N400-like Effect Research Articles

The effect of asymmetric grammatical gender systems on second language processing: Evidence from ERPs

Aims and objectives: This study examined the effect of the first language (L1) grammatical gender (GG) system on the second language (L2) gender agreement processing, particularly when L1 and L2 are asymmetric in their number of gender values such as in Spanish and German languages. Methodology: Behavioral and brain responses (ERPs) were registered while German native-speakers (16) and Spanish-German bilinguals (24) read sentences for comprehension. We manipulated gender agreement between the determiner and the noun: Der/*die Ring, “themasc/*thefem ringmasc.” The nouns were either of similar or opposite gender across languages or unique in L2 (neuter gender). Data and analysis: Behavioral responses measured participants’ ability to discriminate grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. For ERPs, N400 and P600 components were analyzed by means of a linear mixed-effect model. Findings/conclusion: Behavioral data showed that German native-speakers discriminated gender agreement violations better than Spanish-German bilinguals, irrespective of lexical gender overlap across languages. Native speakers showed a P600 effect to gender agreement violations, whereas bilinguals showed an N400-like effect to gender mismatches that involved same-gender nouns across languages and neuter gender nouns. Interestingly, opposite gender nouns between L1 and L2 that agreed in gender with the determiner were processed as incorrect for the bilinguals. These results suggest transfer effects from L2 learners’ L1 GG system that facilitate L2 gender agreement processing for similar and neuter gender nouns or hinder it for opposite gender nouns across languages. Originality: This study used ERPs to demonstrate how asymmetries in terms of the number of lexical gender categories between L1 and L2 GG systems can affect L2 learners’ ability to process L2 gender agreement in a native-like manner. Significance/implications: These findings elucidate the challenges L2 learners face when learning a three-gender value system in L2, including a great number of gender incongruences between L1 and L2 nouns and a new neuter gender category.

Asymetric Event-Related Potential Priming Effects Between English Letters and American Sign Language Fingerspelling Fonts.

Letter recognition plays an important role in reading and follows different phases of processing, from early visual feature detection to the access of abstract letter representations. Deaf ASL-English bilinguals experience orthography in two forms: English letters and fingerspelling. However, the neurobiological nature of fingerspelling representations, and the relationship between the two orthographies, remains unexplored. We examined the temporal dynamics of single English letter and ASL fingerspelling font processing in an unmasked priming paradigm with centrally presented targets for 200 ms preceded by 100 ms primes. Event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants performed a probe detection task. Experiment 1 examined English letter-to-letter priming in deaf signers and hearing non-signers. We found that English letter recognition is similar for deaf and hearing readers, extending previous findings with hearing readers to unmasked presentations. Experiment 2 examined priming effects between English letters and ASL fingerspelling fonts in deaf signers only. We found that fingerspelling fonts primed both fingerspelling fonts and English letters, but English letters did not prime fingerspelling fonts, indicating a priming asymmetry between letters and fingerspelling fonts. We also found an N400-like priming effect when the primes were fingerspelling fonts which might reflect strategic access to the lexical names of letters. The studies suggest that deaf ASL-English bilinguals process English letters and ASL fingerspelling differently and that the two systems may have distinct neural representations. However, the fact that fingerspelling fonts can prime English letters suggests that the two orthographies may share abstract representations to some extent.

Animacy modulates gender agreement comprehension in Hindi: An ERP study

ABSTRACT The animate–inanimate distinction is of crucial importance cognitively, and animacy has been known to influence language comprehension. However, little is known about the role of animacy in verb agreement processing. The present study employed event-related brain potentials to examine whether the gender agreement of the verb with animate (natural gender) and inanimate (grammatical gender) subject nouns reveal similar or different processing mechanisms in Hindi. Critical stimuli were intransitive sentences of the form subject–verb–aux. Subject nouns were either animate or inanimate, and the verb either showed correct gender agreement or violated it. The violation of gender agreement with animate subjects evoked a P600 effect, whereas gender agreement violation with inanimate subjects revealed a long-latency N400-like effect. The result suggests that different underlying mechanisms are involved in the computation of gender agreement with animate and inanimate arguments in Hindi, illustrating the crucial role that animacy plays in verb agreement processing.

Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence regarding their representation and processing

In Chinese, when objects are named with their quantity, a numeral classifier must be inserted between the quantifier and the noun to produce a grammatically correct quantifier + classifier + noun phrase. In this study, we adopted the picture-word interference paradigm to examine participants’ naming latencies for multiple objects and their electroencephalogram in four conditions by manipulating two factors, i.e. semantic relatedness and classifier congruency. Results show that in noun phrase production, naming latencies are significantly longer in classifier-incongruent and semantically related conditions than in classifier-congruent and semantically unrelated conditions. Also, an N400-like effect was observed and found to be stronger in classifier-incongruent and semantically unrelated conditions. Together, the behavioral data and event-related potential analyses suggest that the use of classifiers as lexico-syntactic features in Mandarin Chinese takes place via a competitive selection process in noun phrase production.

Anticipating words during spoken discourse comprehension: A large-scale, pre-registered replication study using brain potentials

Numerous studies report brain potential evidence for the anticipation of specific words during language comprehension. In the most convincing demonstrations, highly predictable nouns exert an influence on processing even before they appear to a reader or listener, as indicated by the brain's neural response to a prenominal adjective or article when it mismatches the expectations about the upcoming noun. However, recent studies suggest that some well-known demonstrations of prediction may be hard to replicate. This could signal the use of data-contingent analysis, but might also mean that readers and listeners do not always use prediction-relevant information in the way that psycholinguistic theories typically suggest. To shed light on this issue, we performed a close replication of one of the best-cited ERP studies on word anticipation (Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman & Hagoort, 2005; Experiment 1), in which participants listened to Dutch spoken mini-stories. In the original study, the marking of grammatical gender on pre-nominal adjectives (‘groot/grote’) elicited an early positivity when mismatching the gender of an unheard, highly predictable noun, compared to matching gender. The current pre-registered study involved that same manipulation, but used a novel set of materials twice the size of the original set, an increased sample size (N = 187), and Bayesian mixed-effects model analyses that better accounted for known sources of variance than the original. In our study, mismatching gender elicited more negative voltage than matching gender at posterior electrodes. However, this N400-like effect was small in size and lacked support from Bayes Factors. In contrast, we successfully replicated the original's noun effects. While our results yielded some support for prediction, they do not support the Van Berkum et al. effect and highlight the risks associated with commonly employed data-contingent analyses and small sample sizes. Our results also raise the question whether Dutch listeners reliably or consistently use adjectival inflection information to inform their noun predictions.

Toward an Individualized Neural Assessment of Receptive Language in Children.

Purpose We aimed to develop a noninvasive neural test of language comprehension to use with nonspeaking children for whom standard behavioral testing is unreliable (e.g., minimally verbal autism). Our aims were threefold. First, we sought to establish the sensitivity of two auditory paradigms to elicit neural responses in individual neurotypical children. Second, we aimed to validate the use of a portable and accessible electroencephalography (EEG) system, by comparing its recordings to those of a research-grade system. Third, in light of substantial interindividual variability in individuals' neural responses, we assessed whether multivariate decoding methods could improve sensitivity. Method We tested the sensitivity of two child-friendly covert N400 paradigms. Thirty-one typically developing children listened to identical spoken words that were either strongly predicted by the preceding context or violated lexical-semantic expectations. Context was given by a cue word (Experiment 1) or sentence frame (Experiment 2), and participants either made an overall judgment on word relatedness or counted lexical-semantic violations. We measured EEG concurrently from a research-grade system, Neuroscan's SynAmps2, and an adapted gaming system, Emotiv's EPOC+. Results We found substantial interindividual variability in the timing and topology of N400-like effects. For both paradigms and EEG systems, traditional N400 effects at the expected sensors and time points were statistically significant in around 50% of individuals. Using multivariate analyses, detection rate increased to 88% of individuals for the research-grade system in the sentences paradigm, illustrating the robustness of this method in the face of interindividual variations in topography. Conclusions There was large interindividual variability in neural responses, suggesting interindividual variation in either the cognitive response to lexical-semantic violations and/or the neural substrate of that response. Around half of our neurotypical participants showed the expected N400 effect at the expected location and time points. A low-cost, accessible EEG system provided comparable data for univariate analysis but was not well suited to multivariate decoding. However, multivariate analyses with a research-grade EEG system increased our detection rate to 88% of individuals. This approach provides a strong foundation to establish a neural index of language comprehension in children with limited communication. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12606311.

In the absence of visual input: Electrophysiological evidence of infants’ mapping of labels onto auditory objects

Despite the prominence of non-visual semantic features for some words (e.g., siren or thunder), little is known about when and how the meanings of those words that refer to auditory objects can be acquired in early infancy. With associative learning being an important mechanism of word learning, we ask the question whether associations between sounds and words lead to similar learning effects as associations between visual objects and words. In an event-related potential (ERP) study, 10- to 12-month-old infants were presented with pairs of environmental sounds and pseudowords in either a consistent (where sound-word mapping can occur) or inconsistent manner. Subsequently, the infants were presented with sound-pseudoword combinations either matching or violating the consistent pairs from the training phase. In the training phase, we observed word-form familiarity effects and pairing consistency effects for ERPs time-locked to the onset of the word. The test phase revealed N400-like effects for violated pairs as compared to matching pairs. These results indicate that associative word learning is also possible for auditory objects before infants’ first birthday. The specific temporal occurrence of the N400-like effect and topological distribution of the ERPs suggests that the object’s modality has an impact on how novel words are processed.

Domain-general inhibition ability predicts the intensity of inhibition on non-target language in bilingual word production: An ERP study

AbstractThis study investigated the predictive effects of executive functions on bilingual language control processes. We used a flanker task, a switching task and an n-back task to investigate inhibition, shifting, and updating, respectively. We adopted a cued language switching task to investigate the language control processes during bilingual word production. Results of linear mixed effects models showed that picture naming in switch trials was significantly slower and elicited larger stimulus-locked N2 and N400-like components. The results further showed that the flanker effect alone robustly predicted the variability of the N2 but not N400-like switch effects. These findings suggest that domain-general inhibition appears to predict the intensity of inhibition exerted on the lexical items in the non-target language during bilingual word production, but bilingual language control only partially overlaps with executive functions.

When is irony influenced by communicative constraints? ERP evidence supporting interactive models.

Distinct theoretical proposals have described how communicative constraints (contextual biases, speaker identity) impact verbal irony processing. Modular models assume that social and contextual factors have an effect at a late stage of processing. Interactive models claim that contextual biases are considered early on. The constraint-satisfaction model further assumes that speaker's and context's characteristics can compete at early stages of analysis. The present ERP study teased apart these models by testing the impact of context and speaker features (i.e., speaker accent) on irony analysis. Spanish native speakers were presented with Spanish utterances that were ironic or literal. Each sentence was preceded by a negative or a positive context. Each story was uttered in a native or a foreign accent. Results showed that contextual biases and speaker accent interacted as early as 150ms during irony processing. Greater N400-like effects were reported for ironic than literal sentences only with positive contexts and native accent, possibly suggesting semantic difficulties when non-prototypical irony was produced by natives. A P600 effect of irony was also reported indicating inferential processing costs. The results support the constraint-satisfaction model and suggest that multiple sources of information are weighted and can interact from the earliest stages of irony analysis.

Environmental sound priming: Does negation modify N400 cross-modal priming effects?

