Refine
Document Type
- Article (4)
- Book (2)
- Part of a Book (2)
- Course Material (1)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Keywords
- Neurolinguistik (10) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
Publisher
Prediction is a central mechanism in the human language processing architecture. The psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature has seen a lively debate about what form prediction may take and what status it has for language processing in the human mind and brain. While predictions are a ubiquitous finding, the implications of these results for models of language processing differ. For instance, eyetracking data suggest that predictions may rely on sublexical orthographic information in natural reading, while electrophysiological data provide mixed evidence for form-based predictions during reading. Other research has revealed that humans rapidly adapt to text specifics and that their predictive capacity varies, broadly speaking, in accordance with inter- and intra-individual language proficiency, which cuts across the speaker groups (e.g. L1 vs. L2 speakers, skilled vs. untrained readers) traditionally used for experimental contrasts. There is therefore evidence that the kind and strength of linguistic predictions depend on (at least) three sources of variability in language processing: speaker, text genre and experimental method.
The aim of this Research Topic is to develop a better understanding of prediction in light of the three sources of variability in language processing, by providing an overview of state-of-the art research on predictive language processing and by bringing together research from various disciplines.
First, intra-and inter-individual differences and their influence on predictive processes remain underrepresented in experimental research on predictive processing. How do language users differ in their predictive abilities and strategies, and how are these differences shaped by e.g. biological, social and cultural factors?
Second, while language users experience great stylistic diversity in their daily language exposure and use, the majority of language processing research still focuses on a very constrained register of well-controlled sentences composed in the standard language. How are predictions shaped by extra- and meta-linguistic context, such as register/genre or accent/speaker identity, and how may this influence the processing of experimental items in another language or text variety?
Third, the Research Topic invites contributions that make use of a multi-method approach, such as combined behavioral and electrophysiological measures or experimental methods combined with measures extracted from corpus data. What opportunities and challenges do we face when integrating multiple approaches to examine linguistic, experimental and individual differences in human predictive capacity?
We welcome contributions from all areas of empirical psycho- and neurolinguistics, but contributions must explicitly address variability and variation in language and language processing. Relevant topics include individual differences and the impact of genre, modality, register and language variety. Contributions that go beyond single word and single sentence paradigms are especially desirable. Experimental, corpus-based, meta-analytic and review papers, as well as theoretical/opinion pieces are welcome; however, papers of the latter type should support their arguments with substantial empirical evidence from the literature. Particularly desirable are contributions which combine topics and/or methods, such as the impact of an individual's native dialect on processing of constructions that show variability in the standard language (e.g. choice of auxiliary, agreement of mass nouns, etc.) or experimental methods combined with measures extracted from corpus data such as information-theoretic surprisal.
Over the past decade, conducting empirical research in linguistics has become increasingly popular. The first of its kind, this book provides an engaging and practical introduction to this exciting versatile field, providing a comprehensive overview of research aspects in general, and covering a broad range of subdiscipline-specific methodological approaches. Subfields covered include language documentation and descriptive linguistics, language typology, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The book reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of each single approach and on how they interact with one-another across the study of language in its many diverse facets. It also includes exercises, example student projects and recommendations for further reading, along with additional online teaching materials. Providing hands-on experience, and written in an engaging and accessible style, this unique and comprehensive guide will give students the inspiration they need to develop their own research projects in empirical linguistics.
The teaching slides accompany the following textbook:
Svenja Völkel & Franziska Kretzschmar (2021): Introducing linguistic research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The slides follow the structure of the book chapters and can be used for teaching in class. They include the basic information per chapter and exercises to work on in class or as homework. More detailed information, additional exercises, suggestions for research projects and recommendations for further reading can be found in the textbook.
