Semantic Violations Research Articles

Event-related potentials of familiar monosyllabic words with unexpected lexical tones: A picture-word study of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without a history of late talking.

This study examined how Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without a history of late talking (LT) process familiar monosyllabic words with unexpected lexical tones, focusing on both phonological and semantic violations. This study initially enrolled 64 Mandarin-speaking toddlers: 31 with a history of LT (mean age: 27.67 months) and 33 without a history of LT (non-LT) (mean age: 27.85 months). Event-related potentials were recorded at the age of 4 years during a picture-word mismatch task (LT mean age: 51.36 months; non-LT mean age: 51.20 months); in this task, the participants were presented with auditory words either matching (Tone 3) or mismatching with images in terms of their lexical tones; the mismatches encompassed acoustically dissimilar (Tone 1) and similar (Tone 2) mismatches. A significant difference in the phonological mapping negativity (PMN) responses to Tones 1 and 3 was observed only in the non-LT group. However, differences in the N400 responses to Tones 1 and 3 remained consistent across both groups. In addition, greater differences in the PMN responses between Tones 1 and 3 were associated with higher language proficiency during the preschool period. The PMN response serves as an indicator of neural correlates in lexical tone processing, reflecting challenges encountered by preschoolers with a history of LT when processing the lexical tones of familiar words. Furthermore, the PMN response was correlated with concurrent language abilities. These findings indicate the importance of early tonal perception development for Mandarin speakers with a history of LT. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Preschoolers with a history of late talking (LT), similar to preschoolers without such a history, can establish word expectations and detect the lexical tone violation in real time. However, those with a history of LT require additional time to process acoustic cues and differentiate between word semantics based on lexical tone information. The phonological mapping negativity response serves as an indicator of neural correlates in lexical tone processing, reflecting challenges encountered by preschoolers with a history of LT when processing the lexical tones of familiar words. The present findings indicate the importance of early intervention for Mandarin speakers with a history of LT, with an emphasis on lexical tone processing from toddlerhood.

Lexical inhibition after semantic violations recruits a domain-general inhibitory control mechanism.

Language processing is incremental. As language signals-for example, words in a sentence-unfold, humans predict and activate likely upcoming input to facilitate comprehension. Prediction not only accelerates understanding but also prompts reassessment in the case of prediction error, fostering learning and refining comprehension skills. Therefore, it is paramount to understand what happens when linguistic predictions are violated-for example, when a sentence ends in an unpredicted word. One theory, which we test here, is that the originally predicted word is actively inhibited after semantic violations. Furthermore, we tested whether this purported lexical inhibition process is achieved by a domain-general mechanism-that is, one that also inhibits other processes (e.g., movement). We combined a semantic violation task, in which highly constrained sentences primed specific words but sometimes continued otherwise, with a motoric stop-signal task. Across two experiments, semantic violations significantly impaired simultaneous action-stopping. This implies that lexical and motor inhibition share the same process. In support of this view, multivariate decoding of electroencephalographic recordings showed early overlap in neural processing between action-stopping (motor inhibition) and semantic violations (lexical inhibition). Moreover, a known signature of motor inhibition (the stop-signal P3) was reduced after this initial overlap period, further suggesting the presence of a bottleneck due to shared processing. These findings show that semantic violations trigger inhibitory processing and suggest that this lexical inhibition recruits a domain-general inhibitory control mechanism. This provides a new perspective on long-standing debates in psycholinguistics, extends the range of a well-characterized cognitive control mechanism into the linguistic domain, and offers support for recent neurobiological models of domain-general inhibitory control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Lexical Inhibition After Semantic Violations Recruits a Domain-General Inhibitory Control Mechanism

Supplemental Material for Lexical Inhibition After Semantic Violations Recruits a Domain-General Inhibitory Control Mechanism

An fMRI study of phrase structure and subject island violations.

In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. In order to facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted an fMRI experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using event-related potentials. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.

Encounters with semantic violations do not interfere with immediately subsequent scene-viewing behavior

Encounters with semantic violations do not interfere with immediately subsequent scene-viewing behavior

The human brain deals with violating general color or depth knowledge in different time courses

Utilizing the high temporal resolution of event-related potentials (ERPs), we compared the time course of processing incongruent color versus 3D-depth information. Participants were asked to judge whether the food color (color condition) or 3D structure (3D-depth condition) was congruent or incongruent with their previous knowledge and experience. The behavioral results showed that the reaction times in the congruent 3D-depth condition were slower than those in the congruent color condition. The reaction times in the incongruent 3D-depth condition were slower than those in the incongruent color condition. The ERP results showed that incongruent color stimuli induced a larger N270, larger P300, and smaller N400 components in the fronto-central region than the congruent color stimuli. Incongruent 3D-depth stimuli induced a smaller N1 in the occipital region, larger P300 and smaller N400 in the parietal-occipital region than congruent 3D-depth stimuli. The time–frequency analysis found that incongruent color stimuli induced a larger theta band (360–580 ms) activation in the fronto-central region than congruent color stimuli. Incongruent 3D-depth stimuli induced larger alpha and beta bands (240–350 ms) activation in the parietal region than congruent 3D-depth stimuli. Our results suggest that the human brain deals with violating general color or depth knowledge in different time courses. We speculate that the depth perception conflict was dominated by solving the problem with visual processing, whereas the color perception conflict was dominated by solving the problem with semantic violation.

Neural evidence for referential understanding of object words in dogs

Using words to refer to objects in the environment is a core feature of the human language faculty. Referential understanding assumes the formation of mental representations of these words.1,2 Such understanding of object words has not yet been demonstrated as a general capacity in any non-human species,3 despite multiple behavior-based case reports.4,5,6,7,8,9,10 In human event-related potential (ERP) studies, object word knowledge is typically tested using the semantic violation paradigm, where words are presented either with their referent (match) or another object (mismatch).11,12 Such mismatch elicits an N400 effect, a well-established neural correlate of semantic processing.12,13 Reports of preverbal infant N400 evoked by semantic violations14 assert the use of this paradigm to probe mental representations of object words in nonverbal populations. Here, measuring dogs' (Canis familiaris) ERPs to objects primed with matching or mismatching object words, we found a mismatch effect at a frontal electrode, with a latency (206-606ms) comparable to the human N400. A greater difference for words that dogs knew better, according to owner reports, further supported a semantic interpretation of this effect. Semantic expectations emerged irrespective of vocabulary size, demonstrating the prevalence of referential understanding in dogs. These results provide the first neural evidence for object word knowledge in a non-human animal. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Detection of illicit phrasal movement in Huntington’s disease

ABSTRACT The role of the basal ganglia has been a longstanding issue in neural language models. Huntington’s disease (HD) shows primary impairment in the striatum and has previously been shown to affect the processing of phrase-structural hierarchies that are built by phrasal movement (e.g. in passives). Here we asked patients with HD to judge the acceptability of sentences containing different types of illicit phrasal movement, which were contrasted with semantic violations involving no movement. A logistic mixed-effects regression showed that patients had a profound impairment in judging incorrect but not correct sentences across all types of illicit movement, while the semantic condition was also affected, but significantly less so. Adding neuropsychological variables to the model did not improve predictions. These results demonstrate a loss of cognitive control, worsening with disease progression, over phrase-structural hierarchies, which extends to forms of meaning built at sentential levels.

Positive cross-linguistic influence in the representation and processing of sentence-final particle le by L2 and heritage learners of Chinese.

This study investigates the representation and processing of written Chinese sentences subject to a semantic condition (i.e., "direction of change") attached to the sentence-final particle (SFP) le in Mandarin Chinese. Three groups of bilingual speakers of Chinese and English who differ in their onset age of bilingualism and proficiency of English were studied. It was anticipated that there would be a positive cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from English due to similarities between the SFP le and the English adverb already in terms of direct semantic transfer. An acceptability judgment (AJ) task and a self-paced reading (SPR) task were conducted to elicit judgment and processing difficulty with and without semantic violations. The participants included English-dominant second language (L2) learners (n = 18) and heritage learners (n = 19) who had advanced proficiency in Chinese, as well as monolingually raised Mandarin speakers from China as a baseline control group (n = 18). The results indicated that sensitivity to violations of the semantic condition varied depending on factors such as the specific structure (noun vs. verb phrase), the task type (offline vs. online), and the type of bilingual speaker (early vs. late). Among the three groups of bilinguals, the heritage learners demonstrated a representation of the semantic condition that resembled the target language across different sentence structures, whereas the L2 learners did not. Furthermore, the heritage learners exhibited earlier sensitivity to violations during online processing compared to the baseline control group. These exceptional results can be attributed to the heritage learners' early exposure to and positive CLI between the SFP le in Mandarin and the English adverb already.