Human information processing is incredibly fast and flexible. In order to survive, the human brain has to integrate information from various sources and to derive a coherent interpretation, ideally leading to adequate behavior. In experimental setups, such integration phenomena are often investigated in terms of cross-modal association effects. Interestingly, to date, most of these cross-modal association effects using linguistic stimuli have shown that single words can influence the processing of non-linguistic stimuli, and vice versa. In the present study, we were particularly interested in how far linguistic input beyond single words influences the processing of non-linguistic stimuli; in our case, environmental sounds. Participants read sentences either in an affirmative or negated version: for example: "The dog does (not) bark". Subsequently, participants listened to a sound either matching or mismatching the affirmative version of the sentence ('woof' vs. 'meow', respectively). In line with previous studies, we found a clear N400-like effect during sound perception following affirmative sentences. Interestingly, this effect was identically present following negated sentences, and the negation operator did not modulate the cross-modal association effect observed between the content words of the sentence and the sound. In summary, these results suggest that negation is not incorporated during information processing in a manner that word-sound association effects would be influenced.

Sentence-Level Effects of Literary Genre: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence.

The current study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures to examine effects of genre awareness on sentence processing and evaluation. We hypothesized that genre awareness modulates effects of genre-typical manipulations. We manipulated instructions between participants, either specifying a genre (poetry) or not (neutral). Sentences contained genre-typical variations of semantic congruency (congruent/incongruent) and morpho-phonological features (archaic/contemporary inflections). Offline ratings of meaningfulness (n = 64/group) showed higher average ratings for semantically incongruent sentences in the poetry vs. neutral condition. ERPs during sentence reading (n = 24/group; RSVP presentation at a fixed per-constituent rate; probe task) showed a left-lateralized N400-like effect for contemporary vs. archaic inflections. Semantic congruency elicited a bilateral posterior N400 effect for incongruent vs. congruent continuations followed by a centro-parietal positivity (P600). While N400 amplitudes were insensitive to the genre, the latency of the P600 was delayed by the poetry instruction. From these results, we conclude that during real-time sentence comprehension, readers are sensitive to subtle morphological manipulations and the implicit prosodic differences that accompany them. By contrast, genre awareness affects later stages of comprehension.

Shaving Bridges and Tuning Kitaraa: The Effect of Language Switching on Semantic Processing.

Language switching has been repeatedly found to be costly. Yet, there are reasons to believe that switches in language might benefit language comprehension in some groups of people, such as less proficient language learners. This study therefore investigated the interplay between language switching and semantic processing in groups with varying language proficiency. EEG was recorded while L2 learners of English with intermediate and high proficiency levels read semantically congruent or incongruent sentences in L2. Translations of congruent and incongruent target words were additionally presented in L1 to create intrasentential language switches. A control group of English native speakers was tested in order to compare responses to non-switched stimuli with those of L2 learners. An omnibus ANOVA including all groups revealed larger N400 responses for non-switched incongruent stimuli compared to congruent stimuli. Additionally, despite switches to L1 at target word position, semantic N400 responses were still elicited in both L2 learner groups. Further switching effects were reflected by an N400-like effect and a late positivity complex, pointing to possible parsing efforts after language switches. Our results therefore show that although language switches are associated with increased mental effort, switches may not necessarily be costly on the semantic level. This finding contributes to the ongoing discussion on language inhibition processes, and shows that, in these intermediate and high proficient L2 learners, semantic processes look similar to those of native speakers of English.

Evidence for Separate Contributions of High and Low Spatial Frequencies during Visual Word Recognition.

