Syntactic Priming in Comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials
Kerry Ledoux, Mathew J. Traxler, M.J., & Tamara Swaab In Press Psychological Science
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Syntactic priming is the facilitation of processing that occurs when a sentence has the same syntactic form as a preceding sentence. Such priming effects have been less consistently demonstrated in comprehension than in production, and those that have been reported have depended on the repetition of verbs across sentences. In an ERP experiment, participants read target sentences containing reduced-relative clauses. Each was preceded by a sentence that contained the same verb and either a reduced-relative or a main-clause construction. Reduced relative primes elicited a larger positivity than did main-clause primes. Reduced-relative targets that were preceded by a main-clause prime were more positive than the same target sentences following a reduced-relative prime. In addition, syntactic priming effects were dissociated from effects of lexical repetition at the verb.
Electrophysiological differentiation of phonological and semantic integration in word and sentence contexts
Michele Diaz and Tamara Swaab In Press Brain Research
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Coreference and lexical repetition: Neural mechanisms of discourse integration.
Kerry Ledoux, Peter Gordon, C. Christine Camblin and Tamara Swaab In Press Memory and Cognition
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The use of repeated expressions to establish coreference allows an investigation of the relationship between basic processes of word recognition and higher-level language processes that involve the integration of information into a discourse model. In two experiments on reading, we used eye tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether repeated expressions that are coreferential within a local discourse context show the kind of repetition priming that is shown in lists of words. In both experiments, effects of lexical repetition were modulated by effects of local discourse context that arose from manipulations of the linguistic prominence of the antecedent of a coreferentially repeated name. These results are interpreted within the context of discourse prominence theory, which suggests that processes of coreferential interpretation interact with basic mechanisms of memory integration during the construction of a model of discourse.
When and How do Readers and Listeners establish Coreference with Repeated Names?
C. Christine Camblin, Kerry Ledoux, Megan Boudewyn, Peter Gordon & Tamara Swaab In Press Brain Research
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The interplay of discourse congruence and lexical association during sentence processing: Evidence from ERPs and eye tracking.
C. Christine Camblin, Peter C. Gordon and Tamara Swaab In Press Journal of Memory and Language
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Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was associated or not. Violations of discourse congruence had early and lingering effects on ERP and eye-tracking measures. This indicates that discourse representations have a rapid effect on lexical semantic processing even in locally congruous texts. In contrast, effects of association were more malleable: Very early effects of associative priming were only robust when the discourse context was absent or not cohesive. Together these results suggest that the global discourse model quickly influences lexical processing in sentences, and that spreading activation from associative priming does not contribute to natural reading in discourse contexts.
Reading words in discourse: The modulation of intralexical priming effects by message-level context
Kerry Ledoux, C. Christine Camblin, Tamara Swaab and Peter Gordon 2006 Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews
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Separabale Effects of Semantic Priming and Imageability on Word Processing in Human Cortex
Barry Giesbrecht, Chrissy Camblin & Tamara Swaab 2004 Cerebral Cortex
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Gapping: Electrophysiological evidence for immediate processing of missing verbs in sentence comprehension
Edith Kaan, Frank Wijnen & Tamara Swaab 2004 Brain and Language
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Electrophysiological Evidence for Reversed Lexical Repetition Effects in Language Processing
Tamara Swaab, C. Christine Camblin & Peter C. Gordon 2004 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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Repair, revision and complexity in syntactic analysis: An electrophysiological differentiation.
Edith Kaan and Tamara Swaab 2003 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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Electrophysiological evidence for serial sentence processing: A comparison between non-preferred and ungrammatical continuations
Edith Kaan and Tamara Swaab 2003 Cognitive Brain Research
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Understanding words in sentence contexts: The time course of ambiguity resolution
Tamara Swaab, Colin Brown & Peter Hagoort 2003 Brain and Language
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Separable Effects of Priming and Imageability on Word Processing: An ERP Study
Tamara Swaab, Kathleen Baynes & Robert Knight 2002 Cognitive Brain Research
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The Brain Circuitry of Syntactic Comprehension
Edith Kaan & Tamara Swaab 2002 Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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Understanding Ambiguous Words in Sentence Contexts: Electrophysiological Evidence for Delayed Contextual Selection in Broca's Aphasia
Tamara Swaab, Colin Brown & Peter Hagoort 1998 Neuropsychologia
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Event-related potentials in cognitive neuropsychology: Methodological considerations and an example from studies of aphasia.
Tamara Swaab 1998 Behavior, Research Methods, Instruments and Computers
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Spoken Sentence Comprehension in Aphasia: Event-related Potential Evidence for a Lexical Integration Deficit
Tamara Swaab, Colin Brown & Peter Hagoort 1997 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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Lexical-semantic event-related potential effects in patients with left hemisphere lesions and aphasia, and patients with right hemisphere lesions without aphasia.
Peter Hagoort, Colin Brown and Tamara Swaab 1996 Brain
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Lexical-semantic processing impairments in aphasic patients with a left hemisphere lesion and non-aphasic patients with a right hemisphere lesion were investigated by recording Event Related Brain Potentials (ERPs) while subjects listened to auditorily presented word pairs. The word pairs consisted of unrelated words, or words that were related in meaning. The related words were either associatively related (e.g., 'bread-butter'), or were members of the same semantic category without being associatively related (e.g., 'church-villa'). The latter relations are assumed to be more distant than the former ones. The most relevant ERP component in this study is the N400. In elderly control subjects, the N400 amplitude to associatively and semantically related word targets is reduced relative to the N400 elicited by unrelated targets. Compared to this normal N400-effect, the different patient groups showed the following pattern of results: Aphasic patients with only minor comprehension deficits (high comprehenders) showed N400-effects of a similar size as the control subjects. In aphasic patients with more severe comprehension deficits (low comprehenders) a clear reduction in the N400-effects was obtained, both for the associative and the semantic word pairs. The patients with a right hemisphere lesion showed a normal N400-effect for the associatively related targets, but a trend towards a reduced N400-effect for the semantically related word pairs. A dissociation between the N400 results in the word pair paradigm and P300 results in a classical tone oddball task indicated that the N400-effects were not an aspecific consequence of brain lesion, but were related to the nature of the language comprehension impairment. The conclusions drawn from the ERP results are that comprehension deficits in the aphasic patients are due to an impairment in integrating individual word meanings into an overall meaning representation. Right hemisphere patients are more specifically impaired in the processing of semantically more distant relations, suggesting the involvement of the right hemisphere in semantically coarse coding.