When Heuristics Clash with Parsing Routines: ERP Evidence for Conflict Monitoring in Sentence Perception

Abstract

Abstract& Monitoring refers to a process of quality control designed to optimize behavioral outcome. Monitoring for action errors manifests itself in an error-related negativity in event-related potential (ERP) studies and in an increase in activity of the anterior cingulate in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. Here we report evidence for a monitoring process in perception, in particular, language perception, manifesting itself in a late positivity in the ERP. This late positivity, the P600, appears to be triggered by a conflict between two interpretations, one delivered by the standard syntactic algorithm and one by a plausibility heuristic which combines individual word meanings in the most plausible way. To resolve this conflict, we propose that the brain reanalyzes the memory trace of the perceptual input to check for the possibility of a processing error. Thus, as in Experiment 1, when the reader is presented with semantically anomalous sentences such as, ''The fox that shot the poacher. . .,'' full syntactic analysis indicates a semantic anomaly, whereas the word-based heuristic leads to a plausible interpretation, that of a poacher shooting a fox. That readers actually pursue such a word-based analysis is indicated by the fact that the usual ERP index of semantic anomaly, the socalled N400 effect, was absent in this case. A P600 effect appeared instead. In Experiment 2, we found that even when the word-based heuristic indicated that only part of the sentence was plausible (e.g

Wait a second! delayed impact of argument roles on on-line verb prediction

“…These results are in line with previous findings (Chow & Phillips, 2013;Hoeks et al, 2004;Kolk et al, 2003;van Herten et al, 2006van Herten et al, , 2005, and show that comprehenders reliably use argument role information to interpret thematic relations upon encountering the verb.…”

“…The N400's insensitivity to the cloze probability difference resulting from argument role reversals is striking, especially in the context of the P600's sensitivity to argument role reversals as well as the N400's sensitivity to cloze probability in the control comparison. This finding is in line with the absence of N400 effects in previous studies that examined the effect of pre-verbal argument role reversals across different languages (e.g., Chow & Phillips, 2013;Hoeks et al, 2004;Kolk et al, 2003;Oishi & Sakamoto, 2010;van Herten et al, 2006van Herten et al, , 2005Ye & Zhou, 2008), although the effect of argument role reversals on the verb's off-line predictability was quantified in only one of these studies . Importantly, the observation in the current study that role reversals do not impact the N400, even when they have a large impact on cloze probability, suggests that the N400's insensitivity is not attributable to a weak experimental manipulation.…”

“…In fact, a number of studies in languages such as Dutch, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and English have reported that reversing the preverbal arguments did not modulate comprehenders' N400 response at the verb in pairs like (1), despite the large difference in the predictability of the verb (Chow & Phillips, 2013;Hoeks, Stowe, & Doedens, 2004;Kolk et al, 2003;Oishi & Sakamoto, 2010;van Herten, Chwilla, & Kolk, 2006;van Herten, Kolk, & Chwilla, 2005;Ye & Zhou, 2008;cf. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al, 2011).…”

“…For example, the SOA between the second argument and the target verb was only 480 ms in Hoeks et al (2004), 530ms in , 600 ms in Chow and Phillips (2013), and 645 ms in Kolk et al (2003) and van Herten et al (2005van Herten et al ( , 2006. Therefore, it is possible that comprehenders do use argument role information to predict an upcoming verb, but they simply cannot do so quickly enough when the verb appears immediately following the arguments.…”

Monitoring in language perception: Electrophysiological and hemodynamic responses to spelling violations

“…The hypothesis that the P600 effect reflects a more general reanalysis has been strengthened by a number of recent studies (for reviews on these studies see Kolk and Chwilla, 2007;Kuperberg, 2007;Van de Meerendonk et al, 2009), demonstrating P600 effects to different kinds of semantic anomalies (e.g., Ganushchak and Schiller, 2010;Hoeks et al, 2004;Kim and Osterhout, 2005;Kolk et al, 2003;Kuperberg et al, 2006Kuperberg et al, , 2007Kuperberg et al, , 2003b; Van de Meerendonk et al, 2010;Van Herten et al, 2006, 2005. Furthermore, P600 effects were found to picture-sentence mismatches in which the sentences violated the semantics of a previously shown picture (Vissers et al, 2008).…”