Abstract
In this EEG study, we used pre-registered and exploratory ERP and time-frequency analyses to investigate the resolution of anaphoric and non-anaphoric noun phrases during discourse comprehension. Participants listened to story contexts that described two antecedents, and subsequently read a target sentence with a critical noun phrase that lexically matched one antecedent (‘old’), matched two antecedents (‘ambiguous’), partially matched one antecedent in terms of semantic features (‘partial-match’), or introduced another referent (non-anaphoric, ‘new’). After each target sentence, participants judged whether the noun referred back to an antecedent (i.e., an ‘old/new’ judgment), which was easiest for ambiguous nouns and hardest for partially matching nouns. The noun-elicited N400 ERP component demonstrated initial sensitivity to repetition and semantic overlap, corresponding to repetition and semantic priming effects, respectively. New and partially matching nouns both elicited a subsequent frontal positivity, which suggested that partially matching anaphors may have been processed as new nouns temporarily. ERPs in an even later time window and ERPs time-locked to sentence-final words suggested that new and partially matching nouns had different effects on comprehension, with partially matching nouns incurring additional processing costs up to the end of the sentence. In contrast to the ERP results, the time-frequency results primarily demonstrated sensitivity to noun repetition, and did not differentiate partially matching anaphors from new nouns. In sum, our results show the ERP and time-frequency effects of referent repetition during discourse comprehension, and demonstrate the potentially demanding nature of establishing the anaphoric meaning of a novel noun.
Highlights
All nouns have a general meaning, maybe even multiple general meanings, but they acquire a particular, referential meaning when used to refer to someone or something in the world
To examine how people solve such mapping problems, we compared electrophysiological brain responses [event-related potentials (ERPs) and oscillatory activity] to referring expressions that have either one, two or no suitable referent in the linguistic context and that may differ in form from their referent
We considered an alternative possibility, namely that new nouns would elicit larger Late Positive Component (LPC) than anaphors
Summary
All nouns have a general meaning, maybe even multiple general meanings, but they acquire a particular, referential meaning when used to refer to someone or something in the world. The 60–80 Hz range between 500 and 1000 ms after pronoun onset, with source analysis suggesting a contribution from left inferior frontal gyrus, and brain region that is thought to be involved in sentence-level unification/integration processes (e.g., Hagoort, 2005; Hagoort and Indefrey, 2014) Based on these findings, Nieuwland and Martin (2017) argued that the observed gamma-band power increases reflect successful referential binding and resolution, which links incoming information to antecedents through an interaction between the brain’s recognition memory networks and fronto-temporal language network. The available studies report mixed results, which may have to do with differences in type of linguistic expression (pronoun, noun phrase, proper name) and experimental manipulation (difficulty with retrieving an antecedent, referential ambiguity, comparing old, anaphoric names with new names). Ambiguity regarding the anaphoric nature of partially matching nouns could lead to the type of Nref effect we expected for ambiguous nouns (Nieuwland, 2014)
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