The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of music training on the processing of temporal order in Mandarin sentence reading using event-related potentials (ERPs). Two-clause sentences with temporal connectives ("before" or "after") were presented to both musicians and non-musicians. Additionally, a verbal N-back task was utilized to evaluate the participants' working memory capacities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnaphora is an essential means of maintaining textual coherence, the phenomenon of replacing one word or phrase in the preceding part of a discourse with another. At least two crucial stages are involved in anaphor processing: bonding and resolution. The links between the anaphor and potential antecedents are established in the former stage, which would be evaluated and integrated into the latter stage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAction processing is crucial for sports activities. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study investigated whether semantics were activated in action processing and, if so, whether semantic activation was modulated by action duration. Badminton athletes were recruited to finish a lexical decision task following an action-semantic priming paradigm, in which short (400 ms) or long (1000 ms) action videos served as primes, and semantically congruent or incongruent action words served as targets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious studies have suggested that focusing an element can enhance the activation of the focused element and bring about a number of processing benefits. However, whether and how this local prominence of information interacts with global discourse organization remains unclear. In the present study, we addressed this issue in two experiments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropsychologia
January 2018
In real life, the processing of an incoming event is continuously influenced by prior information at multiple timescales. The present study investigated how harmonic contexts at both local and global levels influence the processing of an incoming chord in an event-related potentials experiment. Chord sequences containing two phrases were presented to musically trained listeners, with the last critical chord either harmonically related or less related to its preceding context at local and/or global levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing unimodal auditory tasks of word-matching and meaning-matching, this study investigated how the phonological and semantic processes in Chinese disyllabic spoken word recognition are modulated by top-down mechanism induced by experimental tasks. Both semantic similarity and word-initial phonological similarity between the primes and targets were manipulated. Results showed that at early stage of recognition (~150-250 ms), an enhanced P2 was elicited by the word-initial phonological mismatch in both tasks.
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