Hemispheric asymmetry and pun comprehension: When cowboys have sore calves

Coulson, Seana; Severens, Els

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2005.08.009

Cited by 48 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Other members of the RHD group seemed to adopt a ''physical story" frame, narrating all of the films in terms of the physical movements of the triangles, and making little or no mention of intentional, emotional, or mental states. This is compatible with much of the earlier research on RHD and right-hemisphere processes in general, such as Coulson's idea that impaired frame-shifting may explain people with RHD's reported difficulties with humor comprehension (Coulson & Severens, 2007;Coulson & Williams, 2005), Tompkins' idea that a suppression deficit may undermine people with RHD's ability to revise inferences (Tompkins, Baumgaertner, Lehman, & Fassbinder, 2000;Tompkins, Baumgaertner, Lehman, & Fossett, 1997;Tompkins, Lehman-Blake, Baumgaertner, & Fassbinder, 2001), as well as classic work on the integration of information in humor and narrative comprehension in people with RHD Wapner et al, 1981). …”

Section: Damage To Frontal Systemssupporting

confidence: 74%

Theory of Mind in adults with right hemisphere damage: What’s the story?

Weed

McGregor

Nielsen³

et al. 2010

Brain and Language

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a b s t r a c tWhy do people with right hemisphere damage (RHD) have difficulty with pragmatics and communication? One hypothesis has been that pragmatic impairment in RHD is the result of an underlying impairment in Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to infer the mental states of others. In previous studies evaluating ToM abilities in people with RHD, researchers have used judgment tasks based on story or still cartoon stimuli. However, ToM is likely to draw on kinetic information as well, and these tasks ignore this aspect. The aim of this study was to assess ToM abilities in people with RHD using participants' evaluations of animated films with moving geometric shapes. Participants were presented with eight films of animated triangles. Four of the films represented the triangles as intentional agents with mental states, while the other four represented the triangles as simply inanimate, though moving, objects. Films were evaluated by both button-press response and by oral descriptions. Analysis of the transcriptions revealed that participants with RHD had a reduced ability to discriminate between the film categories, and a bias toward reduced mental-state ascription in the ToM condition.

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Section: Damage To Frontal Systemssupporting

confidence: 74%

Theory of Mind in adults with right hemisphere damage: What’s the story?

Weed

McGregor

Nielsen³

et al. 2010

Brain and Language

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“…These findings, along with those of other studies using similar materials (e.g., Kandhadai and Federmeier, 2007), are inconsistent with the main tenet of the coarse coding hypothesis, which argues that meaning activation is broader in the RH, including both strongly-related information such as the dominant meaning and weakly-related information such as subordinate meanings (Beeman et al, 1994;Jung-Beeman, 2005). Instead, studies that have manipulated SOA or utilized measures that allow continuous sampling of cognitive processing have found evidence that the subordinate meaning is activated in both hemispheres, but with a different time course in each (Burgess and Simpson, 1988;Meyer and Federmeier, 2007; see also Coulson and Severens, 2007, for similar findings in the context of pun comprehension).However, several aspects of our ERP, gaze, and behavioral data suggest that the RH might have an advantage in making broader or more flexible use of context information. First, compared to the LH, the RH showed greater N400 priming when a weakly-biased context preceded strongly-related targets, and the LH also showed reduced N400 priming (compared to the unrelated context condition) when a strongly-biased context preceded weakly-related targets.…”

mentioning

confidence: 40%

The divided visual world paradigm: Eye tracking reveals hemispheric asymmetries in lexical ambiguity resolution

Meyer¹,

Federmeier²

2008

Brain Research

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Eye tracking was combined with the visual half-field procedure to examine hemispheric asymmetries in meaning selection and revision. In two experiments, gaze was monitored as participants searched a four-word array for a target that was semantically related to a lateralized ambiguous or unambiguous prime. Primes were preceded by a related or unrelated centrally-presented context word. In Experiment 1, unambiguous primes were paired with concordant weakly-related context words and strongly-related targets that were similar in associative strength to discordant subordinate-related context words and dominant-related targets in the ambiguous condition. Context words and targets were reversed in Experiment 2. A parallel study involved the measurement of event-related potentials (ERPs; Meyer, A. M., and Federmeier, K. D., 2007. The effects of context, meaning frequency, and associative strength on semantic selection: Distinct contributions from each cerebral hemisphere. Brain Res. 1183, 91-108). Similar to the ERP findings, gaze revealed context effects for both visual fields/hemispheres when subordinate-related targets were presented: initial gaze revealed meaning activation when an unrelated context was utilized, whereas later gaze also revealed activation in the discordant context, indicating that meaning revision had occurred. However, eye tracking and ERP measures diverged when dominant-related targets were presented: for both visual fields/hemispheres, initial gaze indicated the presence of meaning activation in the discordant context, and, for the right hemisphere, discordant context information actually facilitated gaze relative to unrelated context information. These findings are discussed with respect to the activeness of the task and hemispheric asymmetries in the flexible use of context information. KeywordsLexical Ambiguity; Cerebral Hemispheres; Context Effect; Eye Tracking Most English words are ambiguous (Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen-Wilson, 2004), having either multiple unrelated meanings (homonymy) or multiple related senses (polysemy). For example, the homonym bank can refer to a financial institution or the edge of a river, and the polysemous word lamb can refer to food or a living animal. Lexical ambiguity has been the subject of much research over the past several decades; many studies (e.g., Duffy et al., 1988;Simpson, Corresponding Author: Aaron M. Meyer, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801, meyeram@uiuc.edu, (217) 244-9638. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. 1981;Swinney and Hakes, 1976;Ta...

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“…Several authors also used the ERP technique to directly address the issue of metaphor processing. A larger N400 to metaphoric than literal meaning of the same word is a typical finding (Arzouan, Goldstein, & Faust, 2007;Coulson & Severens, 2007;Kazmerski, Blasko, & Dessalegn, 2003;Lai, Curran, & Menn, 2009;Pynte, Besson, Robichon, & Poli, 1996). Using pictures (rather than words) as the context yielded a similar effect (Lu & Zhang, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%