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Semantic Involvement of Initial and Final Lexical Embeddings during Sense-Making: The Advantage of Starting Late

During spoken language interpretation, listeners rapidly relate the meaning of each individual word to what has been said before. However, spoken words often contain spurious other words, like day in daisy, or dean in sardine. Do listeners also relate the meaning of such unintended, spurious words t...

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Autores principales: van Alphen, Petra M., van Berkum, Jos J. A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Research Foundation 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3375653/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22715332
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00190
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author van Alphen, Petra M.
van Berkum, Jos J. A.
author_facet van Alphen, Petra M.
van Berkum, Jos J. A.
author_sort van Alphen, Petra M.
collection PubMed
description During spoken language interpretation, listeners rapidly relate the meaning of each individual word to what has been said before. However, spoken words often contain spurious other words, like day in daisy, or dean in sardine. Do listeners also relate the meaning of such unintended, spurious words to the prior context? We used ERPs to look for transient meaning-based N400 effects in sentences that were completely plausible at the level of words intended by the speaker, but contained an embedded word whose meaning clashed with the context. Although carrier words with an initial embedding (day in daisy) did not elicit an embedding-related N400 effect relative to matched control words without embedding, carrier words with a final embedding (dean in sardine) did elicit such an effect. Together with prior work from our lab and the results of a Shortlist B simulation, our findings suggest that listeners do semantically interpret embedded words, albeit not under all conditions. We explain the latter by assuming that the sense-making system adjusts its hypothesis for how to interpret the external input at every new syllable, in line with recent ideas of active sampling in perception.
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spelling pubmed-33756532012-06-19 Semantic Involvement of Initial and Final Lexical Embeddings during Sense-Making: The Advantage of Starting Late van Alphen, Petra M. van Berkum, Jos J. A. Front Psychol Psychology During spoken language interpretation, listeners rapidly relate the meaning of each individual word to what has been said before. However, spoken words often contain spurious other words, like day in daisy, or dean in sardine. Do listeners also relate the meaning of such unintended, spurious words to the prior context? We used ERPs to look for transient meaning-based N400 effects in sentences that were completely plausible at the level of words intended by the speaker, but contained an embedded word whose meaning clashed with the context. Although carrier words with an initial embedding (day in daisy) did not elicit an embedding-related N400 effect relative to matched control words without embedding, carrier words with a final embedding (dean in sardine) did elicit such an effect. Together with prior work from our lab and the results of a Shortlist B simulation, our findings suggest that listeners do semantically interpret embedded words, albeit not under all conditions. We explain the latter by assuming that the sense-making system adjusts its hypothesis for how to interpret the external input at every new syllable, in line with recent ideas of active sampling in perception. Frontiers Research Foundation 2012-06-15 /pmc/articles/PMC3375653/ /pubmed/22715332 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00190 Text en Copyright © 2012 van Alphen and van Berkum. http://www.frontiersin.org/licenseagreement This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited.
spellingShingle Psychology
van Alphen, Petra M.
van Berkum, Jos J. A.
Semantic Involvement of Initial and Final Lexical Embeddings during Sense-Making: The Advantage of Starting Late
title Semantic Involvement of Initial and Final Lexical Embeddings during Sense-Making: The Advantage of Starting Late
title_full Semantic Involvement of Initial and Final Lexical Embeddings during Sense-Making: The Advantage of Starting Late
title_fullStr Semantic Involvement of Initial and Final Lexical Embeddings during Sense-Making: The Advantage of Starting Late
title_full_unstemmed Semantic Involvement of Initial and Final Lexical Embeddings during Sense-Making: The Advantage of Starting Late
title_short Semantic Involvement of Initial and Final Lexical Embeddings during Sense-Making: The Advantage of Starting Late
title_sort semantic involvement of initial and final lexical embeddings during sense-making: the advantage of starting late
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3375653/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22715332
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00190
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