Interpreting pragmatic markers following proverbs.

This research examined the interpretation of the pragmatic markers literally and figuratively when they followed familiar and unfamiliar proverbs (e.g., "Birds of a feather will flock together, literally"). Event-related brain potential methodology was used to measure costs associated with interpreting the markers during online comprehension, and an offline task provided additional insight into how sensible the markers were in the proverbial contexts. N400 potentials revealed that literally was less semantically congruent than figuratively with familiar and unfamiliar proverbial contexts, and differences in late positive potentials showed that resolving the interpretation of markers inconsistent with the salient meaning of the proverbs was more difficult following unfamiliar than familiar proverbs. Sensibility ratings showed that literally was less sensible than figuratively following both types of proverbs, and that both markers were more sensible following familiar proverbs. These results have implications for understanding how people interpret the pragmatic intent of these markers when they appear after the figurative statements they modify, and highlight the sensitivity of the markers to context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

How discourse constraints influence neurolinguistic mechanisms during the comprehension of proverbs.

We use event-related brain potential (ERP) methodology to examine the influence of the linguistic markers literally speaking and figuratively speaking on the comprehension of proverbs (e.g., The cat is out of the bag). Our results show that slow cortical potentials at anterior electrode sites varied in amplitude across the proverbs as a function of the presence or absence of the markers, the presence and absence of discourse contexts, and the familiarity of the proverbs. The results demonstrate that the integration of literal meaning into context is easier than figurative meaning, and argues against models of figurative language processing that hold that comprehenders are obligated either to first process the literal or figurative sense of the trope.

Time, verbs, and imagining events.

Recent psycholinguistic research shows that grammatical aspect (imperfective, perfective) has a varying impact on language comprehension difficulty, based on the lexical aspect (activities, accomplishments) of the described event (Becker, Ferretti, & Madden-Lombardi, 2013; Yap et al., 2009). The present research examined the influence of these temporal constraints on people's ability to imagine events. Participants read cueing phrases that contained either accomplishments (build) or activities (run) that were grammatically marked as ongoing or completed (I was running/I ran). Slow cortical potentials were recorded while participants imagined events based on the phrases for 8 seconds. Results show that, for activities, participants had less difficulty imagining events cued by imperfective stimuli than by perfective stimuli. The opposite pattern was observed for accomplishments. It was also found that the first-person visual perspective was adopted more often for perfective than imperfective accomplishment stimuli, whereas no differences in visual perspective adoption were found for activity cues. This research provides neurocognitive and behavioural insight into how temporal information associated with verbs influences the cognitive effort required to imagine events as well as the phenomenological properties of the events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Registered Replication Report: Hart & Albarracín (2011).

Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people's mental representations of situations. For example, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e., what a person was doing) as a dynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas the same behavior described using perfective aspect (i.e., what a person did) is perceived as a completed whole. A recent study found that aspect can also influence how we think about a person's intentions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). Participants judged actions described in imperfective as being more intentional (d between 0.67 and 0.77) and they imagined these actions in more detail (d = 0.73). The fact that this finding has implications for legal decision making, coupled with the absence of other direct replication attempts, motivated this registered replication report (RRR). Multiple laboratories carried out 12 direct replication studies, including one MTurk study. A meta-analysis of these studies provides a precise estimate of the size of this effect free from publication bias. This RRR did not find that grammatical aspect affects intentionality (d between 0 and -0.24) or imagery (d = -0.08). We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between these results and those of the original study.

Grammatical aspect, lexical aspect, and event duration constrain the availability of events in narratives.

The present study investigates how readers' representations of narratives are constrained by three sources of temporal information; grammatical aspect, lexical aspect, and the duration of intervening events. Participants read short stories in which a target event with an intrinsic endpoint or not (lexical aspect: accomplishments/activities) was described as ongoing or completed (grammatical aspect: imperfective/perfective). An intervening sentence described either a long or short duration event before the target situation was reintroduced later in the story. The electroencephalogram time-locked to the reintroduction of the target event elicited a larger N400 for perfective versus imperfective accomplishments, and this effect occurred only after short intervening events. Alternatively, the N400 to targets in the activity condition did not vary as a function of grammatical aspect or duration of intervening events. These results provide novel insight into how the temporal properties of events interact to constrain the availability of concepts in situation models.

ERP correlates of online monitoring of auditory feedback during vocalization.

When speakers hear the fundamental frequency (F0) of their voice altered, they shift their F0 in the direction opposite the perturbation. The current study used ERPs to examine sensory processing of short feedback perturbations during an ongoing utterance. In one session, participants produced a vowel at an F0 of their own choosing. In another session, participants matched the F0 of a cue voice. An F0 perturbation of 0, 25, 50, 100, or 200 cents was introduced for 100 ms. A mismatch negativity (MMN) was observed. Differences between sessions were only found for 200-cent perturbations. Reduced compensation when speakers experienced the 200-cent perturbations suggests that this larger perturbation was perceived as externally generated. The presence of an MMN, and no earlier (N100) response suggests that the underlying sensory process used to identify and compensate for errors in mid-utterance may differ from feedback monitoring at utterance onset.

Verb aspect, event structure, and coreferential processing.

We used an off-line story continuation task and an online ERP reading task to investigate coreferential processing following sentences that portrayed transfer-of-possession events as either ongoing or completed, using imperfective and perfective verb aspect (e.g., Amanda was shifting/shifted some poker chips to Scott). The story continuation task demonstrated that people were more likely to begin continuations with references to the Goal than to the Source, but that perfective aspect strengthened this bias. In the ERP task we probed expectations for Source and Goal referents by employing pronouns that matched one of the referents in gender. The ERP results were consistent with the biases revealed in the story continuation task and demonstrate that the difference in Goal bias for the two forms of aspect was manifested differently in the brain. These results provide novel behavioral and neurocognitive evidence that verb aspect influences the construction of situation models during language comprehension.

Electrophysiological evidence for the time-course of verifying text ideas.

We examined how verb factivity influences the ability of readers to detect and resolve the mismatch of receiving false referents in relation to true referents in discourse contexts. Factive verbs (e.g., know), but not nonfactive verbs (believe), entail the truth of their complements. Recent research by Singer [Singer, M. (2006). Verification of text ideas during reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 574-591] suggests that there are pragmatic costs associated with knowing something that is clearly false and only believing something that is clearly true. However, because Singer measured reading times for full sentences, it could not be determined whether these costs were initiated upon the appearance of the critical target word (i.e., the word that validated or invalidated previous text ideas) or at a later point in the sentences. In the present research we recorded event-related brain potentials while people read the same passages for comprehension and analyzed potentials evoked to the critical target words. Our results demonstrate that the brain distinguishes between true and false target words by at least 200ms after their onset, and that the pragmatic costs identified by Singer lead to interactions between verb factivity and truth in both early (P2) and later occurring brain components (late phase of N400 and late frontal positivity). In general, the results suggest readers had greater difficulty integrating false nouns than true nouns following factive than nonfactive verbs, and that detection of this mismatch also occurred earlier following factive verbs. Our results provide insight into the time-course of the processes that underlie the verification of text ideas, and extend neurocognitive research on anaphoric resolution.

Verb aspect and the activation of event knowledge.

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as completions to sentence fragments with imperfective than those with perfect aspect. Third, the amplitude of the N400 component to location nouns varies as a function of aspect and typicality, being smallest for imperfective sentences with highly expected locations and largest for imperfective sentences with less expected locations. Fourth, the amplitude of a sustained frontal negativity spanning prepositional phrases is larger following perfect than following imperfective aspect. Taken together, these findings suggest a dynamic interplay between event knowledge and the linguistic stream.

Electrophysiological and behavioral measures of the influence of literal and figurative contextual constraints on proverb comprehension.

Proverbs tend to have meanings that are true both literally and figuratively (i.e., Lightning really doesn't strike the same place twice). Consequently, discourse contexts that invite a literal reading of a proverb should provide more conceptual overlap with the proverb, resulting in more rapid processing, than will contexts biased towards a non-literal reading. Despite this, previous research has failed to find the predicted processing advantage in reading times for familiar proverbs when presented in a literally biasing context. We investigate this issue further by employing both ERP methodology and a self-paced reading task and, second, by creating an item set that controls for problems with items employed in earlier studies. Our results indicate that although people do not take longer to read proverbs in the literally and proverbially biasing contexts, people have less difficulty integrating the statements in literal than figurative contexts, as shown by the ERP data. These differences emerge at the third word of the proverbs.

The recovery of thematic role structure during noun-noun interpretation.

We examined how people use their knowledge of events to recover thematic role structure during the interpretation of noun-noun phrases. All phrases included one noun that was a good-agent/ poor-patient (prosecutor) in a particular event (accuse), and the other noun was a good-patient/poor-agent (defendant) for the same event If people interpret the noun-noun phrases by inverting the nouns and applying a thematic relation (see Downing, 1977; Levi, 1978), phrases should be interpreted more easily when the head nouns typically are good agents and the modifiers are good patients for specific events. Two experiments supported these predictions. Furthermore, the results indicated that in the less preferred thematic order (agent-patient), people often generated interpretations in which the modifiers became the focus of the interpretations. This finding suggests that violating thematic role preferences is one constraint on when the inversion process occurs during noun-noun interpretation.

Thematic role focusing by participle inflections: evidence from conceptual combination.

The authors examined how people integrate knowledge of agents and patients of events with the temporal and causal properties of present and past participles to constrain interpretation of isolated participle-noun phrases like arresting cop and arrested crook. Good-agent head nouns were more easily combined with present participles (e.g., arresting cop) than with past participles (e.g., arrested cop), and the reverse was true for good patients. Furthermore, present-participle good-patient phrases (e.g., serving customer) were often interpreted as verb phrases. This research provides further evidence of the interaction between morphosyntactic cues and world knowledge of events in language comprehension.