Gina Kuperberg

Tufts University | Tufts · Department of Psychology

We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time-course and localization of evoked activity produced by expected, unexpected plausible, and implausible words during incremental language comprehension. We suggest that the full pattern of results can be explained within a hierarchical predictive coding framew...

The N400 event-related brain potential is elicited by each word in a sentence and offers an important window into the mechanisms of real-time language comprehension. Since the 1980s, studies investigating the N400 have expanded our understanding of how bottom-up linguistic inputs interact with top-down contextual constraints. More recently, a growi...

In people with schizophrenia and related disorders, impairments in communication and social functioning can negatively impact social interactions and quality of life. In the present study, we investigated the cognitive basis of a specific aspect of linguistic communication—lexical alignment—in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. We prob...

During language comprehension, we routinely use information from the prior context to help identify the meaning of individual words. While measures of online processing difficulty, such as reading times, are strongly influenced by contextual predictability, there is disagreement about the mechanisms underlying this lexical predictability effect, wi...

It has been proposed that abnormalities in probabilistic prediction and dynamic belief updating explain the multiple features of schizophrenia. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to ask whether these abnormalities can account for the well-established reduction in semantic priming observed in schizophrenia under nonautomatic conditions. We i...

It has been proposed that people can generate probabilistic predictions at multiple levels of representation during language comprehension. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG), in combination with representational similarity analysis, to seek neural evidence for the prediction of animacy features. In two studies, M...

During language comprehension, online neural processing is strongly influenced by the constraints of the prior context. While the N400 ERP response (300-500ms) is known to be sensitive to a word’s semantic predictability, less is known about a set of late positive-going ERP responses (600-1000ms) that can be elicited when an incoming word violates...

I cannot remember the details of each column but the ones most important are the sentence, column ‘cat’ (NAT=natural, UNN=unnatural), and the columns AT_tru through NT_nat give the mean ratings for truth value (tru) and naturalness (nat) for the affirmative/negative, true/false conditions.

It has been proposed that hierarchical prediction is a fundamental computational principle underlying neurocognitive processing. Here, we ask whether the brain engages distinct neurocognitive mechanisms in response to inputs that fulfill versus violate strong predictions at different levels of representation during language comprehension. Participa...

ERP studies produce large spatiotemporal data sets. These rich data sets are key to enabling us to understand cognitive and neural processes. However, they also present a massive multiple comparisons problem, potentially leading to a large number of studies with false positive effects (a high Type I error rate). Standard approaches to ERP statistic...

It has been proposed that people can generate probabilistic predictions at multiple levels of representation during language comprehension. We used Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Electroencephalography (EEG), in combination with Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), to seek neural evidence for the prediction of animacy features. In two stud...

When semantic information is activated by a context prior to new bottom-up input (i.e. when a word is predicted), semantic processing of that incoming word is typically facilitated, attenuating the amplitude of the N400 event related potential (ERP) - a direct neural measure of semantic processing. N400 modulation is observed even when the context...

A large literature in social neuroscience has associated the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) with the processing of self-related information. However, only recently have social neuroscience studies begun to consider the large behavioral literature showing a strong self-positivity bias, and these studies have mostly focused on its correlates during...

Event-related potential (ERP) studies produce large spatiotemporal datasets. These rich datasets are key to the ability of ERP to help us understand cognition and neural processes. However, they can also present a massive multiple comparisons problem, leading to a high Type I error rate. Standard approaches to statistical analysis, which average ov...

It has been hypothesized that schizophrenia is characterized by overly broad automatic activity within lexico-semantic networks. We used two complementary neuroimaging techniques, Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), in combination with a highly automatic indirect semantic priming paradigm, to spatiotempora...

Background The visual system is recognized as an important site of pathology and dysfunction in schizophrenia. In this study, we evaluated different visual perceptual functions in patients with psychotic disorders using a potentially clinically applicable task battery and assessed their relationship with symptom severity in patients, and with schiz...

Hierarchical prediction has been proposed as a fundamental computational principle underlying neurocognitive processing. Here we ask whether the brain engages distinct neurocognitive mechanisms in response to inputs that fulfill versus violate strong predictions at different levels of representation during language comprehension. Participants read...

Background People with schizophrenia process language in unusual ways, but the causes of these abnormalities are unclear. In particular, it has proven difficult to empirically disentangle explanations based on impairments in the top-down processing of higher level information from those based on the bottom-up processing of lower level information....

