An ERP Analysis of the World-Sense and Semantics Mismatches in Japanese Sentences

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event An ERP Analysis of the World-Sense and Semantics Mismatches in Japanese Sentences Yu Odagaki1*, Sakriani Sakti1, Graham Neubig1, Tomoki Toda1 and Satoshi Nakamura1 1 Nara Institute Science and Technology, Graduate School of Information Science, Japan The effect of mistaken words on the sentence comprehension process has been studied for Dutch. In a previous study, if a sentence has a word that violates semantic or world knowledge violation the N400 ERP component appears during the reading of the sentence (Hagort et al., 2004). Our study presented in this paper used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine whether the process of finding incorrect words due to semantic or world knowledge violation in Japanese sentences is the same as the process in Dutch. In the experiment, we presented three kinds of sentences as visual stimuli. The first ones were completely correct sentences, the next ones included a word that violated world knowledge, and the last ones included a word that violated semantics. As a result, a negative shift appeared after words that violated world knowledge and semantics were presented. According to the previous study, the peak of this negative shift was shown to occur at about 400 ms, which indicates the N400 component. However, the peak shown in this study occurred at about 350 ms in the parietal area. This early N400 phenomenon indicates that Japanese words can be processed faster than those of Dutch. It may be partly due to the processing of Japanese Kanji characters, which also similarly appeared in Chinese study (Zheng Ye et al., 2005). We also found differences of the amplitude N400 between world knowledge and semantic violation exist, in contrast to the previous study. Figure 1 Acknowledgements Part of this research was executed under the Commissioned Research for ” Research and Development on Medical Communication Support System for Asian Languages based on Knowledge and Language Grid” of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan. References Peter Hagoort, Lea Hald, Marcel Bastiaansen and Karl Magnus Petersson. (2004). Integration of Word Meaning and World Knowledge in Language Comprehension. Science Vol 304. 438-441 Zheng Y, Yue-jia Luo, Angela D. Friederici, Xiaolin Zhoua. (2006). Semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials. Brain Research 1071. 186-196 Keywords: EEG/ERP, N400, semantic, world knowledge, Word meaning, mismatch, japanese, Language Conference: ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Language Citation: Odagaki Y, Sakti S, Neubig G, Toda T and Nakamura S (2012). An ERP Analysis of the World-Sense and Semantics Mismatches in Japanese Sentences. Conference Abstract: ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00074 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 13 Oct 2012; Published Online: 07 Nov 2012. * Correspondence: Mr. Yu Odagaki, Nara Institute Science and Technology, Graduate School of Information Science, Ikoma, Nara, 630-0192, Japan, yu-o@is.naist.jp Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Yu Odagaki Sakriani Sakti Graham Neubig Tomoki Toda Satoshi Nakamura Google Yu Odagaki Sakriani Sakti Graham Neubig Tomoki Toda Satoshi Nakamura Google Scholar Yu Odagaki Sakriani Sakti Graham Neubig Tomoki Toda Satoshi Nakamura PubMed Yu Odagaki Sakriani Sakti Graham Neubig Tomoki Toda Satoshi Nakamura Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.