ERPs Reveal Phonological, Syntactic and Semantic Processes in Language Comprehension

The N400 and context
The amplitude of the N400 to a particular word is highly sensitive to the immediate context in which it occurs, whether that context is a single word, a sentence, or a discourse. For example…

Online semantic memory use
Discourse context
As agreed upon, Jane was to wake her sister and her brother at five o’clock in the morning. But the sister had already washed herself, and the brother had even got dressed. Jane told the brother that he was exceptionally… Anomalous in discourse: slow Coherent in discourse: quick
The MMN and native phonetic contrast
Across category: /da/9, /da/9, /da/9, /ba/5 Within category: /ba/1, /ba/1, /ba/1, /ba/5 Control: /ba/5, /ba/5, /ba/5, /ba/5

Violation ቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱaradigm
To compare a critical condition with a minimally differing control condition Examples from Kutas and Hillyard (1980)
Critical condition: He spread the warm bread with socks. Control condition: He spread the warm bread with butter. A negativity with a centro-parietal distribution and a maximum at 400 ms post-onset (N400) was observed in response to socks as compared to butter.
N400
Anomalous in discourse Coherent in discourse (from Van Berkum et al., 2003)
The N400 and memory
The amplitude of the N400 is also sensitive to the easiness of accessing information from long-term semantic memory. N400 amplitude is reduced when the upcoming word shares many semantic features with the item most likely to appear in the current context. For example…
Areas of Study
Human Language: Acquisition; Comprehension; Production Populations: infants adults language learner bilingual aphasic Level of analysis: discourse lexical semantic morphological syntactic phonological prosodic acoustic-phonetic Language: language specific vs. language universal Modality: auditory; visual; gestural; tactile
T h e sp eech w av efo rm
Language In the Brain
How language is instantiated in the brain? What are the neuroanatomical bases for different function?
Across category Within category Control Syllable onset Right superofrontal electrode
(from Dehaene-Lambertz, 1997)
Sentence comprehension
Violation paradigm N400 ELAN (Early Left Anterior Negativity) LAN (Left Anterior Negativity) P600

that
is, an abstract description of what the processes must be like, what levels of representation there are, how do they relate to each other, how they are structured.

Are certain kinds of representation housed in particular parts of the brain? What neural pathways correspond to the links between those representations?

Main Topics in Psycholinguistics
visual word recognition spoken word recognition morphological processing word in context syntactic processing semantic processing discourse processing language production

at the level of sound, or of words, or of sentences
What are characteristics of language?
Structured Arbitrary Generative Dynamic
What Is Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguists investigate:

the processes by which we comprehend and produce spoken or written language; the representations of linguistic input and output created by these processes; the knowledge we must have to perform these processes; how linguistic knowledge and language processes develop in the child
S en ten ce M ean in g
T h em atic R o le A ssig n m en t
P arsin g
L ex ical R etriev al
In p u t lex ico n
W o rd S eg m en tatio n
P h o n em es
P h o n etic featu res
Language In the Mind
Functional architecture We can try to describe the mental representations and processes that occur in between the physical signal (speech waves, ink on a page) and the message at the functional level;
ERPs Reveal Phonological, Syntactic and Semantic Processes in Language Comprehension and Production
Xiaolin Zhou
Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Department of Psychology Peking University Beijing 100871, China xz104@ /

Oddball paradigm
Participants are presented a series of identical “standard” speech sounds. These sounds are intermixed with infrequent (e.g., 20%) “deviant” speech sounds that systematically differ from the standard stimulus. Deviant stimuli that cross a phonetic category boundary elicit a MMN.

ABC’s of the MMN

A negative effect thought to reflect automatic pre-attentive processes that respond to changes in the physical characteristics of auditory stimuli