Biology subjects

Muralikrishnan, R.

Publications and source records attributed to Muralikrishnan, R..

12 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Verb-Specific Linking Properties Modulate the N400 Effect: Evidence from Thematic Reversal Anomalies in Malayalam

The present study examined whether thematic reversal anomalies are processed similarly across subject and object experiencer constructions in Malayalam. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as 30 first-language speakers of Malayalam read transitive sentences with the two types of experiencer verbs, in which the thematic role assignment for the preceding arguments was either correct or reverse. The reversal anomaly became apparent only at the position of the experiencer verb. A linear mixed-models analysis confirmed a biphasic N400-P600 effect at the verb for both verb types when the argument roles were reverse. Thus, our results suggest a uniform processing strategy for TRAs irrespective of the type of experiencer verb involved. However, the N400 amplitude was larger for the object experiencer verb compared to subject experiencer verbs. We suggest that the quantitative difference observed for object experiencer verbs is due to the inverse linking of grammatical function and thematic roles associated with these verbs. In other words, verb-specific linking properties modulate the processing of TRAs involving object experiencer verbs. We argue that this modulation occurs because the parser recalibrates cue weighting when the expected form-to-meaning mappings are overridden by the inverse linking properties of object experiencer verbs.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Neurophysiological correlates of processing Agreement and Tense in Arabic

Most syntactic approaches converge on the fact that Tense and Agreement are two different functional categories, although there is less agreement on their exact representation and relative hierarchical order. Cross-linguistic agrammatic data seems to support the difference between Tense and Agreement, with patterns of dissociation reported from agrammatism between them, in which Tense is generally more impaired than Agreement. To examine whether there is evidence for such a dissociation of tense and agreement processing in neurotypical individuals, the present study employed Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to study the real-time comprehension of Modern Standard Arabic sentences. Critical stimulus sentences were of the form Temporal Adverb-Subject-Verb-PP, in which the intransitive verb was in either the past or future tense, and was preceded by a singular or plural subject and an adverb indicating past or future tense. The subject nouns were all human and either masculine or feminine. The verbs either agreed with the subject noun or presented a person, number or gender agreement violation. They also either agreed or showed a mismatch with the temporal frame of the adverb, the latter being a tense violation. Results at the verb showed that both tense and agreement violations yielded a biphasic N400 - P600 effect. We discuss these results in light of previous ERP findings and conclude that despite the putative configurational differences between Tense and Agreement, the processing of the two categories in Arabic may deploy the same underlying cognitive mechanisms.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Similar does not mean same: ERP correlates of processing mental and physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam complex constructions

The present study examined the neurophysiological correlates of processing mental experiencer verbs and physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam complex constructions, in which the subject argument assumed the experiencer role. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as twenty-eight first-language speakers of Malayalam read intransitive sentences with the two types of experiencer verbs. The subject case either matched the requirements of the verb in the critical stimuli, thereby rendering the sentence acceptable, or it violated the requirements of the verb, and thus rendering the sentence unacceptable. Both mental and physical experiencer verbs engendered negativity effects in the 400-600 ms time-window when the subject case did not match the verbs requirements. Additionally, mental experiencer verbs evoked a LAN-like effect in the same time window regardless of grammaticality. Thus, even though both kinds of experiencer verbs are processed qualitatively similarly, inherent differences between mental and physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam persist and are discernible.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Similar but different: ERP evidence on the processing of mental and physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam.

The study reported here was conducted to investigate the neurophysiological correlates of processing two types of subject experiencer verbs, namely mental experiencer verbs and physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam, a South Dravidian language. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as twenty-eight first-language speakers of Malayalam read intransitive sentences with the two types of experiencer verbs. Critical stimuli were either fully acceptable, whereby the subject case matched the requirements of the verb, or unacceptable, whereby the subject case violated the requirements of the verb. A linear mixed-models analysis confirmed negativity effects in the time window 400-800 ms for mental and physical experiencer verbs. Post-hoc analyses revealed that the negativity peaked relatively early for mental experiencer verbs, whereas relatively late for physical experiencer verbs. Further, the sentence-final acceptability of trials modulated the ERPs in non-anomalous conditions but not in violation conditions, and this modulation qualitatively differed between mental and physical experiencer verbs. These results suggest that, whilst a qualitatively similar mechanism is involved in the processing of both kinds of experiencer verbs, subtle but robust differences are inherent in processing mental versus physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Processing Ergativity in Compound Light Verb Constructions: Electrophysiological Evidence from Hindi