Saccadic eye movements are an inherent component of natural reading, yet their contribution to information processing at subsequent fixation remains elusive. Here we use anatomically-constrained magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine cortical activity following saccades as healthy human subjects engaged in a one-back word recognition task. This ac...

Saccadic eye movements are an inherent component of natural reading, yet their contribution to information processing at subsequent fixation remains elusive. Here we use anatomically-constrained magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine cortical activity following saccades as healthy human subjects engaged in a one-back word recognition task. This ac...

When semantic information is activated by a context prior to new bottom-up input (i.e. when a word is predicted), semantic processing of that incoming word is typically facilitated, attenuating the amplitude of the N400 event related potential (ERP) – a direct neural measure of semantic processing. This N400 modulation is observed even when the con...

The extent to which language processing involves prediction of upcoming inputs remains a question of ongoing debate. One important data point comes from DeLong et al. (2005) who reported that an N400-like event-related potential correlated with a probabilistic index of upcoming input. This result is often cited as evidence for gradient probabilisti...

Probabilistic prediction plays a crucial role in language comprehension. When predictions are fulfilled, the resulting facilitation allows for fast, efficient processing of ambiguous, rapidly-unfolding input; when predictions are not fulfilled, the resulting error signal allows us to adapt to broader statistical changes in this input. We used funct...

In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how dimensions of emotion – valence and arousal – influence different stages of word processing under different task demands. In two experiments, two groups of participants viewed the same single emotional and neutral words while carrying out different tasks. In both experiments, val...

Since the early 2000s, several event-related potential studies have challenged the assumption that we always use syntactic contextual information to influence semantic processing of incoming words, as reflected by the N400 component. One approach for explaining these findings is to posit distinct semantic and syntactic processing mechanisms, each w...

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the interactions between task, emotion, and contextual self-relevance on processing words in social vignettes. Participants read scenarios that were in either third person (other-relevant) or second person (self-relevant) and we recorded ERPs to a neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant critical word. In...

Language and thought dysfunction are central to the schizophrenia syndrome. They are evident in the major symptoms of psychosis itself, particularly as disorganized language output (positive thought disorder) and auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), and they also manifest as abnormalities in both high-level semantic and contextual processing and...

We consider several key aspects of prediction in language comprehension: its computational nature, the representational level(s) at which we predict, whether we use higher-level representations to predictively pre-activate lower level representations, and whether we “commit” in any way to our predictions, beyond pre-activation. We argue that the bu...

Prediction or expectancy is thought to play an important role in both music and language processing. However, prediction is currently studied independently in the two domains, limiting research on relations between predictive mechanisms in music and language. One limitation is a difference in how expectancy is quantified. In language, expectancy is...

The arcuate fasciculus (AF) in the human brain has asymmetric structural properties. However, the topographic organization of the asymmetric AF projections to the cortex and its relevance to cortical function remain unclear. Here we mapped the posterior projections of the human AF in the inferior parietal and lateral temporal cortices using surface...

In two ERP experiments, we asked whether comprehenders used the concessive connective, even so, to predict upcoming events. Participants read coherent and incoherent scenarios, with and without even so, e.g. "Elizabeth had a history exam on Monday. She took the test and aced/failed it. (Even so), she went home and celebrated wildly.", as they rated...

A large body of social psychological research suggests that we think quite positively of ourselves, often unrealistically so. Research on this "self-positivity bias" has relied mainly on self-report and behavioral measures, but these can suffer from a number of problems including confounds that arise from the desire to present oneself well. What ha...

Although there is broad agreement that top-down expectations can facilitate lexical-semantic processing, the mechanisms driving these effects are still unclear. In particular, while previous electroencephalography (EEG) research has demonstrated a reduction in the N400 response to words in a supportive context, it is often challenging to dissociate...

Constituent structure has long been established as a central feature of human language. Analogous to how syntax organizes words in sentences, a narrative grammar organizes sequential images into hierarchic constituents. Here we show that the brain draws upon this constituent structure to comprehend wordless visual narratives. We recorded neural res...

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with processing light verb constructions such as “give a kiss”. These constructions consist of a semantically underspecified light verb (“give”) and an event nominal that contributes most of the meaning and also activates an argument structure of its own...

The verb "pounce" describes a single, near-instantaneous event. Yet, we easily understand that, "For several minutes the cat pounced…" describes a situation in which multiple pounces occurred, although this interpretation is not overtly specified by the sentence's syntactic structure or by any of its individual words-a phenomenon known as "aspectua...

