scholarly journals Integration of World Knowledge and Temporary Information about Changes in an Object's Environmental Location during Different Stages of Sentence Comprehension

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuqian Chen ◽  
Wei Yang ◽  
Lijun Ma ◽  
Jiaxin Li
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
World Knowledge

The Time Course of World Knowledge Integration in Sentence Comprehension

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (7) ◽  
pp. 565-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hua JIN ◽  
Wei-Fang ZHONG ◽  
Gui-Ping XU ◽  
Meng-Xian CAI ◽  
Yu-Fang YANG ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Time Course ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Knowledge Integration ◽  
World Knowledge

scholarly journals How do 3-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech?

2021 ◽  
pp. 014272372110435
Author(s):  
Kirsten Abbot-Smith ◽  
Cornelia Schulze ◽  
Nefeli Anagnostopoulou ◽  
Maria Zajączkowska ◽  
Danielle Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Real World ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Outcome Variable ◽  
Pragmatic Language ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Language Interpretation ◽  
Pragmatic Language Skills ◽  
In The Wild

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, ‘I have a cough’, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. In addition, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3.5- to 4-year-old speakers of British English (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge through priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, reveal a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. There was no clear association between relevance inferencing and Theory of Mind. There was mixed evidence for the role of formal language, which should be further investigated. Finally, real-world knowledge was indeed associated with relevance inferencing but future experimental work is required to test causal relations.

Adapt retrieval rules and inhibit already-existing world knowledge: adjustment of world knowledge’s activation level in auditory sentence comprehension

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-668
Author(s):  
QIANYU LI ◽  
XUQIAN CHEN ◽  
QIAONING SU ◽  
SHUN LIU ◽  
JIAN HUANG
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Visual Display ◽  
Visual Fixation ◽  
Critical Area ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Activation Level ◽  
Critical Words ◽  
Test Package

abstractWe tested whether the proportion of typical sentences in a series of auditory sentences would lead people to adjust the strength of activation of world knowledge (i.e., retrieval rules adaptation) during comprehension. This issue is important because it could help clarify how people efficiently integrate different memory information in cognitive processes. In two experiments, all task materials were presented to participants as a whole package, in which proportions of typical sentences, with typical final locations, varied under different conditions. In Experiment 1, the proportion of typical sentences was equal to the atypical ones (i.e., 50% typical vs. 50% atypical), whereas in Experiment 2, the proportion of typical sentences was not equal to the atypical ones (i.e., 75% typical vs. 25% atypical, and 25% typical vs. 75% atypical). Visual fixation on the critical area in a visual display before/while hearing the critical words was compared across conditions, and across-condition differences were used as an index of the adaptation of the retrieval rule in the activation of world knowledge. The findings indicated that the adaptation of retrieval rules occurs throughout the whole test package of sentence comprehension, and the strength of activation of world knowledge in sentence comprehension can be adjusted.

EXPRESS: Reliance on semantic and structural heuristics in sentence comprehension across the lifespan

2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110532
Author(s):  
Anastasiya A. Lopukhina ◽  
Anna Laurinavichyute ◽  
Svetlana Malyutina ◽  
Galina Ryazanskaya ◽  
Elena Savinova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Semantic Relations ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
Heuristic Processing

People sometimes misinterpret the sentences that they read. One possible reason suggested in the literature is a race between slow bottom-up algorithmic processing and “fast and frugal” top-down heuristic processing that serves to support fast-paced communication but sometimes results in incorrect representations. Heuristic processing can be both semantic, relying on world knowledge and semantic relations between words, and structural, relying on structural economy. Scattered experimental evidence suggests that reliance on heuristics may change from greater reliance on syntactic information in younger people to greater reliance on semantic information in older people. We tested whether the reliance on structural and semantic heuristics changes with age in 137 Russian-speaking adolescents, 135 young adults, and 77 older adults. In a self-paced reading task with comprehension questions, participants read unambiguous high- vs. low-attachment sentences that were either semantically plausible or implausible: i.e., the syntactic structure either matched or contradicted the semantic relations between words. We found that the use of top-down heuristics in comprehension increased across the lifespan. Adolescents did not rely on structural heuristics, in contrast to young and older adults. At the same time, older adults relied on semantic heuristics more than young adults and adolescents. Importantly, we found that top-down heuristic processing was faster than bottom-up algorithmic processing: slower reading times were associated with greater accuracy specifically in implausible sentences.

scholarly journals How do three-year-olds use relevance inferencing to interpret indirect speech

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Abbot-Smith ◽  
Cornelia Schulze ◽  
Nefeli Anagnostopoulou ◽  
Maria Zajączkowska ◽  
Danielle Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Outcome Variable ◽  
Pragmatic Language ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Language Interpretation ◽  
Pragmatic Language Skills ◽  
In The Wild

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies “I have a cough”, the requesting child must make a ‘relevance inference’ to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive skills relate to relevance inferencing. Additionally, we asked whether children’s lab-based pragmatic performance relates to children’s parent-assessed pragmatic language skills. We tested 3½- to 4-year-olds (Study 1: N = 40, Study 2: N = 32). Children were presented with video-recorded vignettes ending with an utterance requiring a relevance inference, for which children made a forced choice. Study 1 measured children’s Theory of Mind, their sentence comprehension and their real-world knowledge and found that only real-world knowledge retained significance in a regression analysis with children’s relevance inferencing as the outcome variable. Study 2 then manipulated children’s world-knowledge via priming but found this did not improve children’s performance on the relevance inferencing task. Study 2 did, however, find a significant correlation between children’s relevance inferencing and a measure of morpho-syntactic production. In both studies parents rated their children’s pragmatic language usage in daily life, which was found to relate to performance in our lab-based relevance inferencing task. This set of studies is the first to empirically demonstrate that lab-based measures of relevance inferencing are reflective of children’s pragmatic abilities ‘in the wild’. We argue that real-world knowledge is a necessary (but not sufficient) for relevance inferencing.

scholarly journals The interaction of discourse context and world knowledge in online sentence comprehension. Evidence from the N400

2007 ◽  
Vol 1146 ◽  
pp. 210-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea A. Hald ◽  
Esther G. Steenbeek-Planting ◽  
Peter Hagoort
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Discourse Context

Speech and Span: Working Memory Capacity Impacts the Use of Animacy but Not of World Knowledge during Spoken Sentence Comprehension

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 2886-2898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroko Nakano ◽  
Clifford Saron ◽  
Tamara Y. Swaab
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Thematic Roles ◽  
N400 Effect ◽  
Thematic Relations ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
On Line

We present results from a study demonstrating that high- and low-span listeners show qualitatively different brain responses when comprehending simple active sentences. Participants listened to naturally produced sentences in three conditions in which the plausibility of thematic relations was manipulated, for instance: The dog(1)/The poet(2)/The box(3) is biting the mailman. Event-related potentials were recorded to the first noun, the verb, and the second noun in all three conditions. In (2), the thematic relations between the words in the sentence are less expected given our world knowledge, and this resulted in an N400 effect of semantic processing difficulty to the second noun for both high- and low-span subjects. In (3), the inanimate first noun cannot be the agent of the verb. Only high-span subjects showed an effect of animacy on the sentence-initial nouns, evident from a larger anterior negative shift to inanimate than animate nouns. Furthermore, to the thematically violated verbs (3), low-span subjects showed an N400, whereas high-span subjects generated a P600. We suggest that this P600 effect to the thematically violated verb may be related to processing costs resulting from a conflict between the provisional thematic roles assigned as a function of the inanimate sentence-initial noun, and the actual (animate) agent required by the verb. We further argue that low-span subjects lag behind those with high span in their use of animacy, but not real-world knowledge in the on-line computation of thematic roles in spoken language comprehension.

scholarly journals The Truth Before and After: Brain Potentials Reveal Automatic Activation of Event Knowledge during Sentence Comprehension

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (11) ◽  
pp. 2215-2228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mante S. Nieuwland
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Critical Word ◽  
Semantic Relatedness ◽  
Semantic Retrieval ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Event Knowledge ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Automatic Activation ◽  
Truth Value

How does knowledge of real-world events shape our understanding of incoming language? Do temporal terms like “before” and “after” impact the online recruitment of real-world event knowledge? These questions were addressed in two ERP experiments, wherein participants read sentences that started with “before” or “after” and contained a critical word that rendered each sentence true or false (e.g., “Before/After the global economic crisis, securing a mortgage was easy/harder”). The critical words were matched on predictability, rated truth value, and semantic relatedness to the words in the sentence. Regardless of whether participants explicitly verified the sentences or not, false-after-sentences elicited larger N400s than true-after-sentences, consistent with the well-established finding that semantic retrieval of concepts is facilitated when they are consistent with real-world knowledge. However, although the truth judgments did not differ between before- and after-sentences, no such sentence N400 truth value effect occurred in before-sentences, whereas false-before-sentences elicited an enhanced subsequent positive ERPs. The temporal term “before” itself elicited more negative ERPs at central electrode channels than “after.” These patterns of results show that, irrespective of ultimate sentence truth value judgments, semantic retrieval of concepts is momentarily facilitated when they are consistent with the known event outcome compared to when they are not. However, this inappropriate facilitation incurs later processing costs as reflected in the subsequent positive ERP deflections. The results suggest that automatic activation of event knowledge can impede the incremental semantic processes required to establish sentence truth value.

When Hearing Does Not Mean Understanding: On the Neural Processing of Syntactically Complex Sentences by Listeners With Hearing Loss

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Margreet Vogelzang ◽  
Christiane M. Thiel ◽  
Stephanie Rosemann ◽  
Jochem W. Rieger ◽  
Esther Ruigendijk
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Loss ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Secondary Task ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Cognitive Demands ◽  
Sentence Complexity ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
And Task

Purpose Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the processing of degraded input interfering with the successful processing of complex sentences. Method We performed a neuroimaging study with a sentence comprehension task, varying sentence complexity (through subject–object order and verb–arguments order) and cognitive demands (presence or absence of a secondary task) within subjects. Groups of older subjects with hearing loss ( n = 20) and age-matched normal-hearing controls ( n = 20) were tested. Results The comprehension data show effects of syntactic complexity and hearing ability, with normal-hearing controls outperforming listeners with hearing loss, seemingly more so on syntactically complex sentences. The secondary task did not influence off-line comprehension. The imaging data show effects of group, sentence complexity, and task, with listeners with hearing loss showing decreased activation in typical speech processing areas, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. No interactions between group, sentence complexity, and task were found in the neuroimaging data. Conclusions The results suggest that listeners with hearing loss process speech differently from their normal-hearing peers, possibly due to the increased demands of processing degraded auditory input. Increased cognitive demands by means of a secondary visual shape processing task influence neural sentence processing, but no evidence was found that it does so in a different way for listeners with hearing loss and normal-hearing listeners.

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