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Abstract: To what extent can statistical language knowledge account for the effects of world knowledge in language comprehension? We address this question by focusing on a core aspect of language understanding: pronoun resolution. While existing studies suggest that comprehenders use world knowledge to resolve pronouns, the distributional hypothesis and its operationalization in large language models (LLMs) provide an alternative account of how purely linguistic information could drive apparent world knowledge effects. We addressed these confounds in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we found a strong effect of world knowledge plausibility (measured using a norming study) on responses to comprehension questions that probed pronoun interpretation. In experiment 2, participants were slower to read continuations that contradicted world knowledge-consistent interpretations of a pronoun, implying that comprehenders deploy world knowledge spontaneously. Both effects persisted when controlling for the predictions of GPT-3, an LLM, suggesting that pronoun interpretation is at least partly driven by knowledge about the world and not the word. We propose two potential mechanisms by which knowledge-driven pronoun resolution occurs, based on validation- and expectation-driven discourse processes. The results suggest that while distributional information may capture some aspects of world knowledge, human comprehenders likely draw on other sources unavailable to LLMs.

Cognitive mechanisms underpinning categorization development are still debated, either resulting from knowledge accretion or an increase in cognitive control. To disentangle the respective influence of accumulated factual knowledge and executive functions (inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) on (a) the development of categorization abilities in the food domain and (b) differences in this development by child characteristics (i.e., food neophobia), we conducted two experiments. The first experiment assessed 4−6-year-old children's (n = 122) ability to taxonomically categorize food at the superordinate level of categorization. The second experiment tested 3−6-year-old children's (n = 100) ability to cross-categorize the same food according to two different relationships alternatively (i.e., taxonomic and thematic). Results indicate that accumulated factual knowledge and executive functions mediated both the effect of age and the effect of food neophobia on categorization performance. Notably, the specific executive functions involved may vary depending on the categorization abilities tested, whereas world knowledge was always a prerequisite. Overall, this research highlights the complex interplay between accumulated factual knowledge, executive functions, and child characteristics in shaping the development of categorization abilities. Public Significance Statement: During development, children learn to categorize objects by identifying relevant features that distinguish them from others. Categorization becomes increasingly flexible, allowing children to categorize the same entity into different categories depending on the context. This study investigates the mechanisms underlying this development and reveals that while knowledge is essential for accurate categorization, it is not enough. Children also need sufficiently developed executive functions to effectively apply their knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs' semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous reviews of the nature and consequences of adult-child book reading have focused on seeking impacts of interactive reading on the acquisition of vocabulary and emergent literacy skills. In this systematic review we examined to what extent there has been systematic study of the effects of interactive reading on four less frequently studied developmental outcomes important to children's academic and life prospects: socio-emotional and socio-cognitive (SEL) skills, narrative skills, grammar, and world knowledge. We identified 67 studies of interactive reading that met the inclusion criteria and that examined the targeted outcomes, using either experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, or single-group intervention methods. We found that studies of effects on grammar and world knowledge outcomes were very sparsely represented; though narrative was often studied as an outcome, the wide variation in conceptualizing and assessing the construct hampered any clear conclusion about book-reading effects. The most robust research strand focused on SEL skill outcomes, though here too the outcome assessments varied widely. We speculate that better instrumented approaches to assessing vocabulary and emergent literacy have led to the persistent emphasis on these domains, despite robust evidence of only modest associations, and argue that work to develop sound shared measures of narrative and SEL skills would enable cross-study comparison and the accumulation of findings. In addition, we note that the various studies implicated different explanatory principles for the value of reading with children: specific interactional features (open-ended questions, following the child's lead, expanding child utterances) or content features (emotion-enhanced books, talk about mental states, science topics), raising another topic for more focused study in the future.

The present eye-tracking reading study investigated the real-time processing of the so-called Lifetime Effect, which involvesthe integration of temporal verb morphology and knowledge ofa referent’s lifetime (alive vs. dead). Critical stimuli containedfamous referents, meaning that their lifetime status is widelyknown. In addition, context sentences mentioned their lifetimestatus and occupation. Tense/aspect was manipulated in a fol-lowing target sentence to contain either the present perfect orthe simple future (e.g., She has performed / will perform...).For dead referents, the target sentence was infelicitous giventhe tense/aspectual marking; for living referents, the mark-ing was felicitous. This design permitted us to examine ef-fects of lifetime status conveyed via world knowledge and lin-guistic context on the processing of tense/aspect morphology.Eye-tracking reading times revealed longer total reading timesat the critical (verb) and post-critical regions for the presentperfect when following a deceased context, while the dead-simple future condition had shorter overall reading times thanany other condition. Naturalness ratings revealed the dead-simple future to be quickly and reliably rejected, while thedead-present perfect was deemed acceptable. However, thelatter was rated significantly lower than the living/present per-fect condition. Taken together, the results imply that worldknowledge and an immediate context defining a real-world ref-erent as being dead or alive can jointly modulate the processingof subsequent verb tense/aspect, but with striking differencesbetween the present perfect and simple future.

Some theories of sentence processing make a distinction between two kinds of meaning: a linguistic meaning encoded at the lexicon (i.e., selectional restrictions), and an extralinguistic knowledge derived from our everyday experiences (i.e., world knowledge). According to such theories, the former meaning is privileged over the latter in terms of the time-course of its access and influence during on-line language comprehension. The present study aims to examine whether world knowledge anomalies (that do not violate selectional restrictions) are rapidly detected during online sentence processing. In an eye-tracking experiment, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific verb (entrevistar or secuestrar, the Spanish translations for to interview and to kidnap) depended on the agent of the event (periodista or terrorista, the Spanish translations for journalist and terrorist). The results showed an effect of typicality in regression path duration and total reading times at both the verb region and the spillover region, thus providing evidence that world knowledge is rapidly accessed and used during on-line sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IntroductionMood is a constant in our daily life and can permeate all levels of cognition. We examined whether and how mood influences the processing of discourse content that is relatively neutral and not loaded with emotion. During discourse processing, readers have to constantly strike a balance between what they know in long term memory and what the current discourse is about. Our general hypothesis is that mood states would affect this balance. We hypothesized that readers in a positive mood would rely more on default world knowledge, whereas readers in a negative mood would be more inclined to analyze the details in the current discourse.MethodsParticipants were put in a positive and a negative mood via film clips, one week apart. In each session, after mood manipulation, they were presented with sentences in discourse materials. We created sentences such as “With the lights on you can see...” that end with critical words (CWs) “more” or “less”, where general knowledge supports “more”, not “less”. We then embedded each of these sentences in a wider discourse that does/does not support the CWs (a story about driving in the night vs. stargazing). EEG was recorded throughout.ResultsThe results showed that first, mood manipulation was successful in that there was a significant mood difference between sessions. Second, mood did not modulate the N400 effects. Participants in both moods detected outright semantic violations and allowed world knowledge to be overridden by discourse context. Third, mood modulated the LPC (Late Positive Component) effects, distributed in the frontal region. In negative moods, the LPC was sensitive to one-level violation. That is, CWs that were supported by only world knowledge, only discourse, and neither, elicited larger frontal LPCs, in comparison to the condition where CWs were supported by both world knowledge and discourse.DiscussionThese results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sensemaking (P600) during discourse processing. These results advance our understanding of the impact and time course of mood on discourse.

Temporal connectives play a crucial role in marking the sequence of events during language comprehension. Although existing studies have shown that sentence comprehension can be modulated by temporal connectives, they have mainly focused on languages with grammatical tense such as English. It thus remains unclear how temporal information is processed in tenseless languages. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how world knowledge is retrieved and integrated in sentences linked by zhiqian (before) and zhihou (after) in Mandarin Chinese (e.g., After/Before going to the countryside, Grandpa went to the city because the air there was fresh and pure). The critical words (e.g., fresh) were either congruent or incongruent with world knowledge. Relative to the after-congruent sentences, the after-incongruent sentences evoked a P600 on critical words and a negativity on sentence-final words, whereas relative to before-congruent sentences, before-incongruent sentences showed no significant difference on critical words but a sustained negativity on sentence-final words. Additionally, before-congruent sentences elicited a larger sustained positivity (P600) than after-congruent sentences. The results suggest that before is more difficult to process than after in Mandarin Chinese, supporting the iconicity account of temporal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text present in natural scenes contains semantic information about its surrounding environment. For example, the majority of questions asked by blind people related to images around them require understanding of text in the image. However, most of the existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) models do not consider the text present in an image. In this paper, the proposed model fuses the multiple inputs such as visual features, questions features and OCR tokens. Also, we have captured the relationship between OCR tokens and the objects in an image, which previous model fail to use. As compared to previous model on TextVQA dataset, the proposed model uses dynamic pointer networks based decoder to predict multi-word (OCR tokens and words from fixed vocabulary) answers instead of single-step classification task. OCR tokens are represented using location, appearance, phoc and fisher vectors features in addition to the FastText features used by previous model on TextVQA. A powerful descriptor is constructed by applying Fisher Vectors (FV) which is computed from PHOCs of the text present in images. This FV based feature representation is better than the feature representation based on word embeddings only, which are used by previous state-of-the-art models. Quantitative and qualitative experiments performed on popular benchmarks including TextVQA, ST-VQA and VQA 2.0 reveal the efficacy of proposed model. Our proposed VQA model attains 41.23% on TextVQA dataset, 40.98% on ST-VQA dataset and 74.98% overall accuracy on VQA 2.0 dataset. Results suggest that there is a significant gap between human accuracy and model accuracy on TextVQA and ST-VQA datasets compared to VQA 2.0, recommending the use of TextVQA and ST-VQA datasets for future research which can complement VQA 2.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real people sometimes appear in fiction, for example,Napoleon in War and Peace. Readers may also believe that aperson who never actually appears in a novel couldpotentially appear there. In two experiments, we find evidencethat readers think that a real person could appear in specificnovels and physically interact with a character. This effect ismagnified when the person and character share spatial andtemporal elements of their setting.