A central question in psycholinguistics is how the human brain processes language in real time. To answer this question, the differences between auditory and visual processing have to be considered. The present dissertation examines the extent to which event-related potentials (ERPs) in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) interact with different modes of presentation during sentence comprehension. Besides the two classical modalities, auditory and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), the monitoring of readers’ eye movements was chosen as a new mode of presentation. Here, the temporal paradox between neuronal ERP effects and behavioral effects in the eye movement record were of particular interest. Specifically, by concurrently measuring ERPs and eye movements in natural reading, the dissertation aimed to shed light on the counterintuitive fact that difficulties in sentence comprehension arise earlier in eye movement measures than in the corresponding neuronal ERP effects. In contrast to RSVP and the auditory modality, reading offers a parafoveal preview of upcoming words (Rayner 1998), which enables the brain to process information of words before these are fixated for the first time (in foveal vision). When the word Gegenteil in example (1) below is fixated and processed, the brain concurrently processes some information of the upcoming parafoveal words von and weiß. (1) Schwarz ist das Gegenteil von weiß. (2) Schwarz […] blau. (3) Schwarz […] nett. The parafoveal preview mostly provides orthographic (word form) information, while semantic information is not conveyed (Inhoff & Starr 2004; White 2008). Whereas word form and lexical meaning are processed simultaneously with RSVP and auditory presentation, the parafoveal preview in natural reading allows for a temporal decoupling such that word forms are processed before meaning. This is one reason for the faster information uptake in reading. The present dissertation is the first to systematically investigate the influence of the parafoveal preview in sentence processing. Participants read sentences such as in (1)-(3), in which two adjectives were either antonyms (1), semantically related non-antonyms (2), or semantically unrelated non-antonyms (3). ERPs were computed for the last fixation before the target word (the sentence-final word in 1-3), which was assumed to capture parafoveal processing, and for the first fixation on the target, that should reflect foveal processing. The results were compared to two experiments using identical stimuli with auditory and RSVP presentation, and the parafoveal preview clearly led to different ERP results. While the RSVP and auditory presentations replicated the finding of a P300 to the second antonym in (1) (Kutas & Iragui 1998; Roehm et al. 2007), there was no P300 in response to antonyms at any fixation position in natural reading. However, the dissociation of parafoveal and foveal processing in reading also made it possible to disentangle different processes underlying the N400. There was a reduced parafoveal N400 for (1,2) compared with (3), which could be attributed to the preactivation of the word forms of the expected antonyms and of semantically related non-antonyms. In foveal vision, all non-antonyms (2,3) showed an enhanced N400 compared with (1) because they were unexpected and implausible in the sentence context. This dissociation between the preactivation of a word-form and the contextual fit of a word’s meaning is impossible with the other two modes of presentation, because orthographic and semantic information become available almost at the same time and are thus processed simultaneously. Furthermore, the parafoveal N400 effect was not accompanied by changes in the duration of the corresponding fixation, whereas the foveal N400 was. Similarly, with the concurrent measurement of ERPs and eye movements, the temporal paradox described above remained, as effects in the eye movement record preceded the neuronal ERP effects. Further support for these central findings came from two additional experiments that investigated different stimuli with concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures. Altogether, the experiments revealed that the previous findings on the language-related N400 can be replicated with natural reading, but they can also be differentiated qualitatively by virtue of the characteristics of natural reading. Although the behavioral and neuronal effects mirrored one another, not every neuronal effect necessarily translates into a behavioral output. Finally, even concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures cannot resolve the temporal paradox.
Although the N400 was originally discovered in a paradigm designed to elicit a P300 (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980), its relationship with the P300 and how both overlapping event-related potentials (ERPs) determine behavioral profiles is still elusive. Here we conducted an ERP (N = 20) and a multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) experiment (N = 16) on distinct participant samples using an antonym paradigm (The opposite of black is white/nice/yellow with acceptability judgment). We hypothesized that SAT profiles incorporate processes of task-related decision-making (P300) and stimulus-related expectation violation (N400). We replicated previous ERP results (Roehm et al., 2007): in the correct condition (white), the expected target elicits a P300, while both expectation violations engender an N400 [reduced for related (yellow) vs. unrelated targets (nice)]. Using multivariate Bayesian mixed-effects models, we modeled the P300 and N400 responses simultaneously and found that correlation between residuals and subject-level random effects of each response window was minimal, suggesting that the components are largely independent. For the SAT data, we found that antonyms and unrelated targets had a similar slope (rate of increase in accuracy over time) and an asymptote at ceiling, while related targets showed both a lower slope and a lower asymptote, reaching only approximately 80% accuracy. Using a GLMM-based approach (Davidson and Martin, 2013), we modeled these dynamics using response time and condition as predictors. Replacing the predictor for condition with the averaged P300 and N400 amplitudes from the ERP experiment, we achieved identical model performance. We then examined the piecewise contribution of the P300 and N400 amplitudes with partial effects (see Hohenstein and Kliegl, 2015). Unsurprisingly, the P300 amplitude was the strongest contributor to the SAT-curve in the antonym condition and the N400 was the strongest contributor in the unrelated condition. In brief, this is the first demonstration of how overlapping ERP responses in one sample of participants predict behavioral SAT profiles of another sample. The P300 and N400 reflect two independent but interacting processes and the competition between these processes is reflected differently in behavioral parameters of speed and accuracy.
