Jos J A Van Berkum
Biographic Data
| ID | 2032103 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jos J A Van Berkum |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jos J A |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Berkum |
| SIGNATURE | VAN BERKUM J J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1673-4845 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge
Introduction Mood 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 bala…
Do People Get Used to Insulting Language
Verbal insults go against a universal moral imperative not to inflict harm on others, and they also pose a threat to one's face or reputation. As such, these “verbal slaps in the face” provide a unique opportunity to explore the interface between language and emotion. We used electroencephalography (EEG) and skin conductance (SC) recordings to compare the short-term impact of verbal insults such as “Linda is an idiot” or “Paula is horrible” to th…
Figuring out what they feel: Exposure to eudaimonic narrative fiction is related to mentalizing ability
Being exposed to narrative fiction may provide us with practice in dealing with social interactions and thereby enhance our ability to engage in mentalizing (understanding other people’s mental states). The current study uses a confirmatory Bayesian approach to assess the relationship between mentalizing and both the self-reported frequency of exposure to narrative fiction across media (books, films, and TV series) and the particular types of fic…
Do self-talk phrases affect behavior in ultimatum games
The current study investigates whether self-talk phrases can influence behavior in Ultimatum Games. In our three self-talk treatments, participants were instructed to tell themselves ( i ) to keep their own interests in mind, ( ii ) to also think of the other person, or ( iii ) to take some time to contemplate their decision. We investigate how such so-called experimenter-determined strategic self-talk phrases affect behavior and emotions in comp…
The Perceived Convincingness Model: Why and under what conditions processing fluency and emotions are valid indicators of a message’s perceived convincingness
Persuasive messages aim to influence people’s behavior. Arguments in these messages typically refer to the positive consequences of the advocated behavior or the negative consequences of failing to do so. It has been claimed that people automatically generate a judgment about the message’s convincingness. We present the Perceived Convincingness Model (PCM) to explain how people generate this judgment based upon the fluency with which they process…
Reading About Us and Them: Moral but no Minimal Group Effects on Language-Induced Emotion
Many of our everyday emotional responses are triggered by language, and a full understanding of how people use language therefore also requires an analysis of how words elicit emotion as they are heard or read. We report a facial electromyography experiment in which we recorded corrugator supercilii, or “frowning muscle”, activity to assess how readers processed emotion-describing language in moral and minimal in/outgroup contexts. Participants r…
Anticipating communication
Let's imagine you just bought some old
The Neural Integration of Speaker and Message
When do listeners take into account who the speaker is? We asked people to listen to utterances whose content sometimes did not match inferences based on the identity of the speaker (e.g., “If only I looked like Britney Spears” in a male voice, or “I have a large tattoo on my back” spoken with an upper-class accent). Event-related brain responses revealed that the speaker's identity is taken into account as early as 200–300 msec after the beginni…
Discourse-Based Word Anticipation During Language Processing: Prediction or Priming
Language is an intrinsically open-ended system. This fact has led to the widely shared assumption that readers and listeners do not predict upcoming words, at least not in a way that goes beyond simple priming between words. Recent evidence, however, suggests that readers and listeners do anticipate upcoming words “on the fly” as a text unfolds. In 2 event-related potentials experiments, this study examined whether these predictions are based on …
The Neurocognition of Referential Ambiguity in Language Comprehension
Referential ambiguity arises whenever readers or listeners are unable to select a unique referent for a linguistic expression out of multiple candidates. In the current article, we review a series of neurocognitive experiments from our laboratory that examine the neural correlates of referential ambiguity, and that employ the brain signature of referential ambiguity to derive functional properties of the language comprehension system. The results…
When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse
In linguistic theories of how sentences encode meaning, a distinction is often made between the context-free rule-based combination of lexical-semantic features of the words within a sentence (“semantics”), and the contributions made by wider context (“pragmatics”). In psycholinguistics, this distinction has led to the view that listeners initially compute a local, context-independent meaning of a phrase or sentence before relating it to the wide…
Anticipating Upcoming Words in Discourse: Evidence From ERPs and Reading Times.
The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatch…
The Use of Referential Context and Grammatical Gender in Parsing: A Reply to Brysbaert and Mitchell (2000)
Discourse Before Gender: An Event-Related Brain Potential Study on the Interplay of Semantic and Syntactic Information During Spoken Language Understanding
Semantic Integration in Sentences and Discourse: Evidence from the N400
In two ERP experiments we investigated how and when the language comprehension system relates an incoming word to semantic representations of an unfolding local sentence and a wider discourse. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with short stories. The last sentence of these stories occasionally contained a critical word that, although acceptable in the local sentence context, was semantically anomalous with respect to the wider discourse (e…
When Does Gender Constrain Parsing? Evidence from ERPs
Discourse-Based Word Anticipation During Language Processing: Prediction or Priming
Language is an intrinsically open-ended system. This fact has led to the widely shared assumption that readers and listeners do not predict upcoming words, at least not in a way that goes beyond simple priming between words. Recent evidence, however, suggests that readers and listeners do anticipate upcoming words “on the fly” as a text unfolds. In 2 event-related potentials experiments, this study examined whether these predictions are based on …
When Does Gender Constrain Parsing? Evidence from ERPs
The Neurocognition of Referential Ambiguity in Language Comprehension
Referential ambiguity arises whenever readers or listeners are unable to select a unique referent for a linguistic expression out of multiple candidates. In the current article, we review a series of neurocognitive experiments from our laboratory that examine the neural correlates of referential ambiguity, and that employ the brain signature of referential ambiguity to derive functional properties of the language comprehension system. The results…
Discourse Before Gender: An Event-Related Brain Potential Study on the Interplay of Semantic and Syntactic Information During Spoken Language Understanding
Semantic Integration in Sentences and Discourse: Evidence from the N400
In two ERP experiments we investigated how and when the language comprehension system relates an incoming word to semantic representations of an unfolding local sentence and a wider discourse. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with short stories. The last sentence of these stories occasionally contained a critical word that, although acceptable in the local sentence context, was semantically anomalous with respect to the wider discourse (e…
When Does Gender Constrain Parsing? Evidence from ERPs
The Use of Referential Context and Grammatical Gender in Parsing: A Reply to Brysbaert and Mitchell (2000)
Discourse Before Gender: An Event-Related Brain Potential Study on the Interplay of Semantic and Syntactic Information During Spoken Language Understanding
Anticipating Upcoming Words in Discourse: Evidence From ERPs and Reading Times.
The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatch…
When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse
In linguistic theories of how sentences encode meaning, a distinction is often made between the context-free rule-based combination of lexical-semantic features of the words within a sentence (“semantics”), and the contributions made by wider context (“pragmatics”). In psycholinguistics, this distinction has led to the view that listeners initially compute a local, context-independent meaning of a phrase or sentence before relating it to the wide…
The Neural Integration of Speaker and Message
When do listeners take into account who the speaker is? We asked people to listen to utterances whose content sometimes did not match inferences based on the identity of the speaker (e.g., “If only I looked like Britney Spears” in a male voice, or “I have a large tattoo on my back” spoken with an upper-class accent). Event-related brain responses revealed that the speaker's identity is taken into account as early as 200–300 msec after the beginni…
Discourse-Based Word Anticipation During Language Processing: Prediction or Priming
Language is an intrinsically open-ended system. This fact has led to the widely shared assumption that readers and listeners do not predict upcoming words, at least not in a way that goes beyond simple priming between words. Recent evidence, however, suggests that readers and listeners do anticipate upcoming words “on the fly” as a text unfolds. In 2 event-related potentials experiments, this study examined whether these predictions are based on …
The Neurocognition of Referential Ambiguity in Language Comprehension
Referential ambiguity arises whenever readers or listeners are unable to select a unique referent for a linguistic expression out of multiple candidates. In the current article, we review a series of neurocognitive experiments from our laboratory that examine the neural correlates of referential ambiguity, and that employ the brain signature of referential ambiguity to derive functional properties of the language comprehension system. The results…
Anticipating communication
Let's imagine you just bought some old
Reading About Us and Them: Moral but no Minimal Group Effects on Language-Induced Emotion
Many of our everyday emotional responses are triggered by language, and a full understanding of how people use language therefore also requires an analysis of how words elicit emotion as they are heard or read. We report a facial electromyography experiment in which we recorded corrugator supercilii, or “frowning muscle”, activity to assess how readers processed emotion-describing language in moral and minimal in/outgroup contexts. Participants r…
Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge
Introduction Mood 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 bala…
Do People Get Used to Insulting Language
Verbal insults go against a universal moral imperative not to inflict harm on others, and they also pose a threat to one's face or reputation. As such, these “verbal slaps in the face” provide a unique opportunity to explore the interface between language and emotion. We used electroencephalography (EEG) and skin conductance (SC) recordings to compare the short-term impact of verbal insults such as “Linda is an idiot” or “Paula is horrible” to th…
Figuring out what they feel: Exposure to eudaimonic narrative fiction is related to mentalizing ability
Being exposed to narrative fiction may provide us with practice in dealing with social interactions and thereby enhance our ability to engage in mentalizing (understanding other people’s mental states). The current study uses a confirmatory Bayesian approach to assess the relationship between mentalizing and both the self-reported frequency of exposure to narrative fiction across media (books, films, and TV series) and the particular types of fic…
Do self-talk phrases affect behavior in ultimatum games
The current study investigates whether self-talk phrases can influence behavior in Ultimatum Games. In our three self-talk treatments, participants were instructed to tell themselves ( i ) to keep their own interests in mind, ( ii ) to also think of the other person, or ( iii ) to take some time to contemplate their decision. We investigate how such so-called experimenter-determined strategic self-talk phrases affect behavior and emotions in comp…
The Perceived Convincingness Model: Why and under what conditions processing fluency and emotions are valid indicators of a message’s perceived convincingness
Persuasive messages aim to influence people’s behavior. Arguments in these messages typically refer to the positive consequences of the advocated behavior or the negative consequences of failing to do so. It has been claimed that people automatically generate a judgment about the message’s convincingness. We present the Perceived Convincingness Model (PCM) to explain how people generate this judgment based upon the fluency with which they process…
Psychology (15 works) · Linguistics (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Cognition (7 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (7 works) · Sentence (7 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (6 works) · Natural language processing (6 works)