The electrophysiological reality of parafoveal processing [Elektronische Ressource] : on the validity of language-related ERPs in natural reading / Franziska Kretzschmar. Betreuer: Matthias Schlesewsky

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• Publié par: philipps-universitat_marburg
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 38
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 16 Mo

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The electrophysiological reality of parafoveal processing:
On the validity of language-related ERPs in natural reading





Inaugural-Dissertation

zur
Erlangung des akademischen Grades
eines Doktors der Philosophie (Dr. phil.)



dem
Fachbereich Germanistik und Kunstwissenschaften
der Philipps-Universität Marburg
vorgelegt




von
Franziska Kretzschmar
geb. in Potsdam


Marburg/Lahn 2010


























Vom Fachbereich Germanistik und Kunstwissenschaften der Philipps-Universität Marburg als
Dissertation angenommen am 9.6.2010

Tag der Disputation: 28.9.2010

Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Matthias Schlesewsky
Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky Acknowledgements

This thesis wouldn’t have been possible without the help and support of a number of people
and its contents would be different without the insightful comments of many colleagues. First
and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisors Matthias
Schlesewsky and Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. Their keen interest in language, their open-
minded view on data and research methods, and, in particular, their continuous support for my
PhD project were a constant motivation. Special thanks go to Matthias for discussing virtually
everything, even “dead end” hypotheses, with me, for believing in my data when I couldn’t
and for being available for advice and discussions almost all the time. Special thanks go to Ina
for reminding me how fascinating the field of neurolinguistics is and for pointing out the
fascinating aspects of my own project. Last but not least, she made it possible for me to
extend the time I needed to write up this thesis.
Adrian Staub and Chuck Clifton willingly shared their knowledge about eye movements
in reading and language comprehension with me. I am grateful for the patience with which
they – nearly instantaneously – answered all my questions and, in many cases, anticipated
what I would have asked next.
I hope that the present thesis reflects at least some of the input I received from these
people. Any shortcomings are, of course, due to my inability to understand them completely.
I also benefited a lot from my colleagues Petra Schumacher and Markus Philipp. Petra
has broadened my knowledge in neurolinguistics and, most importantly, she taught me that
less is more. Indeed, this thesis would contain at least 50 more pages if Petra hadn’t shaped
my style of writing during our collaborative work. My officemate Markus discussed each and
every part of this thesis with me and he proved to be a discussion partner with a lot (!) of
critical comments on my data interpretations. This and his willingness to help me with every
technical, intellectual, or imaginary problem have contributed to the final version of this
thesis.
I also want to thank my former colleagues from the University of Marburg and the
current members of the neurolinguistics working group at the of Mainz who all
have made my time as a PhD student very agreeable. For their assistance in various stages of
data preparation and collection I thank Alexander Dröge, Petra Seipp, Tong Fei, Yu-Chen
Hung, and especially Anika Jödicke and Jane Han who collected the data for Experiments 2 –
5. Special thanks are due to Jane Han for proofreading this thesis and for changing my
“Franglish” into proper English. The concurrent registration of ERPs and eye movements would not have been possible without the software implemented by Torsten Schenk and other
software-related issues would not have been resolved without R. Muralikrishnan. Finally, I
enjoyed many lively conversations with Luming Wang, R. Muralikrishnan and Yu-Chen
Hung, whose moral support during the last weeks was highly appreciated.
This thesis was generously supported by the DFG graduate program NeuroAct
“Neuronal Representation and Action Control”, led by Prof. Frank Bremmer and Prof. Karl R.
Gegenfurtner. This graduate program also gave me the opportunity to discuss my ideas and
findings with a number of different researchers.
Last but not least, I want to acknowledge the support I received from my family and
friends. Since my undergraduate studies the “Golden Girls” Jana Wiggers and Katharina Kley
have supported me and cheered me up whenever necessary. I’m glad I could count on them all
these years. A big thank you to Cord Wilke, Kathrin Spindler, and Ute Conradi, for they have
made my stay in Mainz a fairly happy one. Cord, thank you for the joy you took in “kindly”
reminding me to continue writing and for also distracting me from it every now and then.
Kathrin’s personal catering service and her analytic view on major and minor problems have
helped me a lot during the last months. I enjoyed many encouraging conversations, fun parties
and Schnitzel with Ute and am looking forward to reviving these times. I thank you all for
being patient friends while I temporarily turned into a hermit.

Das größte Dankeschön gilt meiner Familie, insbesondere meinen Eltern Bärbel und
Klaus Kretzschmar, für ihren unschätzbaren Rückhalt. Ihr habt mich stets bedingungslos bei
der Verwirklichung meiner Ziele und Träume unterstützt – egal was es euch in den letzten
Jahren meines Umherziehens „in der Weltgeschichte“ abverlangt hat. Ohne Eure
Unterstützung hätte ich es nicht so weit geschafft, würde es diese Doktorarbeit nicht geben.
Danke.