Previous studies have shown that different spatial frequency information processing streams interact during the recognition of visual stimuli. However, it is a matter of debate as to the contributions of high and low spatial frequency (HSF and LSF) information for visual word recognition. This study examined the role of different spatial frequencies in visual word recognition using event-related potential (ERP) masked priming. EEG was recorded from 32 scalp sites in 30 English-speaking adults in a go/no-go semantic categorization task. Stimuli were white characters on a neutral gray background. Targets were uppercase five letter words preceded by a forward-mask (#######) and a 50 ms lowercase prime. Primes were either the same word (repeated) or a different word (un-repeated) than the subsequent target and either contained only high, only low, or full spatial frequency information. Additionally within each condition, half of the prime-target pairs were high lexical frequency, and half were low. In the full spatial frequency condition, typical ERP masked priming effects were found with an attenuated N250 (sub-lexical) and N400 (lexical-semantic) for repeated compared to un-repeated primes. For HSF primes there was a weaker N250 effect which interacted with lexical frequency, a significant reversal of the effect around 300 ms, and an N400-like effect for only high lexical frequency word pairs. LSF primes did not produce any of the classic ERP repetition priming effects, however they did elicit a distinct early effect around 200 ms in the opposite direction of typical repetition effects. HSF information accounted for many of the masked repetition priming ERP effects and therefore suggests that HSFs are more crucial for word recognition. However, LSFs did produce their own pattern of priming effects indicating that larger scale information may still play a role in word recognition.

Foreign-accented speaker identity affects neural correlates of language comprehension

Abstract This study tested semantic and grammatical processing of native- and foreign-accented speech. Monolinguals with little experience with foreign-accented speech listened to sentences spoken by foreign-accented and native-accented speakers while their brain activity was recorded using EEG/ERPs. We gathered behavioral measures of sentence comprehension, language attitudes, and accent perception. Behavioral results showed that listeners were highly accurate in comprehending both native- and foreign-accented sentences. ERP results showed that grammatical and semantic violations elicited different neural responses in native versus foreign accented speech. Native-accented speech elicited a frontal negativity (Nref) for grammatical violations and a robust N400 for semantic violations. However, in foreign-accented speech only semantic (not grammatical) violations elicited an ERP effect, a late negativity. Closer inspection of listeners who did and who did not correctly identify the foreign accent revealed that listeners who identified the foreign accent showed ERP responses for both grammatical and semantic errors: an N400-like effect to grammatical errors and a late negativity to semantic errors. In contrast, listeners who did not correctly identify the foreign accent showed no ERP responses to grammatical errors in the foreign-accented condition, but did show a late negativity to semantic errors. These findings provide novel insights into understanding the effects of listener experience and foreign-accented speaker identity on the neural correlates of language processing.

Discourse comprehension in L2: Making sense of what is not explicitly said

Using ERPs, we tested whether L2 speakers can integrate multiple sources of information (e.g., semantic, pragmatic information) during discourse comprehension. We presented native speakers and L2 speakers with three-sentence scenarios in which the final sentence was highly causally related, intermediately related, or causally unrelated to its context; its interpretation therefore required simple or complex inferences. Native speakers revealed a gradual N400-like effect, larger in the causally unrelated condition than in the highly related condition, and falling in-between in the intermediately related condition, replicating previous results. In the crucial intermediately related condition, L2 speakers behaved like native speakers, however, showing extra processing in a later time-window. Overall, the results show that, when reading, L2 speakers are able to process information from the local context and prior information (e.g., world knowledge) to build global coherence, suggesting that they process different sources of information to make inferences online during discourse comprehension, like native speakers.

Investigating the relationship between implicit and explicit memory: Evidence that masked repetition priming speeds the onset of recollection

Memory theories assume that unconscious processes influence conscious remembering, but the exact nature of the relationship between implicit and explicit memory remains an open question. Within the context of episodic recognition tests research typical shows that priming impacts behavioral and neural indices of familiarity. By this account, implicit memory leads to enhanced fluency of processing, which is then attributed to ‘oldness’ in the context of recognition judgments. Recently, however, behavioral and neuroimaging evidence has emerged to suggest that priming can also influence recollection, suggesting that the rate of recollection increases following priming. Here, we examine the relationship between priming and recollection, using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to assess changes in the timecourse of processing. Participants studied a series of words, and episodic memory was assessed using a standard item recognition test, but masked repetition priming preceded half of the test cues. Results confirmed that implicit memory was engaged: priming produced robust facilitation of recognition Reaction Times (RTs), with larger effects for studied than unstudied words. Mapping onto the RT data, ERPs recorded during recognition testing over centro-parietal electrodes revealed N400-like priming effects (250–500ms) that were larger in magnitude for studied than unstudied words. More importantly, priming also had a clear impact on explicit memory, as measured by recollection-related left-parietal old/new effects. While old/new effects for unprimed trials were present during the typical 500–800ms latency interval, the old/new effects seen for primed trials were equivalent in magnitude and topography, but onset ~300ms earlier. ERPs reveal that repetition priming speeds the onset of recollection, providing a novel demonstration that unconscious memory processes can have a measureable, functional, influence on conscious remembering.

