Francesca Delogu

Saarland University | UKS · Language Science & Technology

Intensional verbs like want select for clausal complements expressing propositions, though they can be perfectly natural when combined with a direct object. There are two interesting phenomena associated with intensional transitive expressions. First, it has been suggested that their interpretation requires enriched compositional operations, simila...

Previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have presented evidence suggesting that coercion expressions (e.g., began the book) are more difficult to process than control expressions like read the book. While this processing cost has been attributed to a specific coercion operation for recovering an event-sense of the complement (e.g., beg...

When reading a text describing an everyday activity, comprehenders build a model of the situation described that includes prior knowledge of the entities, locations, and sequences of actions that typically occur within the event. Previous work has demonstrated that such knowledge guides the processing of incoming information by making event boundar...

Questions under Discussion (QUDs) have been suggested to influence the integration of individual utterances into a discourse-level representation. Previous work has shown that processing ungrammatical ellipses is facilitated when the elided material addresses an implicit QUD raised through a nonactuality implicature (NAIs). It is not clear, however...

The functional interpretation of two salient language-sensitive ERP components – the N400 and the P600 – remains a matter of debate. Prominent alternative accounts link the N400 to processes related to lexical retrieval, semantic integration, or both, while the P600 has been associated with syntactic reanalysis or, alternatively, to semantic integr...

The integration of word meaning into an unfolding utterance representation is a core operation of incremental language comprehension. There is considerable debate, however, as to which component of the ERP signal—the N400 or the P600—directly reflects integrative processes, with far reaching consequences for the temporal organization and architectu...

While the N400 and P600 are the most salient ERP indices of language processing, it remains under debate which component indexes integration processes (e.g., Brouwer et al., 2017, Rabovsky et al., 2018). A recent study (Aurnhammer et al., 2021) demonstrated their differential sensitivity to how associated a word is to the context (N400 alone) versu...

Electrophysiological studies suggest that situational event knowledge plays an important role in language processing, but often fail to distinguish whether observed effects are driven by combinatorial expectations, or simple association with the context. In two ERP experiments, participants read short discourses describing ongoing events. We manipu...

In referential communication, Grice's Maxim of Quantity is thought to imply that utterances conveying unnecessary information should incur comprehension difficulties. There is, however, considerable evidence that speakers frequently encode redundant information in their referring expressions, raising the question as to whether such overspecificatio...

Expectation-based theories of language processing, such as Surprisal theory, are supported by evidence of anticipation effects in both behavioural and neurophysiological measures. Online measures of language processing, however, are known to be influenced by factors such as lexical association that are distinct from—but often confounded with—expect...

The problem of spatiotemporal overlap between event-related potential (ERP) components is generally acknowledged in language research. However, its implications for the interpretation of experimental results are often overlooked. In a previous experiment on the functional interpretation of the N400 and P600, it was argued that a P600 effect to impl...

While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being a highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as discourse connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question...

Expectation-based theories of language comprehension, in particular Surprisal Theory, go a long way in accounting for the behavioral correlates of word-by-word processing difficulty, such as reading times. An open question, however, is in which component(s) of the Event-Related brain Potential (ERP) signal Surprisal is reflected, and how these elec...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide a multidimensional and real-time window into neurocognitive processing. The typical Waveform-based Component Structure (WCS) approach to ERPs assesses the modulation pattern of components - systematic, reoccurring voltage fluctuations reflecting specific computational operations - by looking at mean amplitude...

Contrary to the Gricean maxims of Quantity (Grice 1975), it has been repeatedly shown that speakers often include redundant information in their utterances (over- specifications). Previous research on referential communication has long debated whether this redundancy is the result of speaker-internal or addressee-oriented processes, while it is als...

This paper presents the second release of arrau , a multigenre corpus of anaphoric information created over 10 years to provide data for the next generation of coreference/anaphora resolution systems combining different types of linguistic and world knowledge with advanced discourse modeling supporting rich linguistic annotations. The distinguishin...

Psycholinguistic research has established that event knowledge influences a word's processing difficulty. Less clear, is the precise nature of this influence as indexed by ERPs: Some studies attribute it to semantic expectancy, reflected in N400 amplitude (Metusalem et al., 2012), while others attribute it to integration difficulties reflected in P...

The N400 and P600 are the two most salient language-sensitive components of the Event-Related Potential (ERP) signal. Yet, their functional interpretation is still a matter of debate. Traditionally, the N400 is taken to reflect processes of semantic integration while the P600 is linked to structural reanalysis [1,2]. These views have, however, been...

Previous ERP research has extensively studied the influence of linguistic context on language processing, demonstrating that the semantic expectedness of a word is negatively correlated with N400 amplitude (Kutas & Hillyard, 1984). Such findings have traditionally been interpreted as indexing compositional semantic integration, but can often be exp...

Previous research has shown that the semantic expectedness of a word – as established by the linguistic context – is negatively correlated with N400 amplitude. While such evidence has been used to argue that the N400 indexes semantic integration processes, findings can often be explained in terms of facilitated lexical retrieval, which, among other...

In online language comprehension, the N400 component of the Event-Related Potentials (ERP) signal is inversely proportional to semantic expectancy (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). Among other factors, a word’s expectancy is influenced by both lexical-level (Bentin et al., 1985) as well as event-level (Metusalem et al., 2012) priming: the N400 amplitude...

In situated communication, reference to an entity in the shared visual context can be established using either an expression that conveys precise (minimally specified) or redundant (over-specified) information. There is, however, a long-lasting debate in psycholinguistics concerning whether the latter hinders referential processing. We present evid...

Over-specifications (OS) are expressions that provide more information than minimally required for the identification of a referent, thereby violating Grice’s 2nd Quantity Maxim. In recent years, psycholinguistic research has tried to test the empirical validity of Grice’s Maxim, resulting in conflicting findings. That is, there is evidence both th...

While the influence of linguistic context on language processing has been extensively studied, less is known about the mental representation, structure and use of so-called script knowledge. Scripts are defined as a person’s knowledge about temporally and causally ordered sequences of events. They are often activated by linguistic context, but othe...

Violations of the Maxims of Quantity occur when utterances provide more (over- specified) or less (under-specified) information than strictly required for referent identification. While behavioural data suggest that under-specified (US) expressions lead to comprehension difficulty and communicative failure, there is no consensus as to whether over-...

The Live Memories corpus is an Italian corpus annotated for anaphoric relations. The corpus includes manual annotated information about morphosyntactic agreement, anaphoricity, and semantic class of the NPs. For the annotation of the anaphoric links the corpus takes into account specific phenomena of the Italian language like incorporated clitics a...

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, th...

This paper presents two reading experiments investigating reference processes in intensional contexts. Both studies employ sentence pairs containing a definite NP whose potential antecedent is embedded in an intensional context, where definite anaphora is not supported. Previous work on this topic has shown that the interpretation of such sentences...