Abstract Background This study investigated the impact of handedness on a common spatial abilities task, the mental rotation task (MRT). The influence of a right-handed world was contrasted with people’s embodied experience with their own hands by testing both left- and right-handed people on an MRT of right- and left-hand stimuli. An additional consideration is the influence of matching the shape of the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one’s own hands. Two orthogonal hypothesis axes were crossed to yield four competing hypotheses. One axis contrasted (i) embodied experience versus (ii) world knowledge; the other axis contrasted (a) the match between the visual image of a hand on the screen and one’s own hand versus (b) the resemblance of the shape outline information from the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one’s own hands. Results Among people with mixed handedness, right-handers performed more accurately for left-hand stimuli, while left-handers had a trend for higher accuracy for right-hand stimuli. For people with extreme handedness, right-handers outperformed left-handers. Regardless of group, there was no significant variation in performance for left-hand stimuli, with only right-hand stimuli producing significant variation. Conclusions No hypothesis fully aligned with all the data. For left-hand stimuli, the consistent performance across groups does not provide support for embodied experience, while world knowledge might influence all groups similarly. Alternatively, the within-group variation for mixed-handed people supports embodied experience in the hand MRT, likely processed through visual-proprioceptive integration.

People all around the world learn different foreign languages for various reasons. As a result of globalization, need for knowing a language other than one’s native language became a necessity more than a need. Although there are thousands of languages used by millions of people in different geographies, some languages are more commonly used and preferred. English, which is used as a lingua franca in many fields including science, education and numerous branches of business, is one of these languages. Turkey, as a country that serves as a bridge between Asia and Europe, has gone through many reforms concerning foreign language teaching and today foreign languages are taught in every phase of education starting from early years of primary school and continues until students graduate from university. Although people have different reasons to learn a foreign language, it is very common among university students that most of them learn a foreign language for a better future as well as increasing their world knowledge in a fast-globalized world. In this study, it is aimed to analyze university prep class students’ views about role of English as a foreign language for enhancing their world knowledge and success in education and professional career. The results of the study reveal that students accept English as lingua franca and they are enthusiastic to learn it. Another finding underlines the need for ESP (English for Specific Purposes) courses expressed by prep students.

World knowledge enters into pragmatic utterance interpretationin complex ways, and may be defeasible in light of speakers’utterances. Yet there is to date a surprising lack of systematicinvestigation into the role of world knowledge in pragmaticinference. In this paper, we show that a state-of-the-artmodel of pragmatic interpretation greatly overestimates the influenceof world knowledge on the interpretation of utteranceslike Some of the marbles sank. We extend the model to capturethe idea that the listener is uncertain about the backgroundknowledge the speaker is bringing to the conversation. Thisextension greatly improves model predictions of listeners’ interpretationand also makes good qualitative predictions aboutlisteners’ judgments of how ‘normal’ the world is in light of aspeaker’s statement. Theoretical and methodological implicationsare discussed.

