Distinguishing Old From New Referents During Discourse Comprehension: Evidence From ERPs and Oscillations

Abstract

In this EEG study, we used pre-registered and exploratory ERP and time-frequency analyses to investigate the resolution of anaphoric and non-anaphoric noun phrases during discourse comprehension. Participants listened to story contexts that described two antecedents, and subsequently read a target sentence with a critical noun phrase that lexically matched one antecedent (‘old’), matched two antecedents (‘ambiguous’), partially matched one antecedent in terms of semantic features (‘partial-match’), or introduced another referent (non-anaphoric, ‘new’). After each target sentence, participants judged whether the noun referred back to an antecedent (i.e., an ‘old/new’ judgment), which was easiest for ambiguous nouns and hardest for partially matching nouns. The noun-elicited N400 ERP component demonstrated initial sensitivity to repetition and semantic overlap, corresponding to repetition and semantic priming effects, respectively. New and partially matching nouns both elicited a subsequent frontal positivity, which suggested that partially matching anaphors may have been processed as new nouns temporarily. ERPs in an even later time window and ERPs time-locked to sentence-final words suggested that new and partially matching nouns had different effects on comprehension, with partially matching nouns incurring additional processing costs up to the end of the sentence. In contrast to the ERP results, the time-frequency results primarily demonstrated sensitivity to noun repetition, and did not differentiate partially matching anaphors from new nouns. In sum, our results show the ERP and time-frequency effects of referent repetition during discourse comprehension, and demonstrate the potentially demanding nature of establishing the anaphoric meaning of a novel noun.

Dissociating activation and integration of discourse referents: Evidence from ERPs and oscillations

“…The design and settings of our analysis procedures (i.e., preprocessing, time-frequency analysis, and statistical analysis) were pre-registered at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/bpt5s) prior to data collection. For the most part, the ERP and time-frequency preprocessing and analysis pre-registration followed that from another study in our laboratory (Nieuwland, Coopmans, & Sommers, 2019). Analyses that were not pre-registered are designated as exploratory.…”

A mapping-knowledge-domain analysis of ERP research on language processing

“…The first finding denotes a transition toward examining larger linguistic units ( Nieuwland et al, 2019 ). Throughout the early 21st Century, ERPs investigations in language predominantly centred on lexical processing, evident from burst terms like “lexical decision” (2003–2005) and “word” (2003–2005).…”

Pronoun resolution via reinstatement of referent-related activity in the delta band

“…Pronoun resolution thus also fits into this account as it requires access to previously encoded entities or concepts in order to integrate them in turn with roles the pronoun plays, so that coherent construction of events in a text or conversation can be achieved. Indeed, supporting evidence has emerged from a plethora of studies showing that properties of both external and internal cues (e.g., featural match/mismatch, referent prominence), as well as how they are combined, can influence how the brain resolves a pronoun (LeDoux et al, 2007;Foraker & McElree, 2007;Parker, 2019;Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2008;Nieuwland, 2014;Chow, Lewis, & Philips, 2014;Brodbeck, Gwilliam, & Pylkkanen, 2016;Brodbeck & Pylkkanen, 2017;Karimi, Swaab, & Ferreira, 2018;Lissón et al, 2021;Nieuwland, Coopmans, & Sommers, 2019;Coopmans & Nieuwland, 2020). Yet, the neural mechanism by which a referent concept is retrieved and represented in memory when the brain resolves a pronoun has barely been discussed.…”