Premium
Comprehending how visual context influences incremental sentence processing: Insights from ERPs and picture‐sentence verification
Author(s) -
Knoeferle Pia,
Urbach Thomas P.,
Kutas Marta
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2010.01080.x
Subject(s) - psychology , sentence , verb , congruence (geometry) , cognitive psychology , sentence processing , comprehension , noun , object (grammar) , communication , linguistics , cognition , artificial intelligence , social psychology , computer science , neuroscience , philosophy
To re‐establish picture‐sentence verification—discredited possibly for its over‐reliance on post‐sentence response time (RT) measures—as a task for situated comprehension, we collected event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) as participants read a subject‐verb‐object sentence, and RTs indicating whether or not the verb matched a previously depicted action. For mismatches (vs. matches), speeded RTs were longer, verb N400s over centro‐parietal scalp larger, and ERPs to the object noun more negative. RTs (congruence effect) correlated inversely with the centro‐parietal verb N400s, and positively with the object ERP congruence effects. Verb N400s, object ERPs, and verbal working memory scores predicted more variance in RT effects (50%) than N400s alone. Thus, (1) verification processing is not all post‐sentence; (2) simple priming cannot account for these results; and (3) verification tasks can inform studies of situated comprehension.