Highlighting relevant information in a discourse context is a major aim of spoken language communication. Prosodic cues such as focal prominences are used to fulfill this aim through the pragmatic function of prosody. To determine whether listeners make on-line use of focal prominences to build coherent representations of the informational structure of the utterances, we used the brain event-re...

Viewed as “father of the new generation postmodernism writers”, Donald Barthelme ranks top among most influential writers. “The School” is one his postmodern short stories. With application innovative genre, style and language, such writing techniques collage fragmentation, juxtaposes intentionally incongruous elements contemporary language culture, creating an atmosphere both humorous unsettli...

Human beings are not only intelligent, but also comprise a social species capable of extensive cooperation. Moreover, they collaborate. Individual human efforts segregate into incongruous silos multimodal distributions expression and low performance. A psychological, economic mathematical review indicates that collaboration can integrate mental facilities congruent unimodal normal distribution ...

Behavioral research consistently shows that congruous events, that is, events whose constituent elements match along some specific dimension, are better remembered than incongruous events. Although it has been speculated that this "congruency subsequent memory effect" (cSME) results from enhanced semantic elaboration, empirical evidence for this account is lacking. Here, we report a set of beha...

Developmental dyslexia is a specific disorder of reading acquisition characterized by a phonological core deficit. Sentence reading is also impaired in dyslexic readers, but whether semantic processing deficits contribute is unclear. Combining spatially and temporally sensitive neuroimaging techniques to focus on semantic processing can provide a more comprehensive characterization of sentence ...

Grapheme-color synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which particular graphemes, such as the numeral 9, automatically induce the simultaneous perception of a particular color, such as the color red. To test whether the concurrent color sensations in graphemecolor synaesthesia are treated as meaningful stimuli, we recorded event-related brain potentials as 8 synaesthetes and 8 matched con...

This study investigated whether adding auditory angular and curved sounds to tactile angle curve shapes – one unspecified sound shape positively influences the accuracy exploration time in recognising angles curves when experienced inexperienced using haptic touch. A within-participant experiment was conducted, with two groups of participants: touch, conditions: congruous (e.g., sound) incongru...

The idea that extensive musical training can influence processing in cognitive domains other than music has received considerable attention from the educational system and the media. Here we analyzed behavioral data and recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 8-year-old children to test the hypothesis that musical training facilitates pitch processing not only in music but also in l...

Whether syntactic and semantic processes during sentence comprehension follow strict sets of rules or succumb to context-dependent heuristics was studied by recording event-related potentials in a dual-task design. In one condition, sentence-extraneous acoustic material was either semantically congruent or incongruent relative to an adjective in the visually presented sentence, the latter being...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 26 scalp sites were used to investigate whether or not and, if so, the extent to which the brain processes subserving the understanding of imageable written words and line drawings are identical. Sentences were presented one word at a time to 28 undergraduates for comprehension. Each sentence ended with either a written word (regular sentences) or with...