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Temporal predictions guide attention to linguistically focused words during spoken language comprehension.
Poster Session C, Friday, October 25, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
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
Introduction. Spoken language rapidly unfolds over time. Listeners are thought to predict the timing of upcoming critical information, pre-allocating attention to those points in time to facilitate processing. However, to date the field has mostly focused on temporal prediction via oscillatory entrainment to the rhythmic patterns of speech. Less is known about whether non-rhythmic linguistic cues guide attention to the timing of relevant upcoming information, similarly to cue-based temporal predictions for single intervals observed in non-linguistic studies. Prior behavioral research suggests that linguistic focus cues may direct attention towards upcoming focused words, leading to faster reaction times and greater memory recall (Cutler & Fodor, 1979; Beier & Ferreira, 2022). Here, we test the hypothesis that these linguistic focus cues guide attention through non-rhythmic temporal prediction, by measuring EEG neural dynamics associated with attention pre-allocation. Method. Data was collected for forty right-handed, native English speakers with no hearing or language impairments. Stimuli consisted of 80 question-answer pairs. On each trial, participants heard either 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). Participants were instructed to answer the question out loud at randomly presented filler trials (28% of total trials), to ensure that participants used the question to attend to each target word. Memory for the target words was measured through a memory test at the end of each block of 18 trials. Results. Behaviorally, we replicate prior findings of greater memory recall for words focused by the preceding question. Event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the onset of the Early and Late target words revealed a larger frontal negative component when the word had been focused, suggesting greater engagement of working memory resources. Critically, we performed a time-frequency analysis of oscillatory dynamics prior to the onset of each target word, as a function of focus. We find overall higher power in alpha oscillations at occipital electrodes during the auditory presentation of the stimulus relative to baseline, suggesting suppression of visual information in favor of auditory processing. This effect was larger for focused target words, consistent with greater attention pre-allocation leading up to the timing of upcoming focused information. Conclusions. Overall, these results suggest that temporal predictions based on linguistic focus cues guide attention towards the timing of upcoming focused information. These non-rhythmic temporal predictions provide a compelling alternative to the debated role of rhythm-based predictions through oscillatory entrainment.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics,