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Early and late ERP effects to minimalistic syntactic differences during speech perception

Poster D31 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.

Bissera ivanova^1,2,3, Deirdre Bolger^1,3, Benjamin Morillon^2,3, Liina Pylkkänen^4,5,6, Kristof Strijkers^1,3; ¹Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille University, ²Institut de Neuroseiences de la Système, Aix-Marseille University, ³Institute of Language, Communication, and the Brain, Aix-Marseille University, ⁴Department of Linguistics, NYU, ⁵Department of Psychology, NYU, ⁶NYUAD Institute, New York University Abu Dhabi

While syntactic structure processing is taken as a fundamental part of language comprehension, its underlying neural dynamics remain disputed. This may be due to previous research relying on violation paradigms or complex or ambiguous syntactic structures to probe brain activity, which results in secondary cognitive activity that cannot be confidently attributed to syntax per se. Therefore, in this study we investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of syntactic processing by relying on a simple minimalist paradigm where we compare three-word noun phrases matched for semantic content but with a different syntactic structure. Specifically, we contrast the processing of the last (critical) word between pairs of noun phrases, which is crucially physically identical, but has a different syntactic role between conditions. In condition (1) "joli buisson fleuri" ("beautiful bush flowering") the critical word is a modifier to the head and in condition (2) "buisson joliment fleuri" ("bush beautifully flowering") it is both a head and a modifier. In terms of semantics the only change is that the prenominal adjective in (1) turns to its adverbial form in (2), keeping the semantic-compositional content as close as possible between conditions. In this ongoing study we have tested 24 French native speakers and recorded brain activity in response to those naturally spoken auditory stimuli, with high-density EEG. We contrasted the two conditions with a parametric t-test and those preliminary results suggest a syntactic effect can be observed in both early and late time windows with the early effect lasting between 100 and 140ms and the later effect taking place between 350 and 500ms after onset of the critical word. Next steps in the analyses will be to compute the sources for these effects and to compare them to the predictions made by leading brain-language models. For the kind of minimalistic contrast we use models have diverging predictions. While some expect early activity in frontal followed by later activation in posterior brain areas (e.g. Friederici 2011; 2017), other models predict the inverse pattern with early posterior and later frontal activity (e.g., Hagoort, 2013; Pylkkänen, 2019); yet other models expect activity to be distributed between frontal and posterior areas of the language network for both the early and the late time windows (e.g., Pulvermüller, 2018; Strijkers & Costa, 2016; Fedorenko et al., 2020). Our approach will therefore provide a critical test to constrain future neural models of syntactic structure processing.

Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics, Speech Perception