Francesca Pesciarelli

Electrophysiological evidence of visual encoding deficits in a cross-modal attentional blink paradigm

Two experiments are reported in which two target stimuli, T1 and T2, were presented at variable stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In Experiment 1, T1 and T2 were visual stimuli embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of distractors. Participants were asked to report T1 and T2 at the end of the stream. In Experiment 2, T1 was an auditory stimulus, and T2 a visual stimulus embedded in an RSVP stream. Participants made a speeded discriminative response to T1, and reported T2 at the end of the stream. An attentional blink (AB) effect was observed in both experiments: T2 report suffered at short SOA compared to long SOA. During the AB, the amplitude of the P300 component of the event-related potential (ERP) locked to T2 onset was sensibly reduced in both experiments. Behavioral and ERP results were very similar across the two experiments. Implications for models of the AB effect are discussed.

Bidirectional semantic priming in the attentional blink

The time course of semantic priming between two associated words was tracked using rapid serial visual presentation of two synchronized streams of stimuli appearing at about 20 items/sec, each stream including a target word. The two words were semantically related or unrelated and were separated by stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 0–213 msec. Accuracy in reporting the first target (T1) versus the second target (T2) has been shown to interact dramatically with SOA over this range. The materials were in English in Experiment1 and Italian in Experiment2. T1 was semantically primed only at short SOAs, whereas T2 was primed at all SOAs (Experiment 1) or at all SOAs except the shortest one (Experiment2). The results indicate a strong competition between target words early in processing, with T2 often becoming the first word identified at short SOAs, thus priming T1.

Are complex function words processed as semantically empty strings? A reading time and ERP study of collocational complex prepositions

Collocational complex prepositions (CCPs, e.g., in the hands of) are prefabricated strings of words that play a prepositional role in natural language. Typically, CCPs are formed by a first preposition (P1) followed by a content word (N1) and a second, final preposition (P2) (in the - P1 - hands - N1 - of - P2). Despite their default structure stored in semantic memory, some CCPs allow internal modification (e.g., adjective insertion). In this study, two experiments tested the comprehension of CCPs in which we modified their default structure inserting an adjective before the noun. This modification preserved the semantic well-formedness of the string. The self-paced reading time study (Experiment 1) showed that readers took significantly longer to read the CCP constituents after the inserted adjective (N1 and P2). The ERP (Experiment 2) showed a smaller N400 response to the noun when preceded by the adjective, suggesting that the insertion did not disrupt the online processing of the CCP. Critically, the adjective insertion increased the processing load of the prepositional phrase introduced by the CCP, as evidenced by a LAN in response to the complement noun (N2). Overall, these findings showed that processing CCPs was not disrupted by insertions despite their predefined default word order. Rather, their interpretation was semantically enriched, correlating with an increase in the processing load when the CCP was integrated with the complement noun.

The Electrophysiological Underpinnings of Processing Gender Stereotypes in Language

Despite the widely documented influence of gender stereotypes on social behaviour, little is known about the electrophysiological substrates engaged in the processing of such information when conveyed by language. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we examined the brain response to third-person pronouns (lei “she” and lui “he”) that were implicitly primed by definitional (passeggera FEM “passenger”, pensionato MASC “pensioner”), or stereotypical antecedents (insegnante “teacher”, conducente “driver”). An N400-like effect on the pronoun emerged when it was preceded by a definitionally incongruent prime (passeggera FEM – lui; pensionato MASC – lei), and a stereotypically incongruent prime for masculine pronouns only (insegnante – lui). In addition, a P300-like effect was found when the pronoun was preceded by definitionally incongruent primes. However, this effect was observed for female, but not male participants. Overall, these results provide further evidence for on-line effects of stereotypical gender in language comprehension. Importantly, our results also suggest a gender stereotype asymmetry in that male and female stereotypes affected the processing of pronouns differently.

Is the comprehension of idiomatic sentences indeed impaired in paranoid Schizophrenia? A window into semantic processing deficits

Schizophrenia patients have been reported to be more impaired in comprehending non-literal than literal language since early studies on proverbs. Preference for literal rather than figurative interpretations continues to be documented. The main aim of this study was to establish whether patients are indeed able to use combinatorial semantic processing to comprehend literal sentences and both combinatorial analysis, and retrieval of pre-stored meanings to comprehend idiomatic sentences. The study employed a sentence continuation task in which subjects were asked to decide whether a target word was a sensible continuation of a previous sentence fragment to investigate idiomatic and literal sentence comprehension in patients with paranoid schizophrenia. Patients and healthy controls were faster in accepting sensible continuations than in rejecting non-sensible ones in both literal and idiomatic sentences. Patients were as accurate as controls in comprehending literal and idiomatic sentences, but they were overall slower than controls in all conditions. Once the contribution of cognitive covariates was partialled out, the response times (RTs) to sensible idiomatic continuations of patients did not significantly differ from those of controls. This suggests that the state of residual schizophrenia did not contribute to slower processing of sensible idioms above and beyond the cognitive deficits that are typically associated with schizophrenia.

