Thematic roles in Alzheimer's disease: Hierarchy violations in psychological predicates

Manouilidou, Christina; Almeida, Roberto G. de; Schwartz, George J.; Nair, N.P.V.

doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2008.10.002

Cited by 40 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 58 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As shown in the lower section of Figures 7 and 8, linking the nominative argument to the undergoer macrorole requires either that the prominence scale is reconsidered (Figure 7) or that the assignment of an actor macrorole is bypassed. Prior studies have shown that ObjExp psych verbs lead to greater processing difficulty than verbs in which the nominative argument was assigned the "actor" macrorole according to several metrics, such as increased reading times, (Brennan & Pylkkännen, 2010;Cupples, 2002;Gennari & MacDonald, 2009), and decreased comprehension accuracy in patients with Alzheimer's disease (Manouilidou, de Almeida, Schwartz, & Nair, 2009) and aphasia (Beretta & Campbell, 2001;Piñango, 2006;Thompson & Lee, 2009). Results from studies that used ERPs (Bornkessel et al, 2003) and neuroimaging techniques (Bornkessel et al, 2005) also found differential brain activity after the presentation of sentences with each type of verb.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

Gattei

Dickey

Wainselboim

et al. 2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand "who did what to whom" in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object-experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax-semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence comprehension with alternative word orders. Results indicate that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when the order of the constituents in the sentence mirrors their ranking on a semantic hierarchy that encodes a verb's lexical semantics. Moreover, results show that during online comprehension, predictive mechanisms based on argument hierarchization are used rapidly to inform the processing system. Our findings corroborate already existing cross-linguistic evidence on the issue and are briefly discussed in the light of other sentence-processing models.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

Gattei

Dickey

Wainselboim

et al. 2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Degraded semantic memory, for example, is likely to be the source of category-specific deficits of single-word comprehension (Harciarek & Kertesz, 2009; but see Diesfeldt, 1989), of impaired verb naming (Kim & Thompson, 2004), or of impaired interpretation of thematic roles even in irreversible sentences (e.g., Manouilidou, de Almeida, Schwartz, & Nair, 2009;Price & Grossman, 2005). Moreover, it has been suggested that pAD patients' poor performance on explicit semantic tasks is due to a partially degraded semantic network in combination with deficient explicit retrieval (Rogers & Friedman, 2008).…”

Section: Please Scroll Down For Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

Agrammatic patterns in Alzheimer's disease: Evidence from tense, agreement, and aspect

Fyndanis¹,

Manouilidou²,

Koufou³

et al. 2013

Aphasiology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…We predicted that the same effect would not be found in the case of the perception/psychological class because, contrary to causatives, the Experiencers (“agents”) of perception/psychological verbs are the very entities that supposedly undergo a “change of state” (or that experience an object). Dissociations between agentives and Experiencer verbs have been found in Alzheimer’s and aphasia patients (Piñango, 2006; Manouilidou et al, 2009), and the relative difficulty of Experiencer verbs has been attributed to their non-canonical thematic structure (no Agent role). Thus, the predicted difference between verbs in these two conditions ( Theme that undergoes a change of state by the Agent ; and Theme that causes a change of state in the Experiencer ) should have contributed to enhance the differences in eye-movement behavior, if thematic roles were constraining referents in the visual context.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Events by Eye and Ear: Agent and Verb Drive Non-anticipatory Eye Movements in Dynamic Scenes

et al. 2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As Macnamara (1978) once asked, how can we talk about what we see? We report on a study manipulating realistic dynamic scenes and sentences aiming to understand the interaction between linguistic and visual representations in real-world situations. Specifically, we monitored participants’ eye movements as they watched video clips of everyday scenes while listening to sentences describing these scenes. We manipulated two main variables. The first was the semantic class of the verb in the sentence and the second was the action/motion of the agent in the unfolding event. The sentences employed two verb classes–causatives (e.g., break) and perception/psychological (e.g., notice)–which impose different constraints on the nouns that serve as their grammatical complements. The scenes depicted events in which agents either moved toward a target object (always the referent of the verb-complement noun), away from it, or remained neutral performing a given activity (such as cooking). Scenes and sentences were synchronized such that the verb onset corresponded to the first video frame of the agent motion toward or away from the object. Results show effects of agent motion but weak verb-semantic restrictions: causatives draw more attention to potential referents of their grammatical complements than perception verbs only when the agent moves toward the target object. Crucially, we found no anticipatory verb-driven eye movements toward the target object, contrary to studies using non-naturalistic and static scenes. We propose a model in which linguistic and visual computations in real-world situations occur largely independent of each other during the early moments of perceptual input, but rapidly interact at a central, conceptual system using a common, propositional code. Implications for language use in real world contexts are discussed.

show abstract

Thematic roles in Alzheimer's disease: Hierarchy violations in psychological predicates

Cited by 40 publications

References 58 publications

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

Agrammatic patterns in Alzheimer's disease: Evidence from tense, agreement, and aspect

Understanding Events by Eye and Ear: Agent and Verb Drive Non-anticipatory Eye Movements in Dynamic Scenes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About