Semantic memory for objects, actions, and events: A novel test of event-related conceptual semantic knowledge.

People possess significant knowledge about how real-world events typically unfold. Such event-related semantic memory connects action and object knowledge, is essential for multiple stages of language processing, and may be impaired in neurological conditions like aphasia. However, current assessments are not well designed for measuring this knowledge. This study presents and tests a novel measure of event-related semantic memory. Task-performance data were collected from unimpaired adults across the lifespan and a sample of stroke survivors with aphasia. Individuals with aphasia also completed measures of language processing and action-/object-related semantic memory, to establish the novel measure's convergent validity. Results demonstrate that performance on the event-knowledge measure correlated with action and object semantic-memory measures and was also associated with a broader range of language-processing performance than other semantic-memory measures. These findings suggest that the novel measure can be used to detect the presence and impact of event-knowledge impairments in neurological conditions.

Idiom comprehension in aphasia: Literal interference and abstract representation.

We investigate three potential mechanisms underlying the deficit in idiom comprehension seen in aphasia: difficulty inhibiting literal meanings, inability to recognize that a figurative interpretation is required, and difficulty processing abstract words and concepts. Unimpaired adults and PWA read high and moderate familiarity idioms either preceded or followed by a figuratively biasing context sentence. They then completed a string-to-word probe selection task, choosing between a figurative target, a literal lure, and unrelated concrete and abstract lures. PWA chose the figurative target more often for more familiar idioms and after figuratively biasing contexts, suggesting that difficulty accessing figurative meanings may be a key contributor to idiom impairment in aphasia. Importantly, PWA chose abstract lures at the same rate as they chose literal lures, suggesting that abstract lures may be considered equally good matches for weak idiomatic representations in PWA, and therefore that idiomatic figurative meanings may be represented similarly to abstract concepts for PWA. These results have implications for models of idiom comprehension in aphasia, as well as the design of future studies of idiom comprehension in PWA.

Structural Prediction in Aphasia: Evidence from either.

Young neurotypical adults engage in prediction during language comprehension (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Staub & Clifton, 2006; Yoshida, Dickey & Sturt, 2013). The role of prediction in aphasic comprehension is less clear. Some evidence suggests that lexical prediction may be spared in aphasia (Dickey et al., 2014; Love & Webb, 1977; cf. Mack et al, 2013), and there is even indication that structural prediction may be spared in some people with aphasia (PWA; e.g. Hanne, Burchert, De Bleser, & Vashishth, 2015). The current self-paced reading experiment manipulated the presence of either to examine structural prediction among PWA and a set of similar-aged neurotypical control participants. Consistent with intact structural prediction for both groups of participants, when either preceded a disjunction, reading times were faster on the or and second disjunct (cf. Staub & Clifton, 2006). For neurotypical controls, this effect of the presence vs. absence of either shrank reliably as more experimental items were encountered, whereas for PWA there was a non-significant trend for it to grow as more experimental items were encountered. These findings indicate that PWA and older neurotypical individuals can use a lexical cue to predict the structural form of upcoming material during comprehension, but that on-line adaptation to patterns in the local context may be different for the two groups.

Does negation influence the choice of sentence continuations? Evidence from a four-choice cloze task.

Event plausibility facilitates the processing of affirmative sentences, but little is known about how it affects negative sentences. In six behavioural experiments, we investigated negation's impact on the choice of sentence continuations that differ with respect to event plausibility. In a four-choice cloze task, participants saw affirmative and negative sentence fragments (The child will [not] eat the . . .) in combination with four potential continuations: yoghurt (a plausible word), shellfish (a weak world knowledge violating word), branch (a severe world knowledge violating word), and minivan (a word resulting in a semantic violation). Across all experiments the plausible word was highly preferred in both affirmative and negative sentences. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while ruling out the possibility that the lack of effect of negation in Experiment 1 stemmed from participants not fully processing the negation. Experiment 3 showed that the observed plausibility effects can be generalised to other aspectual forms (The child has [not] eaten the yoghurt). Experiment 4 ruled out the possibility that the choices were mainly driven by lexical associations and additionally suggested a role for informativity. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4 and reinforced the general pattern according to which negative sentences express the denial of plausible positive events. Experiment 6 provided evidence that informativity might be driving patterns of choices in the negative sentences. All in all, these findings suggest that upcoming continuations are chosen to maximise the plausibility of the event in the affirmative sentences and to deny that event in the negative sentences. The observed plausibility effects do not seem to be modulated by the internal representation of events, but they can be modulated by changes to the expected informativity of the sentence.

Rational adaptation in word production: Strong conceptual ability reduces the effect of lexical impairments on verb retrieval in aphasia.

