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

ABSTRACT

Several recent event-related potential (ERP) studies have observed a left (anterior) negativity (L(A)N) in (morpho)syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous sentences, which are often referred to as semantic reversal anomalies (e.g. The window closes someone). Such a L(A)N elicitation for semantic reversal anomalies is not expected under the widely held assumption that LANs are associated with morphosyntactic processing loads and are insensitive to semantic anomalies. This raises the empirical question of why semantic reversal anomalies elicit a L(A)N effect. One possible explanation for this observation can be presented in relation the multi-stream processing model, according to which the independent semantic processing stream challenges an analysis outputted by the morphosyntactic processing stream, leading to a misperception of morphosyntactic ill-formedness. Alternatively, the L(A)N effect may reflect a mismatch between expected and actual syntactic structures. As an inanimate subject triggers the expectation of an intransitive structure rather than an active transitive structure, the input of a transitive verb should violate such an expectation. The present study tests these two hypotheses by manipulating the temporal predictabilities of verbs to examine the underlying cognitive processes of L(A)N effects in semantic reversal anomalies. The results reveal a L(A)N effect for semantic reversal anomalies only when prediction of a verb type was possible, in favour of the latter prediction-based view. The implications of this finding are discussed with respect to predictive processing mechanisms and the architecture of processing systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Sentence comprehension
• syntactic prediction
• semantic reversal anomaly
• event-related brain potentials (ERPs)
• left anterior negativity (LAN)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank anonymous reviewers 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 experiments.

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 An increasing number of recent ERP studies have suggested that a biphasic response of the grand mean ERP can sometime reflect a result of a spatiotemporal component overlapping of N400-like negativities that some participants show and P600-like positivities that other participants show (Grey, Tanner, & van Hell, 2017; Kos, van den Brink, & Hagoort, 2012; Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2008; Osterhout, 1997; Tanner, 2015; Tanner & Van Hell, 2014; Tanner, Inoue, & Osterhout, 2014; Tanner, McLaughlin, Herschensohn, & Osterhout, 2013). The biphasic response was a representative pattern of Yano and Sakamoto’s (2016) experiment. Thus, the bi-phasic pattern was not a result of grand mean averaging with some participants showing either a negativity or a positivity. As an anonymous reviewer correctly pointed out, however, this does not rule out a possibility of a component overlap within individual participants.

2 The interpretation of this finding is rather limited, as the ELAN effect was observed only using the average (but not mastoid) reference (Lau et al., 2006, Figure 4).

3 Some other examples were given below:

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4 Since Japanese and Chinese differ in terms of word order and the use of case marker, these differences could affect the time-course of predictive computation. Thus, the assumption that the Japanese parser cannot make a prediction for a type of verbs within 600 ms after reading an NP should be warranted independently.

5 In Experiment 1, the small anterior negativity for the case-assignment violation appeared to not be left-lateralised. The anterior negativity sometimes distributes bilaterally (e.g. Martín-Loches, Muñoz, Casado, Melcón, & Fernández-Frías, 2005) and along the right anterior region (Ueno & Kluender, 2009). This variability may reflect a spatiotemporal component overlapped with a following positivity within and between individuals and the selection of reference electrodes. Future studies should examine why the anterior negativity was not left-lateralised in the present experiment.

6 “Others” in Figure 3 include (i) transitive verb in the tough-like construction, (ii) transitive verb with a volitional morpheme “-tai”, (iii) transitive verb with a stative morpheme “-tearu/-teiru”. In these transitive constructions, a THEME/PATIENT argument exceptionally takes a nominative case, as exemplified below.

Table

7 Some other examples were given below:

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