Temporal connectives play a crucial role in marking the sequence of events during language comprehension. Although existing studies have shown that sentence comprehension can be modulated by temporal connectives, they have mainly focused on languages with grammatical tense such as English. It thus remains unclear how temporal information is processed in tenseless languages. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how world knowledge is retrieved and integrated in sentences linked by zhiqian (before) and zhihou (after) in Mandarin Chinese (e.g., After/Before going to the countryside, Grandpa went to the city because the air there was fresh and pure). The critical words (e.g., fresh) were either congruent or incongruent with world knowledge. Relative to the after-congruent sentences, the after-incongruent sentences evoked a P600 on critical words and a negativity on sentence-final words, whereas relative to before-congruent sentences, before-incongruent sentences showed no significant difference on critical words but a sustained negativity on sentence-final words. Additionally, before-congruent sentences elicited a larger sustained positivity (P600) than after-congruent sentences. The results suggest that before is more difficult to process than after in Mandarin Chinese, supporting the iconicity account of temporal relations.

Reading comprehension is a very complex process that depends on a number of cognitive and metacognitive skills and processes, the crucial ones being inference skills. The paper presents the results of a study that aimed to identify the inference skills of young learners of English as a foreign language in comprehending a narrative text (a comic strip). The participants were 90 young learners aged 11, drawn from a state primary school in Serbia. The post-reading reflection protocol was used to collect qualitative data on the participants' inference skills, while quantitative data were collected by means of a reading task. The results indicate that successful readers applied a variety of inference skills, flexibly combining local inferences (referential, case and antecedent causal inferences) with global inferences (superordinate goal, thematic, and character emotional reaction inferences), and monitoring their comprehension while reading. By contrast, less successful readers relied mainly on local inferences, not monitoring their understanding, which resulted in poor scores in the reading test. The study highlights the need for integrating the development of young English language learners' inference skills into reading programmes.

