Poster C1, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 10:45 am – 12:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Individual alpha frequency has greater impact on the interaction of prediction and interference in language comprehension than age
Pia Schoknecht1, Dietmar Roehm1, Matthias Schlesewsky2, Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky2;1University of Salzburg, 2University of South Australia
Interference and prediction have independently been identified as crucial influencing factors during language processing. However, their interaction remains severely underinvestigated. As both might be influenced by inter-individual differences and cognitive changes across the lifespan, we conducted an ERP experiment that examined the interaction of interference and prediction during language processing and the influence of age and individual alpha frequency (IAF) on the underlying processes. IAF has been found a more crucial factor for performance during sentence comprehension than age within an older adult group [1]. We used the N400-as-model-updating account [2] that is based on the neurobiologically well-established predictive coding framework [3,4] for the theoretical framing of our study. This account proposed that negativities like the N400 are related to the degree to which prediction errors lead to internal model updating [2]. Eighty-three healthy, right-handed, native speakers of German (10-13 years (N=28), 18-35 years (N=31), 61-72 years (N=24)) read sentence pairs word-by-word. A context sentence introduced two noun phrases (NPs). A target sentence referred back to one of the NPs; the article was our critical word. Interference was manipulated via a gender match/mismatch between the NPs in the context and the article. In high interference conditions, the article is ambiguous; in low interference conditions, there is only one compatible NP in the context. Prediction was measured via offline cloze probability. Sentences were truncated before the article itself to obtain its cloze values. We further obtained cloze values for the following noun (with sentences then truncated after the article), because we hypothesized that article processing would also be influenced by prediction generation/confirmation/falsification related to the noun. We analyzed mean single trial EEG activity in the N400 time window with LMMs and found that interference, predictability of article and noun, IAF and age interact. During processing of a low-cloze article which was followed by a highly predictable noun (i.e. the noun became highly predictable at the position of the article), the following effects were observed: At anterior electrode sites, the article elicited a negativity in low IAF subjects (of all ages) for high interference versus low interference conditions, while high IAF subjects (only young/older adults) showed a negativity for the low interference versus high interference conditions. We assume that the low IAF subjects were not aware that the article under high interference was ambiguous and treated it as a confirmation of their noun prediction (probably shaped by verb bias). In contrast, the high IAF subjects only engaged in model updating when the article was unambiguous (low interference conditions). This suggests that IAF modulates the strategy that individuals use to update their internal predictive models during language processing. We conclude that interference should be included in predictive coding-based accounts of language and, in addition, that IAF may have a stronger influence than age on inter-individual differences in how prediction and interference interact in language. [1]Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al. (2015). Front. Aging Neurosci. [2]Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky (2019). Front. Psychol. [3]Friston (2005). Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol. [4]Bastos et al. (2012). Neuron.
Themes: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Development
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)