Wait a second! delayed impact of argument roles on on-line verb prediction

ABSTRACT

Comprehenders can use rich contextual information to anticipate upcoming input on the fly, but recent findings suggest that salient information about argument roles may not impact verb prediction. We took advantage of the word order properties of Mandarin Chinese to examine the time course with which argument role information impacts verb prediction. We isolated the contribution of argument role information by manipulating the order of pre-verbal noun phrase arguments while holding lexical information constant, and we examined its effects on accessing the verb in long-term semantic memory by measuring the amplitude of the N400 component. Experiment 1 showed when the verb appeared immediately after its arguments, even strongly constraining argument role information failed to modulate the N400 response to the verb. An N400 effect emerged in Experiment 2 when the verb appeared at a greater delay. Experiment 3 corroborated the contrast between the first two experiments through a within-participants manipulation of the time interval between the arguments and the verb, by varying the position of an adverbial phrase. These results suggest time is a key factor governing how diverse contextual information contributes to predictions. Here argument role information is shown to impact verb prediction, but its effect is not immediate.

KEYWORDS:

• Language comprehension
• prediction
• thematic relations
• N400

Acknowledgements

We thank Nan Li, Lan Chen, Jie Li, Qiong Sun, Wenjia Zhang, Luodi Yu, Jian Wang, Zhizhou Deng, Dongxia Sun, Xiayan Zhu, Yangling Cui and Gangyi Feng for invaluable help in material creation and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Wing-Yee Chow http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1734-485X

Notes

1. Federmeier and Kutas (1999) pointed out that the predictability of a word, as assessed by cloze probability, is not always identical to the predictability of the meaning (or semantic features) of that word. Therefore, cloze probability may be an imperfect proxy if the N400 amplitude is modulated by the ease of accessing the meaning of a word. We return to this point in discussing the logic of the current study.

2. Earlier studies have reported that the N400 was insensitive to negation in simple sentences (e.g. “A robin is not a tree/bird”; Fischler, Bloom, Childers, Roucos, & Perry, 1983; Katayama, Miyata, & Yagi, 1987; Kounios & Holcomb, 1992; Lüdtke, Friedrich, De Filippis, & Kaup, 2008), but more recent work has demonstrated that the N400 is sensitive to negation as long as it is pragmatically licensed (Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008).

3. These accounts typically posit that such insensitivity to implausibility is temporary, as participants’ end-of-trial plausibility judgements are highly accurate across studies.

4. In Experiment 1, average sentence constraint in the canonical condition was 64% in the high-predictability sentences and 22% in the low-predictability sentences; in the role-reversed condition, average sentence constraint was 25% and 22% in high- and low-predictability sentences respectively. The target verb was the most predictable word in the canonical condition in all of the high predictability sentences and only some of the low predictability sentences.

5. Note that this result does not indicate that comprehenders computed predictions more quickly in the filler sentences than in the experimental sentences. As in previous studies on the effects of cloze probability, the cloze probability manipulation in the filler sentences did not allow precise estimation of the delay between predictive context and predicted target because the same target words were presented in completely different sentence contexts across conditions.

6. Since these sentences were adapted from those used in Experiment 1, some target words in the low predictability sentences (which had very low cloze probabilities in Experiment 1) may have a zero cloze probability simply due to sampling error.

7. Sentence constraint were also highly similar between items in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 2, average sentence constraint (cloze probability of the most likely continuation) in the canonical condition was 58% in the high-predictability sentences and 21% in the low-predictability sentences; in the role-reversed condition, average sentence constraint was 26% and 22% in high-predictability and low-predictability sentences respectively.

8. Since the materials were developed by first selecting the short-distance sentences with a suitable cloze probability profile and then adapting those sentences to create the long-distance versions, in some cases the target word had a lower cloze probability in the long-distance condition simply because a synonym (or a closely related word) was more frequent in the cloze responses in the long-distance sentences.

9. As in Experiments 1 and 2, sentence constraint was not affected by the distance manipulation in Experiment 3. In Experiment 3, average sentence constraint in the canonical condition was 37% and 35% in the short- and long-distance sentences respectively; in the role-reversed condition, average sentence constraint was 27% in both short- and long-distance sentences. The target word was the most predictable word in the canonical condition in the majority of the items.

10. Since the target words in the filler sentences were not matched in any way with those in the experimental sentences, such a comparison may be suggestive but must be interpreted with caution.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant (BCS-0848554) to Colin Phillips, and by a Key Project of National Social Science Foundation of China (15AZD048) and a Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (2014A030311016) to Suiping Wang.