Semantic memory for objects, actions, and events: A novel test of event-related conceptual semantic knowledge

Dresang, Haley C.; Dickey, Michael Walsh; Warren, Tessa

doi:10.1080/02643294.2019.1656604

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…Taken together, this evidence indicates that isolated verbs, event nouns, and thematic role/participant nouns activate conceptual event knowledge, resulting in facilitated naming of related concepts. This kind of direct event-related priming has not previously been tested in people with aphasia, but Dresang et al (2019) found an indirect relation between event knowledge and verb naming. They found that conceptual knowledge of events positively predicted performance on verb naming and argument structure production tests in a sample of people with aphasia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Rational Adaptation in Using Conceptual Versus Lexical Information in Adults With Aphasia

et al. 2021

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The information theoretic principle of rational adaptation predicts that individuals with aphasia adapt to their language impairments by relying more heavily on comparatively unimpaired non-linguistic knowledge to communicate. This prediction was examined by assessing the extent to which adults with chronic aphasia due to left-hemisphere stroke rely more on conceptual rather than lexical information during verb retrieval, as compared to age-matched neurotypical controls. A primed verb naming task examined the degree of facilitation each participant group received from either conceptual event-related or lexical collocate cues, compared to unrelated baseline cues. The results provide evidence that adults with aphasia received amplified facilitation from conceptual cues compared to controls, whereas healthy controls received greater facilitation from lexical cues. This indicates that adaptation to alternative and relatively unimpaired information may facilitate successful word retrieval in aphasia. Implications for models of rational adaptation and clinical neurorehabilitation are discussed.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Rational Adaptation in Using Conceptual Versus Lexical Information in Adults With Aphasia

et al. 2021

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“…Further, very few neuroimaging (Baldassano et al, 2018;Thierry & Price, 2006) or neuropsychological (Dresang et al, 2019;Marshall et al, 1993) studies have investigated the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic semantic processing of events (as opposed to individual objects or actions). Constructing event-level meaning representations requires object and action processing but is not reducible to them (Dresang et al, 2019), and therefore may engage additional mental operations. In particular, to understand an event, we must identify relations between participating entities and assign them thematic roles (Estes et al, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The language network is recruited but not required for non-verbal event semantics

Ivanova

Mineroff

Zimmerer

et al. 2019

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Consistent with longstanding findings from neuropsychology, several brain regions in left frontal and temporal cortex respond robustly and selectively to language [1]. These regions, often referred to as the "language network", respond more strongly to meaningful stimuli (like words and sentences) than to stimuli devoid of meaning (like pseudowords and Jabberwocky sentences) [2]. But are these regions selectively recruited in processing linguistic meaning? Or do they instead store and/or process complex semantic information independent of its format (sentences or pictures)? In Experiment 1, we scanned participants with fMRI while they performed a semantic plausibility judgment task vs. a difficult perceptual control task on sentences and line drawings that describe/depict simple agent-patient interactions. We found that the language regions responded more strongly when participants performed the semantic task compared to the perceptual task, for both sentences and pictures (although sentences elicited overall stronger responses). Thus, healthy adults engage language regions when processing non-verbal meanings. But is this engagement necessary for understanding pictorial depictions of events? In Experiment 2, we tested two individuals with global aphasia, who have sustained massive damage to perisylvian language areas and display severe language difficulties, together with a group of control participants. Individuals with aphasia were at chance on a task of matching the sentences and pictures. However, they performed close to controls in assessing the plausibility of pictorial depictions of agent-patient interactions. Taken together, these results indicate that the left fronto-temporal language system is recruited but not necessary for processing complex non-verbal meanings.

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“…The importance of verb knowledge to these abstractions is supported by evidence from Colvin et al (2019), who found that people with aphasia who showed more processing disruption to selectional restriction violations also performed better on an independent standardized test of access to verbs with varying numbers of arguments (the Verb Naming Task from the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences; Cho-Reyes & Thompson, 2012). In contrast, processing disruption to selectional restriction violations was not predicted by performance on a world knowledge task in which participants judged whether a pictured event was plausible or not (Dresang et al, 2019). Thus it seems likely that even if some aspects of selectional restrictions might be abstracted from world knowledge, these abstractions are tightly tied to words and form part of our linguistic knowledge about how specific words can and can't be used.…”

Section: Abstractions Influence Language Comprehension Independent Of World Knowledge?mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…For example, there is some evidence that purely linguistic input may be sufficient to learn sophisticated semantics; there are distributional semantic models (mathematical models that develop representations of meaning based on the distribution of words in large corpora of text) that can distinguish the presence of a selectional restriction from event-based impossibility in Warren et al's (2015) stimuli (Chersoni et al, 2018). There is also recent work looking at the relationship between impairment in language and impairment in event-related world knowledge in aphasia (e.g., Dresang et al, 2019), and promising verb-retrieval treatments that specifically target world knowledge regarding common situations or events (Verb Network Strengthening Training, VNeST: Edmonds, 2016). Verhuizen et al's (2019) model might provide a way to examine and understand these patterns of co-impairment, and it provides a specific set of computational mechanisms that might be used to explain VNeST's beneficial effects.…”

Section: And World Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

The use of linguistic and world knowledge in language processing

Warren

Dickey

2021

Language and Linguist. Compass

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There has been considerable investigation of the roles that linguistic and world knowledge play during language comprehension. This investigation is important because its results have ramifications for both basic questions about how the mature intact language comprehension system functions and for applied questions regarding how comprehension systems that are impaired by aphasia might function. In the current paper, we review debates and research related to the representation and use of linguistic and world knowledge in language comprehension and then describe a recent computational model that takes both world and linguistic knowledge into account in predicting language comprehension difficulty. We then review empirical work that attempts to characterize the interactions and potential trade-offs between world and linguistic knowledge during language comprehension, and relate this work to the computational model previously described. We conclude with a brief overview of a few open questions regarding the representation of linguistic and world knowledge. | DEFINING LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE AND WORLD KNOWLEDGESimply defined, linguistic knowledge is knowledge of the patterns that characterize linguistic input. World knowledge is knowledge of the patterns that characterize our experiences in the world. At certain levels of analysis, these two kinds of knowledge are quite distinct. For

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Semantic memory for objects, actions, and events: A novel test of event-related conceptual semantic knowledge

Cited by 15 publications

References 92 publications

Rational Adaptation in Using Conceptual Versus Lexical Information in Adults With Aphasia

Rational Adaptation in Using Conceptual Versus Lexical Information in Adults With Aphasia

The language network is recruited but not required for non-verbal event semantics

The use of linguistic and world knowledge in language processing

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