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Event-related potentials elicited by similarity-based interference during subject-verb dependency resolution

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Poster A50 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Also presenting in Lightning Talks A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:00 - 10:15 am CEST, Auditorium

Pia Schoknecht¹, Shravan Vasishth¹; ¹University of Potsdam

Similarity-based interference during cue-based retrieval has been examined in a large number of behavioral studies (see Jäger et al., 2017), but the electrophysiological correlates of interference have not received as much attention. While no link between any event-related potential (ERP) component and similarity-based interference has been established so far, some studies have found negativities for high vs. low interference conditions (Lee and Garnsey, 2015; Martin et al., 2014; Schoknecht et al., 2022; Vasishth and Drenhaus, 2011). Here, we present an ERP study on interference during subject-verb dependency resolution in German based on the design of Van Dyke (2007), a landmark behavioral study. Cue-based retrieval theories propose that the verb in a long-distance subject-verb dependency initiates retrieval of its subject. The retrieval is mediated by retrieval cues generated at the verb. In the design employed here, a syntactic and/or a semantic cue triggers a retrieval at a verb. The syntactic cue triggers a search for a noun with subject marking and the semantic cue for an animate noun. A distractor noun intervening between the subject and verb is manipulated to match/mismatch the subject and animacy retrieval cues. Conditions where the distractor matched the subject or animacy cues (or both) were expected under cue-based retrieval theory to induce high interference during retrieval. In two EEG sessions separated by 1-8 weeks, 100 monolingual, right-handed, native speakers of German with no history of neurological disease read 120 item quadruplets, presented word-by-word in a standard Latin-Square design. The dependent variable for Bayesian mixed model analyses was the mean amplitude 350 – 450 ms post verb onset at 16 electrodes (FC1/z/2, F3/z/4, C3/z/4, CP1/z/2, P3/z/4, Pz, POz). Here, we report the Bayes factors using a truncated normal prior with a standard deviation of 0.5 for the effects of interest, which corresponds to effect sizes up to approx. 1.5 µV. In line with the literature, this prior assumes a more negative response for high vs. low interference conditions. Bayes factors provided strong evidence for the semantic interference effect, i.e., a more negative response to conditions with high semantic interference compared to conditions with low semantic interference (BF10=21.2, β=-0.29, CrI=[-0.48, -0.09]). In contrast, no evidence for a syntactic interference effect (BF10=0.3, β=-0.1, CrI=[-0.26, -0.01]) or the interaction of syntactic and semantic interference (BF10=0.6, β=-0.19, CrI=[-0.49, -0.01]) was found. This large-scale ERP study found strong evidence for a semantic interference effect in a broadly distributed negativity in a time window 350 – 450 ms post critical word onset and no evidence for syntactic interference or an interaction. The decisive importance of the semantic cue (here: animacy) to retrieve a subject is in line with the notion that animate entities are proto-typical agents (Dowty, 1991). Furthermore, the data supports the possibility that language processing relies predominantly on semantic associations to form (probabilistic) representations of event structures (Rabovsky et al., 2018) and speaks against a dominant role for syntactic constraints. A semantic-association view is also consistent with underspecification and good-enough processing accounts of sentence processing (Ferreira and Patson, 2007).

Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes