Online Processing of Temporal Agreement in a Grammatical Tone Language: An ERP Study

Tsiwah, Frank; Bastiaanse, Roelien; Rij, Jacolien van; Popov, Srđan

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638716

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 59 publications

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“…This aspect is essential in this study, which aims at analyzing the effects of pre‐stimulus alpha power in a wide time window starting from the target word onset, including both early and late language‐related ERP components, without a‐priori defining them. Because of their flexibility, GAMMs have already been used in the analysis of EEG data in linguistic experiments (e.g., Alday et al, 2017; De Cat et al, 2015; Meulman et al, 2015; Porretta et al, 2017; Tremblay et al, 2016; Tsiwah et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trial‐by‐trial fluctuations of pre‐stimulus alpha power predict language ERPs

Lago,

Pezzetta,

Gastaldon

et al. 2023

Psychophysiology

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Anticipatory mechanisms are known to play a key role in language, but they have been mostly investigated with violation paradigms, which only consider what happens after predictions have been (dis)confirmed. Relatively few studies focused on the pre‐stimulus interval and found that stronger expectations are associated with lower pre‐stimulus alpha power. However, alpha power also fluctuates spontaneously, in the absence of experimental manipulations; and in the attention and perception domains, spontaneously low pre‐stimulus power is associated with better behavioral performance and with event‐related potential (ERPs) with shorter latencies and higher amplitudes. Importantly, little is known about the role of alpha fluctuations in other domains, as it is in language. To this aim, we investigated whether spontaneous fluctuations in pre‐stimulus alpha power modulate language‐related ERPs in a semantic congruence task. Electrophysiology data were analyzed using Generalized Additive Mixed Models to model nonlinear interactions between pre‐stimulus alpha power and EEG amplitude, at the single‐trial level. We found that the N400 and the late posterior positivity/P600 were larger in the case of lower pre‐stimulus alpha power. Still, while the N400 was observable regardless of the level of pre‐stimulus power, a late posterior positivity/P600 effect was only observable for low pre‐stimulus alpha power. We discuss these findings in light of the different, albeit connected, functional interpretations of pre‐stimulus alpha and the ERPs according to both a nonpredictive interpretation focused on attentional mechanisms and under a predictive processing framework.

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