This coming week we will have a talk by Clara Soberats, from Brain Mechanisms of Language Learning group. Below are details about the talk:
Manufacturing meaning in grammar: new evidence from ERPs
While it is obvious that sentential meaning arises from combining words grammatically, electrophysiological correlates of how specific aspects of grammar impact on meaning are less explored. Here we focused on verbal aspect (e.g. progressive) and definiteness in noun phrases as regulated by determiners. 34 neurotypical young adults took part in an EEG experiment. Stimuli were manipulated so as to contain violations of expected patterns of verbal aspect and nominal definiteness, respectively, which were contrasted with violations of purely formal syntactic principles and with lexically-driven violations of meaning not dependent on specific grammatical principles. An ERP analysis in different word positions in anomalous sentences revealed specific potentials for the target condition (a late positivity in key word position), distinct from those elicited by purely semantic (N400) and purely syntactic violations (P600). These results illuminate the process of meaning generation at a grammatical level through a new paradigm, which we will later use to shed light on language dysfunction in people with Williams syndrome (WS). This is because our specific hypothesis there is that what fails in (WS) is neither lexically-driven semantic meaning, nor formal syntactic principles of linguistic organization, but specifically the process of generating meaning through grammar.
Location (online, ZOOM): https://ub-edu.zoom.us/j/94500494920