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      Two routes to actorhood: lexicalized potency to act and identification of the actor role

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          Abstract

          The inference of causality is a crucial cognitive ability and language processing is no exception: recent research suggests that, across different languages, the human language comprehension system attempts to identify the primary causer of the state of affairs described (the “actor”) quickly and unambiguously ( Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2009). This identification can take place verb-independently based on certain prominence cues (e.g., case, word order, animacy). Here, we present two experiments demonstrating that actor potential is also encoded at the level of individual nouns (a king is a better actor than a beggar). Experiment 1 collected ratings for 180 German nouns on 12 scales defined by adjective oppositions and deemed relevant for actorhood potential. By means of structural equation modeling, an actor potential (ACT) value was calculated for each noun. Experiment 2, an event-related potential study, embedded nouns from Experiment 1 in verb-final sentences, in which they were either actors or non-actors. N400 amplitude increased with decreasing ACT values and this modulation was larger for highly frequent nouns and for actor versus non-actor nouns. We argue that potency to act is lexically encoded for individual nouns and, since it modulates the N400 even for non-actor participants, it should be viewed as a property that modulates ease of lexical access (akin, for example, to lexical frequency). We conclude that two separate dimensions of actorhood computation are crucial to language comprehension: an experience-based, lexically encoded (bottom–up) representation of actorhood potential, and a prominence-based, computational mechanism for calculating goodness-of-fit to the actor role in a particular (top–down) sentence context.

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          Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing.

          Functional dissociations within the neural basis of auditory sentence processing are difficult to specify because phonological, syntactic and semantic information are all involved when sentences are perceived. In this review I argue that sentence processing is supported by a temporo-frontal network. Within this network, temporal regions subserve aspects of identification and frontal regions the building of syntactic and semantic relations. Temporal analyses of brain activation within this network support syntax-first models because they reveal that building of syntactic structure precedes semantic processes and that these interact only during a later stage.
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            Analyzing Linguistic Data

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              Guidelines for a graph-theoretic implementation of structural equation modeling

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                30 January 2015
                2015
                : 6
                : 1
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Department of Germanic Linguistics, University of Marburg Marburg, Germany
                [2] 2Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Mainz, Germany
                [3] 3Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia
                Author notes

                Edited by: Charles Clifton Jr., University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

                Reviewed by: Mante Sjouke Nieuwland, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Spain; Jean-Pierre Koenig, University at Buffalo, USA

                *Correspondence: Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia e-mail: Ina.Bornkessel-Schlesewsky@ 123456unisa.edu.au

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00001
                4311632
                25688217
                b43af998-8161-45a2-96f6-1b703e1a5388
                Copyright © 2015 Frenzel, Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 10 October 2014
                : 02 January 2015
                Page count
                Figures: 10, Tables: 4, Equations: 0, References: 120, Pages: 21, Words: 0
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research Article

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                language comprehension,actor,causality,agency,event-related potentials,n400,extended argument dependency model

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