Salience is in the brain of the beholder: ERPs reflect acoustically salient variables

Abstract

A recent paper by Boswijk, Loerts & Hilton (Boswijk et al., 2020) in this journal discusses how technological advances allow us to explore the cognitive processing of so-called salient linguistic features, and how this could provide us with quantifiable measures of ‘salience’. The paper concludes that, although promising, the used measure of pupil dilation seems to be limited as a measure for linguistic salience, and therefore refers future research to other measures, specifically Event Related Potentials (ERPs). In this paper we therefore replicate the Boswijk et al. study using the ERP measure with the hypothesis that linguistic salience evokes distinct ERP components. We use the same materials that were used in the Boswijk et al. (2020) paper to observe changes in Dutch participants' pupil sizes when listening to stimuli containing salient and non-salient variants of linguistic variables.Using Generalized Additive Mixed Modelling (GAMM), we find distinct responses for five of six stimuli categories. We consider our findings in light of the literature on linguistic salience and discuss how our findings relate to the Boswijk et al. (2020) study. We find that ERPs provide a more fine-grained measure of theoretically salient stimuli.