!
Contents

LIST OF TABLES 4
LIST OF FIGURES 5
INTRODUCTION 7
I STIMULUS IDENTIFICATION AND ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY 16
1 A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE P300 16
1.1 THE EEG AND ERP METHODOLOGY 16
1.1.1 BASIC CONCEPTS AND METHOD 16
1.1.2 ON THE USEFULNESS OF ERPS IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION 19
1.2 THE P300: DETERMINANTS OF ITS AMPLITUDE AND LATENCY 22
1.2.1 STIMULUS PROBABILITY: FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE 24
1.2.2 STIMULUS RELEVANCE: ALLOCATION OF ATTENTION AND TASK INSTRUCTION 28
1.2.3 STIMULUS ENCODING: THE ROLE OF TARGET DISCRIMINABILITY 33
1.2.4 SUMMARY 38
1.3 THE P300 IN LANGUAGE PROCESSING 40
1.3.1 P300 AND WORD IDENTIFICATION 41
1.3.2 THE IDENTITY HYPOTHESIS: IS THE P600 A P300 OR NOT? 61
1.3.3 SUMMARY 69
II READING AS AN INPUT MODALITY 72
2 A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF EYE MOVEMENTS 72
2.1 BASIC DEFINITIONS 72
2.2 EYE MOVEMENTS IN READING 74
2.2.1 WHEN AND WHERE DECISIONS IN READING 74
2.2.2 WORD IDENTIFICATION AND SEMANTIC PRIMING 78
2.3 ALLOCATION OF ATTENTION IN READING: SERIAL OR PARALLEL? 82
2.3.1 PARAFOVEAL PREVIEW BENEFIT AND PARAFOVEAL-ON-FOVEAL EFFECTS 82
2.3.2 ALLOCATION OF ATTENTION IN READING 89
2.4 SUMMARY 94
III INTERIM SUMMARY AND HYPOTHESES 97
IV EXPERIMENTS 108
1 4 LOOKING FOR THE P300 IN NATURAL INPUT MODALITIES OF LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION 108
4.1 EXPERIMENT 1: ANTONYMY COMPREHENSION IN THE AUDITORY MODALITY 108
4.1.1 METHOD 108
4.1.2 RESULTS 111
4.1.3 DISCUSSION 116
4.2 EXPERIMENT 2: ANTONYMY COMPREHENSION IN NATURAL READING 119
4.2.1 METHOD 119
4.2.2 RESULTS 125
4.2.3 DISCUSSION 135
4.3 EXPERIMENT 3: NO P300 IN NATURAL READING – A VALIDATION WITH RAPID SERIAL VISUAL
PRESENTATION (RSVP) 149
4.3.1 METHOD 150
4.3.2 RESULTS 152
4.3.3 DISCUSSION 157
4.4 SUMMARY 158
V GENERAL DISCUSSION 161
5.1 THE P300 IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION 162
5.2 PARAFOVEAL VS. FOVEAL N400 169
5.3 ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN ERP AND EYE MOVEMENT DATA 174
5.4 OUTLOOK 179
VI SUPPLEMENT: ADDITIONAL TESTS OF THE N400 AS AN INDEX OF
PARAFOVEAL PROCESSING IN READING 188
6 DETERMINING THE DEPTH OF PROCESSING IN THE PARAFOVEA 188
VII EXPERIMENTS 191
7.1 EXPERIMENT 4: SUBJECT-OBJECT AMBIGUITY AND SYNTACTIC REANALYSIS 191
7.1.1 INTRODUCTION 191
7.1.2 METHOD 202
7.1.3 RESULTS 206
7.1.4 DISCUSSION 220
7.2 EXPERIMENT 5: DATIVE-OBJECT SCRAMBLING IN UNAMBIGUOUSLY CASE-MARKED
STRUCTURES 228
7.2.1 INTRODUCTION 228
7.2.2 METHOD 235
2 7.2.3 RESULTS 239
7.2.4 DISCUSSION 250
7.3 SUMMARY 258
REFERENCES 261
APPENDIX 276
APPENDIX A: SUPPLEMENTARY SINGLE-FIXATION ANALYSIS FOR EXPERIMENT 2 276
APPENDIX B: SUPPLEMENTARY EYE MOVEMENT ANALYSES FOR THE PRETARGET REGION IN
EXPERIMENT 2 280
APPENDIX C: SUPPLEMENTARY EYE MOVEMENT ANALYSES FOR THE TARGET REGION IN
EXPERIMENT 2 283
APPENDIX D: SUPPLEMENTARY ERP ANALYSES FOR EXPERIMENT 3 289
APPENDIX E: SUPPLEMENTARY ANALYSES FOR THE POST-CRITICAL REGION IN EXPERIMENT 5 292
APPENDIX F: STIMULUS MATERIALS FOR EXPERIMENTS 1 – 5 301
APPENDIX G: SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURES FOR EXPERIMENTS 1 – 5 316
ABSTRACT (ENGLISH) 333
ABSTRACT (GERMAN) 340
CURRICULUM VITAE 348


















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List of Tables