When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse

Nieuwland, Mante S.; Berkum, Jos J. A. Van

doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.7.1098

Cited by 427 publications

(380 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…The ERP results reported in both studies fit with previous psycholinguistic research in showing that context has an early influence on discourse comprehension (Van Berkum et al, 2003;Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006). Following a factual context (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…For example, typical N400 responses to local semantic anomalies (e.g. the peanut was in love) have been shown to reverse within an appropriate discourse context that makes the described events plausible (Filik & Leuthold, 2013;Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006). Similarly, N400 effects are activated when a narrative describes a character's inappropriate emotional response to a given social situation (Leuthold, Filik, Murphy, & MacKenzie, 2012), when a statement conflicts with a person's moral values (Van Berkum, Holleman, Nieuwland, Otten, & Murre, 2009), or when their actions mismatch their (false) beliefs (Ferguson, Cane, Douchkov, & Wright, in press).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Ferguson

Cane

2015

Brain Research

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Recent empirical research suggests that understanding a counterfactual event (e.g. 'If Josie had revised, she would have passed her exams') activates mental representations of both the factual and counterfactual versions of events. However, it remains unclear when readers switch between these models during comprehension, and whether representing multiple 'worlds' is cognitively effortful. This paper reports two ERP studies where participants read contexts that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, followed by a second sentence describing a consequence of this event.Critically, this sentence included a noun that was either consistent or inconsistent with the preceding context, and either included a modal verb to indicate reference to the counterfactualworld or not (thus referring to the factual-world). Experiment 2 used adapted versions of the materials used in Experiment 1 to examine the degree to which representing multiple versions of a counterfactual situation makes heavy demands on cognitive resources by measuring individuals' working memory capacity. Results showed that when reference to the counterfactual-world was maintained by the ongoing discourse, readers correctly interpreted events according to the counterfactual-world (i.e. showed larger N400 for inconsistent than consistent words). In contrast, when cues referred back to the factual-world, readers showed no difference between consistent and inconsistent critical words, suggesting that they simultaneously compared information against both possible worlds. These results support previous dualrepresentation accounts for counterfactuals, and provide new evidence that linguistic cues can guide the reader in selecting which world model to evaluate incoming information against.Crucially, we reveal evidence that maintaining and updating a hypothetical model over time relies upon the availability of cognitive resources.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Ferguson

Cane

2015

Brain Research

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“…For instance, in the case of language comprehension, it has become increasingly clear that the brain uses several types of information in a qualitatively similar way to arrive at a full understanding of a message. This includes information from world-knowledge, co-speech gestures, pictures, speaker's identity derived from voice characteristics and information from a preceding discourse (Federmeier & Kutas, 2001;Hagoort, 2005;Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004;Hagoort & van Berkum, in press;Nieuwland & van Berkum, 2006;Ö zyü rek et al, in press;van Berkum, Hagoort, & Brown, 1999;van Berkum, Zwitserlood, Hagoort, & Brown, 2003;Willems et al, 2006). Importantly, these examples serve to demonstrate that the brain not only is capable of taking several streams of information into account, but actually does so in a qualitatively similar way.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Neural evidence for the interplay between language, gesture, and action: A review

2007

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Co-speech gestures embody a form of manual action that is tightly coupled to the language system. As such, the co-occurrence of speech and co-speech gestures is an excellent example of the interplay between language and action. There are, however, other ways in which language and action can be thought of as closely related. In this paper we will give an overview of studies in cognitive neuroscience that examine the neural underpinnings of links between language and action. Topics include neurocognitive studies of motor representations of speech sounds, action-related language, sign language and co-speech gestures. It will be concluded that there is strong evidence on the interaction between speech and gestures in the brain. This interaction however shares general properties with other domains in which there is interplay between language and action.

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“…The latter regularity suggests that within the language domain, the N400 reflects some aspect(s) of the processes that integrate the meaning of a particular word into a higher-order semantic interpretation. (Van Berkum, Hagoort, & Brown, 1999, p. 358) The N400 has also been associated with the integration of word meaning into a broader context or discourse (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006;Van Berkum et al, 1999) and to the integration of world knowledge (Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Solving the problem of double negation is not impossible: electrophysiological evidence for the cohesive function of sentential negation

Schiller

Lenteren

Witteman

et al. 2016

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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In natural languages, two negating elements that cancel each other out (as in not impossible) are logically equivalent to the non-negated word form (in this case, possible). It has been proposed that the function of sentential double negation is to create coherence between sentences containing opposing information. Thus, not impossible is functionally different from possible. The present ERP study tested this hypothesis in Dutch. Native speakers read sentences in which evoked negative expectations are cancelled by a second sentence including either a double negation or the corresponding non-negated word form. Results showed that non-negated word forms, such as possible, elicited a larger N400 effect than double negations, such as not impossible. We suggest that canceling out a negative expectation by a double negation compared to the non-negated word form, makes it easier for the reader to integrate the two sentences semantically and connect them to the present discourse.ARTICLE HISTORY

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When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse

Abstract: Abstract& In linguistic theories of how sentences encode meaning, a distinction is often made between the context-free rule-based combination of lexical-semantic features of the words within a sentence (

Cited by 427 publications

References 48 publications

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Neural evidence for the interplay between language, gesture, and action: A review

Solving the problem of double negation is not impossible: electrophysiological evidence for the cohesive function of sentential negation

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