Can You Hear What's Coming? Failure to Replicate ERP Evidence for Phonological Prediction.

Prediction-based theories of language comprehension assume that listeners predict both the meaning and phonological form of likely upcoming words. In alleged event-related potential (ERP) demonstrations of phonological prediction, prediction-mismatching words elicit a phonological mismatch negativity (PMN), a frontocentral negativity that precedes the centroparietal N400 component. However, classification and replicability of the PMN has proven controversial, with ongoing debate on whether the PMN is a distinct component or merely an early part of the N400. In this electroencephalography (EEG) study, we therefore attempted to replicate the PMN effect and its separability from the N400, using a participant sample size (N = 48) that was more than double that of previous studies. Participants listened to sentences containing either a predictable word or an unpredictable word with/without phonological overlap with the predictable word. Preregistered analyses revealed a widely distributed negative-going ERP in response to unpredictable words in both the early (150-250 ms) and the N400 (300-500 ms) time windows. Bayes factor analysis yielded moderate evidence against a different scalp distribution of the effects in the two time windows. Although our findings do not speak against phonological prediction during sentence comprehension, they do speak against the PMN effect specifically as a marker of phonological prediction mismatch. Instead of an PMN effect, our results demonstrate the early onset of the auditory N400 effect associated with unpredictable words. Our failure to replicate further highlights the risk associated with commonly employed data-contingent analyses (e.g., analyses involving time windows or electrodes that were selected based on visual inspection) and small sample sizes in the cognitive neuroscience of language.

Code-Switching Does Not Equal Code-Switching. An Event-Related Potentials Study on Switching From L2 German to L1 Russian at Prepositions and Nouns.

Studies on event-related potentials (ERP) in code-switching (CS) have concentrated on single-word insertions, usually nouns. However, CS ranges from inserting single words into the main language of discourse to alternating languages for larger segments of a discourse, and can occur at various syntactic positions and with various word classes. This ERP study examined native speakers of Russian who had learned German as a second language; they were asked to listen to sentences with CS from their second language, German, to their first language, Russian. CS included either a whole prepositional phrase or only the lexical head noun of a prepositional phrase. CS at nouns resulted in a late positive complex (LPC), whereas CS at prepositions resulted in a broad early negativity, which was followed by an anterior negativity with a posterior positivity. Only in the last time window (800-1000 ms) did CS at prepositions result in a broad positivity similar to CS at nouns. The differences between both types of CS indicate that they relate to different psycholinguistic processes.

Corrigendum: The Phonological Mapping (Mismatch) Negativity: History, Inconsistency, and Future Direction.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01967.].

How struggling adult readers use contextual information when comprehending speech: Evidence from event-related potentials.

We investigated how struggling adult readers make use of sentence context to facilitate word processing when comprehending spoken language, conditions under which print decoding is not a barrier to comprehension. Stimuli were strongly and weakly constraining sentences (as measured by cloze probability), which ended with the most expected word based on those constraints or an unexpected but plausible word. Community-dwelling adults with varying literacy skills listened to continuous speech while their EEG was recorded. Participants, regardless of literacy level, showed N400 effects yoked to the cloze probability of the targets, with larger N400 amplitudes for less expected than more expected words. However, literacy-related differences emerged in an earlier time window of 170-300 ms: higher literacy adults produced a reduced negativity for strongly predictable targets over anterior channels, similar to previously reported effects on the Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN), whereas low-literacy adults did not. Collectively, these findings suggest that in auditory sentence processing literacy may not notably affect the incremental activation of semantic features, but that comprehenders with underdeveloped literacy skills may be less likely to engage predictive processing. Thus, basic mechanisms of comprehension may be recruited differently as a function of literacy development-even in spoken language.