Ergativity marks subject arguments as agents of a transitive event and thereby signals verbal transitivity and influences language comprehension. We report here on an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study in Hindi, in which we investigated this interconnection to ascertain whether the ergative case as a processing cue and its ERP correlates can be generalized across and within ergative languages. The case marking on the subject argument (ergative or nominative case) in our study either matched or mismatched with the transitivity of the light verb (transitive or intransitive) in compound light verb constructions. Ergative case violations due to an intransitive light verb evoked an N400 effect, whereas nominative case violations due to a transitive light verb elicited a P600 effect. The results reveal neurophysiological differences in the processing of ergative and nominative case alignment modulated by the transitivity of the light verbs. The findings highlight the need for cross-linguistic research to aim beyond universality and elucidate the mechanism underlying the processing of language-specific structural variations.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Rapid neural encoding of the contrast between native and nonnative speech in the alpha band

More than half of the worlds population is multilingual, yet it is not known how the human brain encodes the perception of native vs. nonnative speech. To find out, we asked German native speakers to detect the onset of native and nonnative (English and Turkish) vowels in a roving standard stimulation. Using EEG, we show that nonnativeness is robustly registered by an increase in phase coherence in the alpha band (8-12 Hz), beginning as early as [~]100 ms after stimulus onset and lasting more than 200 ms. The alpha band effect is speech-specific, successfully predicts the response speed advantage of nonnative speech, and grants [~]90% decoding accuracy in distinguishing native vs. nonnative speech irrespective of language familiarity. We propose alpha phase coherence as a candidate neural channel for the online resolution of the native-nonnative contrast in the adult brain. Significance StatementWe show that the human brain takes only [~] 100 ms to distinguish native vs. nonnative speech. This difference is neurally encoded in the alpha band in a reliable and specific way, supporting a processing model in which the mixture of top-down and bottom-up information represented in the speech signal is concurrently partitioned into different frequency channels.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Neural harmonics reflect grammaticality

Can neural rhythms reflect purely internal syntactic processes in multi-word constructions? To test this controversial conjecture - relevant to language in particular and cognition more broadly - we recorded electroencephalographic and behavioural data as participants listened to isochronously presented sentences of varying in syntactic complexity. Each trial comprised ten concatenated sentences and was either fully grammatical (regular) or rendered ungrammatical via randomly distributed word order violations. We found that attending the regular repetition of abstract syntactic categories (phrases and sentences) generates neural rhythms whose harmonics are mathematically independent of word rate. This permits to clearly separate endogenous syntactic rhythms from exogenous speech rhythms. We demonstrate that endogenous but not exogenous rhythms predict participants grammaticality judgements, and allow for the neural decoding of regular vs. irregular trials. Neural harmonic series constitute a new form of behaviourally relevant evidence for syntactic competence.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Gesture's body orientation modulates the N400 during semantic integration of gesture and visual sentence

Body orientation of gesture entails social-communicative intention, and may thus influence how gestures are perceived and comprehended together with auditory speech during face-to-face communication. To date, despite the emergence of neuroscientific literature on the role of body orientation on hand action perception, limited studies have directly investigated the role of body orientation in the interaction between gesture and language. To address this research question, we carried out an EEG experiment presenting to participants (n=21) videos of frontal and lateral hand gestures of five-seconds (e.g., raising a hand), followed by visually presented sentences that are either congruent or incongruent with the hand gesture (e.g., the mountain is high/low...). All participants underwent a semantic-probe task, judging whether a target word is related or unrelated to the gesture-speech event. EEG results suggest that, during the perception phase of hand-gestures, while both frontal and lateral gestures elicited power decrease in both the alpha (8-12Hz) and the beta (16-24Hz) bands, lateral gestures elicited reduced power decrease in the beta band when compared with frontal gestures. For sentence comprehension, at the critical word whose meaning is congruent/incongruent with the gesture, frontal gestures elicited an N400 effect for gesture-sentence incongruency. More importantly, this incongruency effect was significantly reduced for lateral gestures. The findings suggest that body orientation plays a crucial role in gesture perception, and that its inferred social-communicative intention influences gesture-sentence semantic integration in an interactive manner.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Animacy modulates gender agreement computation in Hindi: An ERP study

Gender has been investigated in psycholinguistics research both with respect to how it is retrieved when a noun is encountered and the computation of its agreement dependencies between different elements in a sentence. The literature is abound with differences as to the processing of gender agreement computations across languages and constructs. Similarly, neurophysiological evidence with respect to gender retrieval mechanisms differ wherein languages differ in the way the gender feature is retrieved when a noun is encountered based on different properties. The present study aims to scrutinize gender agreement computations in verb-agreement relations in Hindi and to ascertain if the intrinsic property (i.e. the animacy) of a noun participating in the relation plays a role in processing agreement dependencies. In addition, it also looks into the issue of whether the gender retrieval mechanism in the language influences agreement comprehension. Results revealed a positivity for the animate subject agreement and a negativity for the inanimate subject agreement violations at the position of the verb respectively. The results are suggestive of distinct processing mechanisms underlying semantic and syntactic gender. Further, the results also suggest that gender agreement computation in Hindi is modulated by the way gender is retrieved at the position of the noun.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2019

