Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Abstract The electrophysiology of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like “he did it” or “the little girl”, combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough—re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Brain research 2007-05, Vol.1146, p.158-171
Main Authors: Van Berkum, Jos J.A, Koornneef, Arnout W, Otten, Marte, Nieuwland, Mante S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brain Mapping
Comprehension - physiology
Coumarins
Electroencephalography
Electrophysiology - methods
Emotions
ERPs
Establishing reference
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Frontal Lobe - physiology
Humans
Implicit causality
Interpersonal Relations
Language
Language comprehension
Linguistics
Neurology
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Summary:Abstract The electrophysiology of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like “he did it” or “the little girl”, combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough—readers and listeners also need to work out what or who is being referred to. We review our event-related brain potential research on the processes involved in establishing reference, and present a new experiment in which we examine when and how the implicit causality associated with specific interpersonal verbs affects the interpretation of a referentially ambiguous pronoun. The evidence suggests that upon encountering a singular noun or pronoun, readers and listeners immediately inspect their situation model for a suitable discourse entity, such that they can discriminate between having too many, too few, or exactly the right number of referents within at most half a second. Furthermore, our implicit causality findings indicate that a fragment like “David praised Linda because…” can immediately foreground a particular referent, to the extent that a subsequent “he” is at least initially construed as a syntactic error. In all, our brain potential findings suggest that referential processing is highly incremental, and not necessarily contingent upon the syntax. In addition, they demonstrate that we can use ERPs to relatively selectively keep track of how readers and listeners establish reference.
ISSN:0006-8993
1872-6240
DOI:10.1016/j.brainres.2006.06.091