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Dissociating predictability, plausibility and possibility of sentence continuations in reading: evidence from late-positivity ERPs.

ABSTRACT: Late positive event-related potential (ERP) components occurring after the N400, traditionally linked to reanalysis due to syntactic incongruence, are increasingly considered to also reflect reanalysis and repair due to semantic difficulty. Semantic problems can have different origins, such as a mismatch of specific predictions based on the context, low plausibility, or even semantic impossibility of a word in the given context. DeLong, Quante & Kutas (2014) provided the first direct evidence for topographically different late positivities for prediction mismatch (left frontal late positivity for plausible but unexpected words) and plausibility violation (posterior-parietal late positivity for implausible, incongruent words). The aim of the current study is twofold: (1) to replicate this dissociation of ERP effects for plausibility violations and prediction mismatch in a different language, and (2) to test an additional contrast within implausible words, comparing impossible and possible sentence continuations. Our results replicate DeLong, Quante & Kutas (2014) with different materials in a different language, showing graded effects for predictability and plausibility at the level of the N400, a dissociation of plausible and implausible, anomalous continuations in posterior late positivities and an effect of prediction mismatch on late positivities at left-frontal sites. In addition, we found some evidence for a dissociation, at these left-frontal sites, between implausible words that were fully incompatible with the preceding discourse and those for which an interpretation is possible.

SUBMITTER: Quante L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6187994 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The present fMRI study investigated whether human observers spontaneously exploit the statistical structure underlying continuous action sequences. In particular, we tested whether two different statistical properties can be distinguished with regard to their neural correlates: an action step's predictability and its probability. To assess these properties we used measures from information theory. Predictability of action steps was operationalized by its inverse, conditional entropy, which combines the number of possible action steps with their respective probabilities. Probability of action steps was assessed using conditional surprisal, which increases with decreasing probability. Participants were trained in an action observation paradigm with video clips showing sequences of 9-33 s length with varying numbers of action steps that were statistically structured according to a Markov chain. Behavioral tests revealed that participants implicitly learned this statistical structure, showing that humans are sensitive toward these probabilistic regularities. Surprisal (lower probability) enhanced the BOLD signal in the anterior intraparietal sulcus. In contrast, high conditional entropy, i.e., low predictability, was correlated with higher activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal gyrus, and posterior intraparietal sulcus. Furthermore, we found a correlation between the anterior hippocampus' response to conditional entropy with the extent of learning, such that the more participants had learnt the structure, the greater the magnitude of hippocampus activation in response to conditional entropy. Findings show that two aspects of predictions can be dissociated: an action's predictability is reflected in a top-down modulation of attentional focus, evident in increased fronto-parietal activation. In contrast, an action's probability depends on the identity of the stimulus itself, resulting in bottom-up driven processing costs in the parietal cortex.

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Dissociating predictability, plausibility and possibility of sentence continuations in reading: evidence from late-positivity ERPs.

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