Presentation format affects the behavioural and neural processing costs of sentence reinterpretation

Figures & data

Table 2. Stimulus characteristics. Sentences in the Ambiguous condition contained an ambiguous key noun (e.g. “bark”) that was disambiguated towards its subordinate meaning by the final word (e.g. “willow”). Control sentences in the Unambiguous condition contained a frequency-matched and length-matched unambiguous key noun and final word. Means (SD) are reported for psycholinguistic characteristics of the stimuli.

	Condition
Characteristic	Ambiguous	Unambiguous
N	90	90
Number of syllables	16.42 (1.5)	16.42 (1.5)
Number of words	13.04 (1.16)	13.04 (1.16)
Main noun frequency^a	75.14 (112.66)	69.64 (97.03)
Final word frequency^a	73.04 (110.68)	77.53 (123.02)
Main noun single-word dominance score^b	0.75 (0.16)
Sentence comprehensibility^c	8.2 (1.04)
Sentence level subordinate-meaning suitability rating^d	7.9 (1.08)

^a Lemma frequency per million (CELEX lexical database, Baayen et al., 1995).

^b Volunteers in a pilot word association study, who did not participate in the present experiment, were presented with the ambiguous main nouns in isolation, and asked to respond with the first word that came to mind. After providing their association response, they selected their intended meaning of the ambiguous main noun from alternatives. The score provided here indicates the proportion of word association responses that matched the purported dominant meaning of the word.

^c Pilot participants rated whether the sentences made sense on a scale from 1–10 (with 1 indicating “makes no sense at all”, and 10 indicating “makes perfect sense”, see Vitello, 2014; and Vitello et al., 2014, for details).

^d Pilot participants were explicitly asked which of two possible meanings (e.g. “the noise a dog makes” or “the outer covering of a tree”) made more sense in the given context for each sentence (see Vitello, 2014; and Vitello et al., 2014). The score provided here indicates the preference given to the subordinate meaning on a scale from 1–10 (with 1 indicated “subordinate meaning makes no sense at all”, and 10 indicating “subordinate meaning makes perfect sense”).

Table 1. Example stimuli in the two coherent conditions (Ambiguous, Unambiguous) and the anomalous filler conditions.

Condition	Example sentence
Ambiguous	The woman thought that the bark must have come from her neighbour's willow.
Unambiguous	The woman thought that the fumes must have come from her neighbour's boiler.
Anomalous Ambiguous	The woman thought that such a big scoop might be quite a challenge to sharpen.
Anomalous Unambiguous	The woman thought that such a big quest might be quite a challenge to wash.

Figure 1. Accuracy rates and response times in the Meaning Coherence Judgement task. Boxplots show median and interquartile range of accuracy scores (top panel) and response times (bottom panel) for the Ambiguous and Unambiguous condition in each presentation format.

Table 3. Summary of descriptive statistics for accuracy and response times in the Meaning Coherence Judgement task for each of the presentation formats (means with standard deviations in parentheses).

	Spoken	Written	RSVP
Accuracy
Ambiguous	0.8 (0.13)	0.8 (0.14)	0.76 (0.14)
Unambiguous	0.95 (0.06)	0.95 (0.07)	0.93 (0.09)
Mean difference	0.15	0.15	0.18
RT
Ambiguous	1413.5 (435.1)	981.4 (351)	1223.7 (373.7)
Unambiguous	1122 (336.9)	887.9 (299.6)	961.3 (347)
Mean difference	291.5	93.5	262.4

Figure 2. Accuracy rates in the post-scan Recognition Memory test. Boxplots show median and interquartile range of accuracy scores. by scanning run (top panel) and presentation format (bottom panel).

Figure 3. Accuracy rates and response times in the post-scan Explicit Disambiguation task. Boxplots show median and interquartile range of accuracy scores (top panel) and response times (bottom panel) for the Ambiguous and Unambiguous condition.

Figure 4. Results of the whole-brain analyses. Brain activation in the contrast of intelligible > unintelligible sentences (panel 1), and ambiguous > unambiguous sentences (panel 2) in each of the presentation formats.

Figure 5. Results of the ROI analyses. Panel 1. Illustration of the approximate location of the BA 45 and BA 47 ROIs in the left IFG (left). Boxplots showing median and interquartile range of ambiguity effects (Ambiguous > Unambiguous contrast) in each of the presentation formats, and ROIs (right). Panel 2. Peri-stimulus time histograms of mean BOLD signal extracted from BA 47 (left) and BA 45 (right).

Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., & Gulikers, L. (1995). The CELEX lexical database (release 2). Distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.

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Vitello, S. (2014). Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms Underlying Semantic Ambiguity Resolution. (Doctoral dissertation, University of London).

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Vitello, S., Warren, J. E., Devlin, J. T., & Rodd, J. M. (2014). Roles of frontal and temporal regions in reinterpreting semantically ambiguous sentences. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00530

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Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of Experiment 1 and anonymised summary data that support the findings of Experiment 2 are openly available at the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/m87vg/. The raw data that support the findings of Experiment 2 of this study are available on request from the senior author, JEW. These data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.