TY - JOUR
T1 - The effects of utterance timing and stimulation of left prefrontal cortex on the production of referential expressions
AU - Arnold, Jennifer E.
AU - Nozari, Nazbanou
N1 - Funding Information:
This project was partially supported by an NIH grant to Sharon Thompson-Schill (R01-DC009209). We are grateful to the following people for their help with data collection and coding: Elizabeth Schopfer, Kristina Woodard, William Marinello, Luke Miller, Michael Chen, Sarah Lineberry, and Ivy Hauser. Thanks to Chris Wiesen and Laura Castro-Schillo for discussions of statistics in relation to this project.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2017/3/1
Y1 - 2017/3/1
N2 - We examined the relationship between the timing of utterance initiation and the choice of referring expressions, e.g., pronouns (it), zeros (…and went down), or descriptive NPs (the pink pentagon). We examined language production in healthy adults, and used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to test the involvement of the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the timing of utterance production and the selection of reference forms in a discourse context. Twenty-two subjects (11 anodal, 11 sham) described fast-paced actions, e.g. The gray oval flashes, then it moves right 2 blocks. We only examined trials in contexts that supported pronoun/zero use. For sham participants, pronouns/zeros increased on trials with longer latencies to initiate the target utterance, and trials where the previous trial was short. We argue that both of these conditions enabled greater message pre-planning and greater discourse connectedness: The strongest predictor of pronoun/zero usage was the presence of a connector word like and or then, which was also tended to occur on trials with longer latencies. For the anodal participants, the latency effect disappeared. PFC stimulation appeared to enable participants to produce utterances with greater discourse connectedness, even while planning incrementally.
AB - We examined the relationship between the timing of utterance initiation and the choice of referring expressions, e.g., pronouns (it), zeros (…and went down), or descriptive NPs (the pink pentagon). We examined language production in healthy adults, and used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to test the involvement of the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the timing of utterance production and the selection of reference forms in a discourse context. Twenty-two subjects (11 anodal, 11 sham) described fast-paced actions, e.g. The gray oval flashes, then it moves right 2 blocks. We only examined trials in contexts that supported pronoun/zero use. For sham participants, pronouns/zeros increased on trials with longer latencies to initiate the target utterance, and trials where the previous trial was short. We argue that both of these conditions enabled greater message pre-planning and greater discourse connectedness: The strongest predictor of pronoun/zero usage was the presence of a connector word like and or then, which was also tended to occur on trials with longer latencies. For the anodal participants, the latency effect disappeared. PFC stimulation appeared to enable participants to produce utterances with greater discourse connectedness, even while planning incrementally.
KW - Message planning
KW - PFC stimulation
KW - Reference production
KW - tDCS
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.008
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.008
M3 - Article
C2 - 28088713
AN - SCOPUS:85009114644
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 160
SP - 127
EP - 144
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
ER -