Lexical Frequency and Sentence Context Influence the Brain’s Response to Single Words

Abstract

Typical adults read remarkably quickly. Such fast reading is facilitated by brain processes that are sensitive to both word frequency and contextual constraints. It is debated as to whether these attributes have additive or interactive effects on language processing in the brain. We investigated this issue by analysing existing magnetoencephalography data from 99 participants reading intact and scrambled sentences. Using a cross-validated model comparison scheme, we found that lexical frequency predicted the word-by-word elicited MEG signal in a widespread cortical network, irrespective of sentential context. In contrast, index (ordinal word position) was more strongly encoded in sentence words, in left front-temporal areas. This confirms that frequency influences word processing independently of predictability, and that contextual constraints affect word-byword brain responses. With a conservative multiple comparisons correction, only the interaction between lexical frequency and surprisal survived, in anterior temporal and frontal cortex, and not between lexical frequency and entropy, nor between lexical frequency and index. However, interestingly, the uncorrected index*frequency interaction revealed an effect in left frontal and temporal cortex that reversed in time and space for intact compared to scrambled sentences. Finally, we provide evidence to suggest that, in sentences, lexical frequency and predictability may independently influence early (<150ms) and late stages of word processing, but also interact during late stages of word processing (>150-250ms), thus helping to converge previous contradictory eye-tracking and electrophysiological literature. Current neuro-cognitive models of reading would benefit from accounting for these differing effects of lexical frequency and predictability on different stages of word processing.

A tradeoff between acoustic and linguistic feature encoding in spoken language comprehension

“…however previous studies have shown that they interact during late stages of word processing (Fruchter et al, 2015;Huizeling et al, 2022). In a naturalistic listening paradigm, even though it is an instrumental way to study language comprehension, it is not fully possible to control for word frequency or to completely dissociate it from any sentence context effects.…”

“…In this study, to disassociate the effects of word entropy and word frequency, we modelled word frequency with an assumption that entropy and frequency have linearly additive effects; however previous studies have shown that they interact during late stages of word processing (Fruchter et al, 2015; Huizeling et al, 2022). In a naturalistic listening paradigm, even though it is an instrumental way to study language comprehension, it is not fully possible to control for word frequency or to completely dissociate it from any sentence context effects.…”

Copredication and Complexity Revisited: A Reply to Löhr and Michel

“…While Murphy (2019, 2021a) documented the frequency profiles of nominal senses in copredications, the authors declare without evidence that CITY “is connected to child nodes like” government , population, and geography , with a “high conditional probability” being that the “jump” will land on government . The author's model concerns prediction, but what is missing is a discussion of lower‐level statistics pertaining to lexicality, such as frequency, which is known to intimately relate to linguistic predictions and language processing more generally (Huizeling, Arana, Hagoort, & Schoffelen, 2022), and their new apparatus of sense node “jumping” is not anchored around any clear psycholinguistic architecture.…”

Dutch Norming Study For 208 Color Drawings Depicting Transitive Events

“…Prior to conducting this study, we did not test whether the children also knew these verbs and whether they had already acquired them or not (as we were mainly interested in whether children were able to interpret our pictures equally well with an active and a passive structure). For this reason, if researchers intend to use our materials to test, for instance, the online processing of transitive structures, it should be noted that lexical frequency may affect sentence processing (Huizeling et al, 2022). We emphasize, however, that the children only provided 7% incorrect answers, which means that we should not overlook the fact that our materials did largely elicit correct interpretations of both active and passive descriptions of transitive events (93%).…”