Integration of Contextual Information in Real-Time
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Lexical semantic processing:
Word and sentence meaning depends on a multitude of factors including who is speaking, who is listening, and the context of the utterance. The importance of context on meaning integration is demonstrated in the following example: “I still miss my wife, but I have improved my aim”. The specific meaning of “miss” in this sentence only becomes clear when the meaning of the rest of the sentence is integrated and an overall representation of the whole message is generated. In a number of projects in my laboratory we have studied the intersection between lexical (word) processing and the processes required to establish a coherent message-level representation, and we have shown that with meaningful contexts, the overall sentence or discourse information quickly interacts with processes at the lexical level. Specifically, the results of several studies provide evidence that the moment in time at which context starts to exert its influence on lexical processing depends on how constraining the previous context is, with lists of words at one end of the spectrum and highly constraining sentence contexts at the other end.
- Syntactic Processing
Humans have a remarkable capacity to quickly recover from initial problems in understanding syntactically ambiguous or complex sentences, and yet the mechanisms by which we do so remain largely unresolved. In several studies we have examined the immediacy of syntactic processing and have found that the sentence processor recognizes and reconstructs difficulties at the earliest possible occasion. We have also examined effects of syntactic priming with ERPs. 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, raising the question of whether these priming effects are indeed syntactic in nature. In our study we found effects of syntactic priming such that ERPs sensitive to syntactic but not to semantic processing were modulated by the manipulation; when the same difficult structure was repeated a reduction was found in syntactic ERPs, indicating that the second time the difficult structure was more easily processed.
CMB Acting Director Andy Yonelinas Featured in Sacramento Bee