Poster A28, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Definitely saw it coming? An ERP study on the role of article gender and definiteness in predictive processing
Damien Fleur1, Monique Flecken1,2, Joost Rommers2, Mante S. Nieuwland1,2;1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
People sometimes anticipate specific words during language comprehension. Consistent with word anticipation, pre-nominal articles elicit differential neural activity when they mismatch the gender of a predictable noun compared with when they match (e.g., for Dutch, Otten and Van Berkum, 2009; Van Berkum et al., 2005; for Spanish, Foucart et al., 2014; Gianelli & Molinaro, 2018; Martin etal., 2018; Molinaro et al., 2017; Wicha et al., 2003, 2004). However, the functional significance of this pre-nominal effect is unclear. A minimal interpretation is that people predict the noun (with or without its gender) and then use article gender, once available, to confirm or change the noun prediction (e.g., Otten & Van Berkum, 2009; see also Otten et al., 2007; Otten & Van Berkum, 2008; Van Berkum et al., 2005). However, a stronger claim has been made, namely that people predict a specific article-noun combination including the gender-marked form of the article (Kutas et al., 2011; Wicha et al., 2003, 2004; DeLong et al., 2005). We contrasted these accounts in an ERP study (N=48) on Dutch mini-story comprehension, with pre-registered data collection and analyses (https://osf.io/6drcy), capitalizing on gender-marking on Dutch definite articles and the lack thereof on indefinite articles. Participants read mini-story contexts that strongly suggested either a definite or indefinite noun phrase (e.g., ‘het/een boek’, the/a book) as its best continuation, followed by a definite noun phrase with the expected noun or an unexpected, different gender noun (‘het boek/de roman’, the book/the novel). If gender-mismatch effects reflect the prediction of specific article-noun combinations, including article form, then we expect to observe an interaction effect: a gender-mismatch effect for expectedly definite articles but not for unexpectedly definite articles. Alternatively, if gender-mismatch effects only reflect the incremental use of article gender-information to update a prediction, rather than the consequences of an article form misprediction, we expect to observe no interaction. We observed an enhanced negativity (N400) for articles that were unexpectedly definite or mismatched the expected gender, with the former effect being strongest. This negative ERP effect extended into the 500-700 ms time window. Pre-registered analyses and exploratory Bayesian analyses did not yield convincing evidence that the effect of gender-mismatch depended on expected definiteness. Although these results do not constitute clear evidence against prediction of a specific article form, they suggest that article form prediction is not required to elicit a pre-nominal effect. An additional finding of interest was a much larger N400 effect of unexpected definiteness than of unexpected gender; this may reflect the fact that unexpected gender may signal a potentially very small change in upcoming meaning, whereas unexpected definiteness may signal a strong change in meaning because it changes information structure of the discourse Such changes in semantic processing, and the potential meanings they afforded, may be reflected in N400 activity (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2019; Kutas & Federmeier, 2011; Rabovsky et al., 2018; Van Berkum, 2009). Pre-print: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/563783v1
Themes: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)