Previous studies have demonstrated that verbs violating selectional constraints of their arguments elicit N400 effects in the event-related potentials (ERPs) in sentence comprehension. The present study examined brain responses to verbs violating semantic constraints specified by syntactic structures (i.e., phrasal constructions), contrasting them with those elicited by lexical–semantic violations between verbs and their arguments. The construction-based semantic violations gave rise to a posterior N400, while the lexicalbased semantic violations produced a much stronger N400 with a broader scalp distribution. These findings suggested that the integration of verb meaning with prior sentence context is influenced not only by semantic features of preceding content words with which the verb co-occurs, but also by semantic properties of the syntactic structure in which the verb appears. This study provides online evidence supporting the constructionist approaches to language, which claim that syntactic structures may have their own (abstract) meanings, independent of lexical meanings of their constituent content words. © 2007 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the Simon effect (i.e., faster responding when irrelevant stimulus location corresponds with response location than when it does not) in visual search tasks. The search items were arranged in a 4 × 4 grid, and grid locations were coded into sets of four, two involving inner columns and two involving outer columns. In experiment 1, three different types of inefficient search tasks were used. The Simon effects were shown to be larger when the target appeared in one of the outer columns than in one of the inner columns (“laterality effect”). This pattern of results was not observed when distractors were absent, suggesting that the laterality effect depends on the operation of selective attention. In experiment 2, a pop-out search task was used, and no significant effect of target location on the Simon effect was found. Interpretations of the results based on the attention-shift account and referential-coding account were discussed.

Congenitally blind adults’ performance in spatial and nonspatial peripheral auditory attention tasks was compared with that of sighted adults in a paradigm manipulating location-based and frequency-based inhibition of return concurrently. Blind study participants responded faster in spatial attention tasks (detection/localization) and slower in the nonspatial frequency discrimination task than sighted participants. Both groups, however, showed the same patterns of interaction between location-based and frequency-based inhibition of return. These results suggest that early vision deprivation enhances the function of the posterior-dorsal auditory ‘where’ pathway but impairs the function of the anterior-ventral ‘what’ pathway during peripheral auditory attention. The altered processing speed in the blind, however, is not accompanied by alteration in attentional orienting mechanisms that may be localized to higher cortices. NeuroReport 17: 1449-1452 © 2006 LippincottWilliams &Wilkins.

An ERP experiment was conducted to explore semantic and syntactic processes as well as their interplay in Chinese sentence comprehension. Participants were auditorily presented with Chinese ba sentences, which were either correct, semantically incorrect, syntactically incorrect, or both semantically and syntactically incorrect. The syntactic violation, which was created by eliminating the object-noun phrase from a preposition-object phrase structure, elicited an early starting anterior negativity which merged into a sustained negativity over anterior sites and a temporally limited centro-parietal negativity. The semantic violation elicited an early starting N400 effect. The combined violation in which the syntactic phrase structure violation and the semantic violation were crossed elicited an early staring sustained anterior negativity similar to the pure syntactic effect, and a centroparietal negativity which was more negative than those of the syntactic condition and the semantic condition. No P600 was obtained neither for the syntactic nor for the combined condition. The results suggest that the syntactic processes (at about 50 ms) appear earlier than the semantic processes (at around 150 ms). They are independent from each other in the early time window (150–250 ms) but interact in a later processing phase (250–400 ms) during Chinese ba sentence comprehension. The broadly distributed negativity, which occurred during the N400 latency range observed in the three violation conditions, is thought to reflect thematic integration processes in the sentence-final position. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This study investigated whether individuals with a high trait anxiety (HTA) rating retain attentional bias towards threatening pictures when such pictures are repeatedly presented. Subjects rated high (n = 20) and low (n = 20) on an anxiety scale participated in a forced-choice reaction time version of a modified dotprobe task. Picture pairs were presented in four exposure blocks. On each exposure, the attentional bias to the threatening pictures was measured. HTA individuals showed more selective attention to the high threatening pictures than individuals with low trait anxiety (LTA). However, HTA individuals did not maintain attentional bias. On the fourth block, the attentional bias to threatening pictures disappeared. Theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.