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He Who Must Not Be Named (Yet): Sustained Anterior Negativity as a Potential Neural Index of Active Cataphor Processing
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Alba Jorquera1, Victor Chamot1, Tessa Culleton1, Philip Resnik1, Ellen Lau1; 1University of Maryland
This EEG study tests the hypothesis that sustained anterior negativity (SAN) indexes the working memory maintenance of predictively generated syntactic representations (Cruz Heredia et al., 2022). We use cataphors (pronouns that precede their antecedents) as our test case. Previous work has found that SAN is associated with predictions involving long-distance dependencies, but exactly what computations it indexes remains unknown. Prior behavioral work shows that in sentences with cataphors (e.g. After he came to the birthday party, John cheerfully gave Mary a hug), comprehenders predict a cataphor's antecedent in the closest structurally available position before it is actually encountered (Kazanina et al., 2007). Here we look for a neural index of this predictive process by contrasting sentences with cataphors to sentences with negative quantifiers (e.g., After nobody came to the birthday party, the child cried for hours). This design is motivated by a prior EEG study (Cruz Heredia et al., SNL 2020) that found no SAN for cataphora (After he…John) compared to forward anaphora (After John…he). We hypothesize that their null result may reflect a problem with the control condition: comprehenders could be predicting coreference in both the forward anaphora and cataphora conditions, in which case both might induce an equivalent sustained negativity. In the current study, using a negative quantifier ensures that no coreference relation can be predicted in the control condition because no such relation (nobody-the child) is possible. If SAN indexes the maintenance of syntactic predictions in general, we should observe a SAN across the first clause following the cataphor, relative to controls. Absence of a SAN would suggest sustained activity does not track syntactic prediction more broadly. We include a standard wh-contrast (wh-questions vs. yes/no questions) to replicate prior SAN findings for wh-dependencies. We also include an additional cataphor condition to explore what happens when the cataphor is not resolved at the expected main subject position but only later (e.g., After he came to the birthday party, Mary cheerfully gave John a hug). We expect a mismatch effect in the ERPs at the expected position and potentially a SAN that continues until the cataphor is resolved. The cataphor contrast includes three conditions: sentences where the first name in the second clause is a grammatical antecedent (After he…John), sentences where it is not but a later antecedent is available (After he…Mary…John), and negative quantifier controls (After nobody…the child). Regions of interest (e.g., came to the birthday party) are identical across all three conditions. We average ERPs for the cataphor conditions and compare with the control. A SAN for cataphors relative to control would support our syntactic prediction hypothesis. We designed 96 items for the cataphor contrast (32 per condition) and 64 for the wh-contrast (32 per condition). Stimuli will be presented RSVP-style, word-by-word, followed by comprehension probes. Epochs for the cataphor contrast will be time-locked to the word following the cataphor/quantifier and span until the end of the first clause; epochs for the wh-contrast will be handled similarly. Data collection is underway.
Topic Areas: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes, Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics