Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired 'role hierarchies'. By examining occurrences of the 'same' verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.

/pdf/thematic-proto-roles-and-argument-selection-44n9gqgebg.pdf

Thematic proto-roles and argument selection

http://psych.colorado.edu/~kimlab/Gibson.1998.pdf

Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies

K. Haberlandt, Methods in Reading Research. F. Ferreira and M. Anes, Why Study Spoken Language? K. Rayner and S.C. Sereno, Eye Movements in Reading Psycholinguistic Studies. M. Kutas and C.K. Van Petten, Psycholinguistics Electrified: Event-Related Brain Potential Investigations. R.E. Remez, A Guide to Research on the Perception of Speech. K.R. Kluender, Speech Perception as a Tractable Problem in Cognitive Science. D.W. Massaro, Psychological Aspects of Speech Perception: Implications for Research and Theory. S.E. Lively, D.B. Pisoni, and S.D. Goldinger, Spoken Word Recognition: Research and Theory. D.A. Balota, Visual Word Recognition: The Journey from Features to Meaning. G.B. Simpson, Context and the Processing of Ambiguous Words. D.C. Mitchell, Sentence Parsing. R.W. Gibbs, Jr., Figurative Thought and Figurative Language. C. Cacciari and S. Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language. M. Singer, Discourse Inference Processes. A.C. Graesser, C.L. McMahen, and B.K. Johnson, Question Asking and Answering. P. van den Broek, Comprehension and Memory of Narrative Texts: Inferences and Coherence. C.R. Fletcher, Levels of Representation in Memory for Discourse. A.M. Glenberg, P. Kruley, and W.E. Langston, Analogical Processes in Comprehension: Simulation of a Mental Model. B.K. Britton, Understanding Expository Text: Building Mental Structures to Induce Insights. S.C. Garrod and A.J. Sanford, Resolving Sentences in a Discourse Context: How Discourse Representation Affects Language Understanding. A.J. Sanford and S.C. Garrod, Selective Processing in Text Understanding. W. Kintsch, The Psychology of Discourse Processing. P. Bloom, Recent Controversies in the Study of Language Acquisition. L. Gerken, Child Phonology: Past Research, Present Questions, Future Directions. J. Oakhill, Individual Differences in Children's Text Comprehension. C.A. Perfetti, Psycholinguistics and Reading Ability. R.K. Olson, Language Deficits in Specific Reading Disability. K. Kilborn, Learning a Language Late: Second Language Acquisition in Adults. K. Bock and W. Levelt, Language Production: Grammatical Encoding. H.H. Clark, Discourse in Production. D. Caplan, Language and the Brain. E. Zurif and D. Swinney, The Neuropsychology of Language. P.A. Carpenter, A. Miyake, and M.A Just, Working Memory Constraints in Comprehension: Evidence from Individual Differences, Aphasia, and Aging. A. Garnham, Future Directions. Index.

Handbook of Psycholinguistics

Two experiments investigated how people assign an interpretation to question phrases. In order to determine the meaning of the WH-phrase (e.g., who, what), a "gap" must be located and the role associated with the gap assigned to the WH-phrase. Two experiments tested the Lexical Expectation model of Fodor (1978), according to which lexical properties of the verb determine when a gap is posited, and the All Resorts model of Stowe (1984), according to which all possibilities are considered and evaluated on their pragmatic appropriateness. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the meaningfulness of full sentences. The frequency with which verbs are used transitively determined whether there was an effect of the plausibility of the WH-phrase to act as an object of the verb. Effects of plausibility of the WH-phrase as an object showed up in just those cases where the object role should be assigned to the WH-phrase according to the Lexical Expectation model, rather than as predicted by the All Resorts model. In Experiment 2, these results were replicated using the word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm. The plausibility effect showed up at the verb itself when it is normally used transitively. This evidence suggests that a gap is preferred even over a lexically filled object for transitive expectation verbs.

Filling Gaps On-Line: Use of Lexical and Semantic Information in Sentence Processing

Event-related brain potentials were used to study the retrieval of visual semantic information to concrete words, and to investigate possible structural overlap between visual object working memory and concreteness effects in word processing. Subjects performed an object working memory task that involved 5 s retention of simple 4-angled polygons (load 1), complex 10-angled polygons (load 2), and a no-load baseline condition. During the polygon retention interval subjects were presented with a lexical decision task to auditory presented concrete (imageable) and abstract (nonimageable) words, and pseudowords. ERP results are consistent with the use of object working memory for the visualisation of concrete words. Our data indicate a two-step processing model of visual semantics in which visual descriptive information of concrete words is first encoded in semantic memory (indicated by an anterior N400 and posterior occipital positivity), and is subsequently visualised via the network for object working memory (reflected by a left frontal positive slow wave and a bilateral occipital slow wave negativity). Results are discussed in the light of contemporary models of semantic memory.

Processing of visual semantic information to concrete words: temporal dynamics and neural mechanisms indicated by event-related brain potentials

https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/66411437/Stowe_Kaan_Sabourin_Taylor_Cognition_2018.pdf

The sentence wrap-up dogma

In this study we investigate the effect of age of acquisition (AoA) on grammatical processing in second language learners as measured by event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We compare a traditional analysis involving the calculation of averages across a certain time window of the ERP waveform, analyzed with categorical groups (early vs. late), with a generalized additive modeling analysis, which allows us to take into account the full range of variability in both AoA and time. Sixty-six Slavic advanced learners of German listened to German sentences with correct and incorrect use of non-finite verbs and grammatical gender agreement. We show that the ERP signal depends on the AoA of the learner, as well as on the regularity of the structure under investigation. For gender agreement, a gradual change in processing strategies can be shown that varies by AoA, with younger learners showing a P600 and older learners showing a posterior negativity. For verb agreement, all learners show a P600 effect, irrespective of AoA. Based on their behavioral responses in an offline grammaticality judgment task, we argue that the late learners resort to computationally less efficient processing strategies when confronted with (lexically determined) syntactic constructions different from the L1. In addition, this study highlights the insights the explicit focus on the time course of the ERP signal in our analysis framework can offer compared to the traditional analysis.

/pdf/age-effects-in-l2-grammar-processing-as-revealed-by-erps-and-5g6a9je9s8.pdf

Age Effects in L2 Grammar Processing as Revealed by ERPs and How (Not) to Study Them

In order to understand the basis of language in the brain, we must be able to describe the neurological systems that are used in language comprehension and production. In this paper, one technique for functional neuroimaging is discussed: measurement of blood flow change using positron emission tomography (PET). Two experiments were carried out investigating the usefulness of this method. One experiment examined the intrinsic time limitations of blood flow change as a measure of cognitive activity. A second issue considered is the replicability of the results obtained using this method. A comparison of two experiments containing the same conditions suggests that the results are replicable, when the experiments and method are similar. One case is discussed where the experiments differ; it is suggested that this is due to a difference in the materials used in the experiments, and that the difference has a principled basis.

Laurie A. Stowe

Papers

Filling Gaps On-Line: Use of Lexical and Semantic Information in Sentence Processing

Processing of visual semantic information to concrete words: temporal dynamics and neural mechanisms indicated by event-related brain potentials

The sentence wrap-up dogma

Age Effects in L2 Grammar Processing as Revealed by ERPs and How (Not) to Study Them

Pet studies of language - an assessment of the reliability of the technique