Neural Systems Mediating American Sign Language: Effects of Sensory Experience and Age of Acquisition

Neville, Helen J.; Coffey, Sharon A.; Lawson, Donald; Fischer, Andrew Martín; Emmorey, Karen; Bellugi, Ursula

doi:10.1006/brln.1997.1739

Cited by 228 publications

(171 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The N400 is a negative polarity ERP component that peaks approximately 400 ms post-word onset, and it is maximal over posterior scalp sites (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980). The N400 has been related specifically to semantic aspects of the input and has been found independent of modality of input, being present for written, spoken and signed language (e.g., Holcomb and Neville, 1991;Kutas and Hillyard, 1980;Kutas et al, 1987;Neville et al, 1997). It has been proposed that the amplitude of the N400 effect is modulated as a function of the ease with which the meaning of a word can be integrated with a higher order representation of the preceding word, sentence or discourse context.…”

Section: Erp Studies Of Spoken Word Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electrophysiological differentiation of phonological and semantic integration in word and sentence contexts

Diaz

Swaab

2007

Brain Research

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During auditory language comprehension, listeners need to rapidly extract meaning from the continuous speech-stream. It is a matter of debate when and how contextual information constrains the activation of lexical representations in meaningful contexts. Electrophysiological studies of spoken language comprehension have identified an event-related potential (ERP) that was sensitive to phonological properties of speech, which was termed the phonological mismatch negativity (PMN). With the PMN, early lexical processing could potentially be distinguished from processes of semantic integration in spoken language comprehension. However, the sensitivity of the PMN to phonological processing per se has been questioned, and it has additionally been suggested that the "PMN" is not separable from the N400, an ERP that is sensitive to semantic aspects of the input. Here, we investigated whether or not a separable PMN exists and if it reflects purely phonological aspects of the speech input. In the present experiment, ERPs were recorded from healthy young adults (N =24) while they listened to sentences and word lists, in which we manipulated semantic and phonological expectation and congruency of the final word. ERPs sensitive to phonological processing were elicited only when phonological expectancy was violated in lists of words, but not during normal sentential processing. This suggests a differential role of phonological processing in more or less meaningful contexts and indicates a very early influence of the overall context on lexical processing in sentences.

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Section: Erp Studies Of Spoken Word Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electrophysiological differentiation of phonological and semantic integration in word and sentence contexts

Diaz

Swaab

2007

Brain Research

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“…As ERPs are differentially sensitive to the various types of information in question and, furthermore, provide a continuous mea- suited to an exploration of the issues at hand. The vast majority of ERP studies examining language comprehenmaximum has also been observed in correlation with the sion has made use of the violation paradigm, in which processing of closed class words [25, [31][32][33]36,43]. responses to correct sentences are compared to those…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential task effects on semantic and syntactic processes as revealed by ERPs

Hahne

Friederici

2002

Cognitive Brain Research

334

175

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Two experiments investigated the time-course of semantic and syntactic processes in auditory language comprehension as well as their possible functional dependencies, using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants listened to sentences which were either correct, semantically incorrect, syntactically incorrect, or both semantically and syntactically incorrect. In experiment 1, participants judged the overall correctness of these sentences. The semantic violation elicited an N400 whereas the syntactic phrase structure violation elicited an early anterior negativity followed by a P600. Sentences in which the critical element violated both semantic and syntactic constraints elicited the same pattern of ERPs as the syntactic violation alone, not evoking an N400. In experiment 2, participants judged the same sentences for semantic coherence, required to ignore syntactic violations. Again, an early anterior negativity was elicited for those sentences containing phrase-structure errors. In contrast to experiment 1, however, combined violations elicited both an early negativity and an N400. Together, the results suggest that the N400 associated with semantic aspects of sentence comprehension reflects controlled processes whereas initial parsing processes associated with the early anterior negativity are independent of semantic constraints and task requirements. © 2002 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved. Theme: Neural basis of behavior Topic: Cognition: languageKeywords: Auditory event-related brain potential; Syntax; Semantics; N400 Introductionnated and what their functional dependencies are [9,11,28,29]. In order for sentences to be understood, the human The present paper focuses on the processing of phrase language comprehension system must process and intestructure (i.e. syntactic) and selectional restriction (i.e. grate a wide range of heterogeneous linguistic information semantic) information. In particular, we explore the tempowithin a short time-period. The question of how the exact ral coordination of these two processes and, moreover, architecture of this system is best described, however, has whether the processing of one type of information is a yet to be definitively answered, in spite of the many necessary prerequisite for the other to occur. In other models proposed to this extent during the last decades.words, we investigate whether the semantic integration of While there appears to be a general consensus that a word into a sentence depends on its prior successful sentence processing is incremental and that different types integration at the phrase structure level and if so, whether of information are processed fairly quickly whenever a such a primacy of structural aspects can be overcome by a new word is encountered [3,29], the proposed architectures task effecting an attentional shift to semantic aspects. differ with respect to when different information sources We examine these issues by using event-related brain become available and / or are used, how they are coordipotentia...

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“…N400) after stimulus onset in both spoken and written language [13] as well as in American Sign Language [18]. The N400 is large whenever a word does not fit a context and is reduced in amplitude whenever it does fit.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicating hands: ERPs elicited by meaningful symbolic hand postures

Gunter

Bach

2004

Neuroscience Letters

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Meaningful and meaningless hand postures were presented to subjects who had to carry out a semantic discrimination task while electrical brain responses were recorded. Both meaningful and control sets of hand postures were matched as closely as possible. The ERPs elicited by meaningless hand postures showed an anteriorly distributed N300 and a centro-posteriorly distributed N400 component. The N300 probably reflects picture-specific processes, whereas the N400-effect probably reflects processing in an amodal semantic network. The scalpdistribution of the N400-effect, which is more posterior than usually reported in picture processing, suggests that the semantic representations of the concepts expressed by meaningful hand postures have similar properties to those of abstract words.

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Neural Systems Mediating American Sign Language: Effects of Sensory Experience and Age of Acquisition

Cited by 228 publications

References 28 publications

Electrophysiological differentiation of phonological and semantic integration in word and sentence contexts

Electrophysiological differentiation of phonological and semantic integration in word and sentence contexts

Differential task effects on semantic and syntactic processes as revealed by ERPs

Communicating hands: ERPs elicited by meaningful symbolic hand postures

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