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SUMMARY:Distinguishing two routes to silent meaning through hemodynamic an
 d electrophysiological techniques - Matt Husband (University of Oxford)
DTSTART:20130307T170000Z
DTEND:20130307T183000Z
UID:TALK41204@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Alison Biggs
DESCRIPTION:Research on the online composition of sentence meanings has ma
 de significant headway in recent years by investigating the processes that
  comprehenders use to recover silent meanings. Sentences like “The repor
 ter (1) began/(2) needed the article” both assert an implicit activity (
 e.g. writing or reading)\, and previous research has found the recovery of
  these implicit meanings is costly (McElree\, et al.\, 2001\; Traxler\, et
  al. 2002\; Delogu\, et al.\, 2010). While these assertions appear to be s
 imilar and give rise to similar processing costs\, different computations\
 nare thought to derive them: (1) requires semantic enrichment via a silent
  type-shifting operator\, while (2) requires syntactic enrichment via a si
 lent verb (Pylkkänen 2008). In this talk\, I propose that these computati
 onal differences require recruitment of different neural circuits which ha
 ve been linked to characteristic electrophysiological and hemodynamic resp
 onses. I first discuss the different neural responses that have been previ
 ously linked to semantic and syntactic processing and then report on some 
 preliminary results from an electrophysiological study and an event-relate
 d fMRI study contrasting sentences requiring semantic or syntactic enrichm
 ent with unenriched control sentences. The results of these studies sugges
 t that different neural circuits are required to process computationally d
 ifferent silent meanings\, providing further evidence that\, while similar
  on the surface\, not all implicit meanings are created alike.
LOCATION:Bowett Room\, Queens' College
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