The sentence wrap-up dogma

Abstract

Current sentence processing research has focused on early effects of the on-line incremental processes that are performed at each word or constituent during processing. However, less attention has been devoted to what happens at the end of the clause or sentence. More specifically, over the last decade and a half, a lot of effort has been put into avoiding measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at the final word of a sentence, because of the possible effects of sentence wrap-up. This article reviews the evidence on how and when sentence wrap-up impacts behavioral and ERP results. Even though the end of the sentence is associated with a positive-going ERP wave, thus far this effect has not been associated with any factors hypothesized to affect wrap-up. In addition, ERP responses to violations have not been affected by this positivity. "Sentence-final" negativities reported in the literature are not unique to sentence final positions, nor do they obscure or distort ERP effects associated with linguistic manipulations. Finally, the empirical evidence used to argue that sentence-final ERPs are different from those recorded at sentence-medial positions is weak at most. Measuring ERPs at sentence-final positions is therefore certainly not to be avoided at all costs, especially not in cases where the structure of the language under investigation requires it. More importantly, researchers should follow rigorous method in their experimental design, avoid decision tasks which may induce ERP confounds, and ensure all other possible explanations for results are considered. Although this article is directed at a particular dogma from a particular literature, this review shows that it is important to reassess what is regarded as "general knowledge" from time to time.

Gesture's body orientation modulates the N400 for visual sentences primed by gestures

“…All sentences were of the same structure as in Figure 1b: Dass der Fisch groß/klein ist, findet Lara (The fish is big/small, thinks Lara). Therefore, the congruency between the sentence and the prime video becomes only apparent at the critical adjective, and that the critical words do not occur at the sentence‐final position (Stowe, Kaan, Sabourin, & Taylor, 2018). We controlled word length and frequency (Wortschatz Leipzig) at the position of the critical words between both congruency conditions.…”

Switchmate! An Electrophysiological Attempt to Adjudicate Between Competing Accounts of Adjective-Noun Code-Switching

“…However, the second comparison did not yield any significant differences. It is possible that this null result was caused, in part, by sentence 'wrap-up' effects (Hagoort et al, 2003), given that the critical stimuli appeared in sentence-final position, even though recent findings cast doubt on this interpretation (e.g., Stowe et al, 2018). Nevertheless, the authors acknowledged this limitation and suggested that the inclusion of an adverbial or prepositional phrase at the end of the experimental sentences may help resolve the ambiguity of these results.…”

Gesture’s body orientation modulates the N400 during semantic integration of gesture and visual sentence

“…All sentences were of the same structure as in Figure 1B: Dass der Fisch groß/klein ist, findet Lara (The fish is big/small, thinks Lara). Therefore, the congruency between the sentence and the prime video becomes only apparent at the critical adjective, and that the critical words do not occur at the sentence-final position (Stowe et al, 2018). We controlled word length and frequency (Wortschatz Leipzig) at the position of the critical words between both congruency conditions.…”