| Literature DB >> 17963486 |
Marte Otten1, Mante S Nieuwland, Jos J A Van Berkum.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Recently several studies have shown that people use contextual information to make predictions about the rest of the sentence or story as the text unfolds. Using event related potentials (ERPs) we tested whether these on-line predictions are based on a message-level representation of the discourse or on simple automatic activation by individual words. Subjects heard short stories that were highly constraining for one specific noun, or stories that were not specifically predictive but contained the same prime words as the predictive stories. To test whether listeners make specific predictions critical nouns were preceded by an adjective that was inflected according to, or in contrast with, the gender of the expected noun.Entities:
Mesh:
Year: 2007 PMID: 17963486 PMCID: PMC2186342 DOI: 10.1186/1471-2202-8-89
Source DB: PubMed Journal: BMC Neurosci ISSN: 1471-2202 Impact factor: 3.288
Example of stimulus materials
| Mijn opa en oma zijn erg religieus. Boven hun bed hangt een [kruis] | Mijn opa en oma zijn niet erg religieus. Boven hun bed hangt een [...] |
| (1) | (1) |
| (2) | (2) |
Example story in the original Dutch version and an approximate English translation, across all four conditions. Critical adjectives are printed in bold face, and critical nouns are printed in italics (in the Dutch example) or regular letters (English example). The word between brackets indicates the predictable word at that point in the story.
Figure 1Adjectives in a predictive context. Grand average ERPs elicited by the critical adjectives in a predictive context. Black lines represent the response to adjectives bearing an inflection that is consistent with the gender of the predicted noun; red lines represent responses to gender inconsistent adjectives. The ERPs are timelocked to the onset of the adjective, and are filtered (8 Hz high cut-off, 48 dB/oct) for presentation purposes only. Note that in this and all following figures, negative polarity is plotted upward.
Figure 2Adjectives in a prime control context. Grand average ERPs elicited by the critical adjectives in a prime control context. Black lines represent the response to adjectives bearing an inflection that is consistent with the gender of the predicted noun; red lines represent responses to gender inconsistent adjectives. The ERPs are timelocked to the onset of the adjective, and are filtered (8 Hz high cut-off, 48 dB/oct) for presentation purposes only.
Figure 3Nouns in a predictive and prime control context. Grand average ERPs elicited by the critical nouns in a predictive context and prime control context over the midline electrodes. Black lines represent the ERP to the predicted nouns; red lines represent the ERP to unexpected but still congruent nouns. The ERPs are timelocked to the onset of the noun, and are filtered (4 Hz high cut-off, 48 dB/oct) for presentation purposes only.