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Neural Correlates of Syntactic Unification in Minimal Phrases: Evidence from an EEG Study in Audio and Visual Modalities.
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Poster C47 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Tanzida Zaman1, M. Blake Rafferty2, Ashley W. Harkrider1, Devin M. Casenhiser1; 1University of Tennessee Health Science Center, 2New Mexico State University
An electroencephalography (EEG) study by Rafferty et al. (2023) found that participants demonstrated significantly greater neural synchrony when they read pseudoword noun phrases (the moop) compared to when reading the same words in reversed order. Other research, however, found that participants who listened to pseudoword sentences showed comparatively little neural synchrony (Kaufeld et al. 2020, Coopmans et al. 2022). These divergent findings may be due to differences in reading versus listening. To test this possibility, we both replicated Rafferty et al to confirm neural synchrony for pseudowords during reading and tested whether neural synchrony is also elicited when the stimuli are presented auditorily. Finally, we investigated the comparative amount of neural synchrony when stimuli are presented with identical or varying inter-word intervals. Methods: Forty participants (experiment 1+2) listened to and read stimuli from two conditions: unifiable and non-unifiable. Unifiable stimuli consisted of an English determiner followed by a pseudoword (the moop). In non-unifiable stimuli the words were reversed so that they did not form a complete phrase. Differences in neural synchrony were measured using Inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC) at the phrase rate (.5 Hz) and the word rate (1 Hz). We hypothesized that regardless of stimulus modality, participants would demonstrate greater ITPC for unifiable stimuli at the phrase rate, while they would show no differences at the word rate. In a second experiment we manipulated the duration of auditorily presented stimuli to create two conditions: isochronous (word duration and inter-word intervals were held constant), and anisochronous (word durations were allowed to vary naturally). We hypothesized that the isochronous condition would exhibit greater differences in neural synchrony when comparing unifiable and non-unifiable conditions. Results: For visual stimuli, 17/20 participants elicit greater ITPC for unifiable words than the non-unifiable words. Participants also demonstrated significantly greater ITPC at the phrase rate (p = 0.003) for unifiable words. No significant difference was observed at the word-rate (p = 0.764). For auditory stimuli, 13/20 participants elicited greater ITPC in the unifiable condition. Somewhat unexpectedly the unifiable word pairs elicited only marginally higher ITPC when compared to non-unifiable words (p = 0.064). Again, no differences were observed at the word rate (p = 0.840). In Experiment 2, 19/20 participants who heard stimuli presented isochronously demonstrated greater ITPC for unifiable words, and significantly greater ITPC for unifiable words was found for the phrase-band (p= 0.001) but not for the word band (p = 0.075). When the stimuli were presented anisochronously, 15/20 participants elicited greater ITPC in the unifiable condition, and there was marginally greater ITPC for unifiable phrases in the phrase-band (p= 0.059). No differences were observed in the word band (p = 0.143). Conclusion: Results confirm previous evidence that neural oscillations can synchronize with linguistic structures. Further, since neural synchrony is elicited even when stimuli lack content words, the results suggest that syntactic patterns need not project from lexical items, as has been previously suggested. Finally, the results from experiment two underscore the extent to which neural synchrony depends on the temporal predictability of stimuli.
Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics, Methods