TY - JOUR
T1 - Lexical inhibition due to failed prediction
T2 - Behavioral evidence and ERP correlates
AU - Ness, Tal
AU - Meltzer-Asscher, Aya
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Psychological Association.
PY - 2018/8
Y1 - 2018/8
N2 - During sentence processing, comprehenders form expectations regarding upcoming material, and may even predict a specific word. Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that disconfirmed predictions elicit a post-N400-positivity (PNP) with two distinct distributions. A frontal-PNP (f-PNP) is elicited when an unexpected but congruent word appears instead of a highly predictable word, whereas an anomalous word elicits a posterior-PNP. The current study tested the hypothesis that during the processing of a sentence, the predicted word is inhibited to enable the integration of unexpected but congruent material, and that this inhibitory process is reflected in the f-PNP component. In contrast, anomalous continuations, which are not compatible with the preceding context, do not induce inhibition. Experiment 1 used cross-modal lexical priming to test inhibition patterns of predicted words, demonstrating inhibition when integration of a congruent-unexpected word was needed, but not when an anomaly was encountered. Experiment 2 showed that the inhibition observed in Experiment 1 is specific to the predicted word and does not stem from competition between two congruent continuations. In Experiment 3 we recorded ERPs using the same materials, and found that the f-PNP component is elicited under the same conditions giving rise to behavioral inhibition, and that the two are correlated, thus providing preliminary support for the hypothesis that this component reflects an inhibitory process.
AB - During sentence processing, comprehenders form expectations regarding upcoming material, and may even predict a specific word. Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that disconfirmed predictions elicit a post-N400-positivity (PNP) with two distinct distributions. A frontal-PNP (f-PNP) is elicited when an unexpected but congruent word appears instead of a highly predictable word, whereas an anomalous word elicits a posterior-PNP. The current study tested the hypothesis that during the processing of a sentence, the predicted word is inhibited to enable the integration of unexpected but congruent material, and that this inhibitory process is reflected in the f-PNP component. In contrast, anomalous continuations, which are not compatible with the preceding context, do not induce inhibition. Experiment 1 used cross-modal lexical priming to test inhibition patterns of predicted words, demonstrating inhibition when integration of a congruent-unexpected word was needed, but not when an anomaly was encountered. Experiment 2 showed that the inhibition observed in Experiment 1 is specific to the predicted word and does not stem from competition between two congruent continuations. In Experiment 3 we recorded ERPs using the same materials, and found that the f-PNP component is elicited under the same conditions giving rise to behavioral inhibition, and that the two are correlated, thus providing preliminary support for the hypothesis that this component reflects an inhibitory process.
KW - Event-related potentials
KW - Inhibition
KW - PNP
KW - Prediction
KW - Sentence processing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85039171792&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/xlm0000525
DO - 10.1037/xlm0000525
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AN - SCOPUS:85039171792
SN - 0278-7393
VL - 44
SP - 1269
EP - 1285
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
IS - 8
ER -