Viviane Déprez

Cross-talk between Language Processes and Overt Motor Behavior in the First 200 msec of Processing

A recently emerging view sees language understanding as closely linked to sensory and motor processes. The present study investigates this issue by examining the influence of processing action verbs and concrete nouns on the execution of a reaching movement. Fine-grained analyses of movement kinematics revealed that relative to nouns, processing action verbs significantly affects overt motor performance. Within 200 msec after onset, processing action verbs interferes with a concurrent reaching movement. By contrast, the same words assist reaching movement when processed before movement onset. The cross-talk between language processes and overt motor behavior provides unambiguous evidence that action words and motor action share common cortical representations and could thus suggest that cortical motor regions are indeed involved in action word retrieval.

Grip force reveals the context sensitivity of language-induced motor activity during "action words" processing: evidence from sentential negation.

Background Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sentence listening. We use this tool to investigate whether language-induced motor activity remains constant or is modulated in negative, as opposed to affirmative, linguistic contexts. Methodology/Principal Findings Participants listened to spoken action target words in either affirmative or negative sentences while holding a sensor in a precision grip. The participants were asked to count the sentences containing the name of a country to ensure attention. The grip force signal was recorded continuously. The action words elicited an automatic and significant enhancement of the grip force starting at approximately 300 ms after target word onset in affirmative sentences; however, no comparable grip force modulation was observed when these action words occurred in negative contexts. Conclusions/Significance Our findings demonstrate that this simple experimental paradigm can be used to study the online crosstalk between language and the motor systems in an ecological and economical manner. Our data further confirm that the motor brain structures that can be called upon during action word processing are not mandatorily involved; the crosstalk is asymmetrically governed by the linguistic context and not vice versa.

Two types of Negative Concord

The paper provides a descriptive, comparative and theoretical analysis ofFrench and Haitian Creole Negative Concord constructions which are shown to manifest properties unpredicted under a Standard Neg Criterionperspective. An alternative approach to Negative Concord is sketched which proposes 1) that N-words are indefinite DPs with varying quantificational force and 2) that crosslinguistic variations are largely deductiblefrom the dijfering internal syntactic andsemantic make-up of N-words rather than from differences in the structure of a putative sentential NegP constituent. On this view, parametrization is shifted from the sentential level into the DP.

Raising constructions in Haitian Creole

This paper examines the raising constructions of Haitian Creole both from a descriptive and from a theoretical point of view. Descriptively, the constructions involve a local relation between the non-thematic subject position of a verbal predicate and the thematic subject position of an embedded tensed sentence, which is occupied by an overt pronominal copy in place of the expected trace and manifests the thematic dependency characteristic of well-understood forms of raising. The theoretical interest of these constructions concerns the theory of A-chains and predication. Despite the fact that Haitian Creole raising appears to manifest resumptive pronouns in A-chains, I argue that a revision of the standard A-chain theory is not warranted. Haitian Creole raising constructions manifest both NP movement and predication in the sense of Williams (1980, 1986). I provide evidence supporting the existence of clausal predicates, small clauses, and A-chains conceived in terms of NP movement.

Action relevance in linguistic context drives word-induced motor activity

Many neurocognitive studies on the role of motor structures in action-language processing have implicitly adopted a “dictionary-like” framework within which lexical meaning is constructed on the basis of an invariant set of semantic features. The debate has thus been centered on the question of whether motor activation is an integral part of the lexical semantics (embodied theories) or the result of a post-lexical construction of a situation model (disembodied theories). However, research in psycholinguistics show that lexical semantic processing and context-dependent meaning construction are narrowly integrated. An understanding of the role of motor structures in action-language processing might thus be better achieved by focusing on the linguistic contexts under which such structures are recruited. Here, we therefore analyzed online modulations of grip force while subjects listened to target words embedded in different linguistic contexts. When the target word was a hand action verb and when the sentence focused on that action (John signs the contract) an early increase of grip force was observed. No comparable increase was detected when the same word occurred in a context that shifted the focus toward the agents mental state (John wants to sign the contract). There mere presence of an action word is thus not sufficient to trigger motor activation. Moreover, when the linguistic context set up a strong expectation for a hand action, a grip force increase was observed even when the tested word was a pseudo-verb. The presence of a known action word is thus not required to trigger motor activation. Importantly, however, the same linguistic contexts that sufficed to trigger motor activation with pseudo-verbs failed to trigger motor activation when the target words were verbs with no motor action reference. Context is thus not by itself sufficient to supersede an “incompatible” word meaning. We argue that motor structure activation is part of a dynamic process that integrates the lexical meaning potential of a term and the context in the online construction of a situation model, which is a crucial process for fluent and efficient online language comprehension.

Semantic effects of agreement: The case of French past participle agreement

Kaynes (1989) seminal paper on participle agreement in Italian and French has spurred numerous studies on the syntactic conditions governing agreement relations. The focus of this paper is on the semantic aspects of this phenomenon. Within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, an analysis of French participle agreement is developed, that relates the semantic impact of overt agreement to the syntactic structure that it enforces. We argue that the interaction of Move with the projection of a morphologically strong AGR-O/v determines the position of DPs at LF and their interpretations. Modifying Diesing’s proposal for a syntax-semantic mapping, we propose that only DPs adjoined to a V-head (incorporation) can be interpreted predicatively (or non-specifically) in the sense of De Hoop (1992) while those adjoined to AGR-O/v projection receive a specific interpretation. We further take the presence of AGR-O/v in a sentence structure to be subject to Economy conditions operating on the numeration. The complex distribution of overt object agreement in French, -- optional in accusative constructions, obligatory in passives and impossible in impersonal constructions -- as well as its semantic impact on the interpretation of the triggering nominal expressions are then shown to derive straightforwardly from the interaction of Case and the Economy driven projection of AGR-O/v in the sentence structure.

Do you agree? Electrophysiological characterization of online agreement checking during the comprehension of correct French passive sentences

With this research we investigated the real-time electrophysiological correlates of noun–verb agreement checking during the comprehension of correct passive sentences in French. Event-related potentials were acquired while participants read passive sentences that contained covert (singular, masculine) or overt (plural, feminine) noun–verb agreement. Results show that the processing of overtly or covertly agreeing verbs in passive sentences is associated with an asymmetrical electrophysiological response, reflecting former psycholinguistic evidence of markedness and unmarkedness of certain features. The reading of an overtly marked verb agreeing in number and gender with a feminine plural subject was associated with a left anterior negativity (LAN), whereas covertly marked verbs were associated with a negativity presenting a central-posterior distribution, an N400. These results, confirming the lexical status of features and their immediate but asymmetrical checking during sentence comprehension are discussed in the context of current linguistic and psycholinguistic models of agreement checking. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Syntax at hand: common syntactic structures for actions and language.

Evidence that the motor and the linguistic systems share common syntactic representations would open new perspectives on language evolution. Here, crossing disciplinary boundaries, we explore potential parallels between the structure of simple actions and that of sentences. First, examining Typically Developing (TD) children displacing a bottle with or without knowledge of its weight prior to movement onset, we provide kinematic evidence that the sub-phases of this displacing action (reaching + moving the bottle) manifest a structure akin to linguistic embedded dependencies. Then, using the same motor task, we reveal that children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI), whose core deficit affects syntactic embedding and dependencies, manifest specific structural motor anomalies parallel to their linguistic deficits. In contrast to TD children, SLI children performed the displacing-action as if its sub-phases were juxtaposed rather than embedded. The specificity of SLI’s structural motor deficit was confirmed by testing an additional control group: Fragile-X Syndrome patients, whose language capacity, though delayed, comparatively spares embedded dependencies, displayed slower but structurally normal motor performances. By identifying the presence of structural representations and dependency computations in the motor system and by showing their selective deficit in SLI patients, these findings point to a potential motor origin for language syntax.

How speakers interpret the negative markers no and no…pas in Catalan

Abstract This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation designed to test the interpretation of the optional doubling of the negative markers no and pas in Expletive Negation (EN) contexts and in preverbal Negative Concord Items (NCI) contexts in Catalan. We show that in EN contexts a negative interpretation of no is preferred to an expletive one, with non-negative readings being less widespread than expected from what is described in traditional grammars. In NCI contexts the overt presence of no basically contributes to a single negation interpretation, thus confirming the status of Catalan as a Negative Concord language. We also show that, in the absence of discourse environments, pas in both EN and NCI contexts shows a variable interpretation, a characteristic of negative polarity items. Our results indicate that pas does not increase the amount of negative interpretation of no in EN contexts, or of double negation in NCI contexts, but is an item dependent on the interpretation of no. We conclude that the strengthening role of Catalan pas (at stage two of Jespersen’s cycle), while associated with the expression of metalinguistic negation, does not reverse the truth or falsity of a proposition.

Children’s Developing Knowledge of Wh-/Quantifier Question-Answer Relations

ABSTRACT In response to questions in which a wh-term interacts with a universal quantifier in object position, such as Who picked every toy?, children as old as 5 years of age often provide a list, pairing toys with the people who picked each of them. This response pattern is unexpected, it has been claimed, because children appear to overproduce such pair-list answers in comparison to what would otherwise be expected in adults, therefore suggesting a non-adult grammar. However, not only have such comparisons been made to a hypothetical baseline of adult responses, but they also fail to take into account the range of possible answers that may be available for such questions, once certain syntactic and lexical manipulations are accounted for. We therefore lack sufficient evidence to fault the grammar for this response pattern. This article investigates this phenomenon from a fresh methodological and theoretical perspective, uncovering a more complex picture. We show, on the one hand, that children do overproduce pair-list readings to which questions with every, in comparison to adults. On the other hand, they also “underproduce” pair-list answers in response to similar questions with each. However, children are also sensitive to the syntactic position of the quantifier in the direction expected by a subject-object asymmetry. We therefore argue that a key part of the explanation for children’s performance lies in immature lexical entries for the participating quantifiers.