Discourse Expectations Are Sensitive to the Question Under Discussion: Evidence From ERPs

ABSTRACT

Questions under Discussion (QUDs) have been suggested to influence the integration of individual utterances into a discourse-level representation. Previous work has shown that processing ungrammatical ellipses is facilitated when the elided material addresses an implicit QUD raised through a nonactuality implicature (NAIs). It is not clear, however, if QUDs influence discourse coherence during comprehension of fully acceptable discourse. We present two ERP studies examining the effects of QUDs introduced by NAIs using two-sentence discourses. Experiment 1 showed that processing definite NPs with inaccessible antecedents is facilitated when their content is relevant to the QUD. Using acceptable discourses, Experiment 2 showed that definite NPs failing to address a QUD elicit increased processing cost. Overall, our results indicate that QUDs raise the expectation that the following discourse will address them, providing unambiguous evidence that their influence is not limited to the processing of ungrammatical input.

Acknowledgments

We thank Matthew Crocker, Les Sikos, and Lyn Frazier for comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ While there have been several attempts to integrate the QUD approach with theories based on coherence relations, the work is still in progress (Benz & Jasinskaja, 2017). We are therefore agnostic as to whether QUDs subsume coherence relations or are rather complementary to them.

² Dwivedi et al. (2006) also report a significant effect (a late negativity starting at about 500 ms) on the pretarget region (the pronoun). As previously noted (Delogu et al., 2010), the prestimulus baseline for the target region might have picked up this effect and created an ERP artifact on the target (see Steinhauer & Drury, 2012).

³ Based on Dwivedi et al. (2006)’s findings on the pronoun, an increase in cognitive load on the definite should be observed even in the case of anaphoric reference in the context of modal subordination (i.e., if the anaphor is initially interpreted as occurring in a nonfactual clause). As shown by Dwivedi et al. (2006), anaphoric processes in modal contexts are more demanding, presumably because modal contexts are semantically and structurally more complex than factual contexts.

⁴ This time window was chosen based on visual inspection of the waveforms (see Figure 2). In Experiment 1, however, the N400 effect appeared in an earlier time window, between 250 and 450 ms. We think that this difference in latency may depend in part on the distinct stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) employed in the two experiments: in Experiment 1 words appeared with an SOA of 600 ms, while in Experiment 2 they appeared with an SOA of 500 ms. With faster presentation rates, both the onset and peak of the N400 effect are delayed (see, for example, Dambacher et al., 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Cluster of Excellence “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” of the German Excellence Initiative and the SFB/CRC 1102 “Information Density and Linguistic Encoding” awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Further support was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI), the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) (grant PSI2015-65694-P, “Severo Ochoa” program SEV-2015-490 for Centers of Excellence in R&D), and the Basque Government (grant PI_2016_1_0014).