NieuwlandVanBerkum CUNY2005 SemanticIllusionpost e

Testing the limits of the semantic illusion phenomenon:ERPs reveal temporary semantic change deafness in discourse comprehensionMante S. Nieuwland 1 & Jos J.A. van Berkum 1,21 University of Amsterdam 2 F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging : 

Testing the limits of the semantic illusion phenomenon: ERPs reveal temporary semantic change deafness in discourse comprehension Mante S. Nieuwland 1 & Jos J.A. van Berkum 1,2 1 University of Amsterdam 2 F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging Did you answer ‘two’ and not notice anything funny? If so, you fell prey to a semantic illusion (the ‘Moses illusion’. Remember Noah?). The semantic illusion phenomenon illustrates that although listeners immediately relate meaning of incoming words to their linguistic context [1-3], under certain conditions this immediate analysis does not lead to complete and accurate representations of the actual input. [4] There are several conditions that have been reported to induce semantic illusions: A discourse context biasing towards the correct word (‘During the Biblical flood, how many…’). The impostor word is semantically associated with the correct word (e.g. ‘Nixon’ is detected more easily than ‘Moses’) and is relevant to the scenario. The absence of focus (Detection increases when the impostor word is brought into focus, e.g. ‘It was Moses who…. True or False?’) In a sense, the existence of these illusions is very surprising, since story characters are central to the discourse model and readers appear to be intensively engaged in keeping track of them. [5] This raises the issue of just how far we can stretch the limits of the semantic illusion phenomenon. For example, would listeners also fail to detect an anomaly when it involves a core semantic feature like animacy, which is often considered to be an innate organizing principle of cognition? [6] The experiment: Subjects listened to short narratives portraying a man and a woman engaged in conversation about an inanimate object. In the fifth sentence, the woman would either continue her conversation with the man or suddenly address the inanimate object. To examine whether subjects would detect the anomaly, we relied on the N400, a negative shift in the ERP that is maximum at parietal sites about 300-500 ms after word onset, and that is highly sensitive to the ease of integration of the meaning of a word into the prior sentence or discourse context. [1] Marslen-Wilson, W., & Tyler, L. K. (1980). The temporal structure of spoken language understanding. Cognition, 8(1), 1-71. [2] Sedivy, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K., Chambers, C. G., & Carlson, G. N. (1999). Achieving incremental semantic interpretation through contextual representation. Cognition, 71(2), 109-147. [3] Van Berkum, J. J. A., Zwitserlood, P., Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (2003). When and how do listeners relate a sentence to the wider discourse? Evidence from the N400 effect. Cognitive Brain Research, 17(3), 701-718. [4] Sanford, A., & Sturt, P. (2002, Sep 1). Depth of processing in language comprehension: not noticing the evidence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(9), 382. [5] Zwaan, R. A., & Radvansky, G. A. (1998). Situation models in language comprehension and memory. Psychological Bulletin, 123(2), 162-185. [6] Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works: New York, W W Norton and Co Inc. [7] Sanford, A. J., & Garrod, S. C. (1998). The role of scenario mapping in text comprehension. Discourse Processes, 26(2-3), 159-190. [8] Townsend, D. J. & Bever, T. G. (2001). Sentence comprehension: The integration of habits and rules, MIT Press, Cambridge. Contact: M.S.Nieuwland@uva.nl Presented at CUNY 2005, March 31st- April 2nd, Tucson, Arizona Results: No regular word-onset elicited N400 effect. A positive deflection emerging at about 500-600 ms “How many animals of each sort did Moses put on the ark? Would even a powerful animacy violation remain undetected if there is a biasing context, the impostor word is scenario-relevant, deaccented and semantically related to the correct word? If subjects detect the anomaly > N400 effect If they don’t > no N400 effect