This research tests whether comprehenders use their knowledge of typical events in real time to process verbal arguments. In self-paced reading and event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific patient noun (brakes or spelling) depended on the combination of an agent and verb (mechanic checked vs. journalist checked). Reading times were shorter at the word directly following the patient for the congruent than the incongruent items. Differential N400s were found earlier, immediately at the patient. Norming studies ruled out any account of these results based on direct relations between the agent and patient. Thus, comprehenders dynamically combine information about real-world events based on intrasentential agents and verbs, and this combination then rapidly influences online sentence interpretation.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2976562 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2010.08.004 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Trends and Disparities in Non-fatal Firearm Injuries among Working-Age Adults in the United States, 2000-2021.
J Community Health
December 2024
Department of Public Health Sciences, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, 88003, USA.
Firearm-related injuries remain a significant public health issue in the United States, with patterns and trends among various age groups not well characterized. This study analyzed time series trends and disparities in firearm injury rates among U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerceived impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and government restrictions on the lives of young adults living with HIV in Kisumu, Kenya.
PLOS Glob Public Health
December 2024
ICAP at Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health, New York, New York, United States of America.
Young adults with HIV (YAHIV) may be particularly vulnerable to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, associated mitigation measures among YAHIV can adversely impact fragile social and economic systems. We examined the impact of the pandemic and related government-mandated restrictions among YAHIV in Kisumu, Kenya.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCaregivers as experimenters: Reducing unfamiliarity helps shy children learn words.
Infancy
October 2024
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
Previous work has found that shy children show chance-level disambiguation and retention of novel word meanings in a typical lab-based word learning task. This effect could be explained in terms of shy children's aversion to unfamiliarity disrupting the requisite attentional processes, because the task is marked by a high degree of unfamiliarity. To test this argument, we examined whether increasing the familiarity of the task facilitates shy children's ability to form and retain word meanings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDoes bride price harm women? Using ethnography to think about causality.
Evol Hum Sci
May 2024
Lise Meitner Research Group BirthRites, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Many institutions claim that bride price - where the groom's family transfers wealth to the bride's family at marriage - harms women. Owing to its long-term engagement with communities that practise bride price, ethnography is well placed to identify causal mechanisms at play in this issue, and there is a substantial literature on its effects in a variety of world regions, including Melanesia. Here, we condense this literature, drawing out key causal arguments made about bride price in various Melanesian societies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMental states via possessive predication: the grammar of possessive experiencer complex predicates in Persian.
Nat Lang Semant
April 2024
Department of Linguistics and English Language, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Persian possesses a number of stative complex predicates with 'to have' that express certain kinds of mental state. I propose that these be given a formal semantic treatment involving possession of a portion of an abstract quality by an individual, as in the analysis of property concept lexemes due to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Language 91(3):533-563, 2015; Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34:93-106, 2016; Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property concepts, Oxford University Press, 2017). Augmented with an analysis of prepositional phrases introducing the target of the mental state and an approach to gradability in terms of measure functions (Wellwood in Measuring predicates, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014), the analysis explains various properties of possessive experiencer complex predicates, including the behavior of target phrases, the ability of the non-verbal element to be modified by a range of adjectives, the direct participation of the non-verbal element in comparative constructions, and the ability of degree expressions to modify both the non-verbal element and the VP containing the complex predicate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!