Poster E39, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Examining prediction at the level of the Discourse: An ERP study
José Alemán Bañón1, Clara Martin2;1Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University, 2Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language
INTRODUCTION: An ongoing debate in psycholinguistics concerns whether adult L2ers can generate predictions online. Grüter et al. (2016) propose that adult L2ers have Reduced Ability to Generate Expectations. Alternatively, Kaan (2014) argues that prediction is similar in the L1 and L2, but is impacted by individual differences in cognitive factors. We used ERP to investigate the role of prediction in Focus assignment (property of the discourse) via the it-cleft. Example: What did Ann buy, a book or a calculator? It is [a book]FOCUS that Ann bought. We examine whether comprehenders use the it-cleft to anticipate the Noun Phrase (NP) with Focus status. METHODS: Participants read wh-questions like (1). STIMULI: (1) Either an agent or an adviser could work for a banker. In your opinion, which of the two should a banker hire? (1a) In my opinion… it is an agent that a banker should hire; (1b) ...it is a banker that should hire an agent; (1c) ...an agent should be hired; (1d) ...a banker should hire an agent. Then their EEG was recorded while they read the responses (RSVP: 450/300ms). In (1a-b) the it-cleft provided a cue for Focus assignment. Half of the times, Focus was assigned to an accessible NP (1a) and the other half, to the Topic (1b), thus violating information structure. In (1c-d) the absence of the it-cleft made Focus assignment less constrained/predictable. As shown in (1), the two Focus NPs (an agent/an adviser) and the Topic (a banker) were preceded by different allomorphs of the indefinite article (counterbalanced), allowing us to examine prediction effects at the article, before semantic integration occurred (Delong et al. 2005). We used 30 items/condition. RESULTS/DISCUSSION: L1-English speakers (n=23) showed an N400 (250-400ms) for unexpected (1b) relative to expected articles (1a) in the conditions with the it-cleft (Cleft by Expectedness by Anterior by Hemisphere, F(1,22)=4.38, p<.05), suggesting that the cleft allows the parser to anticipate upcoming (Focus) nouns. Topic nouns (1b/1d, banker) yielded a P600 relative to Focus nouns (1a/1c, agent) overall. Since the P600 is argued to reflect the reanalysis processes triggered by violations of top down expectations, L1 speakers might have expected the first NP in the response to fill the slot opened by the wh-question. L1-Spanish L2-English learners (n=22, intermediate/advanced) show an Anterior Positivity for unexpected (1b) relative to expected articles (1a). This effect, linked to prediction disconfirmation (Delong et al. 2014) emerged in the conditions with the it-cleft (Cleft by Expectedness, F(1,21)=6.89, p<.05). Topic nouns (1b/1d, banker) yielded an N400 effect relative to Focus nouns (1a/1c, agent), suggesting that the L2ers processed infelicitous Focus assignment lexically. Finally, the size of the prediction effect on the article correlated with processing speed in both L1 and L2ers (Huettig & Janse, 2016). Our results are not fully consistent with either Grüter et al.’s or Kaan’s proposals, but they show that L2ers can predict at the level of the discourse, although differently from L1 speakers, and that L2 prediction is impacted by similar cognitive factors as in L1 speakers (processing speed).
Themes: Multilingualism, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)