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Neural response to complexity of mappings between meaning, syntax, and form in language production
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Poster E10 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Alexandra Krauska1, Ellen Lau1; 1University of Maryland
A great deal of research has focused on the processing of syntactic complexity, as well as the complexity of conceptual/semantic representations and phonological representations. However, there is another kind of complexity that is not often considered, in the mappings between meaning and syntax and between syntax and form. For example, simple transitive verb phrases like “eat an apple” involve a verb and an object which can be mapped to their meanings fully transparently. In contrast, an idiom like “hit the sack” (go to sleep) involves one conceptual representation that maps onto a complex syntactic structure, while a phrase like “take a nap” involves a similar kind of syntactic and conceptual representation (sleeping), but the object is semantically transparent and can be substituted by a pronoun (John took a nap yesterday, and took one again today; c.f., * Mary hit the sack yesterday, and she hit one again today). Given that natural language has many examples of non-compositionality such as this, we also need to consider the mapping processes that are able to generate these kinds of utterances. How is the mapping process affected by factors such as the number of actions or entities involved in the conceptual representation, the size and complexity of the syntactic representation, and the transparency of the relationship between those two representations? Furthermore, in the mapping between syntax and form, there can also be a great deal of variability in how a single syntactic object is pronounced based on its syntactic context, constituting another kind of mapping complexity. Are all alternatives exhaustively considered when calculating the form of the utterance? To investigate the role of mapping complexity - independent of syntactic complexity - in modulating neural activity during language production, we will conduct an MEG experiment in which participants produce sentences which have the same basic syntactic structure ([V NP]), but which vary in the complexity of the meaning-syntax mapping and in the syntax-form mapping, as in the examples above. Before the experiment, participants will be familiarized with phrasal descriptions of a series of images, all with the same basic structure (“take a nap”, “eat the apple”, etc.). During the experiment, the images will be presented along with a question such as “What did John do yesterday?”, and the participants will prepare a response using the correct phrase label properly inflected for tense (“he took a nap”). Our analysis will focus on the neural activity during the pre-articulation period when the sentence structure is being planned. This proposed study will test the following predictions from Krauska & Lau (2023): 1) greater complexity in the meaning-syntax mapping should incur greater neural activity early in the production process (between approximately 200ms and 350ms post stimulus onset, consistent with stages of conceptual preparation and morphosyntactic composition observed by Sahin et al (2009)), localized to the middle temporal lobe; 2) greater complexity in the syntax-form mapping should incur greater neural activity later in the production process, localized to superior temporal lobe structures and the frontal lobe.
Topic Areas: Language Production,