Alpha power decreases associated with prediction in written and spoken sentence comprehension
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemEditorial
Elsevier
Materia
Language comprehension Prediction Oscillations Alpha
Fecha
2022-06-06Referencia bibliográfica
Patricia León-Cabrera... [et al.]. Alpha power decreases associated with prediction in written and spoken sentence comprehension, Neuropsychologia, Volume 173, 2022, 108286, ISSN 0028-3932, [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108286]
Patrocinador
pre-doctoral grant (FPU "Ayudas para la Formacion de Profesorado Universitario") of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport FPU15/05554Resumen
Alpha and beta power decreases have been associated with prediction in a variety of cognitive domains. Recent
studies in sentence comprehension have also reported alpha and/or beta power decreases preceding contextually
predictable words, albeit with remarkable spatiotemporal variability across reports. To contribute to the understanding
of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, and the sources of variability, the present study
explored to what extent these prediction-related alpha and beta power decreases might be common across
different modalities of comprehension. To address this, we re-analysed the data of two EEG experiments that
employed the same materials in written and in spoken comprehension. Sentence contexts were weakly or
strongly constraining about a sentence-final word, which was presented after a 1 s delay, either matching or
mismatching the expectation. In written comprehension, alpha power (8–12 Hz) decreased before final words
appearing in strongly (relative to weakly) constraining contexts, in line with previous reports. Furthermore, a
similar oscillatory phenomenon was evidenced in spoken comprehension, although with relevant spatiotemporal
differences. Altogether, the findings agree with the involvement of both modality-specific and general-domain
mechanisms in the elicitation of prediction-related alpha power decreases in sentence comprehension. Specifically,
we propose that this phenomenon might partly reflect richer and more precise information representation
when linguistic contexts afford prediction.