INCIHUSA   20883
INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS HUMANAS, SOCIALES Y AMBIENTALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Effects of stimulus format presentation during inferencial acquisition of new verbal meanings: a behavioral and Event Related Potential analysis
Autor/es:
LOPES DA CUNHA PAMELA ; SEGURA, ENRIQUE; ZANUTTO SILVANO; WAINSELBOIM ALEJANDRO
Lugar:
Buenos Aires
Reunión:
Simposio; II Simposio Franco Argentino en Neurociencias.; 2012
Institución organizadora:
LIA DEVENIR
Resumen:
First language acquisition occurs by mere exposure to the linguistic context. Infants must infer word meanings by pairing specific aspects of their perceptual experience with particular segments of the concurrent linguistic input. This requires to statistically analyze cross-situational information. Experimentally, subjects infer new noun meanings by cross-situational pairings of images and auditory non-words. Nevertheless, compared to verbs, mapping between words and experience is easier for nouns because of the greater perceptual learnability of nominal referents compared to verbal relational referents. In the present work we studied if new verbal meanings could be inferred by cross-situational pairings of observed actions and concurrent descriptions in an artificial language. Two experiments were performed to study the influence of presentation format of the linguistic input on word-referent mapping. In both experiments training consisted of 70 different visual scenes 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 presented in simultaneous, either audio-visually (Exp. 1) or auditorilly (Exp. 2). Participants had to learn which word denoted each movement. During the test stage 80 new scenes were shown, 40 of them presented a mismatch between the movement and the presented “verb”. Subjects decided on-line whether each sentence correctly described the scene. Simultaneous EEG recordings were obtained in this stage. Results showed that audiovisual presentation of sentences significantly improved performance during testing. EEG recordings showed that in Exp. 1 the appearance of a mismatch between verb and referent elicited an N400-like wave, while in Exp. 2 the same type of mismatch elicited an ELAN-like potential. This difference could be reflecting differential learning strategies during the acquisition phase of the experiments.