“And yet it moves” or why grammar overrides frequency: a reply to Kempen and Harbusch

We show that Kempen and Harbusch's (Cognition (2003) this issue) arguments against our claims cannot be upheld. On the one hand, their alternative account of our data that is based on the availability of constructions with object-experiencer verbs is not compatible with the literature on the processing of these types of sentences in German. Moreover, their allegation that we failed to conduct an accurate corpus count is simply a misreading of our paper. Insofar, the commentary in no way casts doubt on our claim that grammatical regularities override frequency during online comprehension.     

The attenuating effect of mortality salience on dishonest behavior

People are easily tempted to engage in dishonest behavior when an incentive is given and when full anonymity is provided. In the present work, we investigated existential threat as a motivational factor that might reduce dishonest behavior. Research based on terror management theory has found that mortality salience increases the motivation to fulfill salient values of one’s cultural worldview. Assuming the concept of honesty is important to human societies, we hypothesized that mortality salience will reduce dishonest behavior when the concept of honesty is salient. In two experiments, we assessed dishonesty under full anonymity by applying a die-under-the-cup paradigm with the expected value serving as a stochastic baseline for honest behavior. Both experiments provided support for our hypothesis. Given an incentive to cheat, when the concept of honesty was cognitively activated by a word-search puzzle (Study 1) or by the name of the dice game (i.e., “honest game”; Study 2), mortality salient participants showed not only less dishonest behavior but actually honest behavior.

     

Different Kinds of Near-Death Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany

This article provides a short summary of a representative survey on near-death experiences (NDEs) in Germany, which is the first of its kind in Europe. We tested several assumptions derived from previous research on NDEs, including the assumptions of a unified pattern of experience, the universality of the pattern, and the necessary link between NDEs and clinical death. We received replies from more than 2,000 persons, 4 percent of whom reported NDEs. The patterns of the NDEs did not seem to correspond to earlier findings: aside from being much more diverse, they also differed with respect to cultural variables, particularly the difference between religious interpretations and the differences between post-socialist East Germany and West Germany.     

The neural mechanisms of word order processing revisited: electrophysiological evidence from Japanese

We present two ERP studies on the processing of word order variations in Japanese, a language that is suited to shedding further light on the implications of word order freedom for neurocognitive approaches to sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 used auditory presentation and revealed that initial accusative objects elicit increased processing costs in comparison to initial subjects (in the form of a transient negativity) only when followed by a prosodic boundary. A similar effect was observed using visual presentation in Experiment 2, however only for accusative but not for dative objects. These results support a relational account of word order processing, in which the costs of comprehending an object-initial word order are determined by the linearization properties of the initial object in relation to the linearization properties of possible upcoming arguments. In the absence of a prosodic boundary, the possibility for subject omission in Japanese renders it likely that the initial accusative is the only argument in the clause. Hence, no upcoming arguments are expected and no linearization problem can arise. A prosodic boundary or visual segmentation, by contrast, indicate an object-before-subject word order, thereby leading to a mismatch between argument "prominence" (e.g. in terms of thematic roles) and linear order. This mismatch is alleviated when the initial object is highly prominent itself (e.g. in the case of a dative, which can bear the higher-ranking thematic role in a two argument relation). We argue that the processing mechanism at work here can be distinguished from more general aspects of "dependency processing" in object-initial sentences.     

Location-specific versus hemisphere-specific adaptation of processing selectivity

Current theories of cognitive control assume that processing selectivity is adjusted according to the utility of processing task-irrelevant stimulus features. Consistently, interference evoked by flanker stimuli is reduced when the proportion of incompatible trials—in which flankers are associated with an incorrect response—is increased. Consistent with the idea that the cerebral hemispheres select processing strategies independently of each other, Corballis and Gratton (2003) demonstrated that flanker interference for stimuli presented in either the left or right visual hemifield is affected by the ratio of compatible and incompatible target-flanker pairings presented in the same—but not in the other—hemifield. Presenting stimuli at four different locations, we demonstrated independent effects of the ratio of compatible and incompatible trials for stimulus locations in different hemifields as well as for stimulus locations within the same hemifield. Independent selectivity adjustment regarding the left and right visual hemifields thus appears to be a special case of a larger class of location-specific adaptation effects and might not be informative regarding hemisphere-specific processing.     

The neurophysiological basis of word order variations in German

This paper aims to dissociate grammatical and general cognitive (e.g., working-memory based) accounts of the processing costs elicited by word order variations in German. To this end, we present a study using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), in which dislocated arguments were instantiated either by non-pronominal or by pronominal noun phrases. This manipulation allows for a dissociation of the two competing accounts, since only a dislocation of non-pronominal arguments gives rise to a non-canonical structure. The results show that (a) in sentences with non-pronominal arguments, the determiner of a non-canonical noun phrase elicited a broadly distributed negativity, and (b) in sentences with pronominal arguments, no differences were observed for object- vs. subject-initial word orders. These findings show that the human parser is sensitive to fine-grained grammatical regularities. We therefore argue that the negativity is a reflection of a local syntactic mismatch, rather than of an increase in working-memory load.     

Grammar overrides frequency: evidence from the online processing of flexible word order

We show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of grammatical principles during parsing. Event-related brain potentials revealed that dative-marked objects in the initial position of an embedded sentence do not elicit a neurophysiologically distinct response from subjects, whereas accusative-marked objects do. These differences are predictable on the basis of grammatical distinctions (i.e. underlying linguistic properties), but not on the basis of frequency information (i.e. a superficial linguistic property). We therefore conclude that the former, but not the latter, guides syntactic integration during online parsing.