Melanie Malzahn, dean of the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies

Claus Lamm, vice dean of the of Faculty of Psychology

Helmut Leder, head of the Cognitive Science research platform

How language shapes thought

Languages differ in how they describe events. Further, within any given language, options for describing a particular physical event are often myriad. In this talk I will give some examples of how languages help us construct and construe physical reality, parceling up the stream of experience into units, assigning agents, endpoints, and adding information about intention and completion. These features of language guide how speakers of different languages attend to, remember and reason about events. I will also describe work with bilinguals, asking how influences from multiple languages mix in one mind. Do bilinguals perceive events with a cognitive "accent” inherited from the other languages they speak?

Structural priming in second language research

Structural (or syntactic) priming refers to people’s tendency to reuse the same structural pattern as one that was previously encountered (Bock, 1986). Structural priming has been discussed as evidence for an underlying cognitive mechanism in language production, comprehension, and processing in cognitive science (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). The structure of the previous utterance facilitates the production and comprehension of the identical structure in the subsequent sentence. This talk focuses on structural priming as a useful paradigm to conduct language experiments in terms of second language processing in comprehension and production.

Structural priming can be elicited in experimental settings, including picture-description tasks (Bock, 1986), immediate recall tasks with rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP; Potter & Lombardi, 1998), sentence fragment completion tasks (Pickering & Branigan, 1998), sentence recall tasks (Fox Tree & Meijer, 1999), and confederate-scripting tasks (Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000). For instance, if the so-called prime sentences are presented in a double-object dative, such as the lawyer gave his client the document, the same structure (i.e., the double-object dative structure) tends to be more frequently used in a subsequent target utterance like the girl sent her dad a letter than the alternate prepositional dative structure, the girl sent a letter to her dad.

In addition to the production tasks, structural priming effects have been observed in comprehension. Recent researchers have begun to employ event-related potential (ERP) and eye-tracking measures to provide evidence for structural priming during comprehension. Ledoux, Traxler, and Swaab (2007) and Tooley, Traxler, and Swaab (2009) observed the reduced N400 and P600 results in the target sentence comprehension. Also, the Tooley, Swaab, Boudewyn, Zirnstein, and Traxler’s (2014) eye-tracking experiments obtained the syntactic priming results. Based upon these studies, the facilitated effects of syntactic priming on eye-movement and the reduced N400 and P600 effects are proposed in L2 reading as L2 proficiency increases. This line of research will be discussed in terms of their methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical significance, yielding substantial implications for language experiments, second language acquisition, learning, and pedagogy.

Truth value judgment and negation processing in Korean

Verifying truth value is an essential for a successful human communication. Several empirical studies using truth-value verification paradigm have demonstrated that it is easier and faster to judge the truth value in true-affirmative (TA) sentences than false-affirmative (FA) ones. However, the opposite pattern was found in negation sentences, i.e., more response time was needed for the true-negated (TN) sentences than the false negated (FN) sentences in sentence-picture verification task (Just & Carpenter, 1971; Chase & Clark, 1972; Trabasso, Rollins, & Shaughnessy, 1971).

For this phenomenon, Carpenter & Just (1975) suggested “Constituent comparison model” which postulated the incremental processing steps in negation and truth-value verification. According to the model, it took for granted that the longest response time was measured in TN condition because the most number of steps are engaged in TN condition (five comparing steps with two revising) whereas four comparing steps with one revising in FN, three comparing steps with one revising in FA, and two comparing steps with no revising in TA condition. Unfortunately, previous ERP studies did not provide a convergent result of the incremental process on negation (Fischler et al., 1983; Lüdtke et al., 2008).

In this talk, I will introduce my recent research which provides various online ERP evidence on the negation processing contrasting syntactic (for example, A bed/a clock belongs to/doesn't belong to the furniture "침대는/시계는 가구에 속한다/속하지 않는다") vs. lexical negation in Korean (e.g., A tiger/a butterfly has/doesn't have a tail "호랑이는/나비는 꼬리가 있다/없다" (=As for a tiger/a butterfly, a tail is present/absent). The behavioral results (i.e. verification task scores) show that there is a universal pattern of accuracy and response time for verification process: True-Affirmative (high accuracy and short latency) > False-Affirmative > False-Negated > True-Negated. However, the components (early N400 & P600) reflecting the immediate processing of a negation operator were observed only in lexical negation. Moreover, the ERP patterns reflecting an effect of truth value were not identical: N400 effect was observed in the true condition compared to the false condition in the lexically negated sentences, whereas Positivity effect (like early P600) was observed in the false condition compared to the true condition in the syntactically negated sentences. These results indicate that the form and location of negation operator that vary across languages and negation types influences the strategy and pattern of online negation processing. But the final representation resulting from different computational processing of negation appears to be language universal and is not directly affected by negation type.