@article{StoneVasishthMalsburg2022,
  author    = {Stone, Kate and Vasishth, Shravan and Malsburg, Titus von der},
  title     = {Does entropy modulate the prediction of German long-distance verb particles?},
  series = {PLOS ONE},
  journal   = {PLOS ONE},
  publisher = {PLOS ONE},
  address   = {San Francisco, California, US},
  issn      = {1932-6203},
  doi       = {10.1371/journal.pone.0267813},
  pages     = {1 -- 25},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {In this paper we examine the effect of uncertainty on readers' predictions about meaning. In particular, we were interested in how uncertainty might influence the likelihood of committing to a specific sentence meaning. We conducted two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using particle verbs such as turn down and manipulated uncertainty by constraining the context such that readers could be either highly certain about the identity of a distant verb particle, such as turn the bed […] down, or less certain due to competing particles, such as turn the music […] up/down. The study was conducted in German, where verb particles appear clause-finally and may be separated from the verb by a large amount of material. We hypothesised that this separation would encourage readers to predict the particle, and that high certainty would make prediction of a specific particle more likely than lower certainty. If a specific particle was predicted, this would reflect a strong commitment to sentence meaning that should incur a higher processing cost if the prediction is wrong. If a specific particle was less likely to be predicted, commitment should be weaker and the processing cost of a wrong prediction lower. If true, this could suggest that uncertainty discourages predictions via an unacceptable cost-benefit ratio. However, given the clear predictions made by the literature, it was surprisingly unclear whether the uncertainty manipulation affected the two ERP components studied, the N400 and the PNP. Bayes factor analyses showed that evidence for our a priori hypothesised effect sizes was inconclusive, although there was decisive evidence against a priori hypothesised effect sizes larger than 1μV for the N400 and larger than 3μV for the PNP. We attribute the inconclusive finding to the properties of verb-particle dependencies that differ from the verb-noun dependencies in which the N400 and PNP are often studied.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{StoneNicenboimVasishthetal.2023,
  author    = {Stone, Kate and Nicenboim, Bruno and Vasishth, Shravan and R{\"o}sler, Frank},
  title     = {Understanding the effects of constraint and predictability in ERP},
  series = {Neurobiology of language},
  volume    = {4},
  journal   = {Neurobiology of language},
  number    = {2},
  publisher = {MIT Press},
  address   = {Cambridge, MA, USA},
  issn      = {2641-4368},
  doi       = {10.1162/nol_a_00094},
  pages     = {221 -- 256},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.},
  language  = {en}
}