A neurophysiological study of noun-adjective agreement in Arabic: The impact of animacy and diglossia on the dynamics of language processing

We used event-related brain potentials to identify the neurophysiological responses of Arabic speakers to processing full and deflected agreement in plural noun-adjective constructions in Standard Arabic. Under full agreement, an adjective fully agrees in number and gender with a preceding plural noun, but only when this noun is human, while it is systematically marked feminine singular when the noun is non-human under deflected agreement. We recorded grammaticality judgment and ERP responses from 32 speakers of Arabic to sentences violating full and deflected agreement and their well-formed counterparts. The participants were relatively fast and accurate in judging all the sentences, although violations, especially deflected agreement violations, were not always deemed ungrammatical. However, the ERP responses show a differential processing of human versus non-human violations. Violations of full agreement involving human nouns elicited larger N400 and P600 components than violations of deflected agreement involving non-human nouns, whose ERP signatures were hardly distinguishable from those of their acceptable counterparts. Our results present evidence for animacy (more specifically, humanness) and inter-dialect effects on language processing. We argue that violations of Standard Arabic deflected agreement are not treated as outright violations because non-human referents permit both full and deflected agreement in Spoken Arabic. We discuss these results in light of the ERP literature on agreement processing and the role of animacy/humanness in grammar, and highlight the potential effect of diglossia on the architecture of the mental grammar of Arabic speakers.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2019

Seven-year-olds’ recollection of non-adjacent dependencies after overnight retention

Becoming a successful speaker depends on acquiring and learning grammatical dependencies between neighboring and non-neighboring linguistic elements (non-adjacent dependencies; NADs). Previous studies have demonstrated childrens and adults ability to distinguish NADs from NAD violations right after familiarization. However, demonstrating NAD recall after retention is crucial to demonstrate a lasting effect of NAD learning. We tested 7-year-olds NAD learning in a natural, non-native language on one day and NAD recall on the next day by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). Our results revealed ERPs with a more positive amplitude to NAD violations than correct NADs after familiarization on day one, but ERPs with a more negative amplitude to NAD violations on day two. This change from more positive to more negative ERPs to NAD violations possibly indicates that childrens representations of NADs changed during an overnight retention period, potentially associated with childrens NAD learning. Indeed, our descriptive analyses showed that both ERP patterns (i.e., day one: positive, day two: negative) were related to stronger behavioral improvement (i.e., more correct answers on day two compared to day one) in a grammaticality judgment task from day one to day two. We suggest these findings to indicate that children successfully built associative representations of NADs on day one and then strengthened these associations during overnight retention, revealing NAD recall on day two. The present results suggest that 7-year-olds readily track NADs in a natural, non-native language and are able to recall NADs after a retention period involving sleep, providing evidence of a lasting effect of NAD learning. HighlightsO_LI7-year-olds non-adjacent dependency learning in a foreign language tested C_LIO_LIChildren gave grammaticality judgments while electroencephalography was recorded C_LIO_LIBrain responses revealed childrens learning of non-adjacent dependencies C_LIO_LIBrain responses after overnight retention showed different polarity C_LIO_LIChildrens recall of dependencies after sleep associated with representation change C_LI

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Cognitive salience of agreement features modulates language comprehension

The brain establishes relations between elements of an unfolding sentence in order to incrementally build a representation of who is doing what based on various linguistic cues. Many languages systematically mark the verb and/or its arguments to imply the manner in which they are related. A common mechanism to this end is subject-verb agreement, whereby the marking on the verb covaries with one or more of the features such as person, number and gender of the subject argument in a sentence. The cross-linguistic variability of these features would suggest that they may modulate language comprehension differentially based on their relative weightings in a given language. To test this, we investigated the processing of subject-verb agreement in simple intransitive Arabic sentences in a visual event-related brain potential (ERP) study. Specifically, we examined the differences, if any, that ensue in the processing of person, number and gender features during online comprehension, employing sentences in which the verb either showed full agreement with the subject noun (singular or plural) or did not agree in one of the features. ERP responses were measured at the post-nominal verb. Results showed a biphasic negativity-late-positivity effect when the verb did not agree with its subject noun in one of the features, in line with similar findings from other languages. Crucially however, the biphasic effect for agreement violations was systematically graded based on the feature that was violated, which is a novel finding in view of results from other languages. Furthermore, this graded effect was qualitatively different for singular and plural subjects based on the differing salience of the features for each subject-type. These results suggest that agreement features, varying in their salience due to their language-specific weightings, differentially modulate language comprehension. We postulate a Salience-weighted Feature Hierarchy based on our findings and argue that this parsimoniously accounts for the diversity of existing cross-linguistic neurophysiological results on verb agreement processing.

neuroscience↗