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Concurrent use of animacy and event-knowledge during comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials
Luleå University of Technology, Department of Business Administration, Technology and Social Sciences, Humans and technology. Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2511-1631
Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Donders Institute for Cognition, Brain and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany.
2021 (English)In: Neuropsychologia, ISSN 0028-3932, E-ISSN 1873-3514, Vol. 152, article id 107724Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

In two ERP experiments, we investigated whether readers prioritize animacy over real-world event-knowledge during sentence comprehension. We used the paradigm of Paczynski and Kuperberg (2012), who argued that animacy is prioritized based on the observations that the ‘related anomaly effect’ (reduced N400s for context-related anomalous words compared to unrelated words) does not occur for animacy violations, and that animacy violations but not relatedness violations elicit P600 effects. Participants read passive sentences with plausible agents (e.g., The prescription for the mental disorder was written by the psychiatrist) or implausible agents that varied in animacy and semantic relatedness (schizophrenic/guard/pill/fence). In Experiment 1 (with a plausibility judgment task), plausible sentences elicited smaller N400s relative to all types of implausible sentences. Crucially, animate words elicited smaller N400s than inanimate words, and related words elicited smaller N400s than unrelated words, but Bayesian analysis revealed substantial evidence against an interaction between animacy and relatedness. Moreover, at the P600 time-window, we observed more positive ERPs for animate than inanimate words and for related than unrelated words at anterior regions. In Experiment 2 (without judgment task), we observed an N400 effect with animacy violations, but no other effects. Taken together, the results of our experiments fail to support a prioritized role of animacy information over real-world event-knowledge, but they support an interactive, constraint-based view on incremental semantic processing.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Elsevier, 2021. Vol. 152, article id 107724
Keywords [en]
Semantic processing, selection-restrictions, real-world knowledge, semantic relatedness, N400
National Category
Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics
Research subject
Engineering Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-82209DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107724ISI: 000619751400006PubMedID: 33347913Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85100046717OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-82209DiVA, id: diva2:1515348
Funder
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, KAW 2014.0205
Note

Validerad;2021;Nivå 2;2021-02-08 (alebob);

Finansiär: PPLS Research Support Grants, CONACYT, The University of Edinburgh 

Available from: 2021-01-08 Created: 2021-01-08 Last updated: 2023-09-05Bibliographically approved

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Vega-Mendoza, Mariana

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