The wrong horse was bet on: the effects of argument structure versus argument adjacency on the processing of idiomatic sentences.

Introduction: Psycholinguistic research remains puzzled about the circumstances under which syntactically transformed idioms keep their figurative meaning. There is an abundance of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies that have examined which factors may determine why some idioms are more syntactically fixed than others, including transparency, compositionality, and syntactic frozenness; however, they have returned inconclusive, sometimes even conflicting, results. This is the first study to examine argument structure (i.e., the number of arguments a verb takes) and argument adjacency (i.e., the position of the critical arguments relative to the verb) and their effects on the processing of idiomatic and literal sentences in German. Our results suggest that neither the traditional models of idiom processing (according to which idioms are stored as fixed entries) nor more recent hybrid theories (which concede some compositional handling in addition to a fixed entry) adequately account for the effects of argument structure or argument adjacency. Therefore, this study challenges existing models of idiom processing. Methods: In two sentence-completion experiments, participants listened to idiomatic and literal sentences in both active and passive voice without the sentence-final verb. They indicated which of three visually-presented verbs best completed the sentence. We manipulated the factor argument structure within experiments and argument adjacency across experiments. In Experiment 1, passivized three-argument sentences had the critical argument adjacent to the verb while two-argument sentences had the critical argument non-adjacent to the verb, and vice versa in Experiment 2. Results: In both experiments, voice interacted with argument structure. Active sentences-both literal and idiomatic-showed equivalent processing of two- and three-argument sentences. However, passive sentences returned contrasting effects. In Experiment 1, three-argument sentences were processed faster than two-argument sentences and vice versa in Experiment 2. This pattern corresponds to faster processing when critical arguments are adjacent than non-adjacent. Discussion: The results point to the dominant role of argument adjacency over the number of arguments in the processing of syntactically transformed sentences. Regarding idiom processing, we conclude that the adjacency of the verb to its critical arguments determines whether passivized idioms keep their figurative meaning and present the implications of this finding for relevant models of idiom processing.

Morphological processing in the brain: The good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding).

There is considerable behavioral evidence that morphologically complex words such as 'tax-able' and 'kiss-es' are processed and represented combinatorially. In other words, they are decomposed into their constituents 'tax' and '-able' during comprehension (reading or listening), and producing them might also involve on-the-spot combination of these constituents (especially for inflections). However, despite increasing amount of neurocognitive research, the neural mechanisms underlying these processes are still not fully understood. The purpose of this critical review is to offer a comprehensive overview on the state-of-the-art of the research on the neural mechanisms of morphological processing. In order to take into account all types of complex words, we include findings on inflected, derived, and compound words presented both visually and aurally. More specifically, we cover a wide range of electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG and MEG, respectively) as well as structural/functional magnetic resonance imaging (s/fMRI) studies that focus on morphological processing. We present the findings with respect to the temporal course and localization of morphologically complex word processing. We summarize the observed findings, their interpretations with respect to current psycholinguistic models, and discuss methodological approaches as well as their possible limitations.

'Understanding' differs between English and German: Capturing systematic language differences of complex words.

In morphological processing, research has repeatedly found different priming effects by English and German native speakers in the overt priming paradigm. In English, priming effects were found for word pairs with a morphological and semantic relation (SUCCESSFUL-success), but not for pairs without a semantic relation (SUCCESSOR-success). By contrast, morphological priming effects in German occurred for pairs both with a semantic relation (AUFSTEHEN-stehen, 'stand up'-'stand') and without (VERSTEHEN-stehen, 'understand'-'stand'). These behavioural differences have been taken to indicate differential language processing and memory representations in these languages. We examine whether these behavioural differences can be explained with differences in the language structure between English and German. To this end, we employed new developments in distributional semantics as a computational method to obtain both observed and compositional representations for transparent and opaque complex word meanings, that can in turn be used to quantify the degree of semantic predictability of the morphological system of a language. We compared the similarities between transparent and opaque words and their stems, and observed a difference between German and English, with German showing a higher morphological systematicity. The present results indicate that the investigated cross-linguistic effect can be attributed to quantitatively-characterized differences in the speakers' language experience, as approximated by linguistic corpora.

Psycholinguistic measures for German verb pairs: Semantic transparency, semantic relatedness, verb family size, and age of reading acquisition.

