The spatiotemporal dynamics of bottom-up and top-down processing during at-a-glance reading

Abstract

Like all domains of cognition, language processing is affected by top-down knowledge. Classic evidence for this is missing blatant errors in the signal. In sentence comprehension, one instance of this is failing to notice word order errors, such as transposed words in the middle of a sentence: you that read wrong (Mirault et al., 2018). Our brains seem to fix such errors, since they are incompatible with our grammatical knowledge. But how do our brains do this? Following behavioral work on inner transpositions, we flashed four-word sentences for 300ms using rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP, Snell and Grainger, 2017). We compared their magnetoencephalography responses to fully grammatical and reversed sentences. Left lateral language cortex robustly distinguished grammatical and reversed sentences starting at 213ms. Thus, the influence of grammatical knowledge begun rapidly after visual word form recognition (Tarkiainen et al., 1999). At the earliest stage of this neural "sentence superiority effect," inner transpositions patterned between grammatical and reversed sentences, showing evidence that the brain initially "noticed" the error. However, a hundred millisecond later, the inner transpositions became indistinguishable from the grammatical sentences, suggesting that at this point, the brain had "fixed" the error. These results show that after a single glance at a sentence, syntax impacts our neural activity almost as quickly as higher-level object recognition is assumed to take place (Cichy et al., 2014). The earliest stage involves a detailed comparison between the bottom-up input and grammatical knowledge, while shortly afterwards, knowledge can override an error in the stimulus.

Quick, Don’t Move!: Wh-Movement and Wh-In-Situ Structures in Rapid Parallel Reading – EEG studies in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese

“…This lack of a clear effect of wh -subjects may be due to their linear position in the RPVP stimulus. All 3 languages position the subject at the beginning of the clause, thus they are likely to fall outside of the foveal center, and may therefore not be processed as accurately or quickly, which is observed in other RPVP tasks (Snell & Grainger 2019; Dunagan et al 2024; Flower & Pylkkänen 2024). Moreover, the forms of the wh - and non- wh subject in all languages and conditions are orthographically short ( wh -subjects: who , کس kis-ne , 谁 shéi ; non wh -subjects: she / he ; اسنے us-ne ; 她 / 他 tā ).…”

“…The mechanisms supporting reading entire sentences rapidly presented are still under debate (e.g., Wen et al 2019; Dufau et al 2024; Fallon & Pylkkänen 2024; Flower & Pylkkänen 2024; Dunagan et al 2024). Nonetheless, we showed that readers can extract key grammatical information from sentences displayed in 200ms in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese.…”

“…The RPVP experiment was conducted using PsychoPy. The procedure is adapted from the original RPVP paradigm introduced by Snell & Grainger (2017, 2019), and later elaborated by Fallon & Pylkkänen (2024), Krogh & Pylkkänen (2024), Flower & Pylkkänen (2024), and Dunagan et al (2024). Stimuli were presented within-subjects, such that each participant saw each sentence.…”

“…Participants fixate on a single sentence presented in the foveal center for a short duration, usually 200ms, followed by a memory probe. Previous results demonstrate that comprehenders are capable of extracting some sentence-level syntactic and semantic features of the sentence in a single fixation in Japanese (Asano et al 2011), French (Snell & Grainger 2017, 2019; Wen et al 2019; Dufau et al 2024), English (Dunagan et al 2024; Fallon & Pylkkänen 2024, Flower & Pylkkänen 2024) and Danish (Krogh & Pylkkänen 2024). This presentation style mitigates the burden placed on the memory system by more standard word-by-word presentation styles used in cognitive neuroscience of language experiments.…”

“…Here, we present three experiments on the processing of simple main clause questions in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Urdu. All three experiments used the rapid parallel visual presentation paradigm (RPVP; Snell & Grainger 2017; Snell & Grainger 2019; Fallon & Pylkkänen 2024; Flower & Pylkkänen 2024; Krogh & Pylkkänen 2024; Dunagan et al 2024; Dufau et al 2024) with electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. In all three languages, participants read polar (‘yes/no’) questions, questions with wh -objects, questions with wh -subjects, and questions with both wh -subjects and wh -objects.…”