Language users rely on both linguistic and conceptual processing abilities to efficiently comprehend or produce language. According to the principle of rational adaptation, the degree to which a cognitive system relies on one process vs. another can change under different conditions or disease states with the goal of optimizing behavior. In this study, we investigated rational adaptation in reliance on linguistic versus conceptual processing in aphasia, an acquired disorder of language. In individuals living with aphasia, verb-retrieval impairments are a pervasive deficit that negatively impacts communicative function. As such, we examined evidence of adaptation in verb production, using parallel measures to index impairment in two of verb naming's critical subcomponents: conceptual and linguistic processing. These component processes were evaluated using a standardized assessment battery designed to contrast non-linguistic (picture input) and linguistic (word input) tasks of conceptual action knowledge. The results indicate that non-linguistic conceptual action processing can be impaired in people with aphasia and contributes to verb-retrieval impairments. Furthermore, relatively unimpaired conceptual action processing can ameliorate the influence of linguistic processing deficits on verb-retrieval impairments. These findings are consistent with rational adaptation accounts, indicating that conceptual processing plays a key role in language function and can be leveraged in rehabilitation to improve verb retrieval in adults with chronic aphasia.

Increased reliance on world knowledge during language comprehension in healthy aging: evidence from verb-argument prediction.

Cognitive aging negatively impacts language comprehension performance. . However, there is evidence that older adults skillfully use linguistic context and their crystallized world knowledge to offset age-related changes that negatively impact comprehension. Two visual-world paradigm experiments examined how aging changes verb-argument prediction, a comprehension process that relies on world knowledge but has rarely been examined in the cognitive-aging literature. Older adults did not differ from younger adults in their activation of an upcoming likely verb argument, particularly when cued by a semantically-rich agent+verb combination (Experiment 1). However, older adults showed elevated activation of previously-mentioned agents (Experiment 1) and of unlikely but verb-congruent referents (Experiment 2). This is novel evidence that older adults exploit semantic context and world knowledge during comprehension to successfully activate upcoming referents. However, older adults also show elevated activation of irrelevant information, consistent with previous findings demonstrating that older adults may experience greater proactive interference and competition from task-irrelevant information.

Collective nouns are conceptually plural: Evidence from the grammatical SNARC effect.

To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., committee, team), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they nonetheless are conceptually plural (i.e., construed as consisting of multiple entities) by using the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) paradigm (Dehaene & Changeux, 1993). In this paradigm, participants are typically faster to respond to smaller numbers or numerical stimuli when making a response on their left and faster to respond to larger numbers or numerical stimuli when making a response on their right. In three experiments, participants saw German words on a computer screen and decided whether each one described a single entity or something that could be subdivided into multiple entities (Experiment 1) or whether they would use "ist" or "sind" ("is" or "are") in combination with the word if it were the subject of a sentence (Experiments 2 and 3). The mapping of responses to participants' left and right hands was counterbalanced. Experiment 1 failed to show a grammatical SNARC effect. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a grammatical SNARC effect that extended to collective noun phrases. The results of these experiments suggest that collective noun phrases are instantiated as conceptually plural in comprehenders' minds. We discuss the differential task effects and the implications of these data on theories of language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Rational Adaptation in Using Conceptual Versus Lexical Information in Adults With Aphasia.

The information theoretic principle of rational adaptation predicts that individuals with aphasia adapt to their language impairments by relying more heavily on comparatively unimpaired non-linguistic knowledge to communicate. This prediction was examined by assessing the extent to which adults with chronic aphasia due to left-hemisphere stroke rely more on conceptual rather than lexical information during verb retrieval, as compared to age-matched neurotypical controls. A primed verb naming task examined the degree of facilitation each participant group received from either conceptual event-related or lexical collocate cues, compared to unrelated baseline cues. The results provide evidence that adults with aphasia received amplified facilitation from conceptual cues compared to controls, whereas healthy controls received greater facilitation from lexical cues. This indicates that adaptation to alternative and relatively unimpaired information may facilitate successful word retrieval in aphasia. Implications for models of rational adaptation and clinical neurorehabilitation are discussed.

White-Matter Neuroanatomical Predictors of Aphasic Verb Retrieval.

