Evoked potentials correlates of linguistic cross-situational associations in the absence of behavioral learning

LOPES DA CUNHA PAMELA; KACZER LAURA; ZANUTTO SILVANO; SEGURA ENRIQUE; WAINSELBOIM, ALEJANDRO

New Orleans

Congreso; 52nd Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research; 2012

SOCIETY FOR PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

First language acquisition occurs by exposure to the linguistic context. Infants must infer word meanings by pairing specific aspects of their perceptual experience with segments of the concurrent linguistic input. This requires to statistically analyze cross-situational information. Under experimental conditions, subjects infer new noun and verbal meanings by conscious cross-situational pairing of images and auditory non-words, when given an explicit instruction to learn the new terms. In this work we studied if new verbal meanings could be learned implicitly, i.e. in the absence of intention to learn. 22 right-handed adults participated in the experiment. The first stage presented 70 different visual scenes on a computer screen (two geometrical figures, one static and the other performing one of 6 possible movements). Simultaneously, a sentence describing the scene was presented auditorilly in an artificial language. Participants were told not to pay attention to the sentences and concentrate on classifying the movements as ?horizontal? or ?non-horizontal? by pressing two keys. In the test stage 80 new scenes were shown, 40 of them with a mismatch between movement and the presented ?verb?. Subjects were told to decide on-line if each sentence correctly described the scene, while their EEG activity was recorded. Subjects were unable to classify the sentences as correct or not. Yet, the appearance of a mismatch between verb and referent elicited an ELAN-like potential, revealing an association between visual and linguistic information at the neurobiologícal level.