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When the N100 reflects the top-down prediction of verbal inflection during pronoun processing
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Poster C50 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Jane Aristia1, Angèle Brunellière2; 1CICPSI , Faculdade de Psicologia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal, 2SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives - CNRS, UMR 9193 , Université de Lille, Lille, France
It is well known that N100 component is related to both auditory and perceptual processing (Schwartze et al., 2013; Thornton et al., 2007) and the top-down and attentional processing (Schwartze et al., 2013; Thornton et al., 2007, Getz & Toscano, 2019). Yet, to date, it is still debatable if top-down prediction related to pronoun-verb relationships influence the elicitation of N100 component during pronoun processing. Moreover, grammatical features are not the sole representation that are accessed during subject-verb processing (Molinaro et al., 2011) as previous studies have shown that language statistical properties are involved in language processing (Seidenberg & MacDonald, 1999) and subject-verb agreement is processed by sequence detectors linking the representations of morphemes that are likely to occur in succession (Pulvermüller, 2003). Hence, there are two aims in this present study. First, to investigate whether top-down prediction depending on the strength of co-occurrence frequency between French pronouns and their verbal inflections influenced the N100 component during pronoun processing. Second, to investigate if there is automaticity in top-down prediction related to pronoun-verb relationships as previous study showed that subject-verb agreement is automatically processed (Gunter & Friederici, 1999). To achieve the first aim we compared the N100 amplitude elicited by the processing of highly predictable pronouns of verbal inflections (i.e., ‘nous’ – we and ‘vous’ – you plural) to that by the processing of lowly predictable pronouns of verbal inflections (i.e., ‘je’ – I and ‘tu’ – you singular). Pronouns were auditorily presented as primes in a grammatical priming paradigm. To investigate the automaticity, we conducted two EEG experiments. In the first experiment, participants had to perform a lexical decision task on the auditory targets following the presentation of primes (n=23), while in the second experiment, they had to perform a noun categorization task on the targets (n=20). As expected, we observed a larger N100 after the processing of highly predictable pronouns of verbal inflections in comparison with that of lowly predictable pronouns of verbal inflections in both experiments (p<.001). This effect was not affected by the task (p>.2). This suggests that the N100 reflects the top-down prediction of verbal inflection during pronoun processing and that this prediction, which was driven by the strength of co-occurrence frequency between pronouns and verbal inflections, occurs automatically. The current findings support the predictive coding framework (Friston, & Kiebel, 2009) claiming that the brain continuously infers the probabilities of sensory input from higher-level representations in order to predict the upcoming input.
Topic Areas: Speech Motor Control, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration