Delayed impact of argument roles on on-line verb prediction

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Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
ISSN: 2327-3798 (Print) 2327-3801 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/plcp21
Wait a second! delayed impact of argument roles
on on-line verb prediction
Wing-Yee Chow, Ellen Lau, Suiping Wang & Colin Phillips
To cite this article: Wing-Yee Chow, Ellen Lau, Suiping Wang & Colin Phillips (2018): Wait a
second! delayed impact of argument roles on on-line verb prediction, Language, Cognition and
Neuroscience
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1427878
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LANGUAGE,COGNITIONANDNEUROSCIENCE,2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1427878
REGULAR ARTICLE
Wait a second! delayed impact of argument roles on on-line verb prediction
Wing-Yee Chow a, Ellen Laub, Suiping Wangc and Colin Phillipsb
aDepartmentofLinguistics,UniversityCollegeLondon,London,UK;bDepartmentofLinguistics,UniversityofMarylandCollegePark,Maryland,
USA;cDepartmentofPsychology,SouthChinaNormalUniversity,Guangzhou,People’sRepublicofChina
ABSTRACT ARTICLEHISTORY
Comprehenderscanuserichcontextualinformationtoanticipateupcominginputonthefly,but Received14April2017
recent findings suggest that salient information about argument roles may not impact verb Accepted5December2017
prediction.WetookadvantageofthewordorderpropertiesofMandarinChinesetoexaminethe
time course with which argument role information impacts verb prediction. We isolated the KEYWORDS
Languagecomprehension;
contribution of argument role information by manipulating the order of pre-verbal noun phrase
prediction;thematic
arguments while holding lexical information constant, and we examined its effects on accessing
relations;N400
the verb in long-term semantic memory by measuring the amplitude of the N400 component.
Experiment 1 showed when the verb appeared immediately after its arguments, even strongly
constraining argument role information failed to modulate the N400 response to the verb. An
N400 effect emerged in Experiment 2 when the verb appeared at a greater delay. Experiment 3
corroborated the contrast between the first two experiments through a within-participants
manipulation of the time interval between the arguments and the verb, by varying the position
of an adverbial phrase. These results suggest time is a key factor governing how diverse
contextual information contributes to predictions. Here argument role information is shown to
impactverbprediction,butitseffectisnotimmediate.
Introduction arguments, but also the roles they take. For example,
given two arguments “cop” and “thief”, the likelihood
Much recent work suggests that generating predictions
of the verb “arrest” can differ greatly depending on
about the future is a fundamental principle underlying
which argument takes the agent vs. patient role. A
the brain’s operations (Bar, 2011; Hawkins & Blakeslee,
verb like “arrest” may be likely if “cop” takes an agent
2004; Llinás, 2002). After an explosion of work on this
role and “thief” takes a patient role, but it would have
topic across the last decade, predictive processes have
been much less likely if the opposite were true.
now been repeatedly demonstrated across domains
However, some evidence suggests that this information
suchasvisualandauditoryperception(Bar,2007;Bend-
maynotbeusedbyhumanswhentheygeneratepredic-
ixen, Schroger, & Winkler, 2009), motor planning
tionsonline.Thegoalofthecurrentworkistodetermine
(Wolpert, 1997), and language comprehension (e.g.
the cause for this puzzling finding, and more broadly,
Delong,Urbach,&Kutas,2005;VanBerkum,Brown,Zwit-
their implications for models of prediction.
serlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005; Wicha, Moreno, &
Kutas,2004).Justasatennisplayer’sabilitytoanticipate
a flying ball’s trajectory is critical to his/her chances of
Prediction in language comprehension
hitting the ball, the ability to anticipate properties of
upcoming input ahead of time is likely key to the effi- In the domain of language, previous research has pro-
ciency with which the brain processes information. vided much evidence for human comprehenders’
Therefore, a better understanding of how predictions ability to generate linguistic predictions on the fly (for
are computed is important for understanding the a review see Kamide, 2008 ; Kutas, DeLong, & Smith,
brain’s capacity to process information quickly and 2011 ). For example, listeners are more likely to direct
robustly. their eye-gaze to a picture of an edible object (e.g. a
However, recent work in language comprehension cake) when they hear the beginning of an utterance
hasillustratedanotablecaseinwhichsalientandreliable like“Theboywilleat…”comparedtoaneutralutterance
contextual information appears not to impact predic- suchas“Theboywillmove…”(Altmann&Kamide,1999).
tions. The likelihood of a verb depends not only on the Further, much evidence has suggested that
CONTACT Wing-YeeChow [email protected]
Supplementaldataforthisarticlecanbeaccessedhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1427878
