Between alpha and gamma oscillations: Neural signatures of linguistic predictions and listener's attention to speaker's communication intention

Abstract

When listeners hear a message produced by their interlocutor, they can predict upcoming words thanks to the sentential context and their attention can be focused on the speaker's communication intention. In two electroencephalographical (EEG) studies, we investigated the oscillatory correlates of prediction in spoken-language comprehension and how they are modulated by the listener’s attention. Sentential contexts which were strongly predictive of a particular word were ended by a possessive adjective either matching the gender of the predicted word or not. Alpha, beta and gamma oscillations were studied as they were considered to play a crucial role in the predictive process. While evidence of word prediction was related to alpha fluctuations when listeners focused their attention on sentence meaning, changes in high-gamma oscillations were triggered by word prediction when listeners focused their attention on the speaker's communication intention. Independently of the endogenous attention to a level of linguistic information, the oscillatory correlates of word predictions in language comprehension were sensitive to the prosodic emphasis produced by the speaker at a late stage. These findings thus bear major implications for understanding the neural mechanisms that support predictive processing in spoken-language comprehension.