Background: Current neurocognitive models of language function have been primarily built from evidence regarding object naming, and their hypothesized white-matter circuit mechanisms tend to be coarse grained. Methods: In this cross-sectional, observational study, we used novel correlational tractography to assess the white-matter circuit mechanism behind verb retrieval, measured through action picture-naming performance in adults with chronic aphasia. Results: The analysis identified tracts implicated in current neurocognitive dual-stream models of language function, including the left inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, inferior longitudinal fasciculus, and arcuate fasciculus. However, the majority of tracts associated with verb retrieval were not ones included in dual-stream models of language function. Instead, they were projection pathways that connect frontal and parietal cortices to subcortical regions associated with motor functions, including the left corticothalamic pathway, frontopontine tract, parietopontine tract, corticostriatal pathway, and corticospinal tract. Conclusions: These results highlight that corticosubcortical projection pathways implicated in motor functions may be importantly related to language function. This finding is consistent with grounded accounts of cognition and may furthermore inform neurocognitive models. Impact statement This study suggests that in addition to traditional dual-stream language fiber tracts, the integrity of projection pathways that connect frontal and parietal cortices to subcortical motor regions may be critically associated with verb-retrieval impairments in adults with aphasia. This finding challenges neurological models of language function.

Using E-Z Reader to model the effects of higher level language processing on eye movements during reading.

Although computational models of eye-movement control during reading have been used to explain how saccadic programming, visual constraints, attention allocation, and lexical processing jointly affect eye movements during reading, these models have largely ignored the issue of how higher level, postlexical language processing affects eye movements. The present article shows how one of these models, E-Z Reader (Pollatsek, Reichle, & Rayner, 2006c), can be augmented to redress this limitation. Simulations show that with a few simple assumptions, the model can account for the fact that effects of higher level language processing are not observed on eye movements when such processing is occurring without difficulty, but can capture the patterns of eye movements that are observed when such processing is slowed or disrupted.

Idioms show effects of meaning relatedness and dominance similar to those seen for ambiguous words.

Does the language comprehension system resolve ambiguities for single- and multiple-word units similarly? We investigate this question by examining whether two constructs with robust effects on ambiguous word processing - meaning relatedness and meaning dominance - have similar influences on idiom processing. Eye tracking showed that: (1) idioms with more related figurative and literal meanings were read faster, paralleling findings for ambiguous words, and (2) meaning relatedness and meaning dominance interacted to drive eye movements on idioms just as they do on polysemous ambiguous words. These findings are consistent with a language comprehension system that resolves ambiguities similarly regardless of literality or the number of words in the unit.

Serial or parallel? Using depth-of-processing to examine attention allocation during reading.

This paper presents an experiment investigating attention allocation in four tasks requiring varied degrees of lexical processing of 1-4 simultaneously displayed words. Response times and eye movements were only modestly affected by the number of words in an asterisk-detection task but increased markedly with the number of words in letter-detection, rhyme-judgment, and semantic-judgment tasks, suggesting that attention may not be serial for tasks that do not require significant lexical processing (e.g., detecting visual features), but is approximately serial for tasks that do (e.g., retrieving word meanings). The implications of these results for models of readers' eye movements are discussed.

Effects of context on eye movements when reading about possible and impossible events.

Plausibility violations resulting in impossible scenarios lead to earlier and longer lasting eye movement disruption than violations resulting in highly unlikely scenarios (K. Rayner, T. Warren, B. J. Juhasz, & S. P. Liversedge, 2004; T. Warren & K. McConnell, 2007). This could reflect either differences in the timing of availability of different kinds of information (e.g., selectional restrictions, world knowledge, and context) or differences in their relative power to guide semantic interpretation. The authors investigated eye movements to possible and impossible events in real-world and fantasy contexts to determine when contextual information influences detection of impossibility cued by a semantic mismatch between a verb and an argument. Gaze durations on a target word were longer to impossible events independent of context. However, a measure of the time elapsed from first fixating the target word to moving past it showed disruption only in the real-world context. These results suggest that contextual information did not eliminate initial disruption but moderated it quickly thereafter.

Investigating effects of selectional restriction violations and plausibility violation severity on eye-movements in reading.

This paper presents a study investigating whether and how different kinds of knowledge affect the detection of plausibility and possibility violations. Readers' eye-movements were monitored while reading sentences describing impossible events cued by selectional restriction violations, extremely implausible events without selectional restriction violations, and plausible events, in order to determine whether the time course of disruption is determined by overall implausibility/unlikelihood, or whether impossibility cued by selectional restriction violations additionally affects disruption. Both early and late fixation measures showed stronger disruption in the impossible/selectional restriction violation condition. However, measures indexing regressive eye-movements showed similar disruption in both extremely implausible conditions. This suggests that the magnitude and latency of disruption to possibility and plausibility violations is not a simple function of the overall implausibility/unlikelihood of the resulting event, but that selectional restriction violations influence the early and late time course of disruption.

A Closer Look at Strengthened Readings of Scalars.

The majority of the extensive experimental and theoretical literature on scalar strengthening assumes that the phenomenon is uniform across all types of scalars. The experiment reported here contributes to the growing evidence against scalar uniformity, while also exploring the suggestion of van Tiel at al. 2014 of the role of boundedness in the observed variation. The current experiment utilizes a novel approach to exploring the interpretation of scalars, and also investigates the content of strengthened interpretations.

A rational inference approach to group and individual-level sentence comprehension performance in aphasia.

The rational inference, or noisy channel, account of language comprehension predicts that comprehenders are sensitive to the probabilities of different interpretations for a given sentence and adapt as these probabilities change (Gibson, Bergen & Piantadosi, 2013). This account provides an important new perspective on aphasic sentence comprehension: aphasia may increase the likelihood of sentence distortion, leading people with aphasia (PWA) to rely more on the prior probability of an interpretation and less on the form or structure of the sentence (Gibson, Sandberg, Fedorenko, Bergen & Kiran, 2015). We report the results of a sentence-picture matching experiment that tested the predictions of the rational inference account and other current models of aphasic sentence comprehension across a variety of sentence structures. Consistent with the rational inference account, PWA showed similar sensitivity to the probability of particular kinds of form distortions as age-matched controls, yet overall their interpretations relied more on prior probability and less on sentence form. As predicted by rational inference, but not by other models of sentence comprehension in aphasia, PWA's interpretations were more faithful to the form for active and passive sentences than for direct object and prepositional object sentences. However contra rational inference, there was no evidence that individual PWA's severity of syntactic or semantic impairment predicted their sensitivity to form versus the prior probability of a sentence, as cued by semantics. These findings confirm and extend previous findings that suggest the rational inference account holds promise for explaining aphasic and neurotypical comprehension, but they also raise new challenges for the account.

Looking for a Location: Dissociated Effects of Event-Related Plausibility and Verb-Argument Information on Predictive Processing in Aphasia.

Purpose: This study examined the influence of verb-argument information and event-related plausibility on prediction of upcoming event locations in people with aphasia, as well as older and younger, neurotypical adults. It investigated how these types of information interact during anticipatory processing and how the ability to take advantage of the different types of information is affected by aphasia. Method: This study used a modified visual-world task to examine eye movements and offline photo selection. Twelve adults with aphasia (aged 54-82 years) as well as 44 young adults (aged 18-31 years) and 18 older adults (aged 50-71 years) participated. Results: Neurotypical adults used verb argument status and plausibility information to guide both eye gaze (a measure of anticipatory processing) and image selection (a measure of ultimate interpretation). Argument status did not affect the behavior of people with aphasia in either measure. There was only limited evidence of interaction between these 2 factors in eye gaze data. Conclusions: Both event-related plausibility and verb-based argument status contributed to anticipatory processing of upcoming event locations among younger and older neurotypical adults. However, event-related likelihood had a much larger role in the performance of people with aphasia than did verb-based knowledge regarding argument structure.

World knowledge affects prediction as quickly as selectional restrictions: Evidence from the visual world paradigm.

There has been considerable debate regarding the question of whether linguistic knowledge and world knowledge are separable and used differently during processing or not (Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, & Petersson, 2004; Matsuki et al., 2011; Paczynski & Kuperberg, 2012; Warren & McConnell, 2007; Warren, McConnell, & Rayner, 2008). Previous investigations into this question have provided mixed evidence as to whether violations of selectional restrictions are detected earlier than violations of world knowledge. We report a visual-world eye-tracking study comparing the timing of facilitation contributed by selectional restrictions versus world knowledge. College-aged adults (n=36) viewed photographs of natural scenes while listening to sentences. Participants anticipated upcoming direct objects similarly regardless of whether facilitation was provided by only world knowledge or a combination of selectional restrictions and world knowledge. These results suggest that selectional restrictions are not available earlier in comprehension than world knowledge.

The mental representation of plural events.

A growing body of work suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, comprehenders leave their mental representations of plural entities underspecified-that is, they mentally represent plural noun phrases (NPs) as groups or nondifferentiated sets. The current paper investigates whether this also holds for plural events. Experiments 1a-1b used an aspectual coercion manipulation to provide evidence that event plurality can be indexed by the number-of-words judgement task that Patson and Warren [2010. Evidence for distributivity effects in comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 36, 782-789] used to investigate the mental representation of plural nouns. Experiment 2 confirmed this by showing that comprehenders mentally represent predicates associated with distributive quantifiers as plural, and they do so immediately at the verb rather than waiting until the completion of the predicate. Experiment 3 probed inherently distributed verbs and showed that inherent distributivity is not enough to push comprehenders to mentally represent multiple events. Only when the subject of an inherently distributed verb is a conjoined NP, rather than a plural definite description, do comprehenders mentally represent multiple events. Experiment 4 replicated and extended Experiment 3. This body of findings suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, plural events are left underspecified. However, when disambiguating information is provided, comprehenders do mentally represent number information explicitly and incrementally.