EXPRESS: The role of animacy in language production: evidence from bare noun naming.

According to Levelt's language production model, in order to name an object, speakers must first conceptualize and lexicalize the object before its name can be articulated. Conceptualization is conducted through the semantic network that exists at the conceptual level, with the highly activated concept(s) activating lexical items at the lemma-level, i.e., lexicalization. So far, research focused mostly on semantic categories (i.e., semantic interference) but less so on animacy - a concept that is correlated with semantic categories. To investigate the role of this semantic feature in language production, we conducted a picture-word interference study in Mandarin Chinese varying animacy congruency and controlling for classifier congruency while recording behavioral and electrophysiological responses. We observed an animacy interference effect together with a larger N400 component for animacy-incongruent vs. congruent picture-word pairs, suggesting animacy-congruent concepts may be in closer proximity and hence lead to a stronger spreading of activation relative to animacy-incongruent concepts. Furthermore, a larger P600 component was observed for classifier-incongruent vs. congruent picture-word pairs, suggesting syntactically-driven processing of classifiers at the lemma level.

EEG correlates of static and dynamic face perception: the role of naturalistic motion.

Much of our understanding of how the brain processes dynamic faces comes from research that compares static photographs to dynamic morphs, which exhibit simplified, computer-generated motion. By comparing static, video recorded, and dynamic morphed expressions, we aim to identify the neural correlates of naturalistic facial dynamism, using time-domain and time-frequency analysis. Dynamic morphs were made from the neutral and peak frames of video recorded transitions of happy and fearful expressions, which retained expression change and removed asynchronous and non-linear features of naturalistic facial motion. We found that dynamic morphs elicited increased N400 amplitudes and lower LPP amplitudes compared to other stimulus types. Video recordings elicited higher LPP amplitudes and greater frontal delta activity compared to other stimuli. Thematic analysis of participant interviews using a large language model revealed that participants found it difficult to assess the genuineness of morphed expressions, and easier to analyse the genuineness of happy compared to fearful expressions. Our findings suggest that animating real faces with artificial motion may violate expectations (N400) and reduce the social salience (LPP) of dynamic morphs. Results also suggest that delta oscillations in the frontal region may be involved with the perception of naturalistic facial motion in happy and fearful expressions. Overall, our findings highlight the sensitivity of neural mechanisms required for face perception to subtle changes in facial motion characteristics, which has important implications for neuroimaging research using faces with simplified motion.

Event-related potentials of familiar monosyllabic words with unexpected lexical tones: A picture-word study of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without a history of late talking.

This study examined how Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without a history of late talking (LT) process familiar monosyllabic words with unexpected lexical tones, focusing on both phonological and semantic violations. This study initially enrolled 64 Mandarin-speaking toddlers: 31 with a history of LT (mean age: 27.67 months) and 33 without a history of LT (non-LT) (mean age: 27.85 months). Event-related potentials were recorded at the age of 4 years during a picture-word mismatch task (LT mean age: 51.36 months; non-LT mean age: 51.20 months); in this task, the participants were presented with auditory words either matching (Tone 3) or mismatching with images in terms of their lexical tones; the mismatches encompassed acoustically dissimilar (Tone 1) and similar (Tone 2) mismatches. A significant difference in the phonological mapping negativity (PMN) responses to Tones 1 and 3 was observed only in the non-LT group. However, differences in the N400 responses to Tones 1 and 3 remained consistent across both groups. In addition, greater differences in the PMN responses between Tones 1 and 3 were associated with higher language proficiency during the preschool period. The PMN response serves as an indicator of neural correlates in lexical tone processing, reflecting challenges encountered by preschoolers with a history of LT when processing the lexical tones of familiar words. Furthermore, the PMN response was correlated with concurrent language abilities. These findings indicate the importance of early tonal perception development for Mandarin speakers with a history of LT. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Preschoolers with a history of late talking (LT), similar to preschoolers without such a history, can establish word expectations and detect the lexical tone violation in real time. However, those with a history of LT require additional time to process acoustic cues and differentiate between word semantics based on lexical tone information. The phonological mapping negativity response serves as an indicator of neural correlates in lexical tone processing, reflecting challenges encountered by preschoolers with a history of LT when processing the lexical tones of familiar words. The present findings indicate the importance of early intervention for Mandarin speakers with a history of LT, with an emphasis on lexical tone processing from toddlerhood.

