Abstract
AbstractElectroencephalographic (EEG) signals can reveal the cost required to deal with information structure mismatches in speech or in text contexts. The present study investigates the costs related to the processing of different associations between the syntactic categories of Noun and Verb and the information categories of Topic and Focus. It is hypothesized that – due to the very nature (respectively, predicative and non-predicative) of verbal and nominal reference – sentences with Topics realized by verbs, and Focuses realized by nouns, should impose greater processing demands, compared to the decoding of nominal Topics and verbal Focuses. Data from event-related potential (ERP) measurements revealed an N400 effect in response to both nouns encoded as Focus and verbs packaged as Topic, confirming that the cost associated with information structure processing follows discourse-driven expectations also with respect to the word-class level.
Highlights
Because of the great temporal resolution that characterizes them, electroencephalographic (EEG) signals have been often analyzed to gain insights into the brain processes which are carried out during language processing tasks
The present paper aims at assessing the contribution of event-related potential (ERP) in exploring how the brain deals with a special type of language interface, namely the one between the information structure and the word class level of a sentence
To avoid potential overlapping with other discourse phenomena, mainly indefinite phrases were considered for the noun set, since definite noun phrases would have been interpreted as triggering a presupposition, blurring topicalization and focalization effects
Summary
Because of the great temporal resolution that characterizes them, electroencephalographic (EEG) signals have been often analyzed to gain insights into the brain processes which are carried out during language processing tasks. Investigations on language processing have been performed considering event-related potentials (ERPs) since the early 1980s (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980; Kutas & Federmeier, 2000; Bambini, 2012). ERPs are voltage changes of the electrical activity of the brain and can be induced by sensory or cognitive events (Luck & Kappenman, 2011). Two ERP signatures, N400 and P600, have been found to strongly interact with the brain response to linguistic inputs. P600, a component peaking between 500 and 800 ms, was originally observed in parsing difficulties caused by syntactic violations or garden path sentences (Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992; Hagoort et al, 1993; Kaan & Swaab, 2003), yet its functional role has been associated with mechanisms of context update (Burkhardt, 2006; Hoeks et al, 2014) and new information decoding (Burkhardt, 2007; Domaneschi et al, 2018)
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