Search results for "N400"

Gesture's body orientation modulates the N400 for visual sentences primed by gestures

2020

Abstract Body 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 electroencephalography (EEG) experiment presenting to participants (n = 21) videos of frontal and lateral communicative hand gestures of 5 s (e.g., raising a hand), followed by visually presented …

The impact of visual cues during visual word recognition in deaf readers: An ERP study

2021

Abstract Although evidence is still scarce, recent research suggests key differences in how deaf and hearing readers use visual information during visual word recognition. Here we compared the time course of lexical access in deaf and hearing readers of similar reading ability. We also investigated whether one visual property of words, the outline-shape, modulates visual word recognition differently in both groups. We recorded the EEG signal of twenty deaf and twenty hearing readers while they performed a lexical decision task. In addition to the effect of lexicality, we assessed the impact of outline-shape by contrasting responses to pseudowords with an outline-shape that was consistent (e…

Word Processing in Scene Context : An Event-Related Potential Study in Young Children

2017

Semantic priming has been demonstrated in object or word contexts in toddlers. However, less is known about semantic priming in scene context. In this study, 24-month-olds with high and low vocabulary skills were presented with visual scenes (e.g., kitchen) followed by semantically consistent (e.g., spoon) or inconsistent (e.g., bed) spoken words. Inconsistent scene-word pairs evoked a larger N400 component over the frontal areas. Low-producers presented a larger N400 over the right while high-producers over the left frontal areas. Our results suggest that contextual information facilitates word processing in young children. Additionally, children with different linguistic skills activate d…

The N400 as a correlate of interpretively relevant linguistic rules: evidence from Hindi.

2009

Classical views on the electrophysiology of language assume that different event-related potential (ERP) components index distinct linguistic subdomains. Hence, left-anterior negativities are often viewed as correlates of rule-based linguistic knowledge, whereas centro-parietal negativities (N400s) are taken to reflect (non-rule-based) semantic memory or aspects of lexical-semantic predictability. The present ERP study of case marking in Hindi challenges this clear-cut dichotomy. Though determined by a grammatical rule, the choice of subject case in Hindi is also interpretively relevant as it constrains the range of possible interpretations of the subject. For incorrect subject cases, we ob…

Internal vs. external R&D teams: Evidences from the Italian wine industry

2021

R&D teams' internationalization attracts interests from different research-streams. However, the decision on what type of R&D structure is more convenient to invest in may differ, based on several factors, such as risk-taking propensity and internal resource availability. With an aim to enrich the extant literature and to provide practical insights for managers working in the wine industry, this case study explores the determinants of an Italian family-owned winery that attempts to keep a balance between its internal and external R&D teams' decision, using an integrated theoretical framework based on the transaction costs and the resource-based view theory. The optimal R&D s…

Prosodic Phrasing and Transitivity in Head-Final Sentence Comprehension – ERP Evidence from German Ambiguous DPs

2010

In this article, we present an ERP study investigating the neurophysiological correlates of the interplay between prosodic phrasing and case information in head-final sentence processing. We examine German DP1-DP2-V constructions, in which the second DP can either be interpreted as a possessive modifier of the first DP (one-participant reading), or as a verbal argument (two-participant reading). An N400 on the determiner of the second DP is observed when either case information or prosodic phrasing biased toward the establishment of a two-participant reading, thus reflecting local processing costs associated with the introduction of a transitive event. By contrast, when the DPs are integrat…

Emotional Connotations of Musical Instrument Timbre in Comparison With Emotional Speech Prosody: Evidence From Acoustics and Event-Related Potentials

2018

Music and speech both communicate emotional meanings in addition to their domain-specific contents. But it is not clear whether and how the two kinds of emotional meanings are linked. The present study is focused on exploring the emotional connotations of musical timbre of isolated instrument sounds through the perspective of emotional speech prosody. The stimuli were isolated instrument sounds and emotional speech prosody categorized by listeners into anger, happiness and sadness, respectively. We first analyzed the timbral features of the stimuli, which showed that relations between the three emotions were relatively consistent in those features for speech and music. The results further e…

Are Vowels and Consonants Processed Differently? Event-related Potential Evidence with a Delayed Letter Paradigm

2008

Abstract To investigate the neural bases of consonant and vowel processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed in three different conditions: (i) simultaneous presentation of all letters (baseline condition); (ii) presentation of all letters, except that two internal consonants were delayed for 50 msec (consonants-delayed condition); and (iii) presentation of all letters, except that two internal vowels were delayed for 50 msec (vowels-delayed condition). The behavioral results showed that, for words, response times in the consonants-delayed condition were longer than in the vowel…

Potencials evocats (p300, n400 i n200) i paràmetres roc i de la tds aplicats a components implícits de la memòria

2013

Topicality matters: Position-specific demands on Chinese discourse processing

2011

We report an event-related potential study designed to explore the nature of context-induced topicality in Chinese discourse processing. Topic is what an utterance is about and represents the most prominent discourse element, which occurs sentence-initially in Chinese. We tested question-answer pairs consisting of topic and non-topic questions followed by different continuations (Topic-Continuity, Topic-Shift, Novel-Topic). ERPs were measured at distinct sentential positions and revealed that sentence-initially information processing is guided by topicality, which affects N400 and Late Positivity effects alike. In non-initial positions, the given-new distinction is the dominant principle, a…