Yes, You Can? A Speaker’s Potency to Act upon His Words Orchestrates Early Neural Responses to Message-Level Meaning

Abstract

Evidence is accruing that, in comprehending language, the human brain rapidly integrates a wealth of information sources–including the reader or hearer’s knowledge about the world and even his/her current mood. However, little is known to date about how language processing in the brain is affected by the hearer’s knowledge about the speaker. Here, we investigated the impact of social attributions to the speaker by measuring event-related brain potentials while participants watched videos of three speakers uttering true or false statements pertaining to politics or general knowledge: a top political decision maker (the German Federal Minister of Finance at the time of the experiment), a well-known media personality and an unidentifiable control speaker. False versus true statements engendered an N400 - late positivity response, with the N400 (150–450 ms) constituting the earliest observable response to message-level meaning. Crucially, however, the N400 was modulated by the combination of speaker and message: for false versus true political statements, an N400 effect was only observable for the politician, but not for either of the other two speakers; for false versus true general knowledge statements, an N400 was engendered by all three speakers. We interpret this result as demonstrating that the neurophysiological response to message-level meaning is immediately influenced by the social status of the speaker and whether he/she has the power to bring about the state of affairs described.

Who are you talking to? The role of addressee identity in utterance comprehension

“…The present findings represent an exception compared to a number of eye-tracking and electrophysiological studies showing that interlocutor-dependent information interacts at an early stage of analysis with other sources of nonpragmatic information (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al, 2013;Brown-Schmidt et al, 2008;Hanna & Tanenhaus, 2004;Hanna et al, 2003;Hanulíková & Carreiras, 2015;Heller et al, 2008;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Van Berkum et al, 2008). This pattern of results is difficult to reconcile with a strict version of one-step models from referential communication stating that any available interlocutor-related information has a rapid impact on language comprehension and automatically updates the sentence interpretation based on common ground knowledge (Clark & Carlson, 1981;Hanna et al, 2003;Jackendoff, 2002;Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995).…”

“…This P600 effect was interpreted as reflecting late integration processes of speaker-related knowledge, which typically occurred after syntactic and semantic analysis (Friederici, 2002). Although these findings are in line with the two-step model's predictions (treating the P600 component as one of the ERP markers of the second step of analysis), more recent ERP studies using similar paradigms came to opposite conclusions (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Krauspenhaar, & Schlesewsky, 2013;Van Berkum, van den Brink, Tesink, Kos, & Hagoort, 2008). When the content of the utterance was not congruent, or at least implausible, with respect to speakers' characteristics (e.g., gender, social status, age, political relevance) greater posterior negativities were observed as compared to speaker-congruent sentences.…”

“…One-step models predict that addressee congruence effects should arise at an early stage of processing, without any principled delay as compared to the time course of morphosyntactic analysis (Clark & Carlson, 1981;Hanna et al, 2003;Jackendoff, 2002;Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980;MacDonald et al, 1994;Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995). This early integration should appear within the first 500 ms after stimulus onset, as seen in previous ERP and eye-tracking studies (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al, 2013;Brown-Schmidt et al, 2008;Hanna & Tanenhaus, 2004;Hanna et al, 2003;Hanulíková & Carreiras, 2015;Heller et al, 2008;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Van Berkum et al, 2008). In contrast, two-step models (Fodor, 1983;Forster & Ryder, 1971;Frazier, 1987;Frazier & Clifton, 1996;Friederici, 2002;Horton & Keysar, 1996;Keysar et al, 1998) predict that addressee congruence effects should be visible only at a later stage of processing (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000;Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003;Lattner & Friederici, 2003), presumably resulting in a P600 effect (similar to Lattner & Friederici, 2003).…”

The impact of foreign accent on irony interpretation

“…The null result of accent in the case of literal language seems to be at odds with previous studies showing a modulation of language comprehension processes as a function of accent [3–10]. One potential explanation of this inconsistency might be due to the type of technique used.…”

“…Information that can be inferred based on the speaker’s voice (e.g., age, social status, and provenience) may have an influence on some aspects of listeners’ language comprehension [3–6]. Speaker-related effects have been reported on both lexico-semantic and syntactic analysis, with modulations of word semantic integration [7,8], and attenuated consequences of grammatical violations [9,10].…”