INVESTIGADORES
TABULLO Angel Javier
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
INFERENTIAL LEARNING OF NEW VERBAL MEANINGS: AN
Autor/es:
TABULLO, ANGEL; LOPES DA CUNHA, PAMELA; VERNIS, SERGIO; SEGURA, ENRIQUE; ZANUTTO, SILVANO; WAINSELBOIM, ALEJANDRO
Lugar:
Portland
Reunión:
Congreso; 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research; 2010
Institución organizadora:
Society for Psychophysiological Research
Resumen:
Acquisition of language in infants occurs by exposure to the linguistic context. Infants
must map word meanings associating their perceptual experience with the linguistic
input. This task appears to involve cross-situational (inferential) learning. In recent
studies adults (Yu & Smith) and infants (Smith & Yu, 2008) inferred new noun meanings
by cross-situational pairings of images and auditory non-words. In the present
work we studied if new verbal meanings could be inferred by cross-situational pairings
of observed actions with a simultaneous description in an artificial language. 19
healthy right-handed adults volunteered for the experiment. Training: 70 different
visual scenes were presented on a computer screen (two geometrical figures, one static
and the other performing one of 6 possible movements). A sentence in an artificial
language describing the scene was audio-visually presented in simultaneous. Participants
had to learn the words that denoted each of the movements. Testing: 80 new
scenes, in 40 of them the sentence presented an incorrect verb. Subjects decided
whether the sentence was correct or not by pressing two keys. EEG recording (test
phase) allowed analyzing rhythmic cortical activity. Increases in alpha power were
observed in Pz within 300 900 ms post verb presentation for both correct and incorrect
sentences (higher in incorrect sentences). Theta power decreases were observed
from 300 1200 ms in incorrect sentences only. The observed differences seem to be
related to the detection of semantic mismatch between observed action and linguistic
label.