A central issue in visual and spoken word recognition is the lexical representation of complex words-in particular, whether the lexical representation of complex words depends on semantic transparency: Is a complex verb like understand lexically represented as a whole word or via its base stand, given that its meaning is not transparent from the meanings of its parts? To study this issue, a number of stimulus characteristics are of interest that are not yet available in public databases of German. This article provides semantic association ratings, lexical paraphrases, and vector-based similarity measures for German verbs, measuring (a) the semantic transparency between 1,259 complex verbs and their bases, (b) the semantic relatedness between 1,109 verb pairs with 432 different bases, and (c) the vector-based similarity measures of 846 verb pairs. Additionally, we include the verb regularity of all verbs and two counts of verb family size for 184 base verbs, as well as estimates of age of acquisition and age of reading for 200 verbs. Together with lemma and type frequencies from public lexical databases, all measures can be downloaded along with this article. Statistical analyses indicate that verb family size, morphological complexity, frequency, and verb regularity affect the semantic transparency and relatedness ratings as well as the age of acquisition estimates, indicating that these are relevant variables in psycholinguistic experiments. Although lexical paraphrases, vector-based similarity measures, and semantic association ratings may deliver complementary information, the interrater reliability of the semantic association ratings for each verb pair provides valuable information when selecting stimuli for psycholinguistic experiments.

MultiPic: A standardized set of 750 drawings with norms for six European languages.

Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited. Therefore, we constructed a new set of 750 colored pictures of concrete concepts. This set, MultiPic, constitutes a new valuable tool for cognitive scientists investigating language, visual perception, memory and/or attention in monolingual or multilingual populations. Importantly, the MultiPic databank has been normed in six different European languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and German). All stimuli and norms are freely available at http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic .

Take a stand on understanding: electrophysiological evidence for stem access in German complex verbs.

The lexical representation of complex words in Indo-European languages is generally assumed to depend on semantic compositionality. This study investigated whether semantically compositional and noncompositional derivations are accessed via their constituent units or as whole words. In an overt visual priming experiment (300 ms stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA), event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded for verbs (e.g., ziehen, "pull") that were preceded by purely semantically related verbs (e.g., zerren, "drag"), by morphologically related and semantically compositional verbs (e.g., zuziehen, "pull together"), by morphologically related and semantically noncompositional verbs (e.g., erziehen, "educate"), by orthographically similar verbs (e.g., zielen, "aim"), or by unrelated verbs (e.g., tarnen, "mask"). Compared to the unrelated condition, which evoked an N400 effect with the largest amplitude at centro-parietal recording sites, the N400 was reduced in all other conditions. The rank order of N400 amplitudes turned out as follows: morphologically related and semantically compositional ≈ morphologically related and semantically noncompositional < purely semantically related < orthographically similar < unrelated. Surprisingly, morphologically related primes produced similar N400 modulations-irrespective of their semantic compositionality. The control conditions with orthographic similarity confirmed that these morphological effects were not the result of a simple form overlap between primes and targets. Our findings suggest that the lexical representation of German complex verbs refers to their base form, regardless of meaning compositionality. Theories of the lexical representation of German words need to incorporate this aspect of language processing in German.

Electrophysiological evidence for the continuous processing of linguistic categories of regular and irregular verb inflection in German.

A central question concerning word recognition is whether linguistic categories are processed in continuous or categorical ways, in particular, whether regular and irregular inflection is stored and processed by the same or by distinct systems. Here, we contribute to this issue by contrasting regular (regular stem, regular suffix) with semi-irregular (regular stem, irregular suffix) and irregular (irregular stem, irregular suffix) participle formation in a visual priming experiment on German verb inflection. We measured ERPs and RTs and manipulated the inflectional and meaning relatedness between primes and targets. Inflected verb targets (e.g., leite, "head") were preceded either by themselves, by their participle (geleitet, "headed"), by a semantically related verb in the same inflection as the target (führe, "guide") or in the participle form (geführt, "guided"), or by an unrelated verb in the same inflection (nenne, "name"). Results showed that behavioral and ERP priming effects were gradually affected by verb regularity. Regular participles produced a widely distributed frontal and parietal effect, irregular participles produced a small left parietal effect, and semi-irregular participles yielded an effect in-between these two in terms of amplitude and topography. The behavioral and ERP effects further showed that the priming because of participles differs from that because of semantic associates for all verb types. These findings argue for a single processing system that generates participle priming effects for regular, semi-irregular, and irregular verb inflection. Together, the findings provide evidence that the linguistic categories of verb inflection are processed continuously. We present a single-system model that can adequately account for such graded effects.

Phonological and orthographic visual word recognition in the two cerebral hemispheres: Evidence from Hebrew.

Studies on the cerebral mechanisms of reading have mostly used Latin-based writing systems and assume that the left, but not the right, cerebral hemisphere is capable of phonological processing. The present study used Hebrew as the test language to examine the effects of phonological and orthographic information in the two hemispheres. In unvoweled Hebrew script, words are read via consonant information alone. We used two naming tasks with an interference paradigm, where phonemically, orthographically, and figurally incorrect vowel information conflicted with the consonant information of words presented in the left, right, or central visual fields. Interference patterns indicated that the left hemisphere automatically transforms graphemes into phonemes (Experiments 1 and 2), whereas the right hemisphere processes vowel diacritics as visual objects (Experiment 1), although it possesses some phonological categories (Experiment 2). The significance of these findings for models of visual word recognition in the cerebral hemispheres is discussed.