Abstract
ABSTRACTPrevious studies have shown that comprehenders use rich contextual information to anticipate upcoming input on the fly, but less is known about how comprehenders integrate different sources of information to generate predictions in real time. The current study examines the time course with which the lexical meaning and structural roles of preverbal arguments impact comprehenders’ lexical semantic predictions about an upcoming verb in two event-related potential (ERP) experiments that use the N400 amplitude as a measure of online predictability. Experiment 1 showed that the N400 was sensitive to predictability when the verb's cloze probability was reduced by substituting one of the arguments (e.g. “The superintendent overheard which tenant/realtor the landlord had evicted … ”), but not when the verb's cloze probability was reduced by simply swapping the roles of the arguments (e.g. “The restaurant owner forgot which customer/waitress the waitress/customer had served … ”). Experiment 2 showed that argument substitution elicited an N400 effect even when the substituted argument appeared elsewhere in the sentence, indicating that verb predictions are specifically driven by the arguments in the same clause as the verb, rather than by a simple “bag-of-words” mechanism. We propose that verb predictions initially rely on a “bag-of-arguments” mechanism, which specifically relies on the lexical meaning, but not the structural roles, of the arguments in a clause.
Highlights
Just as we are more likely to catch a flying ball if we can anticipate its trajectory, our brain can process information more efficiently if it can anticipate upcoming input ahead of time
We propose that verb predictions initially rely on a ‘bag-of-arguments’ mechanism, which relies on the lexical meaning, but not the structural roles, of the arguments in a clause
In a classic study by Garnsey and colleagues (1989), comprehenders read sentences with an Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) embedded object question like “The businessman knew which customer/article the secretary called...,” and they showed a smaller N400 at the embedded verb when the fronted object was animate than when it was inanimate. These findings suggest that comprehenders can use some information about the arguments for verb predictions rather quickly. These results suggest that comprehenders can use both the meaning and structural roles of preceding words to pre-activate likely upcoming verbs, but the predictive processes involved are initially sensitive to only a subset of this information
Summary
Just as we are more likely to catch a flying ball if we can anticipate its trajectory, our brain can process information more efficiently if it can anticipate upcoming input ahead of time. Van Berkum and colleagues (2005) measured participants’ event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as they listened to Dutch sentences such as “The burglar had no trouble locating the secret family safe It was situated behind a bigNEU / bigCOM but unobtrusive paintingNEU / bookcaseCOM.” and found that, even prior to the onset of the noun, the adjective (e.g., bigCOM) elicited an early positivity when its grammatical gender was inconsistent with that of the predicted noun (e.g., paintingNEU), suggesting that comprehenders pre-activated the most likely noun continuation and its gender.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