Attention and schema violations of real world scenes differentially modulate time perception

In the real world, object arrangement follows a number of rules. Some of the rules pertain to the spatial relations between objects and scenes (i.e., syntactic rules) and others about the contextual relations (i.e., semantic rules). Research has shown that violation of semantic rules influences interval timing with the duration of scenes containing such violations to be overestimated as compared to scenes with no violations. However, no study has yet investigated whether both semantic and syntactic violations can affect timing in the same way. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the effect of scene violations on timing is due to attentional or other cognitive accounts. Using an oddball paradigm and real-world scenes with or without semantic and syntactic violations, we conducted two experiments on whether time dilation will be obtained in the presence of any type of scene violation and the role of attention in any such effect. Our results from Experiment 1 showed that time dilation indeed occurred in the presence of syntactic violations, while time compression was observed for semantic violations. In Experiment 2, we further investigated whether these estimations were driven by attentional accounts, by utilizing a contrast manipulation of the target objects. The results showed that an increased contrast led to duration overestimation for both semantic and syntactic oddballs. Together, our results indicate that scene violations differentially affect timing due to violation processing differences and, moreover, their effect on timing seems to be sensitive to attentional manipulations such as target contrast.

Neurophysiological Evidence for Semantic Processing of Irrelevant Speech and Own-Name Detection in a Virtual Café.

The well-known "cocktail party effect" refers to incidental detection of salient words, such as one's own-name, in supposedly unattended speech. However, empirical investigation of the prevalence of this phenomenon and the underlying mechanisms has been limited to extremely artificial contexts and has yielded conflicting results. We introduce a novel empirical approach for revisiting this effect under highly ecological conditions, by immersing participants in a multisensory Virtual Café and using realistic stimuli and tasks. Participants (32 female, 18 male) listened to conversational speech from a character at their table, while a barista in the back of the café called out food orders. Unbeknownst to them, the barista sometimes called orders containing either their own-name or words that created semantic violations. We assessed the neurophysiological response-profile to these two probes in the task-irrelevant barista stream by measuring participants' brain activity (EEG), galvanic skin response and overt gaze-shifts.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We found distinct neural and physiological responses to participants' own-name and semantic violations, indicating their incidental semantic processing despite being task-irrelevant. Interestingly, these responses were covert in nature and gaze-patterns were not associated with word-detection responses. This study emphasizes the nonexclusive nature of attention in multimodal ecological environments and demonstrates the brain's capacity to extract linguistic information from additional sources outside the primary focus of attention.

Effect and safety of C7 neurotomy at the intervertebral foramen in patients with chronic poststroke aphasia: a multicentre, randomised, controlled study protocol

IntroductionAphasia affects many stroke survivors; therefore, effective treatments are urgently needed. Preliminary clinical findings have suggested an association between contralateral C7–C7 cross nerve transfer and recovery from chronic aphasia. Randomised...

Does negation influence the choice of sentence continuations? Evidence from a four-choice cloze task.

Event plausibility facilitates the processing of affirmative sentences, but little is known about how it affects negative sentences. In six behavioural experiments, we investigated negation's impact on the choice of sentence continuations that differ with respect to event plausibility. In a four-choice cloze task, participants saw affirmative and negative sentence fragments (The child will [not] eat the . . .) in combination with four potential continuations: yoghurt (a plausible word), shellfish (a weak world knowledge violating word), branch (a severe world knowledge violating word), and minivan (a word resulting in a semantic violation). Across all experiments the plausible word was highly preferred in both affirmative and negative sentences. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while ruling out the possibility that the lack of effect of negation in Experiment 1 stemmed from participants not fully processing the negation. Experiment 3 showed that the observed plausibility effects can be generalised to other aspectual forms (The child has [not] eaten the yoghurt). Experiment 4 ruled out the possibility that the choices were mainly driven by lexical associations and additionally suggested a role for informativity. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4 and reinforced the general pattern according to which negative sentences express the denial of plausible positive events. Experiment 6 provided evidence that informativity might be driving patterns of choices in the negative sentences. All in all, these findings suggest that upcoming continuations are chosen to maximise the plausibility of the event in the affirmative sentences and to deny that event in the negative sentences. The observed plausibility effects do not seem to be modulated by the internal representation of events, but they can be modulated by changes to the expected informativity of the sentence.

Cortical speech tracking is related to individual prediction tendencies.

Listening can be conceptualized as a process of active inference, in which the brain forms internal models to integrate auditory information in a complex interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes. We propose that individuals vary in their "prediction tendency" and that this variation contributes to experiential differences in everyday listening situations and shapes the cortical processing of acoustic input such as speech. Here, we presented tone sequences of varying entropy level, to independently quantify auditory prediction tendency (as the tendency to anticipate low-level acoustic features) for each individual. This measure was then used to predict cortical speech tracking in a multi speaker listening task, where participants listened to audiobooks narrated by a target speaker in isolation or interfered by 1 or 2 distractors. Furthermore, semantic violations were introduced into the story, to also examine effects of word surprisal during speech processing. Our results show that cortical speech tracking is related to prediction tendency. In addition, we find interactions between prediction tendency and background noise as well as word surprisal in disparate brain regions. Our findings suggest that individual prediction tendencies are generalizable across different listening situations and may serve as a valuable element to explain interindividual differences in natural listening situations.

Semantic violation in sentence reading and incongruence in chord sequence comprehension: An ERP study

To address the controversy on cognitive resources sharedness between language and music in semantic processing, two experiments were conducted via the interference paradigm using the Event-Related Potential (ERP) technique. In Experiment 1, a five-word sentence and a five-chord sequence were simultaneously presented in a trial. The sentence (e.g., '警察捡到了一部手机/钱包*,' The policeman found a mobile phone/wallet) ended with a semantically acceptable or unacceptable number-classifier-noun collocation (NCN), and the final chord of the chord sequence was congruent or incongruent with the preceding chords in tone. The stimuli in Experiment 1 were adapted in Experiment 2: The particle '了' was removed, and a three-word-long, object-gap relative clause was inserted ahead of the noun of the NCN in each sentence; two chords were inserted ahead of the third chord in each chord sequence. Both similarities and differences were revealed between Experiments 1 and 2, concerning the influences of the manipulated variables on the amplitude of the ERP component N400. In conclusion, the dissolution of semantic violation in sentence reading was likely to happen in parallel with music processing in chord sequence comprehension by non-musician Chinese native speakers, but interaction was observable between language and music in semantic processing when the sentences ended with long-distance NCNs.

Cognitive processing differences between stereotype activation and semantic activation

Previous studies have demonstrated that the activation of stereotype conflict is similar to the N400 congruency effect shown by the activation of semantic violation. In order to distinguish the differences between the two, the first experiment used gender stereotype trait words as target stimuli, and used “male/female” and “synonym of trait words/antonym of trait words” as priming stimuli respectively, so that the subjects completed the consistency determination task. In experiment 2, gender stereotyped behavior pictures were used as target stimuli, and “male/female” was used as priming stimuli, so that the subjects completed the task of consistency determination. The results showed that both gender stereotype conflict and semantic violation could induce N400 a congruency effect. Importantly, the N400 amplitude and response latency induced by gender stereotype activation are both smaller than those induced by semantic activation. These results show that stereotype activation is distinct from semantic activation, further demonstrating that the brain preferentially processes information related to gender stereotypes, and gender stereotype cognitive processing is more likely to happen than semantic knowledge processing.

Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge

IntroductionMood is a constant in our daily life and can permeate all levels of cognition. We examined whether and how mood influences the processing of discourse content that is relatively neutral and not loaded with emotion. During discourse processing, readers have to constantly strike a balance between what they know in long term memory and what the current discourse is about. Our general hypothesis is that mood states would affect this balance. We hypothesized that readers in a positive mood would rely more on default world knowledge, whereas readers in a negative mood would be more inclined to analyze the details in the current discourse.MethodsParticipants were put in a positive and a negative mood via film clips, one week apart. In each session, after mood manipulation, they were presented with sentences in discourse materials. We created sentences such as “With the lights on you can see...” that end with critical words (CWs) “more” or “less”, where general knowledge supports “more”, not “less”. We then embedded each of these sentences in a wider discourse that does/does not support the CWs (a story about driving in the night vs. stargazing). EEG was recorded throughout.ResultsThe results showed that first, mood manipulation was successful in that there was a significant mood difference between sessions. Second, mood did not modulate the N400 effects. Participants in both moods detected outright semantic violations and allowed world knowledge to be overridden by discourse context. Third, mood modulated the LPC (Late Positive Component) effects, distributed in the frontal region. In negative moods, the LPC was sensitive to one-level violation. That is, CWs that were supported by only world knowledge, only discourse, and neither, elicited larger frontal LPCs, in comparison to the condition where CWs were supported by both world knowledge and discourse.DiscussionThese results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sensemaking (P600) during discourse processing. These results advance our understanding of the impact and time course of mood on discourse.

Cognitive processing differences between stereotype activation and semantic activation

Previous studies have demonstrated that the activation of stereotype conflict is similar to the N400 congruency effect shown by the activation of semantic violation. In order to distinguish the differences between the two, the first experiment used gender stereotype trait words as target stimuli, and used “male/female” and “synonym of trait words/antonym of trait words” as priming stimuli respectively, so that the subjects completed the consistency determination task. In experiment 2, gender stereotyped behavior pictures were used as target stimuli, and “male/female” was used as priming stimuli, so that the subjects completed the task of consistency determination. The results showed that both gender stereotype conflict and semantic violation could induce N400 a congruency effect. Importantly, the N400 amplitude and response latency induced by gender stereotype activation are both smaller than those induced by semantic activation. These results show that stereotype activation is distinct from semantic activation, further demonstrating that the brain preferentially processes information related to gender stereotypes, and gender stereotype cognitive processing is more likely to happen than semantic knowledge processing.

Sustained Attention as Measured by Reaction Time Variability Is a Strong Modulator for the P600, but Not the N400.

The functional significance of the two prominent language-related ERP components N400 and P600 is still under debate. It has recently been suggested that one important dimension along which the two vary is in terms of automaticity versus attentional control, with N400 amplitudes reflecting more automatic and P600 amplitudes reflecting more controlled aspects of sentence comprehension. The availability of executive resources necessary for controlled processes depends on sustained attention, which fluctuates over time. Here, we thus tested whether P600 and N400 amplitudes depend on the level of sustained attention. We reanalyzed EEG and behavioral data from a sentence processing task by Sassenhagen and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky [The P600 as a correlate of ventral attention network reorientation. Cortex, 66, A3-A20, 2015], which included sentences with morphosyntactic and semantic violations. Participants read sentences phrase by phrase and indicated whether a sentence contained any type of anomaly as soon as they had the relevant information. To quantify the varying degrees of sustained attention, we extracted a moving reaction time coefficient of variation over the entire course of the task. We found that the P600 amplitude was significantly larger during periods of low reaction time variability (high sustained attention) than in periods of high reaction time variability (low sustained attention). In contrast, the amplitude of the N400 was not affected by reaction time variability. These results thus suggest that the P600 component is sensitive to sustained attention whereas the N400 component is not, which provides independent evidence for accounts suggesting that P600 amplitudes reflect more controlled and N400 amplitudes reflect more automatic aspects of sentence comprehension.

The neurophysiological mechanism of valence-space congruency effect: evidence from spatial Stroop task and event-related EEG features.

Metaphors commonly represent mental representations of abstract concepts. One example is the valence-space metaphor (i.e., positive word-up, negative word-down), which suggests that the vertical position of positive/negative words can modulate the evaluation of word valence. Here, the spatial Stroop task and electroencephalography (EEG) techniques were used to explore the neural mechanism of the valence-space congruency effect in valence-space metaphors. This study showed that the reaction time of the congruent condition (i.e., positive words at the top and negative words at the bottom of the screen) was significantly shorter than that of the incongruent condition (i.e., positive words at the bottom and negative words at the top of the screen), while the accuracy rate of the congruent condition was significantly larger than that of the incongruent condition. The analysis of the amplitudes of event-related potential components revealed that congruency between the vertical position and valence of Chinese words could significantly modulate the amplitude of attention allocation-related P2 component and semantic violations related N400 component. Moreover, statistical tests conducted on the post-stimulus inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC) found that the ITPC value of an alpha band region of interest (8-12Hz, 100-300 ms post-stimulus) in the time-frequency plane of the congruent condition was significantly larger than that of the incongruent condition. Above all, the current study proved the existence of the space-valence congruency effect in Chinese words and provided some interesting neurophysiological mechanisms regarding the valence-space metaphor.