Processing bare quantifiers in discourse

Abstract

During reading or listening, language comprehenders construct a mental representation of the objects and events mentioned. This model is augmented and modified incrementally as the discourse unfolds. In this paper we focus on the interpretation of bare quantifiers, that is, expressions such as 'two', to investigate the processes underlying the construction and modification of the discourse model. Bare quantifiers are temporarily ambiguous when sentences are processed incrementally. For instance, in 'Three ships were in the port. Two…', 'two' can either refer to a subset of the set just mentioned (e.g.,'two of the three ships'), a different set of the entities mentioned (e.g., 'two other ships'), or a set of different entities (e.g., 'two people'). Data from previous studies, and a current completion study, suggest that the subset interpretation is preferred over the establishment of a different set. The current study aimed to investigate ERP correlates of quantifier interpretation and their timing. Quantifiers that unambiguously signaled the establishment of a new referent elicited a late positive component (900-1500 ms), which we interpret as a Late Positive Complex, related to the difficulty involved in context updating. An additional 500-700ms positivity was elicited only in a subset of readers, suggesting that there are individual differences in quantifier interpretation and the timing thereof.

On the predictability of event boundaries in discourse: An ERP investigation

“…2). We interpret this effect as indexing aspects of the updating process, consistent with previous work (see also Burmester, Spalek, & Watenburger, 2014;Kaan, Dallas, & Barkley, 2007;Wang & Schumacher, 2013). The fact that the effect becomes stronger for coarse event boundaries compared to fine event boundaries suggests that the updating process is more demanding when the target is fully unrelated to the activity described.…”

“Who’s he?” Event-related brain potentials and unbound pronouns

“…Other extant literature, however, offers other interpretations of P600 effects, and most relevant to the current study is the claim that the P600 reflects the addition of a new referent (novel noun phrases compared to given noun phrases; Burkhardt, 2006Burkhardt, , 2007Schumacher & Hung, 2012; see also Kaan et al, 2007). Only Experiment 1 involved an explicit instruction to add new referents for mismatching pronouns, and only this experiment generated a P600 effect.…”

“…Given the lack of a behavioural task that directly linked the observed P600 effect to a perceived anomaly, an alternative explanation might be that the observed P600 effect reflects the addition of a novel referent. Such has indeed been claimed for the introduction of new referents by comparing novel versus given noun phrases (e.g., Burkhardt, 2006Burkhardt, , 2007Schumacher & Hung, 2012; see also Kaan, Dallas, & Barkley, 2007), although there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case for pronouns. I will return to this issue in the General Discussion, and provide several reasons for why this alternative explanation seems implausible given the literature on pronoun comprehension and given the currently observed results.…”

“…ERP studies that compared new names to given names also did not find late positive ERP effects (e.g., Camblin, Ledoux, Boudewyn, Gordon, & Swaab, 2007;. Moreover, other late positive ERP effects claimed to reflect the addition of referents differ greatly in timing and waveform morphology (e.g., Kaan et al, 2007) and are perhaps more straightforwardly ascribed to syntactic garden-path phenomena. Hence, it remains to be seen whether late positive ERPs elicited by novel noun phrases actually reflect the addition of a new referent or instead reflect another aspect of comparing new information to given information.…”

Agreement attraction during comprehension of grammatical sentences: ERP evidence from ellipsis

“…Such is also assumed in memory-based processing models of anaphor resolution (e.g., Gerrig & O'Brien, 2005): antecedents that have sufficient features in common with anaphors are automatically elicited from memory, whereas antecedents that do not require additional retrieval processes. Sustained negativities associated with referentially problematic expressions might be an electrophysiological correlate of these additional retrieval processes (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2008a,b; although see Burkhardt, 2006, for different ERP results on introducing referents through anaphoric bridging inferences; see also Kaan, Dallas, & Barkley, 2007), possibly related to sustained frontal shifts that are evoked by linguistically complex structures (King & Kutas, 1995).…”