User Tools
Sidebar
Harm Brouwer:
The Electrophysiology of Language Comprehension: A Neurocomputational Model
One decade ago, researchers using event-related brain potential (ERP) measurements stumbled upon what looked like a Semantic Illusion in language comprehension: Semantically anomalous, but otherwise well-formed sentences did not affect the meaning-related N400 component, but instead increased the amplitude of the structure-related P600 component. This finding spawned five new models of language comprehension, all of which claim that instead of a single comprehension process, there are two or even more separate processing streams, one of which is not driven by structure, but by word meaning alone. In this talk, I will argue that there is a much simpler way to account for these data, and I will present evidence from neurocomputional simulations showing that this alternative explanation is able to predict all relevant ERP patterns found in the literature. In light of these results, I will lay out what I believe to be the most important future directions for the neurocomputional modeling of language comprehension.
