Single prosodic phrase sentences

A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness of special sentences, called Wide Focus Partial Fronting (WFPF), which consist of only one prosodic phrase and a unique initial accented argument, are reported on here. The results help us to decide between different models of German prosody. The absence of pitch height difference on the accent of the sentence speaks in favor of a relative model of prosody, in which accents are scaled relative to each other, and against models in which pitch accents are scaled in an absolute way. The results also speak for a model in which syntax, but not information structure, influences the prosodic phrasing. Finally, perception experiments show that the prosodic structure of sentences with a marked word order needs to be presented for grammaticality judgments. Presentation of written material only is not enough, and falsifies the results

Locality in German

Three experiments (self-paced reading, eyetracking and an ERP study) show that in relative clauses, increasing the distance between the relativized noun and the relative-clause verb makes it more difficult to process the relative-clause verb (the so-called locality effect). This result is consistent with the predictions of several theories (Gibson, 2000; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), and contradicts the recent claim (Levy, 2008) that in relative-clause structures increasing argument-verb distance makes processing easier at the verb. Levy’s expectation-based account predicts that the expectation for a verb becomes sharper as distance is increased and therefore processing becomes easier at the verb. We argue that, in addition to expectation effects (which are seen in the eyetracking study in first-pass regression probability), processing load also increases with increasing distance. This contradicts Levy’s claim that heightened expectation leads to lower processing cost. Dependency- resolution cost and expectation-based facilitation are jointly responsible for determining processing cost

Teasing apart coercion and surprisal : Evidence from eye-movements and ERPs

Previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have presented evidence suggesting that coercion expressions (e.g., began the book) are more difficult to process than control expressions like read the book. While this processing cost has been attributed to a specific coercion operation for recovering an eventsense of the complement (e.g., began reading the book), an alternative view based on the Surprisal Theory of language processing would attribute the cost to the relative unpredictability of the complement noun in the coercion compared to the control condition, with no need to postulate coercionspecific mechanisms. In two experiments, monitoring eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs), respectively, we sought to determine whether there is any evidence for coercion-specific processing cost above-and-beyond the difficulty predicted by surprisal, by contrasting coercing and control expressions with a further control condition in which the predictability of the complement noun was similar to that in the coercion condition (e.g., bought the book). While the eye-tracking study showed significant effects of surprisal and a marginal effect of coercion on late reading measures, the ERP study clearly supported the surprisal account. Overall, our findings suggest that the coercion cost largely reflects the surprisal of the complement noun with coercion specific operations possibly influencing later processing stages

On the predictability of event boundaries in discourse : An ERP investigation

When reading a text describing an everyday activity, comprehenders build a model of the situation described that includes prior knowledge of the entities, locations, and sequences of actions that typically occur within the event. Previous work has demonstrated that such knowledge guides the processing of incoming information by making event boundaries more or less expected. In the present ERP study, we investigated whether comprehenders’ expectations about event boundaries are influenced by how elaborately common events are described in the context. Participants read short stories in which a common activity (e.g., washing the dishes) was described either in brief or in an elaborate manner. The final sentence contained a target word referring to a more predictable action marking a fine event boundary (e.g., drying) or a less predictable action, marking a coarse event boundary (e.g., jogging). The results revealed a larger N400 effect for coarse event boundaries compared to fine event boundaries, but no interaction with description length. Between 600 and 1000 ms, however, elaborate contexts elicited a larger frontal positivity compared to brief contexts. This effect was largely driven by less predictable targets, marking coarse event boundaries. We interpret the P600 effect as indexing the updating of the situation model at event boundaries, consistent with Event Segmentation Theory (EST). The updating process is more demanding with coarse event boundaries, which presumably require the construction of a new situation model

Script Knowledge Constrains Ellipses in Fragments - Evidence from Production Data and Language Modeling

