Abstract
During language comprehension, the processing of each incoming word is facilitated in proportion to its predictability. Here, we asked whether anticipated upcoming linguistic information is actually pre-activated before new bottom-up input becomes available, and if so, whether this pre-activation is limited to the level of semantic features, or whether extends to representations of individual word-forms (orthography/phonology). We carried out Representational Similarity Analysis on EEG data while participants read highly constraining sentences. Prior to the onset of the expected target words, sentence pairs predicting semantically related words (financial “bank” – “loan”) and form-related words (financial “bank” – river “bank”) produced more similar neural patterns than pairs predicting unrelated words (“bank” – “lesson”). This provides direct neural evidence for item-specific semantic and form predictive pre-activation. Moreover, the semantic pre-activation effect preceded the form pre-activation effect, suggesting that top-down pre-activation is propagated from higher to lower levels of the linguistic hierarchy over time.
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Notes
In line with all accounts of predictive language comprehension, and all theories of post-onset homograph processing, we assume that in highly constraining contexts, the appropriate meaning of the homograph is pre-activated. For example, the dominant financial-related meaning of the word “bank” should be pre-activated following a dominant-constraining context, while the subordinate river-related meaning of the word “bank” should be pre-activated following the subordinate-constraining context. In the psycholinguistic literature, there has been some debate about whether, after a homograph is encountered from bottom-up input, we additionally access its contextually-inappropriate meaning. Addressing this question is outside the scope of the present study.
Previous studies have shown that GPT-derived probability values correlate with human-based cloze estimates (e.g. Szewczyk & Federmeier, 2022). Indeed, in the present study, GPT-derived estimates of the lexical probabilities of the predicted target words correlated strongly with the cloze estimates of lexical probability that we had obtained from human participants (r = 0.92, p < 0.001).
We chose to exclude rather than interpolate bad channels to avoid any potential distortion of spatiotemporal patterns over the entire set of channels, which would occur if the true electrical activity at a bad channel was not highly correlated with activity at its neighboring channels.
Following a reviewer’s suggestion, we repeated the RSA using different sampling interval sizes (i.e., 0 ms, 20 ms, and 40 ms). We found qualitatively similar effects for all interval sizes.
Following a reviewer’s request, we carried out two additional post hoc tests. First, we statistically compared the peak latency difference between the semantic and form similarity effects using a Jackknife resampling approach. This also showed a significant effect. Second, we directly compared the neural similarity values produced by the semantically related and form-related pairs within the two time windows that revealed significant differences in the analysis above, i.e., in comparison with the unrelated control condition. Between -391 and -309 ms, the semantically related pairs produced greater neural similarity values than the form-related pairs although this effect was marginal (t(32) = 1.99, p = 0.055). Between -53 and -8 ms, the form-related pairs produced significantly greater neural similarity values than the semantically related pairs (t(32) = 2.53, p = 0.017).
A reviewer raised the possibility that the form pre-activation effect actually reflected an indirect semantic pre-activation effect. On this account, the pre-activation of a homograph’s contextually appropriate meaning (e.g., <financial-bank>) indirectly led to the additional pre-activation of its contextually inappropriate meaning (e.g., <river-bank>), and so the form pre-activation effect that we detected actually reflected overlap of these indirectly pre-activated semantic features. Note that this account would still be consistent with the claim that comprehenders pre-activate upcoming word-form forms. This is because the only way that the alternative meaning of the homograph could have been pre-activated is if its form was also pre-activated. Nonetheless, we explored this possibility by carrying out a post hoc analysis that contrasted the neural similarity values produced by indirectly related pairs (e.g., river “bank” – “loan”) with those produced by the unrelated pairs, each averaged across the -53 to -8 ms time window time window where we detected the form pre-activation effect. This analysis did not reveal a significant effect. Of course, this does not exclude the possibility that the alternative meaning of the predicted homographs was pre-activated in another time window. However, a comprehensive investigation of how different meanings associated with homographs are pre-activated goes beyond the scope of the present study. To investigate this, one would need to construct an additional set of highly constraining sentence contexts that predict words that are semantically related to the subordinate meanings of the predicted homographs.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD082527. We thank Sophie Greene, Feng Cheng, and Edward Alexander for their assistance with stimuli preparation and data collection.
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Wang, L., Brothers, T., Jensen, O. et al. Dissociating the pre-activation of word meaning and form during sentence comprehension: Evidence from EEG representational similarity analysis. Psychon Bull Rev 31, 862–873 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02385-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02385-0