Semantics ePosters

Humans can make an on-the-fly rapid inference when presented with a novel word, using prior knowledge and context. While this is an everyday occurrence necessary for effective communication, the mechanisms of rapid inference and learning during reading are not well understood. One reason for this complexity is that…

Mirative markers, such as “surprisingly”, are linguistic elements that encode a violation of expectations (Delancey, 1997, 2012; Aikhenvald, 2012). Such markers are used for expectation management during communication, informing the listener about an upcoming unexpected message. Sensitivity to mirative markers relies…

Prior neuroimaging studies have shown that words associated with actions, like "grasp" and "kick," activate specific regions in the cortical motor system corresponding to the body parts involved in those actions. This activation follows the somatotopic mapping of these body parts. The variation in activation could…

Our ability to perceive speech remains resilient to variations in voice, rate, and temporal interruptions. While inference models addressed the first two [1], the computational principles by which speech understanding remains impervious to temporal restructuring are largely unexplored. Previous studies indicated…

Introduction and Objective: The hypothesis that language-cognitive system interactions play a role in understanding domain-specific semantic terms is supported by a few neurophysiological studies, mainly on the motor cortex. Our goal was to assess if visuospatial coding affects the semantic comprehension of…

Learning a word, involves mapping low-level perceptual representations of world-referents to high-level semantic representations. It is widely held that conscious access to the visual world-referents is needed to learn the meaning of words. The aim of this study was to use fMRI-based decoded neurofeedback (DecNef) to…