0000000000180178
AUTHOR
R. Muralikrishnan
Animacy-based predictions in language comprehension are robust: contextual cues modulate but do not nullify them
Couldn't a humble coconut hurt a gardener? At least in the first instance, the brain seems to assume that it should not: we perceive inanimate entities such as coconuts as poor event instigators ("Actors"). Ideally, entities causing a change in another entity should be animate and this assumption not only influences event perception but also carries over to language comprehension. We present three auditory event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on the processing of inanimate and animate subjects and objects in simple transitive sentences in Tamil. ERP responses were measured at the second argument (event participant) in all three studies. Experiment 1 employed all possible animacy comb…
Rapid neural encoding of the contrast between native and nonnative speech in the alpha band
AbstractMore than half of the world’s population is multilingual, yet it is not known how the human brain encodes the perception of native vs. nonnative speech. To find out, we asked German native speakers to detect the onset of native and nonnative (English and Turkish) vowels in a roving standard stimulation. Using EEG, we show that nonnativeness is robustly registered by an increase in phase coherence in the alpha band (8-12 Hz), beginning as early as ∼100 ms after stimulus onset and lasting more than 200 ms. The alpha band effect is speech-specific, successfully predicts the response speed advantage of nonnative speech, and grants ∼90% decoding accuracy in distinguishing native vs. nonn…
Gesture’s body orientation modulates the N400 during semantic integration of gesture and visual sentence
AbstractBody orientation of gesture entails social-communicative intention, and may thus influence how gestures are perceived and comprehended together with auditory speech during face-to-face communication. To date, despite the emergence of neuroscientific literature on the role of body orientation on hand action perception, limited studies have directly investigated the role of body orientation in the interaction between gesture and language. To address this research question, we carried out an EEG experiment presenting to participants (n=21) videos of frontal and lateral hand gestures of five-seconds (e.g., raising a hand), followed by visually presented sentences that are either congrue…
Play it by ear? An ERP study of Chinese polysemous verb yǒu
Abstract Mandarin Chinese yŏu is a polysemous verb. It can be interpreted as meaning either ‘have’ or ‘there be/exist’ in sentences of the form ‘NP1 yŏu NP2’, which can correspondingly be analyzed as either a Have-Possessive construction (‘NP1 has NP2’) or an existential/locative construction (‘(At/in) NP1 there is NP2’), or both. This study used event-related brain potentials to investigate whether and how the interpretation of yŏu in a given ‘NP1 yŏu NP2’ construction is determined by the semantics of the nouns involved and their relationship. Twenty-seven participants read sentences of this construction. The results showed that there were different patterns of brain activity that can be …