Katherine A. DeLong

Thinking ahead or not? Natural aging and anticipation during reading.

Despite growing evidence of young adults neurally pre-activating word features during sentence comprehension, less clear is the degree to which this generalizes to older adults. Using ERPs, we tested for linguistic prediction in younger and older readers by means of indefinite articles (as and ans) preceding more and less probable noun continuations. Although both groups exhibited cloze probability-graded noun N400s, only the young showed significant article effects, indicating probabilistic sensitivity to the phonology of anticipated upcoming nouns. Additionally, both age groups exhibited prolonged increased frontal positivities to less probable nouns, although in older adults this effect was prominent only in a subset with high verbal fluency (VF). This ERP positivity to contextual constraint violations offers additional support for prediction in the young. For high VF older adults, the positivity may indicate they, too, engage in some form of linguistic pre-processing when implicitly cued, as may have occurred via the articles.

Predictability, plausibility, and two late ERP positivities during written sentence comprehension

Van Petten and Lukas (2012, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 83(2), 176-190) literature survey of late positive ERP components elicited by more or less predictable words during sentence processing led them to propose two topographically and functionally distinct positivities: a parietal one associated with semantically incongruent words related to semantic reanalysis and a frontal one with unknown significance associated with congruent but lexically unpredicted words. With the goal of testing this hypothesis within a single set of experimental materials and participants, we report results from two ERP studies: Experiment 1, a post-hoc analysis of a dataset that varied on dimensions of both cloze probability (predictability) and plausibility, and Experiment 2, a follow-up study in which these factors were manipulated in a controlled fashion. In both studies, we observed distinct post-N400 positivities: a more anterior one to plausible, but not anomalous, low cloze probability sentence medial words, and a more posterior one to semantically anomalous sentence continuations. Taken together with an observed canonical cloze-modulated N400, these dual positivities indicate a dissociation between brain processes relating to written words׳ sentential predictability versus plausibility, clearly an important distinction for any viable neural or psycholinguistic model of written sentence processing.

Metaphors are physical and abstract: ERPs to metaphorically modified nouns resemble ERPs to abstract language

Metaphorical expressions very often involve words referring to physical entities and experiences. Yet, figures of speech such as metaphors are not intended to be understood literally, word-by-word. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to determine whether metaphorical expressions are processed more like physical or more like abstract expressions. To this end, novel adjective-noun word pairs were presented visually in three conditions: (1) Physical, easy to experience with the senses (e.g., “printed schedule”); (2) Abstract, difficult to experience with the senses (e.g., “conditional schedule”); and (3) novel Metaphorical, expressions with a physical adjective, but a figurative meaning (e.g., “thin schedule”). We replicated the N400 lexical concreteness effect for concrete vs. abstract adjectives. In order to increase the sensitivity of the concreteness manipulation on the expressions, we divided each condition into high and low groups according to rated concreteness. Mirroring the adjective result, we observed a N400 concreteness effect at the noun for physical expressions with high concreteness ratings vs. abstract expressions with low concreteness ratings, even though the nouns per se did not differ in lexical concreteness. Paradoxically, the N400 to nouns in the metaphorical expressions was indistinguishable from that to nouns in the literal abstract expressions, but only for the more concrete subgroup of metaphors; the N400 to the less concrete subgroup of metaphors patterned with that to nouns in the literal concrete expressions. In sum, we not only find evidence for conceptual concreteness separable from lexical concreteness but also that the processing of metaphorical expressions is not driven strictly by either lexical or conceptual concreteness.

A Sampler of Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP) Analyses of Language Processing

In large part, language comprehension and production occur quickly and unavailable to conscious reflection. Electrophysiological methods – eventrelated brain potentials (ERPs) and other measures of electrical brain activity – afford a view of the brain in action as it supports these language processes as they unfold in real time. Moreover, ERPs can be utilized even when a comprehender’s only task is to understand a word, phrase or sentence or to produce names or more elaborate utterances. Recording electrical brain activity in response to written and spoken words (as well as smaller and larger linguistic units) thus provides a means of tracking the brain’s sensitivity to various linguistic inputs, revealing which factors are important to processing and the time course of their influence. As a continuous measure of processing, ERPs allow simultaneous looks at brain activity at the multiple time scales at which language processing transpires, from the first milliseconds of processing a word to the seconds required to comprehend a sentence, or even longer for a discourse. One of the greatest advantages to using ERPs, then, is that this combination of methodological features allows for investigations of aspects of language processing that are otherwise difficult if not impossible to detect via other measures. In this chapter, we will examine such instances, outlining five very different groups of ERP studies which exemplify some of the unique insights made possible by use of the methodology in the study of language-related neural processes. In particular, we will discuss the paradigms and the kinds of information that can be gathered from using ERPs to look at language processing outside the focus of attention, during language learning (before explicit knowing), for individuals in unconscious states, in determining Marta Kutas and Katherine A. Delong 154 the nature of predictive processing, and for testing how specific contextual cues may activate information in semantic memory. Our examination of these specific experimental examples makes clear the important role that ERPs have to play in studying language processing, both traditionally and as the number of neuroimaging techniques continues to grow.

Is there a replication crisis? Perhaps. Is this an example? No: a commentary on Ito, Martin, and Nieuwland (2016)

Is there a replication crisis? Perhaps. Is this an example? No: a commentary on Ito, Martin, and Nieuwland (2016) Katherine A. DeLong, Thomas P. Urbach and Marta Kutas Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA; Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA; Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA; Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA