Wrong or right? Brain potentials reveal hemispheric asymmetries to semantic relations during word-by-word sentence reading as a function of (fictional) knowledge

Nuances of knowing: Brain potentials reveal implicit effects of domain knowledge on word processing in the absence of sentence‐level knowledge

“…Combined with our previous work, we consistently find evidence that among young college-aged adults, variation in domain knowledge leads to differences in the rapid impact of sentence context (Troyer & Kutas, 2018) as well as to the immediate availability of schematically related content (Troyer & Kutas, 2020;Troyer et al, 2022). Our results build on this and other work (Troyer et al, 2019) showing that access to unknown but domain-knowledgerelated languages is facilitated for those with the available domain knowledge.…”

“…As in our prior work (Troyer & Kutas, 2018, 2020; Troyer et al, 2019, 2022), there was substantial variability in HP knowledge across individuals (Figure 1a; Table 2). Table 2 reports descriptive statistics for participants' scores on the HP trivia quiz and other measures of individual differences.…”

“…study was not specifically designed to adjudicate among neurocomputational theories and models of N400s. However, our findings run counter to accounts on which prediction is strictly based on probabilistic word activation (e.g., Brothers & Kuperberg, 2021; see discussion in Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016) and support theories that also incorporate preactivation of semantic feature-based or otherwise partial concepts spanning broad swaths of relevant knowledge-even for concepts that are linguistically unlikely to be encountered in the moment (Luke & Christianson, 2016;Metusalem et al, 2012Metusalem et al, , 2016Szewczyk & Federmeier, 2022;Troyer & Kutas, 2020;Troyer et al, 2022).…”

“…In other words, our N400 findings suggest that individuals with greater HP expertise activate rich mental models based on their domain knowledge, and this knowledge rapidly influences word processing even when those specific words are not likely to have been readily available from long-term memory. In the present study, we did not directly assess the nature of the (partial) information that was available in these moments; however, combined with previous findings that individuals with greater domain knowledge seem to quickly activate information that is related to the sentence context via both event knowledge and overlapping semantic features with predictable words (Troyer & Kutas, 2020;Troyer et al, 2022), we expected that multiple types of schematically related information may have been activated, leading to the facilitated processing we observed on the N400. Indeed, it is possible that in some other moment, the same individuals who were unable to successfully provide the correct responses might have been able to recall the appropriate information.…”

Finding structure during incremental speech comprehension

“…Following the declining effects of the non-directional index upon the recognition of the main verb, we found significant effects of the Passive index in right anterior fronto-temporal regions (Figure 8D), suggesting that the intended Passive interpretation was eventually established in all sentences. Previous studies have revealed that the relatively narrow sentence-specific information and the broad world knowledge are processed in the left and right hemispheres separately (Jung-Beeman 2005; Metusalem et al 2016;Troyer et al 2022). Relevant to this, in the main verb epoch, we found effects of the BERT parse depth vector and those of the Passive index in the left and right hemispheres respectively, arising almost at the same time as the main verb was recognized (compare Figure 6C and Figure 8D).…”