The Responders’ Gender Stereotypes Modulate the Strategic Decision-Making of Proposers Playing the Ultimatum Game

Despite the wealth of studies investigating factors affecting decisions, not much is known about the impact of stereotypical beliefs on strategic economic decision-making. In the present study, we used the ultimatum game paradigm to investigate how participants playing as proposer modulate their strategic economic behavior, according to their game counterparts’ stereotypical identity (i.e., responders). The latter were introduced to the participants using occupational role nouns stereotypically marked with gender paired with feminine or masculine proper names (e.g., linguist-Anna; economist-David; economist-Cristina; linguist-Leonardo). When playing with male-stereotyped responders, proposers quickly applied the equity rule, behaving fairly, while they adopted a strategic behavior with responders characterized by female stereotypes. They were also longer to make their offers to female than to male responders but both kinds of responders received comparable offers, suggesting a greater cognitive effort to treat females as equally as males. The present study explicitly demonstrates that gender stereotypical information affect strategic economic decision-making and highlights a possible evolution of gender discrimination into a more insidious discrimination toward individuals with female characteristics.

Is the noun ending a cue to grammatical gender processing? An ERP study on sentences in Italian

Gender-to-ending consistency has been shown to influence grammatical gender retrieval in isolated word presentation. Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence, the exact role and the time course of processing of this distributional information remain unclear. This ERP study investigated if and when the brain detects gender-to-ending consistency in sentences containing Italian determiner-noun pairs. Determiners either agreed or disagreed in gender with the nouns whose endings were reliable or misleading cues to gender (transparent and irregular nouns). Transparent nouns elicited an increased frontal negativity and a late posterior positivity compared to irregular nouns (350-950 ms), suggesting that the system is sensitive to gender-to-ending consistency from relatively early stages of processing. Gender agreement violations evoked a similar LAN-P600 pattern for both types of nouns. The present findings provide evidence for an early detection of reliable gender-related endings during sentence reading.

Motor activation in literal and non-literal sentences: does time matter?

Despite the impressive amount of evidence showing involvement of the sensorimotor systems in language processing, important questions remain unsolved among which the relationship between non-literal uses of language and sensorimotor activation. The literature did not yet provide a univocal answer on whether the comprehension of non-literal, abstract motion sentences engages the same neural networks recruited for literal sentences. A previous TMS study using the same experimental materials of the present study showed activation for literal, fictive and metaphoric motion sentences but not for idiomatic ones. To evaluate whether this may depend on insufficient time for elaborating the idiomatic meaning, we conducted a behavioral experiment that used a sensibility judgment task performed by pressing a button either with a hand finger or with a foot. Motor activation is known to be sensitive to the action-congruency of the effector used for responding. Therefore, all other things being equal, significant differences between response emitted with an action-congruent or incongruent effector (foot vs. hand) may be attributed to motor activation. Foot-related action verbs were embedded in sentences conveying literal motion, fictive motion, metaphoric motion or idiomatic motion. Mental sentences were employed as a control condition. foot responses were significantly faster than finger responses but only in literal motion sentences. We hypothesize that motor activation may arise in early phases of comprehension processes (i.e., upon reading the verb) for then decaying as a function of the strength of the semantic motion component of the verb.

Event-Related Potential Evidence for Two Functionally Dissociable Sources of Semantic Effects in the Attentional Blink

Three target words (T1, T2, and T3) were embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of non-word distractors, and participants were required to report the targets at the end of each RSVP stream. T2 and T3 were semantically related words in half of the RSVP streams, and semantically unrelated words in the other half of the RSVP streams. Using an identical design, a recent study reported distinct reflections of the T2–T3 semantic relationship on the P2 and N400 components of event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to T3, suggesting an early, automatic, source of P2 semantic effects and a late, controlled, source of N400 semantic effects. Here, P2 and N400 semantic effects were examined by manipulating list-wide context. Relative to participants performing in a semantically unbiased context, participants over-exposed to filler RSVP streams always including semantically related T2/T3 words reported a dilution of T3-locked P2 semantic effects and a magnification of T3-locked N400 semantic effects. Opposite effects on P2 and N400 ERP components of list-wide semantic context are discussed in relation to recent proposals on the representational status of RSVP targets at processing stages prior to consolidation in visual short-term memory.

Gender stereotypes across the ages: On-line processing in school-age children, young and older adults.

Most research to date on implicit gender stereotyping has been conducted with one age group – young adults. The mechanisms that underlie the on-line processing of stereotypical information in other age groups have received very little attention. This is the first study to investigate real time processing of gender stereotypes at different age levels. We investigated the activation of gender stereotypes in Italian in four groups of participants: third- and fifth-graders, young and older adults. Participants heard a noun that was stereotypically associated with masculine (preside “headmaster”) or feminine roles (badante “social care worker”), followed by a male (padre “father”) or female kinship term (madre “mother”). The task was to decide if the two words – the role noun and the kinship term – could describe the same person. Across all age groups, participants were significantly faster to respond, and significantly more likely to press ‘yes,’ when the gender of the target was congruent with the stereotypical gender use of the preceding prime. These findings suggest that information about the stereotypical gender associated with a role noun is incorporated into the mental representation of this word and is activated as soon as the word is heard. In addition, our results show differences between male and female participants of the various age groups, and between male- and female-oriented stereotypes, pointing to important gender asymmetries.