The Anterior Midline Field: Coercion or decision making?

Abstract

a b s t r a c tTo study the neural bases of semantic composition in language processing without confounds from syntactic composition, recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies have investigated the processing of constructions that exhibit some type of syntax-semantics mismatch. The most studied case of such a mismatch is complement coercion; expressions such as the author began the book, where an entity-denoting noun phrase is coerced into an eventive meaning in order to match the semantic properties of the event-selecting verb (e.g., 'the author began reading/writing the book'). These expressions have been found to elicit increased activity in the Anterior Midline Field (AMF), an MEG component elicited at frontomedial sensors at $400 ms after the onset of the coercing noun . An MEG study of silent meaning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 11]. Thus, the AMF constitutes a potential neural correlate of coercion. However, the AMF was generated in ventromedial prefrontal regions, which are heavily associated with decision-making. This raises the possibility that, instead of semantic processing, the AMF effect may have been related to the experimental task, which was a sensicality judgment. We tested this hypothesis by assessing the effect of coercion when subjects were simply reading for comprehension, without a decision-task. Additionally, we investigated coercion in an adjectival rather than a verbal environment to further generalize the findings. Our results show that an AMF effect of coercion is elicited without a decision-task and that the effect also extends to this novel syntactic environment. We conclude that in addition to its role in non-linguistic higher cognition, ventromedial prefrontal regions contribute to the resolution of syntax-semantics mismatches in language processing.

The LATL as locus of composition: MEG evidence from English and Arabic

“…This network typically include the angular gyrus (Bavelier et al, 1997;Bottini et al, 1994;Humphries et al, 2006Humphries et al, , 2007, the left inferior frontal gyrus (Baggio & Hagoort, 2011;Hagoort, 2005;Hagoort, Baggio, & Willems, 2009;Humphries et al, 2006Humphries et al, , 2007, or the ventromedial prefrontal cortex Pylkkänen, 2008;Pylkkänen, Martin, McElree, & Smart, 2009;Pylkkänen & McElree, 2007;Pylkkänen, Oliveri, & Smart, 2009). Intriguingly, when using a more targeted paradigm to investigate basic composition, we found no evidence for a consistent involvement of these regions in general combinatorics, across composition types and languages.…”

Formal Neurosemantics. Logic, meaning and composition in the Brain

“…Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1988) and investigated deeply by Hagoort et al (2004), whereas the latter has recently been found as the generator of the Anterior Midline Field (AMF). The AMF is an MEG component that is a candidate neural correlate of semantic composition, since it showed increased amplitudes in semantic well-formed but hard to compose sentences, such as "begin the book", where there is a resolvable type-mismatch between an eventive verb and an entitydenoting object (Pylkkänen & McElree, 2007;Pylkkänen, Oliveri et al, 2009;Pylkkänen, Martin, McElree, & Smart, 2009), and "the clown jumped for 10 min", where a verb describing a punctual event generates a repetitive reading because of the presence of a durative adverb (Brennan & Pylkkänen, 2008). The authors reported a higher activation in the vmPFC for semantic violations ("the wine was being unchilled"), compared to control sentences ("the wine was being uncorked"), but not for world knowledge violations ("the thirst was being uncorked").…”

Simple Composition: A Magnetoencephalography Investigation into the Comprehension of Minimal Linguistic Phrases

“…Within MEG, a series of studies has investigated the neural correlates of semantic composition through manipulations involving semantic mismatches (Pylkkänen and McElree, 2007;Pylkkänen, 2008, 2010;Pylkkänen et al, 2009b). In these studies, expressions are contrasted for which the computations necessary to construct a coherent meaning are varied while the amount of syntactic work is maximally controlled.…”

“…Thus, there may be both increased variability and decreased power when measuring activity from a source that is more distant from the sensors, such as the vmPFC. However, the majority of previous effects have localized to the medial region of the orbitofrontal cortex (Pylkkänen and McElree, 2007;Pylkkänen et al, 2009a,b;, with activity occasionally spreading either more ventrally or dorsally (Brennan and Pylkkänen, 2008;Pylkkänen et al, 2009b). Thus, to assess the contribution of the vmPFC to basic linguistic composition, we placed an ROI within the whole of the medial, ventral portion of the prefrontal cortex (i.e., approximately the entirety of BA 11) (see Fig.…”