The Neuronal Correlates of Indeterminate Sentence Comprehension: An fMRI Study

Abstract

Sentences such as The author started the book are indeterminate because they do not make explicit what the subject (the author) started doing with the object (the book). In principle, indeterminate sentences allow for an infinite number of interpretations. One theory, however, assumes that these sentences are resolved by semantic coercion, a linguistic process that forces the noun book to be interpreted as an activity (e.g., writing the book) or by a process that interpolates this activity information in the resulting enriched semantic composition. An alternative theory, pragmatic, assumes classical semantic composition, whereby meaning arises from the denotation of words and how they are combined syntactically, with enrichment obtained via pragmatic inferences beyond linguistic-semantic processes. Cognitive neuroscience studies investigating the neuroanatomical and functional correlates of indeterminate sentences have shown activations either at the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (vmPFC) or at the left inferior frontal gyrus (L-IFG). These studies have supported the semantic coercion theory assuming that one of these regions is where enriched semantic composition takes place. Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that indeterminate sentences activate bilaterally the superior temporal gyrus (STG), the right inferior frontal gyrus (R-IFG), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), more so than control sentences (The author wrote the book). Activation of indeterminate sentences exceeded that of anomalous sentences (…drank the book) and engaged more left- and right-hemisphere areas than other sentence types. We suggest that the widespread activations for indeterminate sentences represent the deployment of pragmatic-inferential processes, which seek to enrich sentence content without necessarily resorting to semantic coercion.

How right hemisphere damage after stroke can impair speech comprehension

“…The role of the right inferior frontal lobe in sentence comprehension has also been shown previously, particularly for older compared to younger neurologically normal participants ( Wingfield and Grossman, 2006 ), when words are ambiguous ( Mason and Just, 2007 ), when sentences are reversible ( Meltzer et al , 2010 ) or indeterminate ( de Almeida et al , 2016 ), and when patients with aphasia after left hemisphere strokes are recovering their sentence comprehension abilities ( van Oers et al , 2010 ; Mohr et al , 2014 ; Kielar et al , 2016 ). Finally, implication that the right hemisphere may be playing a non-linguistic executive role in normal speech comprehension has also been proposed ( Bozic et al , 2010 ; Vigneau et al , 2011 ; Baumgaertner et al , 2013 ).…”

Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences

“…While it is clear that Lisa began doing something with a book, the sentence is indeterminate with regards to what exactly Lisa began doing. This kind of construction has been the object of investigation in theoretical linguistics (Pustejovsky, 1995(Pustejovsky, , 2011de Almeida and Dwivedi, 2008;de Almeida and Riven, 2012;Asher, 2015; see also de Swart, 2011, for review), psycholinguistics (e.g., McElree et al, 2001;Traxler et al, 2002;de Almeida, 2004), and neuroimaging (Pylkkänen and McElree, 2007;Husband et al, 2011;de Almeida et al, 2016). What motivates general interest in indeterminate sentences is that, although they are grammatical and semantically felicitous -for a truth value judgment can be made -they appear to convey more information than what is explicitly said.…”

“…This enrichment process has since been the object of considerable experimental investigation involving numerous techniques such as self-paced reading (McElree et al, 2001;de Almeida, 2004), eye-tracking (Traxler et al, 2002(Traxler et al, , 2005Pickering et al, 2005;McElree et al, 2006a;Frisson and McElree, 2008;Katsika et al, 2012;Zarcone et al, 2014;Antal and de Almeida, 2020), probe recognition (Zarcone et al, 2014), sensibility judgments (McElree et al, 2006b), event-related potentials (ERPs; Baggio et al, 2010;Kuperberg et al, 2010), fMRI (Husband et al, 2011;de Almeida et al, 2016), magnetoencephalography (MEG; Pylkkänen and McElree, 2007), and aphasia (Piñango and Zurif, 2001). The majority of these studies have shown that indeterminate sentences engender processing delays or different activation patterns relative to various types of control sentences.…”

Decoding the Real-Time Neurobiological Properties of Incremental Semantic Interpretation

“…More generally, this region has been involved in semantic maintenance and cognitive control ( Shivde and Thompson-Schill 2004 ; Gajardo-Vidal et al. 2018 ), activating when processing an indeterminate sentence which can be interpreted in many different ways ( de Almeida et al. 2016 ) or when encountering a word with multiple meanings in a spoken sentence ( Rodd et al.…”