Prosodic expectations in silent reading: ERP evidence from rhyme scheme and semantic congruence in classic Chinese poems

In an ERP study, classic Chinese poems with a well-known rhyme scheme were used to generate an expectation of a rhyme in the absence of an expectation for a specific character. Critical characters were either consistent or inconsistent with the expected rhyme scheme and semantically congruent or incongruent with the content of the poem. These stimuli allowed us to examine whether a top-down rhyme scheme expectation would affect relatively early components of the ERP associated with character-to-sound mapping (P200) and lexically-mediated semantic processing (N400). The ERP data revealed that rhyme scheme congruence, but not semantic congruence modulated the P200: rhyme-incongruent characters elicited a P200 effect across the head demonstrating that top-down expectations influence early phonological coding of the character before lexical-semantic processing. Rhyme scheme incongruence also produced a right-lateralized N400-like effect. Moreover, compared to semantically congruous poems, semantically incongruous poems produced a larger N400 response only when the character was consistent with the expected rhyme scheme. The results suggest that top-down prosodic expectations can modulate early phonological processing in visual word recognition, indicating that prosodic expectations might play an important role in silent reading. They also suggest that semantic processing is influenced by general knowledge of text genre.

Neurophysiological effects of prediction on head reassignment in German compounds.

Recent research on noun-noun compounds has suggested that the parser may commit to the first noun (N1) as the head and then have to revise that commitment when the second noun (N2) is encountered. However, it remains unclear under what circumstances head commitment at N1 occurs, and whether it involves both semantic and syntactic revisions at N2. In two event-related potential experiments in German, we explored these questions by manipulating gender matches between a determiner and N1/N2 in compounds. In Experiment 1, a determiner-noun match in gender at N1 compared with a mismatch yielded an effect at N2 for the matching condition (increased negativity at 480-550 ms, strongest in the left hemisphere); there was a similar effect for the gender violation at N2. The observed negativity could have been due to either semantic or syntactic head revision, or both. Experiment 2 increased expectations that an N2 was imminent, which attenuated syntactic, but not semantic, effects at N2. We found N400-like effects, often associated with semantic integration, suggesting that, in Experiment 1, the syntactic effects had masked the semantic costs. Taken together, these results support the idea that both semantic and syntactic head commitment and revision occur during compound processing.

Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers' gender.

An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker’s identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker’s gender, i.e., the conceptual representation of gender, on subject–verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker’s gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker’s gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person ‘the neighbors were upset because I ∗stoleMASC plums’) elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker’s gender, a disagreement between a formally marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM ∗stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex.

N400-like effect of stroke-based neighborhood size in Chinese characters

Word-to-letter neighborhood feedback has been proposed to account for the lexical facilitation effect of orthographic neighborhood size (N). In the present study, a new N of Chinese characters was manipulated. Neighbors were created by randomly replacing about one third of the total strokes of characters while keeping the structure and the orientation of its remaining strokes constant. Participants were asked to match probe characters with the preceding target characters while event-related brain potentials elicited by target characters were recorded. In the N400 time window, characters with many neighbors produced more negative amplitudes than characters with few neighbors. The N400-like effect supports the lateral inhibition component of the interactive activation model where the non-target candidates are inhibited; lateral inhibition contributes to the N400-like effect of N more than does character-to-stroke feedback. Likewise, a large neighborhood size yielded higher N250 amplitudes, thus possibly indicating greater summed mismatches between the numerous neighbors and their targets.