Neurocognitive correlates of category ambiguous verb processing: The single versus dual lexical entry hypotheses

Lukic, Sladjana; Meltzer‐Asscher, Aya; Higgins, James; Parrish, Todd B.; Thompson, Cynthia K.

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2019.04.005

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 69 publications

(97 reference statements)

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“…Full priming in the inflected condition arises due to repeated access to the same representational structure comprising the basic entry and the verb-specific subentry that had both been preactivated by the prime. Neuro-imaging data has recently been reported that supports such a view by indicating that polysemic verbs may share a core representation with their noun counterparts (Lukic et al, 2019). Further research is necessary to identify which version of the Hypothesis 2a grasps the representation of nonfinites best.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Representation and Processing of Overtly Identical Complex Forms in L1 and L2

Bordag

Opitz

2021

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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In two visual priming experiments, we investigated the relation of form-identical word forms with different grammatical functions in L1 and L2 German. Four different grammatical types (inflected verbs, infinitives, deverbal conversion forms, and countable nouns) were used as primes and their influence on the processing of form-identical inflected verbs as targets was compared. Results revealed full priming of inflected verbs, but only partial priming for conversion forms and infinitives. No priming was observed for semantically related countable nouns suggesting that they have a separate lexical entry. The findings bring first psycholinguistic evidence for typological claims that deverbal conversion nouns and infinitives fall into the category of nonfinites. They also support accounts assuming representations with a basic lexical entry and word-category specific subentries. The same priming pattern was observed in L1 and L2 suggesting that representation and processing of the studied complex forms is not fundamentally different in the two populations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…data has recently been reported that supports such a view by indicating that polysemic verbs may share a core representation with their noun counterparts (Lukic et al, 2019). Further research is necessary to identify which version of the Hypothesis 2a grasps the representation of nonfinites best.…”

Section: Supplementary Materialsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Representation and Processing of Overtly Identical Complex Forms in L1 and L2

Bordag

Opitz

2021

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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“…For the critical ambiguous words, both response options (the two meanings of the noun-verb homonyms) are available and compete for selection, leading to increased use of computational resources (see Beretta et al, 2005 ; Eddington and Tokowicz, 2015 ). On the other hand, the observed ambiguity effect may also reflect the cost of deriving a more complex structure, given that the ambiguous word would be compatible with the base and derived structure (unlike “paper” which is ambiguous just in meaning), and thus might incur additional processing costs ( Lukic et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of category ambiguity in normal and impaired lexical processing: can you paint without the paint?

Lukic

Krauska

Yoshida

et al. 2023

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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IntroductionMany words are categorially ambiguous and can be used as a verb (to paint) or as a noun (the paint) due to the presence of unpronounced morphology or “zero morphology”. On this account, the verb “paint” is derived from the noun “paint” through the addition of a silent category-changing morpheme. Past studies have uncovered the syntactic and semantic properties of these categorially ambiguous words, but no research has been conducted on how people process them during normal or impaired lexical processing. Are these two different uses of “paint” processed in the same way? Does this morphosyntactic structure have an effect on online sentence processing?MethodsThis study presents two experiments that investigate the effect of morphosyntactic complexity in categorially ambiguous words presented in isolation (experiment 1) and in a sentential context (experiment 2). The first experiment tested the ability to process categorially unambiguous and ambiguous nouns and verbs in 30 healthy older adults and 12 individuals with aphasia, using a forced choice phrasal-completion task, in which individuals choose whether the or to is most compatible with target words.ResultsHealthy controls and individuals with fluent aphasia all showed: (1) a bias toward the base category in selection rates for the and to, where the was selected more frequently for words identified to be base nouns, and to was selected more frequently for base verbs, and (2) longer reaction times for ambiguous (over unambiguous) words. However, individuals with non-fluent agrammatic aphasia showed a base-category effect only for nouns, with chance performance for verbs. The second experiment, using an eye-tracking while reading paradigm with 56 young healthy adults, showed a reading time slowdown for derived forms (to paint) compared to their base-category counterparts (the paint) in sentence contexts.DiscussionThese findings suggest that categorially ambiguous words likely share a common root, and are related by zero-derivation, and that impaired access to the base-category (i.e., verbs like to visit) precludes associated morphological processes and therefore the retrieval of the derived-category (i.e., nouns like the visit) in non-fluent agrammatic aphasia. This study provides insights into the theory of zero morphology, and the principles that need to be accounted for in models of the lexicon.

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“…Another novelty in our work is that we use a multivariate brain encoding approach, in combination with computational models. Previous studies of the interplay between semantic composition and polysemic variation in the interpretation of lexical items in cognitive neuroscience (Klepousniotou, Pike, Steinhauer, & Gracco, 2012; Klepousniotou, Gracco, & Pike, 2014; Lukic, Meltzer‐Asscher, Higgins, Parrish, & Thompson, 2019; MacGregor, Bouwsema, & Klepousniotou, 2015; Mollica et al., 2020; Pylkkänen, Llinás, & Murphy, 2006; Pylkkänen & McElree, 2007; Pylkkänen, 2020) have all used univariate methods (e.g., looking at differences in BOLD activation across conditions), whereas multivariate analyses afford higher sensitivity and, more importantly, a way to test competing accounts (Hebart & Baker, 2018; Naselaris & Kay, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Brain Representations of Words' Concreteness in Context Using GPT‐2 and Human Ratings

Bruera,

Tao,

Anderson

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

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The meaning of most words in language depends on their context. Understanding how the human brain extracts contextualized meaning, and identifying where in the brain this takes place, remain important scientific challenges. But technological and computational advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence now provide unprecedented opportunities to study the human brain in action as language is read and understood. Recent contextualized language models seem to be able to capture homonymic meaning variation (“bat”, in a baseball vs. a vampire context), as well as more nuanced differences of meaning—for example, polysemous words such as “book”, which can be interpreted in distinct but related senses (“explain a book”, information, vs. “open a book”, object) whose differences are fine‐grained. We study these subtle differences in lexical meaning along the concrete/abstract dimension, as they are triggered by verb‐noun semantic composition. We analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activations elicited by Italian verb phrases containing nouns whose interpretation is affected by the verb to different degrees. By using a contextualized language model and human concreteness ratings, we shed light on where in the brain such fine‐grained meaning variation takes place and how it is coded. Our results show that phrase concreteness judgments and the contextualized model can predict BOLD activation associated with semantic composition within the language network. Importantly, representations derived from a complex, nonlinear composition process consistently outperform simpler composition approaches. This is compatible with a holistic view of semantic composition in the brain, where semantic representations are modified by the process of composition itself. When looking at individual brain areas, we find that encoding performance is statistically significant, although with differing patterns of results, suggesting differential involvement, in the posterior superior temporal sulcus, inferior frontal gyrus and anterior temporal lobe, and in motor areas previously associated with processing of concreteness/abstractness.

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Neurocognitive correlates of category ambiguous verb processing: The single versus dual lexical entry hypotheses

Cited by 9 publications

References 69 publications

Representation and Processing of Overtly Identical Complex Forms in L1 and L2

Representation and Processing of Overtly Identical Complex Forms in L1 and L2

The role of category ambiguity in normal and impaired lexical processing: can you paint without the paint?

Modeling Brain Representations of Words' Concreteness in Context Using GPT‐2 and Human Ratings

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