Unpleasant words can affect the detection of morphosyntactic errors: An ERP study on individual differences.

In recent years, several ERP studies have investigated whether the early computation of agreement is permeable to the emotional content of words. Some studies have reported interactive effects of grammaticality and emotionality in the left anterior negativity (LAN) component, while others have failed to replicate these results. Furthermore, novel findings suggest that grammatical processing can elicit different neural patterns across individuals. In this study, we aim to investigate whether the interaction between grammaticality and emotionality is restricted to participants with a specific neural profile. Sixty-one female native speakers of Spanish performed an agreement judgment task in noun phrases composed of a determiner, a noun, and an unpleasant or neutral adjective that could agree or disagree in gender with the preceding noun. Our results support the existence of two different brain profiles: negative and positive dominance (individuals showing either larger LAN or larger P600 amplitudes in ungrammatical stimuli than in grammatical ones, respectively). Interestingly, the neural pattern of these two groups diverged at different points along the time course. Thus, the negative dominance group showed grammaticality effects as early as 200 ms, along with parallel and autonomous processing of grammaticality and emotionality at the LAN/N400 time window. Instead, for the positive dominance group an early interaction was found at around 200 ms, evidencing a grammaticality effect that emerged only for unpleasant words. Our findings confirm the role of individual differences in the interplay between grammar and emotion at the neural level and call for the inclusion of this perspective in studies on syntactic processing.

Music training is associated with better audio-visual integration in Chinese language.

In the present study, we aimed to investigate whether long-term music training could improve audio-visual speech integration in Chinese, using event-related brain potential (ERP) measurements. Specifically, we recruited musicians and non-musicians to participate in our experiment where visual Chinese characters were presented simultaneously with congruent or incongruent speech sounds. In order to maintain participants' focus on both auditory and visual modalities, they were instructed to perform a probe detection task. Our study revealed that for the musicians, audiovisual incongruent stimuli elicited larger N1 and N400 amplitudes compared to audiovisual congruent stimuli. Conversely, for the non-musicians, only a larger N400 amplitude was observed for incongruent stimuli relative to congruent stimuli, without a significant difference in N1 amplitude. Furthermore, correlation analyses indicated that more years of music training was associated with a larger N1 effect for the musicians. These results suggest that musicians were capable of detecting character-speech sound incongruence at an earlier time window compared to non-musicians. Overall, our findings provide compelling evidence that music training is associated with better integration of visual characters and auditory speech sounds in language processing.

Social observation modulates the influence of socioeconomic status on pro-environmental behavior: an event-related potential study.

Understanding the psychological antecedents of socioeconomic status (SES) on pro-environmental behavior is crucial for effectively encouraging individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds to address environmental issues. Previous research has separately examined the influence of SES and social observation on pro-environmental behavior. However, little is known about whether social observation moderates the influence of SES on pro-environmental behavior, and the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms remain uncharacterized. Using event-related potential (ERPs), we adopted the green purchase paradigm and manipulated subjective SES, to examine whether the influence of SES on pro-environmental behavior is moderated by social observation. The behavioral results revealed that individuals of high SES tended to purchase more eco-friendly products under the observable condition than those in the non-observable condition. The ERP results revealed that participants with high SES exhibited more negative N2 and N400 amplitude during environmental decisions in the non-observable condition than in the observable condition, indicating that high SES individuals experience less cognitive conflict during environmental decisions, which may reflect the attenuated cost-benefit trade-off due to reputational incentives in the presence of observers. Additionally, individuals with high SES exhibited greater reputational motivation when observed, as indicated by larger P3 amplitude. However, these differences were not observed among individuals with low SES. These findings suggest that SES is associated with distinct psychological and behavioral differences in pro-environmental behavior, moderated by social observation, evident across both the early and later stages of environmental decisions in the brain.

An ERP investigation of perceptual vs motoric iconicity in sign production.

The type of form-meaning mapping for iconic signs can vary. For perceptually-iconic signs there is a correspondence between visual features of a referent (e.g., the beak of a bird) and the form of the sign (e.g., extended thumb and index finger at the mouth for the American Sign Language (ASL) sign BIRD). For motorically-iconic signs there is a correspondence between how an object is held/manipulated and the form of the sign (e.g., the ASL sign FLUTE depicts how a flute is played). Previous studies have found that iconic signs are retrieved faster in picture-naming tasks, but type of iconicity has not been manipulated. We conducted an ERP study in which deaf signers and a control group of English speakers named pictures that targeted perceptually-iconic, motorically-iconic, or non-iconic ASL signs. For signers (unlike the control group), naming latencies varied by iconicity type: perceptually-iconic < motorically-iconic < non-iconic signs. A reduction in the N400 amplitude was only found for the perceptually-iconic signs, compared to both non-iconic and motorically-iconic signs. No modulations of N400 amplitudes were observed for the control group. We suggest that this pattern of results arises because pictures eliciting perceptually-iconic signs can more effectively prime lexical access due to greater alignment between features of the picture and the semantic and phonological features of the sign. We speculate that naming latencies are facilitated for motorically-iconic signs due to later processes (e.g., faster phonological encoding via cascading activation from semantic features). Overall, the results indicate that type of iconicity plays role in sign production when elicited by picture-naming tasks.

Processing of Counterfactual Conditional Sentences with Differential Propositional Truth-Value in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from ERP.

Although many studies document the role of propositional truth-value in human psychological reading behavior, there is a relative paucity of research examining the role of differential propositional truth-value in processing Chinese counterfactual conditionals. This study is to investigate the role of differential propositional value in processing Chinese counterfactual conditionals by means of ERPs (event-related potentials). The study is based on comprehending two types of Chinese counterfactual conditionals, which is propositional truth value introduced by two different markers of conditional conjunctions in the protasis and apodosis, such as true counterfactual conditional markers jiaru (if) & jiu (so) in the sentence wo xiang yu jiaru you tui jiu keyi zai shuixia zhixi (I think if fish had legs so they could stifle under water), and false counterfactual conditional markers ruguo (if) & namo (then) in the sentence wo xiang gou ruguo you lin namo keyi zai shuixia huxi (I think if dogs had scales, then they could breathe under water). Two counterfactual propositional values (i.e. true and false propositional values) are constructed through manipulating sentence counterfactuality between the true and false counterfactual conditional markers in the protasis and the apodosis. Twenty-four full-time Chinese college students participated in the ERP study. The results demonstrated that processing the true counterfactual propositional sentences with conditional markers jiaru (if) & jiu (so) elicited the N400 effect relative to false propositional sentences with conditional markers ruguo (if) & namo (then). Moreover, the counterfactual sentences with true propositional conditions varied from the elicitation of the N400 effect in the protasis and absence of the N400 effect in the apodosis, showing that semantic roles may gradually disappear under the impact of truth value of propositional counterfactual condition, and/or the roles of semantic anomaly was eliminated in the accumulated sentence processing. While for the false counterfactual conditional sentences, elicitations of P300 in the protasis and robust N400 effect in the apodosis were shown, indicating the increasing semantic role in the processing. Interestingly, there was the absence of the P600 effect for processing sentences with syntactic violation, suggesting little extra syntactic cost in processing sentences with false propositional condition.

Neural Correlates of Telicity in Spanish-Speaking Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder.

BACKGROUND: It is broadly acknowledged that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show verb-related limitations. While most previous studies have focused on tense, the mastery of lexical aspect-particularly telicity-has not been the primary focus of much research. Lexical aspect refers to whether an action has a defined endpoint (telic verbs) or not (atelic verbs). OBJECTIVE: This study investigates the effect of telicity on verb recognition in Chilean children with DLD compared to their typically developing (TD) peers using the Event-Related Potential (ERP) technique. METHOD: The research design is a mixed factorial design with between-group factors of 2 (DLD/TD) and within-group factors of 2 (telic/atelic verbs) and 2 (coherent/incoherent sentences). The participants were 36 school-aged children (18 DLD, 18 TD) aged 7 to 7 years and 11 months. The task required subjects to listen to sentences that either matched or did not match an action in a video, with sentences including telic or atelic verbs. RESULTS: The study found notable differences between groups in how they processed verbs (N400 and post-N400 components) and direct objects (N400 and P600 components). CONCLUSIONS: Children with DLD struggled to differentiate telic and atelic verbs, potentially because they employed overgeneralization strategies consistent with the Event Structural Bootstrapping model.

No electrophysiological evidence for semantic processing during inattentional blindness.

A long-standing question concerns whether sensory input can reach semantic stages of processing in the absence of attention and awareness. Here, we examine whether the N400, an event related potential associated with semantic processing, can occur under conditions of inattentional blindness. By employing a novel three-phase inattentional blindness paradigm designed to maximise the opportunity for detecting an N400, we found no evidence for it when participants were inattentionally blind to the eliciting stimuli (related and unrelated word pairs). In contrast, participants noticed the same task-irrelevant word pairs when minimal attention was allocated to them, and a small N400 became evident. When the same stimuli were fully attended and relevant to the task, a robust N400 was observed. In addition to univariate ERP measures, multivariate decoding analyses were unable to classify related from unrelated word pairs when observers were inattentionally blind to the words, with decoding reaching above-chance levels only when the words were (at least minimally) attended. By comparison, decoding reached above-chance levels when contrasting word pairs with non-word stimuli, even when participants were inattentionally blind to these stimuli. Our results also replicated several previous studies by finding a "visual awareness negativity" (VAN) that distinguished task-irrelevant stimuli that participants noticed compared with those that were not perceived, and a P3b (or "late positivity") that was evident only when the stimuli were task relevant. Together, our findings suggest that semantic processing might require at least a minimal amount of attention.

How do anxiety and stress affect soccer referees? An ERPs study.

The decision-making of soccer referees is one of the typical forms influenced by factors such as environmental pressure and individual emotions. While previous studies have explored how common factors like personal anxiety and on-field pressure affect the decisions of soccer referees, the mechanisms by which anxiety influences decision-making under pressure remain unclear. This study developed a penalty task based on real soccer match scenarios and recruited 76 experienced soccer referees. These referees were divided into two groups, high anxiety and low anxiety, based on their anxiety levels, to perform decision-making tasks under different pressure environments simulated to mimic real matches. Additionally, this research employed Event-Related Potential (ERP) technology to compare the brain signals of soccer referees with different levels of anxiety when facing foul play under various pressure environments. It was found that referees with high levels of anxiety displayed larger P300 and N400 amplitudes in a low-pressure environment (p = 0.0059, t = 2.9437). However, no significant differences in P300 and N400 amplitudes were observed between referees with high and low levels of anxiety under high-pressure conditions (p = 0.1890, t = 1.3411). This study not only reveals the complex mechanisms of anxiety in the decision-making process of referees but also emphasizes the importance of understanding and managing the psychological state of referees in competitive sports to improve the quality of their decisions. Our findings provide an empirical basis for future efforts to mitigate the impact of anxiety and optimize the decision-making process in similar high-pressure environments.

The time course of semantic ambiguity in visual word recognition: behavioral and ERP evidence for the lexical-semantic effect.

Introduction: Homonyms are words with multiple, unrelated meanings that share a single form and pronunciation. These words provide valuable insights into how semantic representation is retrieved and selected independently of orthography and phonology. This study aims to investigate the temporal dynamics of lexical and semantic processing in the visual recognition of Korean words. Specifically, we examine how homonyms and unambiguous words are processed differently during a lexical decision task (LDT) with EEG recording, considering the effects of word frequency and the number of meanings (NOMs). Methods: Participants performed a lexical decision task where they were required to determine if a visually presented stimulus was a valid Korean word. We compared the behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by homonyms and unambiguous words, each possessing either high or low word frequency. Both subjective and objective NOMs were measured and manipulated, while controlling for the subjective balance of individual frequencies of meanings to control for confounding from the relatedness of meaning (ROM). For ERP analysis, a non-parametric cluster-based permutation test was employed in addition to the two time windows of interest (i.e., N400 and P600). Results: Behavioral results indicated a marginally significant interaction between word frequency and semantic ambiguity along with a main effect of word frequency, showing faster and more accurate responses for high-frequency words. An ambiguity advantage was observed only for low-frequency words, with no significant effect found for high-frequency words. ERP results revealed that lexical-semantic interactions were reflected in the modulations of the N400 and P600 components. High-frequency homonyms elicited an enhanced N400 amplitude, while low-frequency homonyms showed a reduced P600 amplitude. Discussion: The findings suggest that the activation of semantic information occurs simultaneously with lexical processing, rather than during post-lexical or decision-making processes. Furthermore, considering balanced homonyms were employed in this study, inhibitory competition may arise from the high-frequency individual meanings of high-frequency words. In contrast, in low-frequency words, a facilitative effect may arise from gains in global semantic activation or semantic feedback to the orthographic level.

On the Mathematical Relationship Between Contextual Probability and N400 Amplitude.

Accounts of human language comprehension propose different mathematical relationships between the contextual probability of a word and how difficult it is to process, including linear, logarithmic, and super-logarithmic ones. However, the empirical evidence favoring any of these over the others is mixed, appearing to vary depending on the index of processing difficulty used and the approach taken to calculate contextual probability. To help disentangle these results, we focus on the mathematical relationship between corpus-derived contextual probability and the N400, a neural index of processing difficulty. Specifically, we use 37 contemporary transformer language models to calculate the contextual probability of stimuli from 6 experimental studies of the N400, and test whether N400 amplitude is best predicted by a linear, logarithmic, super-logarithmic, or sub-logarithmic transformation of the probabilities calculated using these language models, as well as combinations of these transformed metrics. We replicate the finding that on some datasets, a combination of linearly and logarithmically-transformed probability can predict N400 amplitude better than either metric alone. In addition, we find that overall, the best single predictor of N400 amplitude is sub-logarithmically-transformed probability, which for almost all language models and datasets explains all the variance in N400 amplitude otherwise explained by the linear and logarithmic transformations. This is a novel finding that is not predicted by any current theoretical accounts, and thus one that we argue is likely to play an important role in increasing our understanding of how the statistical regularities of language impact language comprehension.

Lexical cues and discourse integration: An ERP study of the N400 and P600 components.

In a sentence reading ERP study in Swedish we investigated the roles of the N400 and P600 components. By manipulating ease of lexical retrieval and discourse integration of the critical words in four conditions (contextually primed/non-primed and degree of contextual fit), we explored these components from a sentence processing perspective. The results indicate that the N400 indexes lexical retrieval and access of stored conceptual knowledge, whereas the P600 component indexes pragmatic processes, such as integration of a word into the discourse context, or the information structural status of the word. The results support single-stream models of sentence processing where lexical retrieval and integration do not take place in parallel, as in multi-stream models.

Auditory associative word learning in adults: The effects of musical experience and stimulus ordering.

Evidence for sequential associative word learning in the auditory domain has been identified in infants, while adults have shown difficulties. To better understand which factors may facilitate adult auditory associative word learning, we assessed the role of auditory expertise as a learner-related property and stimulus order as a stimulus-related manipulation in the association of auditory objects and novel labels. We tested in the first experiment auditorily-trained musicians versus athletes (high-level control group) and in the second experiment stimulus ordering, contrasting object-label versus label-object presentation. Learning was evaluated from Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) during training and subsequent testing phases using a cluster-based permutation approach, as well as accuracy-judgement responses during test. Results revealed for musicians a late positive component in the ERP during testing, but neither an N400 (400-800 ms) nor behavioral effects were found at test, while athletes did not show any effect of learning. Moreover, the object-label-ordering group only exhibited emerging association effects during training, while the label-object-ordering group showed a trend-level late ERP effect (800-1200 ms) during test as well as above chance accuracy-judgement scores. Thus, our results suggest the learner-related property of auditory expertise and stimulus-related manipulation of stimulus ordering modulate auditory associative word learning in adults.

The influence of social knowledge structures on hostile attribution bias in aggressive and nonaggressive individuals: An ERP study.

According to several social-cognitive models, social knowledge structures described as hostile scripts or schemas may explain why aggressive individuals are prone to attribute hostile intention to others' ambiguous behaviors, a cognitive bias called hostile attribution bias (HAB). The aggression-related concepts in aggressive individuals' semantic memory would be highly accessible, notably through the activation of hostile concepts in nonhostile social contexts, and such an activation would result in HAB. The aim of the study was to test this hypothesis using the N400 component with EEG measurements to assess objectively, in real time, the violation of hostile expectations following a nonhostile situation. To this end, scenarios with a clear nonhostile context (mismatch condition) vs. without nonhostile context (match condition) followed by a character's ambiguous provocative behavior were presented to readers, and ERPs to critical words that specified the hostile intent behind the behavior were analysed. Twelve aggressive and twelve nonaggressive individuals participated in the study. The presentation of a critical word (hostile intent) that violated nonhostile expectation caused an N400 response among nonaggressive whereas such an N400 effect was absent in aggressive individuals. The results suggest that, in nonaggressive individuals, a nonhostile social context activates nonhostile concepts, whereas in the same context, aggressive individuals activate nonhostile as well as hostile concepts. Numerous research applications of the Hostile Expectancy Violation paradigm in the field of HAB are discussed.

How L2 Learners Process Different Means of Time Encoding in a Tenseless Language: An ERP Study of Mandarin.

In the past, research on the cognitive neural mechanism of second language (L2) learners' processing time information has focused on Indo-European languages. It has also focused on the temporal category expressed by morphological changes. However, there has been a lack of research on L2 learners' various time coding means, especially for Mandarin, which lacks morphological changes. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the cognitive neural mechanism of L2 learners with native Indonesian background in processing two time coding means (time adverbs and aspect markers) in Chinese. Indonesian has time adverb encoding time information similar to that of Chinese, but there are no aspect markers similar to Chinese in Indonesian. We measured ERPs time locked to the time adverb " (cengjing)" and the aspect marker "verb + (verb + guo)" in two different conditions, i.e., a control condition (the correct sentence) and a temporal information violation. The experimental results showed that the native speaker group induced the biphasic N400-P600 effect under the condition of time adverb violation, and induced P600 under the condition of the aspect marker "verb + (verb + guo)" violation. Indonesian L2 learners of Chinese only elicited P600 for the violation of time adverbs, and there was no statistically significant N400 similar to that of Chinese native speakers. In the case of aspect marker violation, we observed no significant ERPs component for the Indonesian L2 learners of Chinese. Both groups of subjects induced elicited a widely distributed and sustained negativity on the post-critical words after "verb + (verb + guo)" and "(cengjing)". This showed that the neural mechanism of Indonesian L2 learners of Chinese processing Chinese time coding differs from that of Chinese native speakers.

Meaning as mentalization.

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

An electrophysiological investigation of referential communication.

A key aspect of linguistic communication involves semantic reference to objects. Presently, we investigate neural responses at objects when reference is disrupted, e.g., "The connoisseur tasted *that wine"… vs. "…*that roof…" Without any previous linguistic context or visual gesture, use of the demonstrative determiner "that" renders interpretation at the noun as incoherent. This incoherence is not based on knowledge of how the world plausibly works but instead is based on grammatical rules of reference. Whereas Event-Related Potential (ERP) responses to sentences such as "The connoisseur tasted the wine …" vs. "the roof" would result in an N400 effect, it is unclear what to expect for doubly incoherent "…*that roof…". Results revealed an N400 effect, as expected, preceded by a P200 component (instead of predicted P600 effect). These independent ERP components at the doubly violated condition support the notion that semantic interpretation can be partitioned into grammatical vs. contextual constructs.

Neural correlates of unconventional verb extensions reveal preschoolers' analogical abilities.

In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we assessed 4-year-olds' ability to extend verbs to new action events on the basis of abstract similarities. Participants were presented with images of actions (e.g., peeling an orange) while hearing sentences containing a conventional verb (e.g., peeling), a verb sharing an abstract relation (i.e., an analogical verb, e.g., undressing), a verb sharing an object type (i.e., an object-related verb, e.g., pressing) with the action, or a pseudoverb (e.g., kebraying). The amplitude of the N400 gradually increased as a function of verb type-from conventional verbs to analogical verbs to object-related verbs to pseudoverbs. These findings suggest that accessing the meaning of a verb is easier when it shares abstract relations with the expected verb. Our results illustrate that measuring brain signals in response to analogical word extensions provides a useful tool to investigate preschools' analogical abilities.