A core property of human semantic processing is the rapid, facilitatory influence of prior input on extracting the meaning of what comes next, even under conditions of minimal awareness. Previous work has shown a number of neurophysiological indices of this facilitation, but the mapping between time course and localization-critical for separating a...

Words that are semantically congruous with their preceding discourse context are easier to process than words that are semantically incongruous with their context. This facilitation of semantic processing is reflected by an attenuation of the N400 event-related potential (ERP). We asked whether this was true of emotional words in emotional contexts...

When a word is preceded by a supportive context such as a semantically associated word or a strongly constraining sentence frame, the N400 component of the ERP is reduced in amplitude. An ongoing debate is the degree to which this reduction reflects a passive spread of activation across long-term semantic memory representations as opposed to specif...

We aimed to determine whether semantic relatedness between an incoming word and its preceding context can override expectations based on two types of stored knowledge: real-world knowledge about the specific events and states conveyed by a verb, and the verb's broader selection restrictions on the animacy of its argument. We recorded event-related...

Accurately communicating self-relevant and emotional information is a vital function of language, but we have little idea about how these factors impact normal discourse comprehension. In an event-related potential (ERP) study, we fully crossed self-relevance and emotion in a discourse context. Two-sentence social vignettes were presented either in...

We measured Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and naming times to picture targets preceded by masked words (stimulus onset asynchrony: 80 ms) that shared one of three different types of relationship with the names of the pictures: (1) Identity related, in which the prime was the name of the picture ("socks" - ), (2) Phonemic Onset related, in which t...

Active reading requires coordination between frequent eye movements (saccades) and short fixations in text. Yet, the impact of saccades on word processing remains unknown, as neuroimaging studies typically employ constant eye fixation. Here we investigate eye-movement effects on word recognition processes in healthy human subjects using anatomicall...

Just as syntax differentiates coherent sentences from scrambled word strings, the comprehension of sequential images must also use a cognitive system to distinguish coherent narrative sequences from random strings of images. We conducted experiments analogous to two classic studies of language processing to examine the contributions of narrative st...

writing this chapter on an aging Sony notebook computer with a sticky Q key that I bought six years ago) is a linear sequence of words. But in order to extract the intended meaning, the reader must combine the words in just the right way. That much is obvious. What is not obvious is how we do that in real time, as we read or listen to a sentence (s...

Animacy is known to play an important role in language processing and production, but debate remains as to how it exerts its effects: 1) through links to syntactic ordering, 2) through inherent differences between animate and inanimate entities in their salience/lexico-semantic accessibility, 3) through links to specific thematic roles. We contrast...

Just as syntax differentiates coherent sentences from scrambled word strings, sequential images must also use a cognitive system to distinguish coherent narratives from random strings of images. We conducted experiments analogous to two classic psycholinguistic studies to examine structure and semantics in sequential images. We compared Normal comi...

The present study investigated the contribution of lexico-semantic associations to impairments in establishing reference in schizophrenia. We examined event-related potentials as schizophrenia patients and healthy, demographically matched controls read five-sentence scenarios. Sentence 4 introduced a noun that referred back to three possible refere...

In two event-related potential (ERP) experiments, we determined to what extent Grice's maxim of informativeness as well as pragmatic ability contributes to the incremental build-up of sentence meaning, by examining the impact of underinformative versus informative scalar statements (e.g. "Some people have lungs/pets, and…") on the N400 event-relate...

This is the second of two articles that discuss higher-order language and semantic processing in schizophrenia. The companion article (Part 1) gives an introduction to language dysfunction in schizophrenia patients. This article reviews a selection of psycholinguistic studies which suggest that sentence-level abnormalities in schizophrenia may stem...

This is the first of two articles that discuss higher-order language and semantic processing in schizophrenia. This article reviews clinical characterizations of language output and the phenomenon of positive thought disorder, as well as more principled characterizations of language output in schizophrenia. It also gives an overview of evidence for...

Clinically, patients with schizophrenia show prominent abnormalities at the discourse level, with production characterized by tangential and illogical relationships between ideas and unclear references. Despite these clinical manifestations, most studies of language in schizophrenia have focused on semantic relationships between single words and th...

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time-course of processing metaphorical and literal sentences in the brain. ERPs were measured to sentence-final (Experiment 1) and mid-sentence (Experiment 2) critical words (CWs) as participants read and made plausibility judgments about familiar nominal metaphors ("A is a B") as well as liter...

Disturbances of thought and language are fundamental to schizophrenia. Cognitive behavioral and electrophysiological research has implicated problems in two different neurocognitive mechanisms: abnormalities in the structure and function of semantic memory, and abnormalities in combining and integrating words together to build up sentence and disco...

This study examined neural activity associated with establishing causal relationships across sentences during on-line comprehension. ERPs were measured while participants read and judged the relatedness of three-sentence scenarios in which the final sentence was highly causally related, intermediately related, and causally unrelated to its context....

This overview outlines findings of cognitive and neurocognitive studies on comprehension of verbal, pictorial, and video stimuli in healthy participants and patients with schizophrenia. We present evidence for a distinction between two complementary neurocognitive streams of conceptual analysis during comprehension. In familiar situations, adequate...

This study examined the electrophysiological correlates of complement coercion. ERPs were measured as participants read and made acceptability judgments about plausible coerced sentences, plausible noncoerced sentences, and highly implausible animacy-violated sentences ("The journalist began/wrote/astonished the article before his coffee break"). R...

A cardinal feature of schizophrenia is the poor comprehension, or misinterpretation, of the emotional meaning of social interactions and events, which can sometimes take the form of a persecutory delusion. It has been shown that the comprehension of the emotional meaning of the social world involves a midline paralimbic cortical network. However, t...

Schizophrenia is associated with abnormalities in emotional processing and social cognition. However, it remains unclear whether patients show abnormal neurophysiological responses during fast, online appraisals of the emotional meaning of social information. To examine this question, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected while 18 schizoph...

Origins of impaired adaptive functioning in schizophrenia remain poorly understood. Behavioral disorganization may arise from an abnormal reliance on common combinations between concepts stored in semantic memory. Avolition-apathy may be related to deficits in using goal-related requirements to flexibly plan behavior. The authors recorded event-rel...

The schizophrenia research literature contains many differing accounts of semantic memory function in schizophrenia as assessed through the semantic priming paradigm. Most recently, Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) have been used to demonstrate both increased and decreased semantic priming at a neural level in schizophrenia patients, relative to hea...

Our brains rapidly map incoming language onto what we hold to be true. Yet there are claims that such integration and verification processes are delayed in sentences containing negation words like not. However, studies have often confounded whether a statement is true and whether it is a natural thing to say during normal communication. In an event...

Although the neurocognitive mechanisms of nonaffective language comprehension have been studied extensively, relatively less is known about how the emotional meaning of language is processed. In this study, electrophysiological responses to affectively positive, negative, and neutral words, presented within nonconstraining, neutral contexts, were e...

The present study dissociated the immediate neural costs from the subsequent neural consequences of integrating time shifts into our mental representations of events. Event-related potentials were recorded as participants read scenarios that included words referring to short temporal shifts (e.g., after one second), moderate temporal shifts (e.g.,...

Schizophrenia symptoms can be conceptualized in terms of a breakdown of a balance between 1) activating, retrieving, and matching stored representations to incoming information (semantic memory-based processing) and 2) fully integrating activated semantic representations with one another and with other types of representations to form a gestalt rep...

It has been proposed that the loose associations characteristic of thought disorder in schizophrenia result from an abnormal increase in the automatic spread of activation through semantic memory. We tested this hypothesis by examining the time course of neural semantic priming using event-related potentials (ERPs). ERPs were recorded to target wor...

The schizophrenia syndrome is clinically characterized by abnormal constructions of meaning during comprehension (delusions), perception (hallucinations), action (disorganized and non-goal-directed behavior) and language production (thought disorder). This article provides an overview of recent studies from our laboratory that have used event-relat...

How do comprehenders build up overall meaning representations of visual real-world events? This question was examined by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants viewed short, silent movie clips depicting everyday events. In two experiments, it was demonstrated that presentation of the contextually inappropriate information in t...

This study examined how task (implicit vs. explicit) and semantic relationship (direct vs. indirect) modulated hemodynamic activity during lexico-semantic processing. Participants viewed directly related, indirectly related, and unrelated prime-target word-pairs as they performed (a) an implicit lexical decision (LD) task in which they decided whet...

To make sense of a sentence, we must compute morphosyntactic and semantic-thematic relationships between its verbs and arguments and evaluate the resulting propositional meaning against any preceding context and our real-world knowledge. Recent electrophysiological studies suggest that, in comparison with non-violated verbs (e.g. "...at breakfast t...