TY - JOUR
T1 - Characterising kinds and instances of kinds
T2 - ERP reflections
AU - Prasada, Sandeep
AU - Salajegheh, Anna
AU - Bowles, Anita
AU - Poeppel, David
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to Sandeep Prasada, Department of Psychology, Hunter College, CUNY, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021, USA. E-mail: [email protected] We thank Nina Kazanina for help with the script and Elaine Dillingham, Susannah Hoffman and Maura Pilotti for help conducting the behavioural experiments. This work was supported by an NIH grant to DP (R01DC 05660) and a startup grant from Hunter College to SP. SP also received infrastructure support from RCMI grant RR03037 from the National Center for Research Resources (NIH) to the Gene Center at Hunter College. During part of the preparation of this manuscript, DP was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
PY - 2008/3
Y1 - 2008/3
N2 - Syntactic and semantic information are computed online in a manner such that electrophysiological methods can detect distinct processes within a few hundred milliseconds of a word. The amplitude of the N400 response has been shown to reflect semantic integration of a word in the context of a preceding word, sentence, and discourse. We show, in a combined behavioural and ERP study, that the N400 amplitude to the same word, in nearly identical sentential contexts, is modulated as a function of subtly different morphosyntactic environments that condition either a generic (grass is green) or nongeneric (the grass is green) reading. The results suggest that N400 amplitude reflects not only the existence of a semantic computation but can reflect processes relevant to the type of semantic relation being computed. Specifically, it is sensitive to whether a word is interpreted as characterising a kind/type or an instance of a kind/token of a type.
AB - Syntactic and semantic information are computed online in a manner such that electrophysiological methods can detect distinct processes within a few hundred milliseconds of a word. The amplitude of the N400 response has been shown to reflect semantic integration of a word in the context of a preceding word, sentence, and discourse. We show, in a combined behavioural and ERP study, that the N400 amplitude to the same word, in nearly identical sentential contexts, is modulated as a function of subtly different morphosyntactic environments that condition either a generic (grass is green) or nongeneric (the grass is green) reading. The results suggest that N400 amplitude reflects not only the existence of a semantic computation but can reflect processes relevant to the type of semantic relation being computed. Specifically, it is sensitive to whether a word is interpreted as characterising a kind/type or an instance of a kind/token of a type.
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U2 - 10.1080/01690960701428292
DO - 10.1080/01690960701428292
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:39049166173
SN - 0169-0965
VL - 23
SP - 226
EP - 240
JO - Language and Cognitive Processes
JF - Language and Cognitive Processes
IS - 2
ER -