Anticipating predictability: an ERP investigation of expectation-managing discourse markers in dialogue comprehension

Abstract

In two ERP experiments, we investigated how the Dutch discourse markers eigenlijk "actually", signalling expectation disconfirmation, and inderdaad "indeed", signalling expectation confirmation, affect incremental dialogue comprehension. We investigated their effects on the processing of subsequent (un)predictable words, and on the quality of word representations in memory. Participants read dialogues with (un)predictable endings that followed a discourse marker (eigenlijk in Experiment 1, inderdaad in Experiment 2) or a control adverb. We found no strong evidence that discourse markers modulated online predictability effects elicited by subsequently read words. However, words following eigenlijk elicited an enhanced posterior post-N400 positivity compared with words following an adverb regardless of their predictability, potentially reflecting increased processing costs associated with pragmatically driven discourse updating. No effects of inderdaad were found on online processing, but inderdaad seemed to influence memory for (un)predictable dialogue endings. These findings nuance our understanding of how pragmatic markers affect incremental language comprehension. ARTICLE HISTORY

How odd: Diverging effects of predictability and plausibility violations on sentence reading and word memory

“…The larger hit rate to seen words than false alarm rate to unseen words indicates that participants were paying attention during the experiment and remembered the words. Average d' was 1.29 (SD = 0.39, range = 0.42-2.41), which is similar in size to earlier psycholinguistic studies examining effects of predictability on word recognition (e.g., Hubbard et al, 2019;Rommers & Federmeier, 2018;Rasenberg et al, 2020). One participant was excluded from the analyses reported below because they did not use the full response scale (i.e., they only gave highconfidence responses).…”

Babies detect when the timing is right: Evidence from event-related potentials to a contingent mother-infant conversation

“…We interpret the findings that infant contingent vocalisations did not generate N400 as indicating that the infant vocalisations were less meaningful in nature, as they were babbled phonetic syllables, and therefore no lexical access was performed. One recent study in adults using conversational speech showed an N400 effect while comparing the response to predictable versus unpredictable words ( Rasenberg et al, 2020 ). However, the lexical congruency of the contingent and non-contingent stimuli were not explicitly manipulated in the current experiment.…”

The use of the Dutch discourse particle eigenlijk by native and non-native speakers

“…They found that native speakers of Dutch experienced higher processing costs after encountering an utterance with eigenlijk relative to encountering an utterance containing inderdaad "indeed", which could be ascribed to the efforts needed to revise the discourse model. Similarly, Rasenberg et al (2020), who investigated the processing of the same two discourse markers by means of two ERP experiments, found that words following eigenlijk elicited an enhanced posterior post-N400 positivity compared with words following an adverb, which, as they argue, may be potentially due to increased processing costs associated with pragmatically driven discourse updating.…”

“…Particles in general are difficult to learn for non-native speakers (Fox Tree 2010;Foolen 2010). It could be expected that a particle such as eigenlijk is especially complex to acquire, as interpersonal markers seem to be used infrequently by non-native speakers (Buysse 2010), and eigenlijk in particular seems to induce higher processing costs for native speakers as well (van Bergen & Bosker 2018;Rasenberg et al 2020). This research will investigate whether non-native speakers of Dutch understand the two core properties of a context in which eigenlijk is appropriate, namely that (1) the context gives rise to a particular expectation and (2) the utterance containing eigenlijk forms a contrast with this contextually raised expectation (van Bergen et al 2011).…”