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Automaticity and attentional control in neural language processing| old_uid | 15224 |
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| title | Automaticity and attentional control in neural language processing |
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| start_date | 2018/02/12 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| details | Invited by Speech Team |
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| summary | A long-standing debate in the science of language is whether our capacity to process language draws on attentional resources, or whether some stages or types of this processing may be automatic. I will present a series of experiments in which this issue was addressed by removing attention to linguistic stimuli or by modulating the level of attention on the language input while recording brain activity. The overall results of these studies show that the language function does possess a certain degree of automaticity, which seems to apply to different types of information including lexical access, semantic processing, syntactic parsing and even acquisition of new lexemes. Furthermore, such an automaticity appears to exist in both auditory speech perception and visual processing of written words. It can be explained, at least in part, by robustness of strongly connected linguistic memory circuits in the brain that can activate fully even when attentional resources are low. At the same time, this automaticity is limited to the very first stages of linguistic processing (<200 msec from the point in time when the relevant information is available in the input, e.g. word recognition point). Later processing steps are, in turn, more affected by attention modulation and possibly reflect a more in-depth, secondary processing or re-analysis of input, dependant on the amount of resources allocated. The results will be discussed in the framework of distributed neural circuits which function as memory traces for language elements in the human brain. |
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| responsibles | Rämä, Izard |
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