©2018InformaUKLimited,tradingasTaylor&FrancisGroup
2 W.-Y.CHOWETAL.
comprehenders compute rich expectations about structure, event knowledge, world knowledge,
upcoming inputs at multiple levels of representation message-level representations) have also been shown
(syntactic: Ilkin & Sturt, 2011;Lau, Stroud, Plesch, & Phil- to modulate N400 amplitude (Bicknell, Elman, Hare,
lips,2006;Levy,Fedorenko,Breen,&Gibson,2012;Omaki McRae, & Kutas, 2010; Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen, &
etal.,2015;Staub&Clifton,2006;VanBerkumetal.,2005; Petersson, 2004; Kos, Vosse, van den Brink, & Hagoort,
Wichaetal.,2004;Yoshida,Dickey, &Sturt,2013;lexico- 2010; Otten, Nieuwland, & Van Berkum, 2007; Paczynski
semantic: Federmeier & Kutas, 1999; Kutas & Hillyard, & Kuperberg, 2012; Van Berkum, 2009; Xiang & Kuper-
1984;Otten&VanBerkum,2008;Szewczyk&Schriefers, berg, 2015). For example, listeners presented with an
2013;phonologicalandorthographic:Delongetal.,2005; utterance like “Every evening I drink some…” show a
Dikker, Rabagliati, Farmer, & Pylkkanen, 2010; Dikker, smaller N400 response to the word “wine” if the
Rabagliati, & Pylkkänen, 2009; Farmer, Yan, Bicknell, & speaker is an adult compared to when it is a child (Van
Tanenhaus, 2015; Kim & Lai, 2012; Laszlo & Federmeier, Berkum, van den Brink, Tesink, Kos, & Hagoort, 2008).
2009). Here, we operationally define “prediction” as the ItshouldbenotedthattheN400hasalsobeentaken
pre-activation of stored representations before the toreflecttheeasewithwhichawordcanbesemantically
bottom-up input is encountered, and we will make no integrated in a given context (the “integration view” of
a priori assumptions regarding the nature of the mech- the N400; e.g. Brown & Hagoort, 1993; Van Berkum,
anisms involved (e.g. whether they are automatic or Hagoort & Brown, 1999 ). This view is most commonly
controlled). associated with the generalisation that semantically or
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) provide a useful pragmatically incongruous words tend to elicit a larger
tool for investigating the nature of prediction in real N400 response than congruous words (e.g. Hagoort
time language comprehension. In particular, the ampli- et al., 2004). Under this view, the N400’s sensitivity to a
tude of the N400, a negative-going ERP component word’s predictability does not arise from pre-activation
that starts at around 250ms and peaks at around per se, but merely reflects the fact that words that are
400ms post stimulus onset (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980), more predictable can be semantically integrated more
may be used as a diagnostic of comprehenders’ lexical easily. While it is not the primary goal of the present
semantic predictions. An N400 response is elicited by study to resolve this long-standing debate about the
any content word (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives), functional significance of the N400, we will consider
whether presented in isolation or in sentences (Kutas & both the prediction and integration views of the N400
Federmeier, 2011) and it has been proposed to reflect and discuss the present findings’ potential implications
the ease of accessing a word’s meaning from long- for both accounts.
term memory (Kutas & Federmeier, 2000; Lau, Phillips,
& Poeppel, 2008). Crucially, its amplitude is modulated
Predictionintheprocessingofthematicrelations
by a word’s predictability, which is commonly operatio-
nalisedastheproportionoftrialsonwhichspeakerscon- Previous research using different experimental tech-
tinuethesentencecontextwiththatwordinanuntimed niques has demonstrated that comprehenders can use
sentencefragmentcompletiontask(alsoknownascloze various sources of information to compute thematic
probability;Taylor,1953).Manyhaveobservedaninverse relations predictively (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;
relationship between the amplitude of the N400 Aoshima, Phillips, & Weinberg, 2004; Ferretti, McRae, &
response to a word and that word’s cloze probability Hatherell, 2001; Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003;
(e.g. Dambacher, Kliegl, Hofmann, & Jacobs, 2006; Knoeferle, Crocker, Scheepers, & Pickering, 2005;
Gunter, Stowe, & Mulder, 1997; Kutas & Hillyard, 1984; McRae, Hare, Elman, & Ferretti, 2005; Omaki et al.,
Wlotko & Federmeier, 2012), which has been taken to 2015).Forexample,McRaeetal.(2005)reportedthatpar-
reflect facilitated lexical semantic access for more pre- ticipants were faster to name a verb when it was pre-
dictable words. Under this view, reduction in the N400 ceded by a noun that was a typical event participant
response to a given word may be taken to reflect the (e.g.agent, patient) andsuggested that comprehenders
extenttowhich that word’s meaning has been pre-acti- can use nouns to pre-activate the classes of events in
vated (the “prediction view” of the N400; Federmeier & which they typically play a role (see also Hare, Jones,
Kutas, 1999).1 Thomson, Kelly, & McRae, 2009). In another study,
N400amplitudemeasureshaveprovidedsomeofthe Kamide et al. (2003) used a visual world eye-tracking
primary evidence that comprehenders can rapidly inte- paradigm and found that listeners of Japanese, a verb-
gratevarioussourcesofcontextualinformationtogener- final language, were more likely to look towards a
ate predictions. Many factors that are known to affect a picture of a hamburger prior to the verb when the first
word’s cloze probability (e.g. negation,2 sentence argument (waitress) was marked with nominative case
LANGUAGE,COGNITIONANDNEUROSCIENCE 3
and the second argument (customer) was dative- Herten, Chwilla, & Kolk, 2006; van Herten, Kolk, &
marked, compared to when the second argument was Chwilla, 2005; Ye & Zhou, 2008; cf. Bornkessel-Schle-
accusative-marked. Since nominative, accusative and sewsky et al., 2011). These findings are unexpected and
dative cases tend to mark arguments that serve the constitute a clear exception to the generalisation that
agent,patientandgoalrolesformostverbsinJapanese, the amplitude of the N400 response to a word is inver-
theseresultssuggestedthatlistenerscanusecasemark- sely related to its offline predictability or cloze
ingsonpre-verbalargumentstoanticipatepropertiesof probability.
the upcoming verb (e.g. the number of arguments it Relatedly, there is an additional body of studies that
takes).Meanwhile,otherevidencesuggeststhatcompre- examinetheeffectsofrolereversalsinverb-medialsen-
henders’ predictions about an upcoming verb are also tences (e.g. “The hearty meal was devouring/devoured
sensitive to information such as the number of pre- …”; Kim & Osterhout, 2005; Kuperberg, Sitnikova,
verbal arguments (Brusini, Brun, Brunet, & Christophe, Caplan, & Holcomb, 2003; Stroud & Phillips, 2012). We
2015) and the animacy of likely arguments (Altmann, suspectthattherearecloseparallelsinthemechanisms
1999). involved,butwefocushereoncasesinwhichtheargu-
However, evidence for the impact of the arguments’ ments’ structural roles are known prior to the verb in
structural roles, i.e. which argument is the subject and order to study how argument role information impact
whichistheobject,oncomprehenders’verbpredictions verb predictions.
hasremainedsurprisinglyscarce.Inmanylanguagesthe Itshouldbenoted,however, thatcomprehendersdo
arguments’ structural roles are unambiguously encoded not simply ignore the arguments’ structural roles when
bywordorder,e.g.“JohnlikesMary”vs.“MarylikesJohn”. they interpret these sentences. Many have shown that
This information is crucial for interpreting thematic comprehenders can readily detect the implausibility
relations in a sentence, and can drastically change the that results from the reversal of the arguments’ roles
likelihood of an upcoming verb in sentences with a (e.g. Kolk et al., 2003). Further, ERP studies across differ-
verb-final word order. For example, in a verb-final ba- ent languages have shown that argument role reversals
construction sentence in Mandarin Chinese like (1a), elicit a larger late positivity (a P600 effect; e.g. Kim &
the verb “arrest” is much more likely when “cop” is the Osterhout, 2005; Kolk et al., 2003; Stroud & Phillips,
subject and “thief” is the object than if thesame pair of 2012; Ye & Zhou, 2008), which has been associated
arguments are reversed, asin (1b). with error detection and reanalysis (Coulson, King, &
Kutas, 1998; Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen, 1993;
(1) Argument role reversal in a verb-final sentence in Hahne & Friederici, 1999; Kuperberg, 2007; Osterhout &
Mandarin Chinese: Holcomb, 1992; van de Meerendonk, Kolk, Vissers, &
(a) jingcha ba xiaotou zhua-le … Chwilla, 2010). These results suggest that information
cop BA thiefarrest… about the arguments’ structural roles can immediately
“The cop arrested the thief.” impact comprehenders’ interpretation, but it does not
(b) xiaotou bajingcha zhua-le … seem to affect the cognitive processes that underlie
thief BA cop arrest… theN400 response.
“The thief arrested the cop.” Three kinds of accounts have been proposed to
explain the N400’s surprising insensitivity to argument
Since the particle ba always follows the subject and role reversals. First, some researchers adopted the inte-
immediately precedes the direct object, the arguments’ gration view of the N400 (e.g. Hagoort et al., 2004) and
identity and their syntactic roles are evident even havetakentheseresultstoindicatethatcomprehenders
before the target verb. Nevertheless, there is little evi- failtodetectimplausibilityinrole-reversedsentencesat
dence to date that comprehenders’ expectations about least initially3 (“Semantic Illusion” hypothesis, e.g. Born-
an upcoming verb are sensitive to this information kessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2008; Hoeks et al.,
during real-time comprehension. In fact, a number of 2004;Kim&Osterhout,2005;Kolketal.,2003;Kuperberg,
studies in languages such as Dutch, Mandarin Chinese, 2007).Forexample,Kolketal.(2003)proposedthatcom-
Japanese and English have reported that reversing the prehenders have a bias to compute verb-argument
preverbal arguments did not modulate comprehenders’ relations based on what is most plausible rather than
N400 response at the verb in pairs like (1), despite the whatthesyntaxindicates,andthusthatuponencounter-
large difference in the predictability of the verb (Chow ing the verb they compute a plausible interpretation in
& Phillips, 2013; Chow, Smith, Lau, & Phillips, 2016; both the canonical and role-reversed sentences. Under
Hoeks, Stowe, & Doedens, 2004; Kolk, Chwilla, van this view, argument role reversals should not modulate
Herten, & Oor, 2003; Oishi & Sakamoto, 2010; van the N400 amplitude regardless of the impact on the
4 W.-Y.CHOWETAL.
verb’s predictability, since the verb can always form a required for reconfiguring the cues (or the event rep-
plausible thematic relation withthe arguments. resentations themselves) in order for likely events to be
Ontheotherhand,somehavefocusedontheN400’s successfully identified and retrieved from memory.
