Search results for "animacy"

Animacy shifts and resolution of semantic conflicts: A typological commentary onShifting animacyby de Swart & de Hoop

2018

Do animacy effects persist in memory for context?

2017

International audience; The adaptive view of human memory (Nairne, 2010) assumes that animates (e.g., rabbit) are remembered better than inanimates (e.g., glass) because animates are ultimately more important for fitness than inanimates. Previous studies provided evidence for this view by showing that animates were recalled or recognized better than inanimates (e.g., Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013), but they did not assess memory for contextual details (e.g., where animates vs. inanimates occurred). In this study, we tested recollection of spatial information (Study 1) and temporal information (Study 2) associated with animate versus inanimate words. The findings …

Do healthy elders, like young adults, remember animates better than inanimates? An adaptive view

2016

International audience; Background/Study Context: It has been found that young adults remember animates better than inanimates. According to the adaptive view of human memory, this is due to the fact that animates are more important for fitness purposes than inanimates. This effect has been ascribed to episodic memory, where older people exhibit difficulties. Methods: Here the authors investigated whether the animacy effect in memory also occurs for healthy older adults. Older and young adults categorized words for their animacy characteristics and were then given an unexpected recognition test on the words using the Remember/Know paradigm. Executive functions were also evaluated using seve…

Animacy matters: ERP evidence for the multi-dimensionality of topic-worthiness in Chinese

2013

Abstract An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate how animacy interacts with givenness during topic processing. Both animacy and givenness have been considered as within-discourse factors that contribute to an element׳s potential to form an optimal topic (i.e., topic-worthiness). ERPs were recorded while participants read question–answer pairs, of which the target sentence induced either a continuation or an alternation of a previously introduced topic (i.e., given vs. new). Depending on the context, a potential topic further differed in its animacy from the preceding one (i.e., animate vs. inanimate). The data revealed a robust givenness effect with an N400 reduc…

The role of animacy in the real time comprehension of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from auditory event-related brain potentials.

2007

Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which modulated the assignment of actor and undergoer roles to the arguments), both arguments were either animate or inanimate. This allowed us to examine the interplay of animacy with thematic interpretation. In Experiment 1, we observed no effect of animacy at NP1, but N400 effects for inanimate actor arguments in second position. This result mirrors previous findings in German, thus suggesting that an initial undergoer univer…

Animacy effects in episodic memory: do imagery processes really play a role?

2019

International audience; Animates are remembered better than inanimates because the former are ultimately more important for fitness than the latter. What, however, are the proximate mechanisms underpinning this effect? We focused on imagery processes as one proximate explanation. We tested whether animacy effects are related to the vividness of mental images (Study 1), or to the dynamic/motoric nature of mental images corresponding to animate words (Study 2). The findings showed that: (1) Animates are not estimated to be more vivid than inanimates; (2) The potentially more dynamic nature of the representations of animates does not seem to be a factor making animates more memorable than inan…

Animacy-based predictions in language comprehension are robust: contextual cues modulate but do not nullify them

2015

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…

Conflicts in language processing: A new perspective on the N400-P600 distinction

2011

Conflicts in language processing often correlate with late positive event-related brain potentials (ERPs), particularly when they are induced by inconsistencies between different information types (e.g. syntactic and thematic/plausibility information). However, under certain circumstances, similar sentence-level interpretation conflicts (inanimate subjects) engender negativity effects (N400s) instead. The present ERP study was designed to shed light on this inconsistency. In previous studies showing monophasic positivities (P600s), the conflict was irresolvable and induced via a verb. whereas N400s were elicited by resolvable, argument-induced conflicts. Here, we therefore examined irresolv…

THE SEMANTIC NETWORK OF THE LATIN PREPOSITION PER: A DIACHRONIC INVESTIGATION

2020

Proponiamo qui i risultati di uno studio corpus-based sugli slittamenti diacronici osservabili nel network semantico della preposizione per in latino. Sulla base della Cognitive Grammar, descriviamo la semantica di per situandola lungo un continuum che procede dal concreto all’astratto, a partire da un contenuto schematico originario; discutiamo, quindi, i percorsi attraverso i quali i nuovi significati astratti emergono attraverso sli ttamenti metonimici, focalizzando la nostra attenzione sui ruoli causali e sulla caratteristica di animatezza.

An alternative perspective on “semantic P600” effects in language comprehension

2008

Abstract The literature on the electrophysiology of language comprehension has recently seen a very prominent discussion of “semantic P600” effects, which have been observed, for example, in sentences involving an implausible thematic role assignment to an argument that would be a highly plausible filler for a different thematic role of the same verb. These findings have sparked a discussion about underlying properties of the language comprehension architecture, as they have generally been viewed as a challenge to established models of language processing and specifically to the notion that syntax precedes semantics in the comprehension process. In this paper, we review the literature on se…