Image captioning is a multidisciplinary artificial intelligence (AI) research task that has captures the interest of both image and natural language processing experts. Image captioning is a complex problem as it sometimes requires accessing the information that may not be directly visualized in a given scene. It possibly will require common sense interpretation or the detailed knowledge about the object present in image. In this paper, we have given a method that utilizes both visual and external knowledge from knowledge bases such as ConceptNet for better description the images. We demonstrated the usefulness of the method on two publicly available datasets; Flickr8k and Flickr30k.The results explain that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the art approaches for generating image captions. At last, we will talk about possible future prospects in image captioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this pilot study was to explore whether exposing pre-readers to an unfamiliar event in a brief, play-based, session would enhance comprehension of a story based on that event. Twenty-four typically developing participants (9 males; 15 females), aged 30–51 months (M = 39.13, SD = 6.02) were randomly assigned to free-play and event-exposure groups. Comprehension of story content increased in both groups over time; however, a group by time interaction indicated that the increase was greatest in the event-exposure group. Children in that group also improved in their ability to generate a goal-action inference. Findings support the important contribution of event knowledge to story comprehension and suggest that brief, play-based, knowledge-boosting sessions may have value as a pre-reading activity in the early education classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This study investigated the impact of handedness on a common spatial abilities task, the mental rotation task (MRT). The influence of a right-handed world was contrasted with people's embodied experience with their own hands by testing both left- and right-handed people on an MRT of right- and left-hand stimuli. An additional consideration is the influence of matching the shape of the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one's own hands. Two orthogonal hypothesis axes were crossed to yield four competing hypotheses. One axis contrasted (i) embodied experience versus (ii) world knowledge; the other axis contrasted (a) the match between the visual image of a hand on the screen and one's own hand versus (b) the resemblance of the shape outline information from the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one's own hands. Results: Among people with mixed handedness, right-handers performed more accurately for left-hand stimuli, while left-handers had a trend for higher accuracy for right-hand stimuli. For people with extreme handedness, right-handers outperformed left-handers. Regardless of group, there was no significant variation in performance for left-hand stimuli, with only right-hand stimuli producing significant variation. Conclusions: No hypothesis fully aligned with all the data. For left-hand stimuli, the consistent performance across groups does not provide support for embodied experience, while world knowledge might influence all groups similarly. Alternatively, the within-group variation for mixed-handed people supports embodied experience in the hand MRT, likely processed through visual-proprioceptive integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychology of verbal reasoning initially compared performance with classical logic. In the last 25 years, a new paradigm has arisen, which focuses on knowledge-rich reasoning for communication and persuasion and is typically modeled using Bayesian probability theory rather than logic. This paradigm provides a new perspective on argumentation, explaining the rational persuasiveness of arguments that are logical fallacies. It also helps explain how and why people stray from logic when given deductive reasoning tasks. What appear to be erroneous responses, when compared against logic, often turn out to be rationally justified when seen in the richer rational framework of the new paradigm. Moreover, the same approach extends naturally to inductive reasoning tasks, in which people extrapolate beyond the data they are given and logic does not readily apply. We outline links between social and individual reasoning and set recent developments in the psychology of reasoning in the wider context of Bayesian cognitive science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested whether the proportion of typical sentences in a series of auditory sentences would lead people to adjust the strength of activation of world knowledge (i.e., retrieval rules adaptation) during comprehension. This issue is important because it could help clarify how people efficiently integrate different memory information in cognitive processes. In two experiments, all task materials were presented to participants as a whole package, in which proportions of typical sentences, with typical final locations, varied under different conditions. In Experiment 1, the proportion of typical sentences was equal to the atypical ones (i.e., 50% typical vs. 50% atypical), whereas in Experiment 2, the proportion of typical sentences was not equal to the atypical ones (i.e., 75% typical vs. 25% atypical, and 25% typical vs. 75% atypical). Visual fixation on the critical area in a visual display before/while hearing the critical words was compared across conditions, and across-condition differences were used as an index of the adaptation of the retrieval rule in the activation of world knowledge. The findings indicated that the adaptation of retrieval rules occurs throughout the whole test package of sentence comprehension, and the strength of activation of world knowledge in sentence comprehension can be adjusted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The instrument–subject alternation is a cross-linguistic phenomenon in which a verb’s semantic argument with an instrument thematic role can be expressed syntactically not only as an adverbial phrase but also as a subject instead of an agentive subject. Using Hungarian examples, the present paper attempts to work out an account of the alternation that has the following advantageous features. First, by means of a pragmatically oriented weaker notion of causation (Koenig et al. 2008: 214) a solid basis is assumed to determine which verbs alternate and which verbs do not. Second, syntactic alternations are not treated as lexical or constructional phenomena (as are in lexical or constructional approaches, respectively). However, they fit a lexical-constructional approach (Bibok 2008) which naturally extends to lexical pragmatics (Bibok 2010). *** Az eszköz–alany alternáció olyan, több nyelvben is megfigyelhető jelenség, amikor az ige eszköz thematikus szerepű szemantikai argumentuma szintaktikailag nemcsak határozóként fejeződhet ki, hanem alanyként is – az ágensi alany helyébe lépve. A jelen tanulmány a váltakozás olyan lexikai pragmatikai magyarázatát vázolja magyar példákat használva, amely a következő előnyös tulajdonságokkal jellemezhető. Először, az okozás különböző fogalmainak megkülönböztetésével és köztük egy pragmatikai orientáltságú gyengébb okozás (Koenig et al. 2008: 214) bevezetésével biztosabb alapon határozhatjuk meg, melyik ige vesz részt az adott alternációban és melyik nem. Másodszor, a szintaktikai alternációk nem pusztán lexikai jelenségek (szemben a lexikai megközelítéssel), nem is csupán konstrukcionálisak (szemben a konstrukciós megközelítéssel), hanem legmegfelelőbben a lexikai-konstrukciós keretben (Bibok 2008) értelmezhetők. Ez a keret természetes módon illeszkedik a lexikai pragmatikába (Bibok 2010).

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semantically mismatching final words, resulting in a larger N400 for false relative to true affirmative sentences and an opposite effect for negative sentences. Hence, the N400 was independent of the presence of a negation. However, the true negative as well as the false affirmative condition often contained entities or features from different semantic categories and thereby with weak feature overlap, such as e.g., A cat is (not) a saw or Fears are (not) round, which were then compared to true affirmative and false negative sentences containing entities with stronger feature overlap and partially even hyponomy relations, e.g., A cat is (not) an animal or Planets are (not) round. Employing world-knowledge variations, in the current study, we investigate whether increasing the feature overlap between the entities of all conditions leads to similar ERP-patterns as in the previous studies. For this purpose, we use sentences of the following type: George Clooney is (not) an actor vs. George Clooney is (not) a singer where both target words describe a similar profession and thereby function as alternatives to each other. However, in line with the previous studies, we find a truth by polarity interaction, namely, the N400 ERPs are significantly larger for false compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas the effect for negative sentences shows a reversed, though not significant, trend. Overall, the ERP-data suggest that the integration of a negation with the information in its scope is neither fully incremental nor fully delayed, which might be linked to the use of cohyponyms and to the increased feature overlap between alternatives (e.g., actor, singer). Additionally, questionnaire-based rating data show that affirmative sentences are perceived as more natural than negative sentences, and, moreover, that true sentences are perceived as more natural than false sentences, independent of their polarity.

