Early Occipital Sensitivity to Syntactic Category Is Based on Form Typicality

Abstract

Syntactic factors can rapidly affect behavioral and neural responses during language processing, however, the mechanisms that allow this rapid extraction of syntactically relevant information remain poorly understood. We address this issue using magnetoencephalography, and find that an unexpected word category (like The recently princess…) elicits enhanced activity in visual cortex as early as 120ms, as a function of the compatibility of a word's form with the form properties associated with a predicted word category. Since no sensitivity to linguistic factors has been previously reported for words in isolation at this stage of visual analysis, we propose that predictions about upcoming syntactic categories are translated into form-based estimates, which are made available to sensory cortices. This finding may be a key component to elucidating the mechanisms that allow the extreme rapidity and efficiency of language comprehension.

Wait a second! delayed impact of argument roles on on-line verb prediction

“…For example, listeners are more likely to direct their eye-gaze to a picture of an edible object (e.g., a cake) when they hear the beginning of an utterance like 'The boy will eat…' compared to a neutral utterance such as 'The boy will move…' (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). Further, much evidence has suggested that comprehenders compute rich expectations about upcoming inputs at multiple levels of representation (syntactic: Ilkin & Sturt, 2011;Lau, Stroud, Plesch, & Phillips, 2006;Levy, Fedorenko, Breen, & Gibson, 2012;Omaki et al, 2015;Staub & Clifton, 2006;Wicha et al, 2004;Van Berkum et al, 2005;Yoshida, Dickey, & Sturt, 2013;lexico-semantic: Federmeier & Kutas, 1999;Kutas & Hillyard, 1984;Otten & Van Berkum, 2008;Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2013; phonological and orthographic: Delong et al, 2005;Dikker, Rabagliati, Farmer, & Pylkkanen, 2010;Dikker, Rabagliati, & Pylkkänen, 2009;Farmer, Yan, Bicknell, & Tanenhaus, 2015;Kim & Lai, 2012;Laszlo & Federmeier, 2009). Here, we operationally define 'prediction' as the pre-activation of stored representations before the bottom-up input is encountered, and we will make no a priori assumptions regarding the nature of the mechanisms involved (e.g., whether they are automatic or controlled).…”

The importance of awareness for understanding language

“…One alternative interpretation argues that these early components instead index mismatches between predicted sensory input and actual sensory input (e.g., the wordform by is visually surprising in a context in which a noun was expected, because this wordform is only used as a preposition, Dikker, Rabagliati, Farmer, & Pylkkänen, 2010;Dikker, Rabagliati, & Pylkkänen, 2009;Kim & Lai, 2012); under this account, the ERP response to by does not reflect combinatorial syntactic processing, but a sensory prediction error. A second, more deflationary account, has argued that early ERP responses to ungrammatical words might also result from artefacts caused by how ERP data are baseline corrected (Steinhauer & Drury, 2012).…”

Rapid Interactions between Lexical Semantic and Word Form Analysis during Word Recognition in Context: Evidence from ERPs

“…Recent ERP and MEG studies indicate substantially earlier contact (∼100-200 msec) between word form analysis and lexical semantic processing (e.g., Dikker & Pylkkanen, 2011;DellʼAcqua et al, 2010;Dambacher, Rolfs, Göllner, Kliegl, & Jacobs, 2009;Penolazzi, Hauk, & Pulvermüller, 2007;Hauk, Davis, Ford, Pulvermüller, & Marslen-Wilson, 2006;Sereno, Brewer, & OʼDonnell, 2003) or lexical syntactic processing (Dikker, Rabagliati, Farmer, & Pylkkänen, 2010;Dikker, Rabagliati, & Pylkkänen, 2009). , for instance, found that sentence context modulated the ERP elicited by ambiguous words 132-192 msec after stimulus onset.…”

“…Several accounts of these effects involve context-driven predictions about word forms, allowing rapid sensitivity to word form inputs that deviate from predictions (Dikker et al, 2009(Dikker et al, , 2010Dambacher et al, 2009;Solomyak & Marantz, 2009). This recurrent processing view is consistent with growing evidence that language processing operates in an anticipatory manner, using context to predict the linguistic input at multiple levels (e.g., Altmann & Mirković, 2009;DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005).…”

“…Dikker et al (2010) report data suggesting that early mismatch responses are proportional to the degree of physical discrepancy between predicted and actual inputs. Such findings could reflect mechanisms that compare topdown predictions about low-level form features against the actual input (Dikker et al, 2010;Dambacher et al, 2009). We suggest here, however, that conflict between predicted and actual inputs may not always increase monotonically with the degree of physical discrepancy between predicted and actual inputs.…”