Manami Sato

The Case of the Missing Pronouns: Does Mentally Simulated Perspective Play a Functional Role in the Comprehension of Person?.

Language comprehenders can mentally simulate perceptual and motor features of scenes they hear or read about (Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). Recent research shows that these simulations adopt a particular perspective (Borghi, Glenberg, & Kaschak, 2004; Brunyé, Ditman, Mahoney, Augustyn, & Taylor, 2009). Moreover, features of utterances influence the perspective that comprehenders are led to adopt. For instance, language about you primes a participant visual perspective, while third person he and she prime an observer perspective. But what role does perspectival mental simulation play in the comprehension of person? On the one hand, the different perspectives adopted during language understanding could be necessary for successfully determining the meaning of an utterance. However, current empirical evidence is also compatible with the possibility that adopting a perspective in mental simulation is not essential to comprehending who did what to whom. If the latter is the case, then we should be able to find cases where language comprehenders understand who did what to whom without measurably performing mental simulation from a particular perspective. A candidate language that might display such a case is Japanese, where grammatical subject pronouns can be omitted when the subject is inferable from context. We replicated a previously used method for assessing perspectival mental simulation during language comprehension, but tailored it to Japanese. The results showed that when pronouns were present, like in English, sentences facilitated identification of an image matching the proposed perspective associated with the mentioned pronoun. This replicated the previous finding for English. But when the subject pronoun was omitted, so that the sentence did not explicitly mention the subject, there was no such effect. Nonetheless, native comprehenders of Japanese automatically and easily tracked who the subjects of the sentences with omitted subjects were. Together, these findings suggest that while grammatical person modulates visual perspective in mental simulation, visual perspective is not necessary for successful identification and representation of event participants.

One word at a time: Mental representations of object shape change incrementally during sentence processing

Abstract We report on two experiments that ask when and under what linguistic conditions comprehenders construct detailed shape representations of mentioned objects, and whether these can change over the course of a sentence when new information contradicts earlier expectations. We used Japanese because the verb-final word order of Japanese presented a revealing test case where information about objects can radically change with a subsequent verb. The results show that language understanders consistently generate a distinct and detailed shape for an object by integrating the semantic contributions of different sentential elements. These results first confirm that the tendency to generate specific shape information about objects that are involved in described events is not limited to English, but is also present in Japanese, a typologically and genetically distinct language. But more importantly, they shed light on the processing mechanism of object representation, showing that mental representations are initiated sentence medially, and are rapidly revised if followed by a verb that implies a change to an object shape. This work contributes to ongoing research on incremental language processing – comprehenders appear to construct extremely detailed semantic representations early in a sentence, and modify them as needed.

Neurosecretory Protein GL, a Hypothalamic Small Secretory Protein, Participates in Energy Homeostasis in Male Mice

We have recently identified from the avian hypothalamus a complementary DNA encoding a small secretory protein termed neurosecretory protein GL (NPGL). In chicks, NPGL increases body weight gain without affecting food intake. A database search reveals that NPGL is conserved throughout vertebrates. However, the central distribution and functional role of NPGL remains to be elucidated in mammals. In this study, we identified the precursor complementary DNA encoding NPGL from the mouse hypothalamus. Quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction and morphological analyses revealed that NPGL precursor messenger RNA is robustly expressed in the mediobasal hypothalamus with NPGL neurons specifically localized to the lateroposterior part of the arcuate nucleus in the hypothalamus. NPGL-immunoreactive fibers were observed in close anatomical contact with pro-opiomelanocortin neurons in the rostral region of the arcuate nucleus. NPGL messenger RNA expression was elevated by 24-hour fasting and reduced by feeding of a high-fat diet for 5 weeks. Furthermore, intracerebroventricular injection of mature NPGL increased food intake, pointing to an important role in feeding. Taken together, these findings report on the distribution of NPGL in the mammalian brain and point to an important role for this neuropeptide in energy homeostasis.