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Being addressed: ERP evidence for the self-relevance of second person pronouns from naturalistic auditory story processing
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Poster D16 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Ingmar Brilmayer1, Magdalena Repp1, Petra B. Schumacher1; 1Univesity of Cologne, Institute for German Language and Literature I
The processing of first person pronouns in a narrative evoked an early (150-250ms) positive ERP response, and it has been suggested that this enhanced positivity reflects increased sensitivity of the cortex to potentially self-relevant information (Brilmayer et al., 2019). However, all pronouns referred to referents in the story. That is, this study only allows conclusions about the processing of pronouns that are potentially self-relevant to others, i.e. refer to other selves. Yet, the study is uninformative with respect to pronouns that refer to the participant. In the present study, we analyzed two EEG studies with data from 72 participants (32/40) listening to two different audiobooks. We chose these texts because of the stories’ narrative characteristics: In one story ("Tschick"), all occurrences of 2sg pronouns refer to characters in the story due to its dialogue structure; in the second story (“Auferstehung der Toten”), the listener (i.e. the participant) is the most likely referent (~ 30%) of these pronouns because the auctorial narrator addresses the listener . This allows a comparison of the ERP response of 2sg pronouns that potentially refer to the listener with personal pronouns that do not. In our analysis we investigate whether the positive ERP effect of self-relevance is independent of a particular linguistic person (or linguistic token) and extends from the first to the second person, and if so, whether the effect is independent of the referent of the pronoun (listener/story character). The EEG data were recorded using 64 channels at 500 Hz sampling rate and were preprocessed in MATLAB using the EEGLAB toolbox. We decomposed the data into independent components and removed artifact components identified by ICLabel. Afterwards, we used time-resolved regression (unfold toolbox) to calculate overlap-corrected, single-subject averages in a time window of -500 to 1000ms relative to the onset of the critical pronouns for each study separately. The resulting beta-coefficients were then used to reconstruct the (overlap-corrected) single-subject ERP to 2nd person pronouns. Consistent with our hypothesis, the ERPs to 2nd person pronouns in “AdT” show a positive effect relative to “Tschick” with a peak amplitude of ~200ms. Using linear mixed-effect models in R, we modeled the ERP amplitude in the same time window as Brilmayer et al. (2019), i.e. 150-250ms relative to pronoun onset. In addition to the factor audiobook, we included two continuous topographical predictors based on two-dimensional coordinates (laterality, saggitality). The random effect structure included random slopes for the topographic predictors without interaction by subject. Among others, the model suggests a highly significant effect of audiobook at left and right posterior electrodes in the 150-250 ms time window, predicting a more positive ERP response for second person pronouns in “AdT” as compared to “Tschick”. Overall, the results of our analysis provide evidence that the positive ERP effect found for first person pronouns generalizes to second person pronouns, given that they are potentially self-relevant to the listener (when addressed by the narrator). We assume that the positivity reflects attentional processes leading to increased sensitivity of the cortex to the self-other distinction.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics,