eggs would eat...". This P600 effect may reflect the processing cost incurred when semantic-thematic relationships between critical verbs and their preceding NP argument(s) bias towards different interpretations to those dictated by their sentences' syntactic structures. We have termed such violations of alternative thematic roles, 'thematic role violations.' Semantic-thematic relationships are influenced both by semantic associations and by more basic semantic features, such as a noun's animacy. This study determined whether a P600 effect can be evoked by verbs whose thematic structures are violated by their preceding inanimate NP arguments, even in the absence of close semantic-associative relationships with these arguments or their preceding contexts. ERPs were measured to verbs under four conditions: (1) non-violated ("At breakfast the boys would eat..."); (2) preceded by introductory clauses and animate NPs that violated their pragmatic expectations but not their thematic structures ("At breakfast the boys would plant..."); (3) preceded by semantically related contexts but inanimate NPs that violated their thematic structures ("At breakfast the eggs would eat..."); (4) preceded by semantically unrelated contexts and inanimate NPs that also violated their thematic structures ("At breakfast the eggs would plant..."). Pragmatically non-thematic role violated verbs preceded by unrelated contexts and animate NPs evoked robust N400 effects and small P600 effects. Thematically violated verbs preceded by inanimate argument NPs evoked robust P600 effects but no N400 effects, regardless of whether these inanimate arguments or their preceding contexts were semantically related or unrelated to these verbs. These findings suggest that semantic-thematic relations, related to animacy constraints on verbs' arguments, are computed online and can immediately impact verb processing within active, English sentences.     

Is the P600/SPS affected by the richness of semantic content? A linguistic ERP study in Swedish

The study investigated whether the P600/SPS component is sensitive to the richness of semantic content in sentences. ERPs were recorded while 30 native Swedish speakers read sentences, of which half were syntactically correct and half contained a syntactic violation. Both kinds of sentences came in one of three types of descending semantic completeness: semantically coherent sentences, sentences which were incoherent due to violations of selectional restrictions, or sentences of pseudo words, hence void of lexical content. In the semantically coherent sentences a P600/SPS was found for the syntactic violation. A less salient positivity was found for the violation in the semantically incoherent sentences. No P600/SPS was found for the syntactic violation in the pseudo word sentences and no LAN component in any sentence type. The results are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that the P600/SPS component reflects a semantically based reanalysis process.     

Processing correlates of lexical semantic complexity

This paper explores how verb meanings that differ in semantic complexity are processed and represented. In particular, we compare eventive verbs, which denote causally structured events, with stative verbs, which denote facts without causal structure. We predicted that the conceptually more complex eventive verbs should take longer to process than stative verbs. Two experiments, a lexical decision task and a self-paced reading study, confirmed this prediction. The findings suggest that (a) semantic complexity is reflected in processing time, (b) processing verb meanings involves activating properties of the event structure beyond participants' roles, and (c) more generally, lexical event structures, which subsume thematic roles, may mediate between syntactic knowledge and semantic interpretation.     

Wiping the slate clean: a lexical semantic exploration.

This paper presents a case study in lexical semantic analysis aimed at uncovering syntactically relevant components of verb meaning. Our strategy is to investigate the nature of the lexical knowledge that a speaker of English possesses with respect to certain apparently semantically related verbs: a set of verbs that might as a first approximation be classed as verbs of removal. However, a closer examination of these apparently semantically related verbs reveals that their syntactic properties diverge. An exploration of the patterns of behavior of the verbs suggests that the initial class includes three linguistically significant subclasses. The components of meaning that are relevant to characterizing each subclass are identified by isolating those components of meaning that the members of each subclass share. The conclusion considers the implications of the meaning components identified in this study for a lexical semantic representation.     

Effects of relative embodiment in lexical and semantic processing of verbs

Research examining semantic richness effects in visual word recognition has shown that multiple dimensions of meaning are activated in the process of word recognition (e.g., Yap et al., 2012). This research has, however, been limited to nouns. In the present research we extended the semantic richness approach to verb stimuli in order to investigate how verb meanings are represented. We characterized a dimension of relative embodiment for verbs, based on the bodily sense described by Borghi and Cimatti (2010), and collected ratings on that dimension for 687 English verbs. The relative embodiment ratings revealed that bodily experience was judged to be more important to the meanings of some verbs (e.g., dance, breathe) than to others (e.g., evaporate, expect). We then tested the effects of relative embodiment and imageability on verb processing in lexical decision (Experiment 1), action picture naming (Experiment 2), and syntactic classification (Experiment 3). In all three experiments results showed facilitatory effects of relative embodiment, but not imageability: latencies were faster for relatively more embodied verbs, even after several other lexical variables were controlled. The results suggest that relative embodiment is an important aspect of verb meaning, and that the semantic richness approach holds promise as a strategy for investigating other aspects of verb meaning.     

Objects, events and "to be" verbs in Spanish--an ERP study of the syntax-semantics interface

In Spanish, objects and events at subject position constrain the selection of different forms of the auxiliary verb “to be”: locative predicates about objects require “estar en”, while those relating to events require “ser en”, both translatable as “to be in”. Subjective ratings showed that while the “object + ser + en” is considered as incorrect, the “event + estar + en” combination is also perceived as unacceptable but to a lesser degree. In an ERP study, we evaluated the impact of a purely semantic distinction (object versus events) on the subsequent processing of these auxiliary verbs followed by locatives in Spanish. For the “ser en” predicate, the P600 component was larger when the subject was an object than when it was an event. This P600 effect is consistent with an online repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. On the other hand, for the “estar en” predicate, event subjects when compared to object subjects showed more positive ongoing amplitudes between 280 and 380 ms after the presentation of the “en” preposition, followed by a longer positive wave starting around 400 ms and lasting until 700 ms after the presentation of the following determiner, with central and frontal scalp distributions respectively. Thus, the different subject-predicate combinations, depending on the semantic features of the subjects, triggered syntactic reparatory processes at a structural level. These findings are consistent with an incremental interpretation of sentence meaning based on the interaction between syntactic and semantic information.     

Syntactic priming in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study examined the nature of syntactic priming effects in Chinese. Participants were required to read prime-target sentence pairs each embedding an ambiguous relative clause (RC) containing either the same verb or a synonymous verb. In Chinese, the word de serves as a relative clause marker. During reading a potential Chinese RC structure (either the prime or the target sentence), Chinese readers initially expect to read an Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) structure but the encounter of a relative clause marker de would make readers abandon the initial strategy and reanalyze the structure as a relative clause. A reduced P600 effect was elicited by the critical word de in the target sentence containing the same initial verb as in the prime sentence. No significant reduction of the P600 was observed in the target sentences in the synonymous condition. The results demonstrated that verb repetition but not similarity in meaning produced a syntactic priming effect in Chinese. The constraint-based lexicalist hypothesis and the argument structure theory were adopted to explain the syntactic priming effect obtained in the current study.     

The comprehension of anomalous sentences: evidence from structural priming

We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones constructed for well-formed sentences; and a semantic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are erroneous, or altogether missing, and interpretation is achieved on the basis of semantic representations instead. To distinguish between these accounts, we used structural priming. First, we ruled out the possibility that anomaly per se influences the magnitude of the priming effect: Prime sentences with morphologically incorrect verbs produced similarly enhanced priming (lexical boost) to sentences with the same correct verbs (Exp. 1). Second, we found that prime sentences with a novel verb (Exp. 2) or a semantically and syntactically incongruent verb (Exp. 3) produced a priming effect, which was the same as that produced by well-formed sentences. In accord with the syntactic account, we conclude that the syntactic representations of anomalous sentences are similar to those constructed for well-formed sentences. Our results furthermore suggest that lexically-independent syntactic information is robust enough to produce well-formed syntactic representations during processing without requiring aid from lexically-based syntactic information.     

Associations to unfamiliar words: Learning the meanings of new words

Five experiments were designed to examine whether subjects attend to different aspects of meaning for familiar and unfamiliar words. In Experiments 1–3, subjects gave free associations to high- and low-familiarity words from the same taxonomic category (e.g.,seltzer:sarsparilla; Experiment 1), from the same noun synonym set (e.g.,baby:neonate; Experiment 2), and from the same verb synonym set (e.g.,abscond:escape; Experiment 3). In Experiments 4 and 5, subjects first read a context sentence containing the stimulus word and then gave associations; stimuli were novel words or either high- or low-familiarity nouns. Low-familiarity and novel words elicited more nonsemantically based responses (e.g.,engram:graham) than did high-familiarity words. Of the responses semantically related to the stimulus, low-familiarity and novel words elicited a higher proportion of definitional responses [category (e.g.,sarsparilla:soda), synonym (e.g.,neonate:newborn), and coordinate (e.g.,armoire:dresser)], whereas high-familiarity stimuli elicited a higher proportion of event-based responses [thematic (e.g.,seltzer:glass) and noun:verb (e.g.,baby:cry)]. Unfamiliar words appear to elicit a shift of attentional resources from relations useful in understanding the message to relations useful in understanding the meaning of the unfamiliar word.     

Decomposing animacy reversals between agents and experiencers: An ERP study

The present study aimed to refine current hypotheses regarding thematic reversal anomalies, which have been found to elicit either N400 or - more frequently - “semantic-P600” (sP600) effects. Our goal was to investigate whether distinct ERP profiles reflect aspectual-thematic differences between Agent-Subject Verbs (ASVs; e.g., ‘to eat’) and Experiencer-Subject Verbs (ESVs; e.g., ‘to love’) in English. Inanimate subject noun phrases created reversal anomalies on both ASV and ESV. Animacy-based prominence effects and semantic association were controlled to minimize their contribution to any ERP effects. An N400 was elicited by the target verb in the ESV but not the ASV anomalies, supporting the hypothesis of a distinctive aspectual-thematic structure between ESV and ASV. Moreover, the N400 finding for English ESV shows that, in contrast to previous claims, the presence versus absence of N400s for this kind of anomaly cannot be exclusively explained in terms of typological differences across languages.     

Studying the grammatical aspects of word recognition: lexical priming,parsing, and syntactic ambiguity resolution

Two experiments are reported examining the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing during language comprehension, combining techniques common to the on-line study of syntactic ambiguity resolution with priming techniques common to the study of lexical processing. By manipulating grammatical properties of lexical primes, we explore how lexically based knowledge is activated and guides combinatory sentence processing. Particularly, we find that nouns (like verbs, see Trueswell & Kim, 1998) can activate detailed lexically specific syntactic information and that these representations guide the resolution of relevant syntactic ambiguities pertaining to verb argument structure. These findings suggest that certain principles of knowledge representation common to theories of lexical knowledge—such as overlapping and distributed representations—also characterize grammatical knowledge. Additionally, observations from an auditory comprehension study suggest similar conclusions about the lexical nature of parsing in spoken language comprehension. They also suggest that thematic role and syntactic preferences are activated during word recognition and that both influence combinatory processing.     

Linguistic structures and mental operations

The internal representations and mental operations used in verifying a sentence against a pictorial referent are examined in an experiment where the location of the false constituent (subject, verb, or object) varied. The latencies for false sentences were ordered: verb, grammatical subject, grammatical object, with verb mismatches being detected the fastest. An information-processing analysis indicated that both comparison and search operations are employed, and that sentences are represented, in general, as a list of propositions with case-relational information. Context and task demands impose order on the list and lead to different operations on these structures. The depth of processing sentences varies from simple lexical comparisons up to full encoding and usage of syntactic and semantic features and case relations.     

Deep and surface structure in children's sentence learning

Fifth-graders were asked to learn 32 syntactically varied, semantically unrelated sentences containing combinations of agentive, objective and instrumental case relations. Five learning trials, each followed by a noun-prompted recall test, were provided. Recall patterns indicated that variations in surface structure complexity (i.e., verb voice and sentential position of noun prompts) exerted less influence on Ss' memory for sentences than deep structures. Several trials were required for Ss to reproduce syntactic details accurately and many transformational errors were observed. Even then, children were unable to learn one syntactic form. Although patterns of recall were more consistent with deep structure predictions, results were not completely supportive of Fillmore's analysis of deep structure in terms of case relations, and the possibility that other non-linguistic means were used to store sentences loomed as an alternative to the deep structure view.     

The role of syntactic context in word recognition

This study examines the role of syntactic information in word recognition. Subjects made a word-nonword decision regarding a target string that was preceded by a syntactically appropriate word, a semantically related word, or an unrelated word. In Experiment 1, with syntactic and semantic trials assigned to separate blocks, syntactically and semantically appropriate context significantly reduced lexical decision for subsequent target words, compared with unrelated contexts. In Experiment 2, the syntactically and semantically primed trials were either blocked separately or mixed within the same block. Significant syntactic and semantic effects were both observed in the blocked condition, but only the semantic effect was obtained in the mixed condition     

Verb frame frequency as a predictor of verb bias

There is considerable evidence showing that the human sentence processor is guided by lexical preferences in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Several types of preferences have been identified, including morphological, syntactic, and semantic ones. However, the literature fails to provide a uniform account of what lexical preferences are and how they should be measured. The present paper provides evidence for the view that lexical preferences are records of prior linguistic experience. We show that a type of lexial syntactic preference, viz., verb biases as measured by norming experiments, can be approximated by verb frame frequencies extracted from a large, balanced corpus using computational learning techniques.