Disentangling perceptual and psycholinguistic factors in syntactic processing: Tone monitoring via ERPs

Abstract

Franco, Gaillard, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (Behavior Research Methods, 47, 1393-1403, 2015), in a study on statistical learning employing the click-detection paradigm, conclude that more needs to be known about how this paradigm interacts with statistical learning and speech perception. Past results with this monitoring technique have pointed to an end-of-clause effect in parsing-a structural effect-but we here show that the issues are a bit more nuanced. Firstly, we report two Experiments (1a and 1b), which show that reaction times (RTs) are affected by two factors: (a) processing load, resulting in a tendency for RTs to decrease across a sentence, and (b) a perceptual effect which adds to this tendency and moreover helps neutralize differences between sentences with slightly different structures. These two factors are then successfully discriminated by registering event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a monitoring task, with Experiment 2 establishing that the amplitudes of the N1 and P3 components-the first associated with temporal uncertainty, the second with processing load in dual tasks-correlate with RTs. Finally, Experiment 3 behaviorally segregates the two factors by placing the last tone at the end of sentences, activating a wrap-up operation and thereby both disrupting the decreasing tendency and highlighting structural effects. Our overall results suggest that much care needs to be employed in designing click-detection tasks if structural effects are sought, and some of the now-classic data need to be reconsidered.

Parsing Complex Noun Phrases: Effects of Hierarchical Structure and Sentence Position on Memory Load

“…Recent work using the ‘click-detection’ paradigm (Lobina et al, in press) has shown that in simple sentences of the form NP-V-NP, RTs in the detection of a tone tend to decrease along the sentence. According to the authors, these results can be explained by a combination of syntactic and perceptual effects.…”

Parsing for Position

“…In a recent study with the tone-monitoring technique, Lobina, Demestre, and García-Albea (2018) point out that the data reported in Abrams and Bever (1969) and Bever and Hurtig (1975) may not be as robust as commonly thought, as some important factors were not considered at the time, and as a result, the experimental manipulation then used may have been confounded. Monitoring tasks, in general, exhibit a tendency of RTs to decrease across a sentence (Cutler & Norris, 1979), a factor that was not controlled for by Bever et al In fact, the tone both Abrams and Bever (1969) and Bever and Hurtig (1975) placed at the end of clauses was typically the first tone in a series, and their data clearly show a decrease in RTs from the first to the last tone position.…”

“…Monitoring tasks, in general, exhibit a tendency of RTs to decrease across a sentence (Cutler & Norris, 1979), a factor that was not controlled for by Bever et al In fact, the tone both Abrams and Bever (1969) and Bever and Hurtig (1975) placed at the end of clauses was typically the first tone in a series, and their data clearly show a decrease in RTs from the first to the last tone position. Lobina et al (2018) ran a set of experiments to reevaluate some of these results and found that the decreasing tendency is very strong in the tone-monitoring paradigm and can be in conflict with structural factors such as the wrap-up effect, which is applicable at the end of clauses and sentences. In particular, this study reports an experiment (1) in which two types of simple, monoclausal Spanish sentences with three tone positions were used, as shown below in (1), where the | symbol indicates where the tone was placed and the numbers in parentheses are the RTs, in milliseconds, to each position.…”

“…et al (2018) report two main results: There was a general decrease in RTs for each sentence type, and there were no significant differences across sentence type, modulo a small effect regarding the appearance of the verb. Lobina et al (2018) accounted for the data by appealing to the additive effects of two independent factors: one perceptual (a tone position effect indicating uncertainty; viz., when is the tone going to appear?) and the other psycholinguistic (the predictions of the parser or incrementality, indicating a linguistic kind of uncertainty; i.e., what linguistic material is it left to process?).…”

“…Under most linguistic theories, the verb is the central element of a sentence, and it is no less important in parsing theories. According to Gibson (1998), for instance, the storing and integration of dependencies between verbs and nouns (mostly, subjects and objects) constitute some of the parser's most important operations, a perspective that was in fact at the heart of the hypotheses Lobina et al (2018) drew in their study. We shall follow a similar strategy here, which shall be based on the expectation that processing a sentence's main verb, along with computing the relevant verb-noun(s) dependencies, engages significant cognitive resources and may further interact with the position effect that has proved to be so significant in tone-monitoring tasks.…”