sensitivitytolexicalsemanticassociationandhaveattrib- Infact,onecommoncharacteristicamongmanypre-
utedthelackofanN400effecttoargumentrolereversals vious studies that looked at argument role reversals is
tothefactthattheverbtendstobestronglyassociated the close proximity between the arguments and the
with its arguments in both canonical and role-reversal target verb in the experimental materials. For example,
sentences (Brouwer, Fitz, & Hoeks, 2012). Under this the SOA between the second argument and the target
view, argument role reversals should fail to modulate verb was only 480ms in Hoeks et al. (2004), 530ms in
the N400 only when the verb is strongly associated Chow, Smith, et al. (2016), 600ms in Chow and Phillips
with the arguments, and they should elicit an N400 (2013), and 645ms in Kolk et al. (2003) and van Herten
effect when the verb is only weakly associated with the et al. (2005, 2006). Therefore, it is possible that compre-
arguments. henders do use argument role information to predict
Lastly, with the linking hypothesis that the N400 is an upcoming verb, but they simply cannot do so
modulatedbytheextenttowhichaword’ssemanticrep- quicklyenoughwhentheverbappearsimmediatelyfol-
resentation has been pre-activated (i.e. the prediction lowing the arguments. This idea is consistent with pre-
view), we have proposed that the N400’s insensitivity vious findings that timing manipulations can modulate
to argument role reversals may be taken to show that predictability effects (e.g. Dambacher et al., 2012; Ito,
verb predictions are not always sensitive to argument Corley, Pickering, Martin, & Nieuwland, 2016; Kutas,
roleinformation,potentiallybecausetheimpactofargu- 1993; Wlotko & Federmeier, 2015). Under this view, the
ment role information on online verb prediction is not N400’s sensitivity to argument role reversals should
immediate (Chow & Phillips, 2013; Chow, Smith, et al., depend on (i) the predictability of the verb and (ii) the
2016).Wewill callthisthe“Slow Prediction”hypothesis. amountoftimeavailableforcomprehenderstoincorpor-
In the case of argument role reversals (e.g. in (1)), in ateinformationaboutthearguments’rolesintheirverb
order for a verb (e.g. “arrest”) to become differentially predictions.
pre-activated and elicit an N400 effect, comprehenders OnepieceofsuggestiveevidencefortheSlowPredic-
must not only pre-activate events that likely involve tion hypothesis comes from a visual-world eye-tracking
cops and thieves as participants, but those that specifi- study by Kukona and colleagues, who examined listen-
cally involve cops as agents and thieves as patients in ers’ eye fixations on displays containing verb-related
one case and the opposite in the other. Therefore, patients (e.g. crook) and agents (e.g. policeman) as
eventhoughpreviousfindingssuggestthatcomprehen- they listened to simple English sentences (Kukona,
derscanquickly(i)usecasemarkingsonpre-verbalargu- Fang, Aicher, Chen, & Magnuson, 2011). The authors
ments to anticipate the properties of the verb (e.g. found that listeners were nearly as likely to look at
Kamide et al., 2003) and (ii) use nouns to pre-activate agents as patients when they heard the beginning of
events that typically involve them as participants (e.g. active sentences like “Toby arrests the…” (Experiment
McRaeetal.,2005),itisconceivablethatcomprehenders 1), but they were more likely to look at agents when
mayrequiremoretimetopreferentiallypre-activatethe they heard the beginning of passive sentences such as
eventsthatinvolvethoseargumentsinspecificthematic “Toby was arrested by the…” (Experiment 2). With the
roles. linking hypothesis that listeners’ anticipatory eye-move-
In a recent paper, we discussed different cognitive ments reflect their online predictions, these results may
mechanisms that may be involved in verb prediction betakentoshowthatlisteners’predictionsaresensitive
and discussed why argument role information may not to filled vs. unfilled thematic roles in passive sentences
have an immediate impact (Chow, Momma, Smith, Lau, but not in active sentences, potentially because they
& Phillips, 2016). We conceptualised the process of had slightly more time to predict the second argument
verb prediction as a memory retrieval problem, in in passive sentences than in active sentences (due to
which comprehenders use information about the event the presence of additional words “was” and “by” in
participants to query their event knowledge in long- passivesentences,althoughwithspokenstimulithedur-
term memory in order to predictively identify which ation difference may be small). However, asthe authors
events are most likely to be described by the sentence. acknowledged, passive and active sentences differed in
Further, we proposed that our event knowledge may otherways(e.g.thenature andnumberofthesyntactic
not be represented in such a way that can be directly cues available), and anticipatory fixations may not be
queried using linguistically encoded argument role fully reflective of comprehenders’ predictions as they
retrieval cues, and thus additional processes may be can also be driven by priming (e.g. Huettig & Altmann,
LANGUAGE,COGNITIONANDNEUROSCIENCE 5
2005;Yee&Sedivy,2006).Further,thefactthatthetarget (64% vs. 0%) than in the low-predictability sentences
was always presented with a small set of distractors in (7% vs. 0%). Sentences were plausible in the canonical
the visual world paradigm may also artificially restrict conditionandimplausibleintherole-reversedcondition.
(or even interfere with) comprehenders’ predictions. Sinceeachpairofcanonicalandrole-reversedsentences
Therefore, even though these results are suggestive contained identical sets of words, argument role rever-
theyshouldnotbetakenasevidenceforthehypothesis sals effectively isolated the contribution of the argu-
thatargumentroleinformationhasadelayedimpacton ments’ structural roles while holding other factors such
predictions. aslexical semantic association constant.
Inthecurrentstudywetestedcompetingaccountsfor Therefore, if the N400 is sensitive to the verb’s cloze
the N400’s insensitivity to argument role reversals by probabilityanditsinsensitivitytoargumentrolereversals
examining the effects of argument role reversals under isattributabletoalackofclozeprobabilitydifferencesin
different circumstances in three ERP experiments. We previous studies, then argument role reversals should
used the highly frequent ba-construction in Mandarin elicit an N400 effect when there is a clear cloze prob-
Chinesetocreatecanonicalandrole-reversedsentences ability difference between the canonical and role-
(as illustrated in 1a-b above). In Experiments 1 and 2, reversed conditions (i.e. in the high-predictability sen-
argument role information was manipulated by rever- tences). Alternatively, if argument role reversals fail to
sing the order of the preverbal arguments in sentences elicit an N400 effect because (i) argument role infor-
in which the verb had high vs. low predictability in the mation cannot impact comprehenders’ verb predictions
canonical condition, and we controlled the timing of quicklyenough(SlowPredictionhypothesis),or(ii)com-
the verb relative to the arguments by manipulating prehenderstemporarilyfailtodetecttheimplausibilityin
between experiments the linear distance between the role-reversed sentences (Semantic Illusion hypothesis),
argumentsandtheverb.Theverbimmediatelyfollowed then no N400 effects should be observed in high- and
theargumentsinExperiment1(e.g.“copbathiefarrest”); low-predictabilitysentences alike.
a temporal phrase was placed between the arguments
and the verb to increase the linear distance between
Methods
theminExperiment2(e.g.“copbathief(yesterdayafter-
noon)arrest”).InExperiment3wemanipulatedthelinear Participants
distancebetweentheargumentsandtheverbwithinthe Twenty-four students (19 female, mean age=21 years,
same experiment. range 18–24 years) from South China Normal University
participated in the current study. All participants were
native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, were strongly
Experiment 1
right-handed based on the Edinburgh Handedness
Inthisexperimentweexaminedwhetherargumentrole Inventory (scoring 90% or above; Oldfield, 1971), and
reversals impact the N400 response to the verb when had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no
they have a large and demonstrable impact on the historyofneurologicaldisorder.Noneoftheparticipants
verb’s cloze probability. Previous studies that examined in the present study took part in more than one of the
the effects of argument role reversals did not measure experiments. All participants gave informed consent
cloze probability, because they typically focused on and were paid 20 RMB/hour for their participation.
how reversals create implausible sentences, rather than
on how they change cloze probabilities. Therefore, it is Cloze probability norming
uncleartowhatextentthetargetverb’sclozeprobability Cloze probability estimates were gathered from 60
was modulated by argument role reversals in those student volunteers at South China Normal University
studies. Here we explicitly measured and manipulated on a total of 190 pairs of subject-ba-object sentence
the impact of argument role reversals on the target frames (e.g. “cop ba thief…” and its role-reversed
verb’s cloze probability. In high-predictability sentences counterpart “thief ba cop…”). None of these partici-
thetargetverbhadhighclozeprobabilityinthecanoni- pantstook partinanyoftheERP experiments. The sen-
cal control condition; in low-predictability sentences the tence frames were divided into two lists, and each list
verbhadlowclozeprobabilityinthecanonicalcondition. was completed by 30 participants. Participants were
Inbothcasestheverbsalwayshadzeroclozeprobability asked to provide the best continuations for the sen-
when the arguments were reversed. Therefore, argu- tence frames with one or more words. Overwhelmingly
ment role reversals resulted in a much larger cloze participants responded with a verb which completed
probability difference between the canonical and role- the sentence. A few exceptions were found when par-
reversed conditions in the high-predictability sentences ticipants extended the second NP before supplying a
6 W.-Y.CHOWETAL.
verb (e.g. assistant ba manager’s speech recorded) or probability when the arguments were reversed.4
precededtheverbwithapreposition phrase(e.g.magi- High- and low-predictability sentences shared the same
cian ba pigeon from a hat pulled out); we always used SOV ba-construction but contained different arguments
the first word following the sentence fragment to and verbs. Allsentences were plausiblein thecanonical
compute cloze counts. conditions and implausible in the role-reversed con-
ditions. A complete set of the experimental materials
from the present study (Experiments 1–3) is available in
Materials theSupplementary Materials.
AcrossExperiments1–3,allexperimentalsentencesused Inaddition,acrossExperiments1–3,60plausiblefiller
the highly frequent SOV ba-construction in Mandarin sentences from a previous study were included to
Chinese.Role-reversedsentenceswerecreatedbyrever- examine the effects of a standard cloze probability
sing the order of the pre-verbal arguments in the cano- manipulation in the populations studied here (a control
nical sentences. Within each item set the canonical and comparison; bottom of Table 1). In each item, the same
role-reversed sentenceshadanidenticalverb-argument targetwordwaspairedwithtwodifferentsentencecon-
triplet and differed only in the order of the arguments. texts, such that the target word had a high cloze prob-
Both of the arguments were animate and the order of ability (M=88%, SD=11%) in one and a low cloze
the arguments alone did not induce any anomaly prior probability (M=27%, SD=13%) in the other. A group
to the target verb. Further, in order to avoid sentence- of 48 participants were asked to rate the plausibility of
final wrap-up effects the sentences were extended these sentences on a 5-point scale. Both high and low
beyond the target verb with words that were held con- cloze sentences were rated as highly plausible (high
stant across conditions within each item set. cloze: 4.3; low cloze: 4.1). The position of the target
Theexperimentalstimuliconsistedof120pairsofsen- word was matched across conditions in each set. As
tences, each with a canonical and reversed argument was the case in many previous studies, the target word
order. Argument order was manipulated in two groups was preceded by completely different contexts across
ofsentences(Table1).Inthehigh-predictabilitysentences conditions. Therefore, all of the words in the sentence
thetargetverbhadanaverageclozeprobabilityof64% context could have contributed to the differential pre-
(range41%–97%)inthecanonicalcondition;inthelow- dictabilityofthetargetwordinthesesentences.Thiscri-
predictability sentences the verb had an average cloze tically differed from the experimental sentences, in
probabilityof7%(range 3%–21%) inthecanonical con- which the target verb was preceded by sentence con-
dition. In both cases the verbs always had zero cloze texts that only differed by the order of the arguments
across conditions.
Experimental sentences were distributed across two
Table 1. Experimental conditions and sample materials in presentation lists, such that only one version of each
Experiment 1 (top) and sample materials for the control
itemappearedineachlist.Eachlistcontained120exper-
comparisoninExperiments1–3(bottom).
imental sentences (30 per condition), 60 plausible filler
Experimentalcomparison
sentences for the control comparison and 60 unrelated
Low-predictability
Canonical 老刘把鹦鹉 训练了好一段时间。 implausible filler sentences of similar length and struc-
Role- Mr.LiuBAparrot trainquitesometime.
turalcomplexity,sothattheoverallplausible-to-implau-
reversed 鹦鹉把老刘
! "
ParrotBAMr.Liu sible ratio in each presentation list was 1:1, in line with
“Mr.Liutrainedtheparrotforquitesometime.”
many previous ERP studies (e.g. Hoeks et al., 2004; Kim
vs.“TheparrottrainedMr.Liuforquitesometime.”
High-predictability &Osterhout, 2005).
Canonical 警察把小偷 抓了回警局。
Role- copBAthief arrest(andbringback)to
reversed 小偷把警察 policestation. Procedure
! "
thiefBAcop Participants were comfortably seated about 100cm in
“Thecoparrestedthethief(andbroughthimback)tothe
station.” frontofacomputerscreeninatestingroom.Sentences
vs.“Thethiefarrestedthecop(andbroughthimback)tothe were segmented into words (see example in (2)), which
station.”
werepresentedoneatatimeinawhitefont(30ptsim-
Controlcomparison plifiedChinesecharacters)onablackbackgroundatthe
(IdenticalacrossExperiments1–3)
Expected 牧民从羊身上剪下很多毛 … centre of the screen. Each sentence was preceded by a
Herdsmanfromsheep’sbodycut-downalotofwool … fixation cross that appeared for 500ms. Each word
“Fromthesheeptheherdsmancollectedalotofwool…”
Unexpected 老板在去年收购很多毛 … appeared on the screen for 400ms, followed by
BossZAIlastyearbuyalotofwool … 200msofblankscreen.Eachwordconsistedof1–4char-
“Lastyearthebossboughtalotofwool…”
acters.Thelastwordofeachsentencewasmarkedwitha
LANGUAGE,COGNITIONANDNEUROSCIENCE 7
period, followed 1000ms later by a response cue “?”. Statistical analyses on average voltage amplitudes
Participants were instructed to avoid eye blinks and were conducted separately for two time windows
movements during the presentation of the sentences, chosen based on previous literature and on visual
and they were asked to read each sentence attentively inspection of the data: 350–450ms for the N400, and
and to indicate whether the sentence meaning was 600–800ms for the P600.
plausible by pressing one of two buttons. Prior to the Datafromtheexperimentalsentenceswereanalysed
experimental session, participants were presented with using two parallel approaches. As our hypotheses
6 practice trials with feedback to familiarise themselves centred on the effect of role-reversal on the N400 and
with the task. The experimental session was divided P600, our primary analysis examined the effect of role
into four blocks of 60 sentences each, with short reversal on these ERP components within each level of
pausesinbetween.Includingset-uptime,anexperimen- predictability. Since both N400 and P600 effects tend
tal session lasted around1.5h on average. to be broadly distributed with a (central-)posterior
maximum, we chose a cluster of posterior electrodes
(1) Sentence segmentation for stimulus presentation: for this analysis so as to use the same electrodes to
/去年初，/老刘/把/鹦鹉/训练了/好一段/时间。/ capture both N400 and P600 effects (see also Ito,
/Beginning of last year,/Mr. Liu/BA/parrot/train/ Corley, et al., 2016). Further, in order to allow a more
(for)quitesome/time./ comprehensive evaluation of effects across the scalp,
we also conducted omnibus ANOVAs at each time
windowtotestformaineffectsandinteractionswithdis-
tributional factors.
EEG recording
For the posterior electrode cluster analyses, we aver-
EEGwasrecordedcontinuouslyfrom30AgClelectrodes
aged participants’ ERPs across 6 posterior electrodes
mounted in an electrode cap (Electrocap International):
(P3, PZ, P4, O1, OZ, and O2) and ran paired-sample t-
midline: Fz, FCz, Cz, CPz, Pz, Oz; lateral: FP1/2, F3/4, F7/
tests to examine the effect of role reversal within each
8, FC3/4, FT7/8, C3/4, T7/8, CP3/4, TP7/8, P3/4, P7/8,
level of predictability in each time window. Further, we
and O1/2. The electro-oculogram (EOG) was recorded
used the bootES package (Gerlanc & Kirby, 2013) to
at four electrode sites; vertical EOG was recorded from
compute standardised effect sizes of these contrasts
electrodes placed above and below the left eye and
(Pearson’s r) and their bootstrap confidence intervals
the horizontal EOG was recorded from electrodes situ-
(95% CI). An advantage of using Pearson’s r to express
ated at the outer canthus of each eye. Electrode impe-
the effect size of a contrast is that the effect is scaled
dances were kept below 5kΩ. The EEG and EOG
tohave an absolute magnitude between 0 and 1.
recordings were amplified (band-pass filtered at DC -
For the omnibus repeated measures ANOVAs, we
200Hz) and digitised online at 1kHz. Online recordings
examined time-window average ERPs at 18 electrodes,
were referenced to the left mastoid. They were re-refer-
fully crossing predictability (high vs. low) and reversal
enced to the average of the left and right mastoids
(congruous vs. role-reversed) with anteriority (anterior
and filtered using a 0.1–40Hz band-pass filter offline.
vs. central vs. posterior) and laterality (Left vs. Midline
This high-pass filter value was tested in a recent study
vs. Right). We assigned topographical grouping factors
and found to not introduce artefactual effects (Tanner,
to electrodes as follows: left-anterior: F3, FC3; midline-
Morgan-Short, & Luck, 2015). A 15Hz low-pass filter
anterior: FZ, FCZ; right-anterior: F4, FC4; left-central: C3,
was applied for the presentation of grand averages
CP3; midline-central: CZ, CPZ; right-central: C4, CP4;
only, butwas not used inthe analyses.
left-posterior: P3, O1; midline-posterior: PZ, OZ; right-
posterior: P4, O2. Univariate F-tests with more than one
ERP data analysis degree of freedom in the numerator were adjusted by
Event-related potentials were computed separately for means of the Greenhouse-Geisser correction (Green-
each participant and each condition for the 1000ms house&Geisser,1959).Sincepredictabilitywasmanipu-
after the onset of the target verb relative to a 100ms lated between different item sets (i.e. high and low-
baseline preceding the target verb. ERP data in all trials predictability sentences were completely different),
(regardless of end-of-trial behavioural response) were main effects of predictability are not meaningful and
evaluated for EOG and other artefacts. Trials contami- wediscusseffectsofpredictabilityonlywhentheyinter-
nated by artefacts were excluded from the averaging actwiththeeffectsofreversal.Wealsoconductedapre-
procedure. This affected 7.8% of experimental trials, dictability×anteriority×laterality repeated measures
roughly equally distributed across conditions (ranging ANOVA in each time window for the filler sentences to
between 6.3 and 9.6% across conditions). examine the effect of cloze probability.
8 W.-Y.CHOWETAL.
Results distribution of the effects of argument role reversals at
the target word in the 350–450ms and 600–800ms
Plausibility judgments
timeintervalsinthelow-predictabilityandhigh-predict-
Acrossboth high-and low-predictability sentences,par-
ability conditions in Experiment 1. Results of the pos-
ticipantsjudgedcanonicalsentencestobeplausibleand
terior electrode cluster analyses and the omnibus
role-reversedsentencestobeimplausiblewithanoverall
ANOVAs are presented in Table 2 and the leftmost
accuracyof90.6%(Lowpredictability,canonical=88.3%;
column of Table 3 respectively. Grand average ERPs
Low predictability, role-reversed=90.4%; High predict-
acrossall30electrodesitesarepresentedinSupplemen-
ability, canonical=90.3%; High predictability, role-
tary Figures 1 and 2.
reversed=93.3%).
AsshowninFigure1,argumentrolereversalselicited
a clear P600 effect with the same topographic distri-
Event-related potentials (Experimental bution across both high- and low-predictability sen-
comparisons) tences, indicating that participants quickly and reliably
ThetophalfofFigure1showsthegrandaverageERPsat detected that the verb was anomalous in the role-
centro-posterior electrode CPZ and the topographic reversed conditions. However, there was no clear effect
Figure1.Top:GrandaverageERPsatcentro-parietalelectrodeCPZandthetopographicdistributionofERPeffectsinthe350–450ms
and 600–800ms intervals (role-reversed minus canonical) in the low-predictability (left) and high-predictability (right) conditions in
Experiment1,inwhichthetargetverbappearedimmediatelyfollowingthesecondargument(600msSOA).Argumentrolereversals
elicitedaP600effectinbothlow-predictabilityandhigh-predictabilitysentences,buttheN400wasnotmodulatedbythepredictability
ofthetargetverbineithercondition.Bottom:GrandaverageERPsatfrontalelectrodeFZandatcentro-posteriorelectrodeCPZand
topographicdistributionofERPeffectsinthe350–450msand600–800msintervals(expectedminusunexpected)inthecontrolcom-
parison in Experiment 1. A cloze probability manipulation in the filler sentences elicited a clear N400 effect followed by a frontally
distributedlatepositivity.
LANGUAGE,COGNITIONANDNEUROSCIENCE 9
Table 2. Results of the posterior electrode cluster analyses in Event-related potentials (Control comparison)
Experiment 1: t value, standardised effect size (Pearson’s r) and The bottom half of Figure 1 shows the grand average
95%confidenceintervalforthecontrastbetweenthecanonical
ERPsatfrontalelectrodeFZandatcentro-posteriorelec-
androle-reversedconditionsineachtimeinterval.
trodeCPZandthetopographicdistributionofERPeffects
Experiment1 df T Pearson’sr 95%CI
in the control comparison. Results of the statistical ana-
Lowpredictability
350–450ms 23 1.12 −0.23 [−0.55,0.18] lyses are presented inthe leftmost column of Table 4.
600–800ms 23 3.43** 0.58 [0.24,0.76] The standard cloze probability manipulation in the
Highpredictability
fillersentenceselicitedaclearN400effectandafrontally
350–450ms 23 <1 −0.07 [−0.42,0.34]
600–800ms 23 6.4** 0.80 [0.66,0.87] distributedlatepositivity.Statisticalanalysesinthe350–
**p<.01;*p<.05. 450mstimeintervalrevealedasignificantmaineffectof
predictability, showing that expected words elicit a
smaller N400 response than unexpected words. Inter-
of reversal ontheN400 ineither pairofconditions, par-
actions between predictability and the topographic
ticularly in the high-predictability conditions where the
factors indicated that the effect was largest at midline
clozeprobabilitydifferencewas largest.
central and posterior sites. Analyses in the 600–800ms
In the 350–450ms interval, the posterior electrode
time interval revealed a significant predictability×ante-
clusteranalysesrevealednosignificanteffectsofreversal
riority interaction, due to the fact that unexpected
in either high- or low-predictability conditions. The
words elicited a larger frontal positivity than expected
omnibus ANOVA revealed a three-way reversal×ante-
words.
riority×laterality interaction, but further analyses by
AsshowninFigure1,thetopographicdistributionof
anteriority and laterality did not reveal any significant
this late positivity was distinct from the posteriorly dis-
effect.
tributed P600 effect in the experimental sentences.
In the 600–800ms interval, the posterior electrode
This frontally distributed late positivity has been
cluster analyses showed a larger P600 in the role-
observed in previous studies and has been argued to
reversed condition than in the canonical condition in
reflect processes thatare triggered whenstrong predic-
high- and low-predictability sentences alike. The
tions are disconfirmed (DeLong, Quante, & Kutas, 2014;
omnibusANOVAsimilarlyrevealedamaineffectofrever-
Federmeier, Wlotko, De Ochoa-Dewald, & Kutas, 2007;
sal, along with reversal×anteriority, reversal×laterality,
Thornhill & van Petten, 2012; van Petten & Luka, 2012).
andreversal×anteriority×lateralityinteractions,reflect-
We will return to discuss the relationship between this
ing a larger central-posterior positivity (P600) for the
late frontal positivity and the P600 in the General
role-reversed condition in high- and low-predictability
Discussion.
sentences alike.
Table3.OmnibusANOVAF-valuesatthetargetverbinExperiments1–3.
Experiment1 Experiment2 Experiment3
OmnibusANOVA df 350–450ms 600–800ms df 350–450ms 600–800ms df 350–450ms 600–800ms
rev 1,23 <1 18.78** 1,23 1.37 19.01** 1,23 <1 17.95**
rev*type 1,23 <1 <1 1,23 1.01 <1 1,23 <1 <1
rev*ant 2,46 1.24 5.97* 2,46 <1 29.63** 2,46 <1 13.9**
rev*lat 2,46 <1 4.19* 2,46 <1 <1 2,46 <1 2.36
rev*type*ant 2,46 <1 1.03 2,46 <1 <1 2,46 <1 <1
rev*type*lat 2,46 <1 1.94 2,46 <1 <1 2,46 5.68** 1.25
rev*ant*lat 4,92 3.66* 4.89** 4,92 1.74 1.47 4,92 <1 1.25
rev*type*ant*lat 4,92 <1 1.2 4,92 1.35 <1 4,92 1.08 <1
Factors:type=predictability(Experiments1&2)ordistance(Experiment3);ant=anteriority;lat=laterality.
**p<.01;*p<.05.
Table4.OmnibusANOVAF-valuesatthetargetwordforthecontrolcomparisonsinExperiments1–3.
Experiment1 Experiment2 Experiment3
df 350–450ms 600–800ms df 350–450ms 600–800ms df 350–450ms 600–800ms
OmnibusANOVA
pred 1,23 20.3** 2.25 1,23 45.8** 2.09 1,23 6.93* 3.11^
pred*ant 2,46 7.21** 5.18* 2,46 9.02** 4.26* 2,46 10.44** 8.69**
pred*lat 2,46 3.56* <1 2,46 <1 1.68 2,46 <1 <1
pred*ant*lat 4,92 2.91* 1.67 4,92 3.51* 4.13** 4,92 3.07* 5**
Factors:pred=predictability;ant=anteriority;lat=laterality.
**p<.01;*p<.05;^.05<p<.1.