We investigate the effect of script-based (Schank and Abelson 1977) extralinguistic context on the omission of words in fragments. Our data elicited with a production task show that predictable words are more often omitted than unpredictable ones, as predicted by the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis (Levy & Jaeger 2007). We take into account effects of linguistic and extralinguistic context on predictability and propose a method for estimating the surprisal of words in presence of ellipsis. Our study extends previous evidence for UID in two ways: First, we show that not only local linguistic context, but also extralinguistic context determines the likelihood of omissions. Second, we find UID effects on the omission of content words

The online processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives

While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being a highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as discourse connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question using different methodologies (visual world paradigm and ERPs) in two languages (German and English). We find support for highly incremental processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives, causing anticipation of upcoming material. Our visual world study shows that anticipatory looks depend on the discourse connective; furthermore, the German ERP study revealed an N400 effect on a gender-marked adjective preceding the target noun, when the target noun was inconsistent with the expectations elicited by the combination of context and discourse connective. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the facilitation of downstream material based on earlier connectives comes at the cost of reversing original expectations, as evidenced by a P600 effect on the concessive relative to the causal connective

Situational expectancy or association? The influence of event knowledge on the N400

Electrophysiological studies suggest that situational event knowledge plays an important role in language processing, but often fail to distinguish whether observed effects are driven by combinatorial expectations, or simple association with the context. In two ERP experiments, participants read short discourses describing ongoing events. We manipulated the situational expectancy of the target word continuing the event as well as the presence of an associated, but inactive event in the context. In both experiments we find an N400 effect for unexpected compared to expected target words, but this effect is significantly attenuated when the unexpected target is nonetheless associated with non-occurring context events. Our findings demonstrate that the N400 is simultaneously influenced by both simple association with – and combinatorial expectations derived from – situational event knowledge. Thus, experimental investigations and comprehension models of the use of event knowledge must accommodate the role of both expectancy and association in electrophysiological measures

Graded expectations in visually situated comprehension: Costs and benefits as indexed by the N400

Recently, Ankener et al. (Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2387, 2018) presented a visual world study which combined both attention and pupillary measures to demonstrate that anticipating a target results in lower effort to integrate that target (noun). However, they found no indication that the anticipatory processes themselves, i.e., the reduction of uncertainty about upcoming referents, results in processing effort (cf. Linzen and Jaeger, Cognitive Science, 40(6), 1382–1411, 2016). In contrast, Maess et al. (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 1–11, 2016) found that more constraining verbs elicited a higher N400 amplitude than unconstraining verbs. The aim of the present study was therefore twofold: Firstly, we examined whether the graded ICA effect, which was previously found on the noun as a result of a likelihood manipulation, replicates in ERP measures. Secondly, we set out to investigate whether the processes leading to the generation of expectations (derived during verb and scene processing) induce an N400 modulation. Our results confirm that visual context is combined with the verb’s meaning to establish expectations about upcoming nouns and that these expectations affect the retrieval of the upcoming noun (modulated N400 on the noun). Importantly, however, we find no evidence for different costs in generating more or less specific expectations for upcoming nouns. Thus, the benefits of generating expectations are not associated with any costs in situated language comprehension

Influence of speakers' gaze on situated language comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Behavioral studies have shown that speaker gaze to objects in a co-present scene can influence listeners' sentence comprehension. To gain deeper insight into the mechanisms involved in gaze processing and integration, we conducted two ERP experiments (N = 30, Age: [18, 32] and [19, 33] respectively). Participants watched a centrally positioned face performing gaze actions aligned to utterances comparing two out of three displayed objects. They were asked to judge whether the sentence was true given the provided scene. We manipulated the second gaze cue to be either Congruent (baseline), Incongruent or Averted (Exp1)/Mutual (Exp2). When speaker gaze is used to form lexical expectations about upcoming referents, we found an attenuated N200 when phonological information confirms these expectations (Congruent). Similarly, we observed attenuated N400 amplitudes when gaze-cued expectations (Congruent) facilitate lexical retrieval. Crucially, only a violation of gaze-cued lexical expectations (Incongruent) leads to a P600 effect, suggesting the necessity to revise the mental representation of the situation. Our results support the hypothesis that gaze is utilized above and beyond simply enhancing a cued object's prominence. Rather, gaze to objects leads to their integration into the mental representation of the situation before they are mentioned