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semantically mismatching final words, resulting in a larger N400 for false relative to true affirmative sentences and an opposite effect for negative sentences. Hence, the N400 was independent of the presence of a negation. However, the true negative as well as the false affirmative condition often contained entities or features from different semantic categories and thereby with weak feature overlap, such as e.g., A cat is (not) a saw or Fears are (not) round , which were then compared to true affirmative and false negative sentences containing entities with stronger feature overlap and partially even hyponomy relations, e.g., A cat is (not) an animal or Planets are (not) round. Employing world-knowledge variations, in the current study, we investigate whether increasing the feature overlap between the entities of all conditions leads to similar ERP-patterns as in the previous studies. For this purpose, we use sentences of the following type: George Clooney is (not) an actor vs. George Clooney is (not) a singer where both target words describe a similar profession and thereby function as alternatives to each other. However, in line with the previous studies, we find a truth by polarity interaction, namely, the N400 ERPs are significantly larger for false compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas the effect for negative sentences shows a reversed, though not significant, trend. Overall, the ERP-data suggest that the integration of a negation with the information in its scope is neither fully incremental nor fully delayed, which might be linked to the use of cohyponyms and to the increased feature overlap between alternatives (e.g., actor, singer). Additionally, questionnaire-based rating data show that affirmative sentences are perceived as more natural than negative sentences, and, moreover, that true sentences are perceived as more natural than false sentences, independent of their polarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous reviews of the nature and consequences of adult-child book reading have focused on seeking impacts of interactive reading on the acquisition of vocabulary and emergent literacy skills. In this systematic review we examined to what extent there has been systematic study of the effects of interactive reading on four less frequently studied developmental outcomes important to children's academic and life prospects: socio-emotional and socio-cognitive (SEL) skills, narrative skills, grammar, and world knowledge. We identified 67 studies of interactive reading that met the inclusion criteria and that examined the targeted outcomes, using either experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, or single-group intervention methods. We found that studies of effects on grammar and world knowledge outcomes were very sparsely represented; though narrative was often studied as an outcome, the wide variation in conceptualizing and assessing the construct hampered any clear conclusion about book-reading effects. The most robust research strand focused on SEL skill outcomes, though here too the outcome assessments varied widely. We speculate that better instrumented approaches to assessing vocabulary and emergent literacy have led to the persistent emphasis on these domains, despite robust evidence of only modest associations, and argue that work to develop sound shared measures of narrative and SEL skills would enable cross-study comparison and the accumulation of findings. In addition, we note that the various studies implicated different explanatory principles for the value of reading with children: specific interactional features (open-ended questions, following the child's lead, expanding child utterances) or content features (emotion-enhanced books, talk about mental states, science topics), raising another topic for more focused study in the future. • Most book reading studies have addressed vocabulary and literacy outcomes. • 67 studies have examined effects on four generally neglected developmental outcomes. • Grammar and world knowledge outcomes were investigated in only few studies. • Narrative and SEL measures varied widely, reducing comparability across studies. • Interactional and/or content features were hypothesized predictors of outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent findings have shown that information about changes in an object's environmental location in the context of discourse is stored in working memory during sentence comprehension. However, in these studies, changes in the object's location were always consistent with world knowledge (e.g., in “The writer picked up the pen from the floor and moved it to the desk,” the floor and the desk are both common locations for a pen). How do people accomplish comprehension when the object-location information in working memory is inconsistent with world knowledge (e.g., a pen being moved from the floor to the bathtub)? In two visual world experiments, with a “look-and-listen” task, we used eye-tracking data to investigate comprehension of sentences that described location changes under different conditions of appropriateness (i.e., the object and its location were typically vs. unusually coexistent, based on world knowledge) and antecedent context (i.e., contextual information that did vs. did not temporarily normalize unusual coexistence between object and location). Results showed that listeners' retrieval of the critical location was affected by both world knowledge and working memory, and the effect of world knowledge was reduced when the antecedent context normalized unusual coexistence of object and location. More importantly, activation of world knowledge and working memory seemed to change during the comprehension process. These results are important because they demonstrate that interference between world knowledge and information in working memory, appears to be activated dynamically during sentence comprehension.