Predictive processing of aspectual information: evidence from event-related brain potentials

ABSTRACT

We conducted an event-related potential experiment using aspectual coercion to examine whether aspectual information is predictively processed prior to verb input in Japanese. In the experiment, experimental sentences were presented with two presentation durations (500 ms vs. 800 ms) to manipulate the temporal predictability of a verb. Aspectually coerced sentences elicited an early anterior negativity (AN) only when participants had a sufficient time to generate an aspectual prediction for a verb. A late AN was observed in aspectual coercion irrespective of the manipulation of the duration. This result indicates that early AN is elicited by a prediction error pertaining to aspectual information, suggesting that aspectual information is computed predictively based on adverbials without waiting for verb information.

KEYWORDS:

• Aspectual coercion
• prediction
• Japanese
• event-related brain potentials
• anterior negativity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank anonymous reviewers and an editor for their valuable comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Masatoshi Koizumi and Hajime Ono for their insightful comments.

Compliance with ethical standards

This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Linguistics, Kyushu University. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to the experiment.

Disclosure statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. The interpretation of their finding is rather limited since there seems to be a difference between the control and mismatch conditions in the first-pass time at the adverb position of the Adv-VSO order, which is likely due to a lexical difference between them. This difference undermines the interpretation of the significant effect at the adverb position in the SVO-Adv order.

2. As an anonymous reviewer correctly pointed out, these three types of AC do not cover entire possible aspectual transition. For example, stative verbs can be interpreted as an achievement event (i) and an activity event (ii), as exemplified below (see Moens, 1987, p. 61).

1. Suddenly, I knew the answer. (De Swart, 1998, p. 359)

2. Susan is liking this play a great deal. (De Swart, 1998, p. 362)

3. Moens and Steedman (1988, p. 17) mentioned that “[c]ulminated processes, in contrast to ordinary processes, combine readily with an in-adverbial but not with a for-adverbial”, whereas Dowty (1979, p. 56) argues that “accomplishment verbs take adverbial prepositional phrases with in but only very marginally take adverbials with for”. One might wonder whether “climb all the way to the top” is an achievement rather than an accomplishment because an achievement event is incompatible with for-adverbials (e.g. *Harry won the race for several hours). Importantly, however, it should be considered as an accomplishment event according to Dowty's (1979) diagnostics (see Dowty, 1979, p. 60 for a list of criteria). The judgment shown below is based on my informants, who are native speakers of English.

1. “Harry spent several hours climbing all the way to the top” is acceptable.

2. “Harry climbed all the way to the top in several hours” entails “Harry was climbing all the way to the top during several hours”

3. “Harry finished climbing all the way to the top” is acceptable.

4. “Harry stopped climbing all the way to the top” is acceptable.

5. “Harry almost climbed all the way to the top” is ambiguous between “Harry had intention of climbing all the way to the top but changed his mind and did nothing at all” and “Harry did begin climbing all the way to the top, and he almost but not quite finished it”.

6. “Harry {attentively/carefully} climbed all the way to the top” is acceptable.

4. Bott (2010) exemplified that a preparatory phase of “He reached the camp in five minutes” is inferred as “hiking” after reading “A mountaineer was hiking to the basecamp” and as “by helicopter” after reading “A mountaineer got on the helicopter which was leaving the airport for the basecamp” That is, this type of additive coercion involves prior discourse. However, because the examples that Bott (2010, p. 135) used do not satisfy Dowty's (1979) criteria for accomplishments in the first place, as shown below, despite that they are expected to do if an aspectual interpretation shifts from an achievement to an accomplishment, this claim and the experiments using German sentences that are similar to them need to be reconsidered carefully. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this point.

1. “John spent five hours reaching the camp” is not acceptable.

2. “John reached the camp in five hours” does not entail “John was reaching the camp during five hours”.

3. “John finished reaching the camp in five hours” is not acceptable (or only marginally acceptable).

4. “John stopped reaching the camp in five hours” is not acceptable.

5. “John {attentively/carefully} reached the camp in five hours” is not acceptable.

5. In (10) and (11), object NPs can be interpreted as a singular or plural; thus, these sentences allow two interpretations (i.e. “The new employee spent 30 min to print out multiple documents” and “The new employee spent 30 min to print out a single document”). Although the participants were supposed to interpret them as coerced sentences, as supported by the result of the acceptability judgment survey, it is possible that this variation affected the ERPs.

6. For filler sentences, (12a) was judged to be more acceptable than (12b) and (12c) (12a: M = 1.62(SE = 0.08), 12b: M = 1.37 (SE = 0.04), 12c = 1.27 (SE = 0.04)) (12a vs. 12b: t (23) = 4.26, p < 0.05, 12a vs. 12c: t (23) = 3.05, p < 0.05). The more acceptable judgment for (12a) might be due to the fact that it can be interpreted such that “The actress found wallets one after another for 20 min”.

7. The two-alternative forced choice task was employed in the ERP experiment because it was more efficient than the 5-scale acceptability judgment task in terms of EEG recording and analyses given that the present ERP experiment was not interested in the effect of continuous acceptability on AN effects.

8. An anonymous reviewer raised a question of why the effect of the subtractive coercion was stronger than that of the additive coercion in the several regions, although the additive coercion was judged to be less acceptable than the subtractive coercion. This might relate to signal-to-noise (SN) ratio of ERPs. Since the additive coercion was judged to be unacceptable more often than the subtractive coercion condition, the number of trials averaged across trials was less in the additive coercion than the subtractive coercion. Accordingly, the SN ratio may be lower in the additive coercion, resulting in a weaker coercion effect. Importantly, however, because the number of rejected trials did not differ between the two SOA conditions, the difference of the results in the long and short SOA conditions cannot be attributed to that of SN ratio. Another important thing regarding ERPs is that ERPs measures how costly a word is to process rather than how acceptable a sentence is (see Lau, Namyst, Fogel, & Delgado, 2016). Since the offline acceptability judgment measures how acceptable a final representation of the entire sentence is to native speakers of Japanese, whereas the AN measures how costly a verb is given a sequence of S-O-Adv, it is not surprising even if these measures do not show a correlation between unacceptability and the strength of the AN effect.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellows (#16J01818, PI: Masataka Yano) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.