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The role of anticipatory attention during spoken language comprehension and its encoding in alpha amplitude modulations.
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Poster D15 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Eleonora Beier1, Assaf Breska2, Lee Miller1, Yulia Oganian3, George R. Mangun1, Tamara Y. Swaab1; 1University of California, Davis, 2Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, 3University of Tübingen
Spoken language rapidly conveys information over time. Psycholinguistic models posit that listeners pre-allocate attention to the key points in time when the most relevant information is expected to occur. In particular, discourse focus cues such as a preceding question (e.g., “What hat was the man wearing?”) have been shown to lead to faster reaction times and better memory for focused words in the following sentence (e.g., “The man on the corner was wearing the DARK hat”; focused word in all caps). However, the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remain unclear. The goal of this ongoing project is to examine how discourse focus guides attention toward upcoming linguistic information by observing changes in EEG neural dynamics associated with attentional allocation, including anticipatory alpha suppression. Participants heard an Early Focus question (“Which man was wearing the hat?”) or a Late Focus question (“What hat was the man wearing?”), focusing either an Early Target or a Late Target word in the following sentence (“The man on the CORNER was wearing the DARK hat”; target words in all caps). We predict that alpha amplitude prior to the Early and Late Target words varies as a function of whether they were focused through the preceding questions. Additionally, we test whether discourse focus influences depth of semantic processing by measuring the N400 elicited by the Early and Late Target words. Depth of processing was also assessed through a memory test after each block. Preliminary behavioral findings for a subset of 7 participants replicate prior studies, suggesting greater memory for words that had been focused by the preceding questions. Further analyses will test whether memory for the target words and the amplitude of the N400 correlate with pre-target alpha amplitude. Neural and behavioral results for the full dataset will be presented. Overall, this study integrates interdisciplinary lines of research by investigating the role of anticipatory attention mechanisms in language comprehension.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics,