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It is well-known from psycholinguistic literature that the human language processing system exhibits preferences when sentence constituents are ambiguous with respect to their grammatical function. Generally, many theories assume that an interpretation towards the subject is preferred in such cases. Later disambiguations which contradict such a preference induce enhanced processing difficulty (i.e. reanalysis) which reflects itself in late positive deflections (P345/P600) in event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In the case of phoric elements such as pronouns, a second strategy is known according to which an ambiguous pronoun preferentially receives the grammatical function that its antecedent has (parallel function strategy). In an ERP study, we show that this strategy can in principle override the general subject preference strategy (known for both pronominal and nonpronominal constituents) and induce an object preference, in case that the pronoun's antecedent is itself an object. Interestingly, the revision of a subject preference leads to a P600 component, whereas the revision of an object preference induces an earlier positivity (P345). In order to show that the latter component is indeed a positivity and not an N400-like negativity in the same time range, we apply an additional analysis based on symbolic dynamics which allows to determine the polarity of an ERP effect on purely methodological grounds. With respect to the two positivities, we argue that the latency differences reflect qualitative differences in the reanalysis processes
Fakten, Fakten, Fakten!
(2004)
This study describes ME, a patient in the chronic stage after a traumatic brain injury. During an extensive training programme ME tried to regain automaticity in the retrieval of simple multiplication facts. He succeeded in substantially decreasing response latencies in multiplication, reducing the handicap at his job. This improvement generalised to a non-trained operand order, to non-trained problems, and to a non-trained output modality. Moreover, these effects were maintained over at least four months. Interestingly, however, ME's training effects were operation specific: No significant improvement occurred in addition, subtraction, or division. As coloured presentation of multiplication problems proved to be a valuable cue in facilitating the patient's performance, this might turn out to be a useful tool in the rehabilitation of fact retrieval in general
We 'hear words' when we can segment prosodic units from the speech stream and activate associated lexical entries. Segmentation is sometimes regarded in SLA as a perceptual problem, not a grammatical one. I argue here that this view is wrong: segmenting formatives results when we construct prosodic units on the basis of phonetic cues to their edges. The learner's first task is to acquire the relevant cues to these edges. The problem of segmentation is discussed within the framework provided by the Autonomous Induction Theory
Untitled
(2004)
We describe a part of the stimulus sentences of a German language processing ERP experiment using a context- free grammar and represent different processing preferences by its unambiguous partitions. The processing is modeled by deterministic pushdown automata. Using a theorem proven by Moore, we map these automata onto discrete time dynamical systems acting at the unit square, where the processing preferences are represented by a control parameter. The actual states of the automata are rectangles lying in the unit square that can be interpreted as cylinder sets in the context of symbolic dynamics theory. We show that applying a wrong processing preference to a certain input string leads to an unwanted invariant set in the parsers dynamics. Then, syntactic reanalysis and repair can be modeled by a switching of the control parameter - in analogy to phase transitions observed in brain dynamics. We argue that ERP components are indicators of these bifurcations and propose an ERP-like measure of the parsing model