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Individual differences in the processing of referential dependencies: Evidence from event-related potentials.
Robert Fiorentino1, Lauren Covey2, Alison Gabriele3
1Neurolinguistics & Language Processing Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, Dole Human Development Center, Room 4037, 1000 Sunnyside Ave., University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, United States.
Neuroscience Letters
|February 15, 2018
Summary
This study on pronoun resolution found that working memory and attention influence how people process ambiguous sentences. Referential failure in sentences triggered a P600 brainwave response in all participants.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Referential ambiguity and failure pose challenges in language comprehension.
- Event-related potentials (ERPs) offer insights into real-time language processing.
- Individual differences in cognitive abilities may modulate responses to linguistic ambiguity.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the neural processing of referential ambiguity and failure using ERPs.
- To explore the relationship between working memory, attentional control, and ERP responses to referential ambiguity.
- To examine how referential failure is processed neurally.
Main Methods:
- Participants read sentences with varying degrees of referential ambiguity (one, two, or no gender-matching antecedents).
- Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during sentence reading.
- Cognitive abilities were assessed using working memory (Count Span/Reading Span) and attentional control (Number Stroop) tasks.
Main Results:
- Two distinct ERP patterns (sustained negativity - Nref, and sustained positivity) emerged in response to referential ambiguity.
- Nref amplitude correlated positively with working memory capacity (Count Span).
- Positivity effects were marginally related to attentional control (Stroop performance).
- Referential failure consistently elicited a P600 ERP component across all participants.
Conclusions:
- Individual cognitive abilities, specifically working memory and attentional control, differentially modulate neural responses to referential ambiguity.
- The P600 response to referential failure suggests it is treated as a grammatical violation, irrespective of explicit judgment.
- ERPs provide a valuable tool for dissecting the cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension and individual differences.
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