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Related Experiment Video

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Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism

Published on: October 3, 2018

Generalized event knowledge activation during online sentence comprehension.

Ross Metusalem¹, Marta Kutas, Thomas P Urbach

¹University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA.

Journal of Memory and Language

|June 20, 2012

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Readers activate general event knowledge during language comprehension, even when it seems contextually unusual. This real-world knowledge influences understanding and expectation generation.

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Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Linguistics

Background:

Real-world event knowledge is crucial for online language comprehension.
The extent to which this knowledge is activated during comprehension is not fully understood.
Specifically, whether activation is confined to contextually aligned information needs investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the scope of event knowledge activation during language comprehension.
To determine if activation is limited to knowledge elements fitting the local linguistic context.
To examine the role of generalized event knowledge in influencing language processing.

Main Methods:

Analysis of event-related brain potentials (ERPs).
Participants read brief scenarios describing typical real-world events.
Two experiments were conducted, manipulating discourse context.

Main Results:

Experiment 1: A contextually anomalous word, if generally related to the event, elicited a reduced N400 ERP component.
This effect persisted even when controlling for word association and expected continuations.
Experiment 2: The reduced N400 effect disappeared when the discourse context was removed.

Conclusions:

Comprehenders activate general knowledge about described events during incremental comprehension.
This activation occurs even when the knowledge seems anomalous in the immediate linguistic stream.
Generalized event knowledge is readily available, influences language processing, and drives expectancy generation.