Dataset Information

Cognitive empathy modulates the processing of pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension.

ABSTRACT: Previous studies have shown that brain regions for mentalizing, including temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), are activated in understanding the nonliteral meaning of sentences. A different set of brain regions, including left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), is activated for dealing with pragmatic incongruence. Here we demonstrate that individuals' cognitive empathic ability modulates the brain activity underlying the processing of pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension. The lian … dou … construction in Chinese (similar to English even) normally describes an event of low expectedness; it also introduces a pragmatic scale against which the likelihood of an underspecified event can be inferred. By embedding neutral or highly likely events in the construction, we created underspecified and incongruent sentences and compared both with control sentences in which events of low expectedness were described. Imaging results showed that (i) left TPJ was activated for the underspecified sentences, and the activity in mPFC correlated with individuals' fantasizing ability and (ii) anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was activated for the incongruent sentences, and the activity in bilateral IFG correlated with individuals' perspective taking ability. These findings suggest that brain activations in making pragmatic inference and in dealing with pragmatic failure are modulated by different components of cognitive empathy.

SUBMITTER: Li S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4127016 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Cognitive empathy modulates the processing of pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension.

Li Sai S Jiang Xiaoming X Yu Hongbo H Zhou Xiaolin X

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 20130726 8

Previous studies have shown that brain regions for mentalizing, including temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), are activated in understanding the nonliteral meaning of sentences. A different set of brain regions, including left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), is activated for dealing with pragmatic incongruence. Here we demonstrate that individuals' cognitive empathic ability modulates the brain activity underlying the processing of pragmatic constraints during sente ...[more]

PMID: 23893849

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Project description:Sentence comprehension involves timely computing different types of relations between its verbs and noun arguments, such as morphosyntactic, semantic, and thematic relations. Here, we used EEG technique to investigate the potential differences in thematic role computing and lexical-semantic relatedness processing during on-line sentence comprehension, and the interaction between these two types of processes. Mandarin Chinese sentences were used as materials. The basic structure of those sentences is "Noun+Verb+'le'+a two-character word", with the Noun being the initial argument. The verb disambiguates the initial argument as an agent or a patient. Meanwhile, the initial argument and the verb are highly or lowly semantically related. The ERPs at the verbs revealed that: relative to the agent condition, the patient condition evoked a larger N400 only when the argument and verb were lowly semantically related; however, relative to the high-relatedness condition, the low-relatedness condition elicited a larger N400 regardless of the thematic relation; although both thematic role variation and semantic relatedness variation elicited N400 effects, the N400 effect elicited by the former was broadly distributed and reached maximum over the frontal electrodes, and the N400 effect elicited by the latter had a posterior distribution. In addition, the brain oscillations results showed that, although thematic role variation (patient vs. agent) induced power decreases around the beta frequency band (15-30 Hz), semantic relatedness variation (low-relatedness vs. high-relatedness) induced power increases in the theta frequency band (4-7 Hz). These results suggested that, in the sentence context, thematic role computing is modulated by the semantic relatedness between the verb and its argument; semantic relatedness processing, however, is in some degree independent from the thematic relations. Moreover, our results indicated that, during on-line sentence comprehension, thematic role computing and semantic relatedness processing are mediated by distinct neural systems.

Dataset Information

Cognitive empathy modulates the processing of pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension.

Publications

Cognitive empathy modulates the processing of pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension.

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