Hierarchical predictive coding has been identified as a possible unifying principle of brain function, and recent work in cognitive neuroscience has examined how it may be affected by age–related changes. Using language comprehension as a test case, the present study aimed to dissociate age-related changes in prediction generation versus internal model adaptation following a prediction error. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured in a group of older adults (60–81 years; n = 40) as they read sentences of the form “The opposite of black is white/yellow/nice.” Replicating previous work in young adults, results showed a target-related P300 for the expected antonym (“white”; an effect assumed to reflect a prediction match), and a graded N400 effect for the two incongruous conditions (i.e. a larger N400 amplitude for the incongruous continuation not related to the expected antonym, “nice,” versus the incongruous associated condition, “yellow”). These effects were followed by a late positivity, again with a larger amplitude in the incongruous non-associated versus incongruous associated condition. Analyses using linear mixed-effects models showed that the target-related P300 effect and the N400 effect for the incongruous non-associated condition were both modulated by age, thus suggesting that age-related changes affect both prediction generation and model adaptation. However, effects of age were outweighed by the interindividual variability of ERP responses, as reflected in the high proportion of variance captured by the inclusion of by-condition random slopes for participants and items. We thus argue that – at both a neurophysiological and a functional level – the notion of general differences between language processing in young and older adults may only be of limited use, and that future research should seek to better understand the causes of interindividual variability in the ERP responses of older adults and its relation to cognitive performance.
Interindividuelle Unterschiede bei der Verarbeitung sprachlicher Strukturen haben bei experimentellen Untersuchungen zur Sprachverarbeitung mittels neurobasierter Verfahren lange Zeit keine oder bestenfalls eine untergeordnete Rolle gespielt. Während individuelle Verarbeitungsstrategien in Abhängigkeit von experimentellen Faktoren (z.B. Aufgabenstellung) relativ gut belegt sind (z.B. probandenspezifisches strategisches Verhalten bei der Verarbeitung von semantischen Relationen; Roehm et al. 2007), wurde der Einfluss von Variation in der Grammatik des Standarddeutschen in Korrelation zu Hirnprozessen bisher kaum berücksichtigt. In diesem Beitrag werde ich auf der Basis dreier EEG-Experimente aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen (Synästhesie, semantische Relationen, Auxiliarselektion bei intransitiven Verben) Beispiele für Verarbeitungskorrelate interindividueller Variation vorstellen und diskutieren.
Sprache und Gehirn
(2008)
Sprachverstehen ist ein hochkomplexer Prozess bei dem eine Reihe von Subprozessen aufgerufen und zeitlich koordiniert werden müssen. Linguistische Theorien und psycholinguistische Modelle postulieren unterschiedliche Prozessdomänen für die Verarbeitung von gesprochener Sprache: Semantik, Syntax und Phonologie und innerhalb dieser, die Prosodie. Neurophysiologische Studien, die auf den zeitlichen Verlauf dieser Prozesse im Gehirn fokussieren, zeigen, dass syntaktische Information früh und unabhängig von semantischer Information verarbeitet wird. Bildgebende Verfahren belegen, dass diese verschiedenen Prozessdomänen von unterschiedlichen neuronalen Netzwerken in der linken Hirnhälfte unterstützt werden. Für die syntaktische Verarbeitung können dabei zwei Subnetzwerke differenziert werden. Ein Netzwerk, bestehend aus dem frontalen Operculum und dem anterioren Anteil des oberen Temporalgyrus, zeichnet verantwortlich für die Verarbeitung der lokalen Phrasenstruktur. Ein zweites Netzwerk, bestehend aus dem Broca-Areal und dem hinteren Anteil des oberen Temporalgyrus, ist verantwortlich für die Verarbeitung hierarchischer Strukturen. Die rechte Hirnhälfte ist vornehmlich für die Verarbeitung prosodischer Information auf Satzebene zuständig. Die schnelle Kommunikation zwischen beiden Hirnhälften ist Voraussetzung für eine enge Koppelung von syntaktischer und prosodischer Verarbeitung auf dem Weg zum Sprachverstehen. Diese wird durch eine Hirnstruktur gesichert, die die beiden Hemisphären miteinander verbindet. Als Beleg hierfür gilt der Befund, dass Patienten mit Schädigung dieser Hirnstruktur keine normale Interaktion zwischen grammatischer und prosodischer Information zeigen.