Anticipating predictability: an ERP investigation of expectation-managing discourse markers in dialogue comprehension

Marlou Rasenberg; Joost Rommers; Geertje van Bergen

doi:10.1080/23273798.2019.1624789

Anticipating predictability: an ERP investigation of expectation-managing discourse markers in dialogue comprehension

Marlou Rasenberg, Joost Rommers, Geertje van Bergen^* (Corresponding Author)

^*Corresponding author for this work

Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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Abstract

In two ERP experiments, we investigated how the Dutch discourse markers eigenlijk “actually”, signalling expectation disconfirmation, and inderdaad “indeed”, signalling expectation confirmation, affect incremental dialogue comprehension. We investigated their effects on the processing of subsequent (un)predictable words, and on the quality of word representations in memory. Participants read dialogues with (un)predictable endings that followed a discourse marker (eigenlijk in Experiment 1, inderdaad in Experiment 2) or a control adverb. We found no strong evidence that discourse markers modulated online predictability effects elicited by subsequently read words. However, words following eigenlijk elicited an enhanced posterior post-N400 positivity compared with words following an adverb regardless of their predictability, potentially reflecting increased processing costs associated with pragmatically driven discourse updating. No effects of inderdaad were found on online processing, but inderdaad seemed to influence memory for (un)predictable dialogue endings. These findings nuance our understanding of how pragmatic markers affect incremental language comprehension.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-16
Number of pages	16
Journal	Language cognition and neuroscience
Volume	35
Issue number	1
Early online date	3 Jun 2019
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1624789
Publication status	Published - 2020

Bibliographical note

Supplementary Information: https://figshare.com/articles/Anticipating_predictability_an_ERP_investigation_of_expectation-managing_discourse_markers_in_dialogue_comprehension/8221895

Acknowledgments
We thank Maarten van den Heuvel for programming help and Birgit Knudsen and Michel-Pierre Jansen for help with data acquisition.

Funding
This work was supported by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek: [Grant Number 275-89-022 (GvB),275-89-032 (JR)].

Keywords

Discourse processing
EEG
dialogue
discourse markers
pragmatics
predictability
N400
SPEECH
CONTEXT
PREDICTION
MEMORY
INTEGRATION
SENTENCE COMPREHENSION
LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION
BRAIN POTENTIALS
WORLD

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10.1080/23273798.2019.1624789Licence: CC BY

Rasenberg_etal_LCN_Anticipating predictability_VOR
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Final published version, 2.2 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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title = "Anticipating predictability: an ERP investigation of expectation-managing discourse markers in dialogue comprehension",

abstract = "In two ERP experiments, we investigated how the Dutch discourse markers eigenlijk “actually”, signalling expectation disconfirmation, and inderdaad “indeed”, signalling expectation confirmation, affect incremental dialogue comprehension. We investigated their effects on the processing of subsequent (un)predictable words, and on the quality of word representations in memory. Participants read dialogues with (un)predictable endings that followed a discourse marker (eigenlijk in Experiment 1, inderdaad in Experiment 2) or a control adverb. We found no strong evidence that discourse markers modulated online predictability effects elicited by subsequently read words. However, words following eigenlijk elicited an enhanced posterior post-N400 positivity compared with words following an adverb regardless of their predictability, potentially reflecting increased processing costs associated with pragmatically driven discourse updating. No effects of inderdaad were found on online processing, but inderdaad seemed to influence memory for (un)predictable dialogue endings. These findings nuance our understanding of how pragmatic markers affect incremental language comprehension.",

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author = "Marlou Rasenberg and Joost Rommers and {van Bergen}, Geertje",

note = "Supplementary Information: https://figshare.com/articles/Anticipating_predictability_an_ERP_investigation_of_expectation-managing_discourse_markers_in_dialogue_comprehension/8221895 Acknowledgments We thank Maarten van den Heuvel for programming help and Birgit Knudsen and Michel-Pierre Jansen for help with data acquisition. Funding This work was supported by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek: [Grant Number 275-89-022 (GvB),275-89-032 (JR)].",

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Anticipating predictability: an ERP investigation of expectation-managing discourse markers in dialogue comprehension

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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