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Are all the triangles blue? – ERP evidence for the incremental processing of German quantifier restriction*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2016

PETRA AUGURZKY ,
OLIVER BOTT ,
WOLFGANG STERNEFELD  and
ROLF ULRICH
PETRA AUGURZKY*
Affiliation:
Department of General Linguistics, University of Tübingen, and Sonderforschungsbereich 833, University of Tübingen
OLIVER BOTT
Affiliation:
Sonderforschungsbereich 833, University of Tübingen
WOLFGANG STERNEFELD
Affiliation:
Department of General Linguistics, University of Tübingen
ROLF ULRICH
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen
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Abstract

The present ERP study investigates the neural correlates of pictorial context effects on compositional-semantic processing. We examined whether the incremental processing of questions involving quantifier restriction is modulated by the reliability of pictorial information. Contexts either allowed for an unambiguous meaning evaluation at an early sentential position or were ambiguous with respect to whether a further restrictive cue could trigger later meaning revisions. Attention was either guided towards (Experiment 1) or away from (Experiment 2) the picture–question mapping. In both experiments, negative answers elicited a broadly distributed negativity opposed to affirmative answers as soon as an unambiguous truth evaluation was possible. In the presence of ambiguous context information, the truth evaluation initially remained underspecified, as an early commitment would have resulted in the risk of a semantic reanalysis. The negativity was followed by a late positivity in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2, suggesting that attention towards the mismatch affected semantic processing, but only at a later time window. The current results are consistent with the notion that an incremental meaning evaluation is dependent on the reliability of contextual information.

Keywords

language comprehensioncompositional-semantic processingquantifier restrictioncontext effectsevent-related potentialsN400late positivity
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 603 - 636
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

The current research was supported by the SFB 833 of the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft, Project B1. We would like to thank Fabian Schlotterbeck and Robin Hörnig for valuable advice, Nadine Balbach and Helena Schütze for help with the data acquisition, and Jochen Saile for programming advice.

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