Neuropsychologia ( IF 2.6 ) Pub Date : 2020-04-03 , DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107427 Bruno Nicenboim 1 , Shravan Vasishth 2 , Frank Rösler 3
Several studies (e.g., Wicha et al., 2003; DeLong et al., 2005) have shown that readers use information from the sentential context to predict nouns (or some of their features), and that predictability effects can be inferred from the EEG signal in determiners or adjectives appearing before the predicted noun. While these findings provide evidence for the pre-activation proposal, recent replication attempts together with inconsistencies in the results from the literature cast doubt on the robustness of this phenomenon. Our study presents the first attempt to use the effect of gender on predictability in German to study the pre-activation hypothesis, capitalizing on the fact that all German nouns have a gender and that their preceding determiners can show an unambiguous gender marking when the noun phrase has accusative case. Despite having a relatively large sample size (of 120 subjects), both our preregistered and exploratory analyses failed to yield conclusive evidence for or against an effect of pre-activation. The sign of the effect is, however, in the expected direction: the more unexpected the gender of the determiner, the larger the negativity. The recent, inconclusive replication attempts by Nieuwland et al. (2018) and others also show effects with signs in the expected direction. We conducted a Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis using our data and the publicly available data from these recent replication attempts. Our meta-analysis shows a relatively clear but very small effect that is consistent with the pre-activation account and demonstrates a very important advantage of the Bayesian data analysis methodology: we can incrementally accumulate evidence to obtain increasingly precise estimates of the effect of interest.
中文翻译:
句子理解过程中单词是否被概率预先激活?来自新数据的证据以及使用公开数据进行的贝叶斯随机效应荟萃分析。
多项研究(例如,Wicha等人,2003; DeLong等人,2005)表明,读者使用句子环境中的信息来预测名词(或其某些特征),并且可以从EEG推断出可预测性的影响。之前出现的确定词或形容词中的信号预测的名词。尽管这些发现为激活前的提议提供了证据,但最近的复制尝试以及文献结果的不一致都对该现象的鲁棒性产生了怀疑。我们的研究提出了首次尝试使用性别对德语的可预测性的影响来研究激活前的假设,并利用了以下事实:所有德语名词都有性别,并且当名词短语出现时,其先前的确定词可以显示明确的性别标记有指责的情况。尽管有相对较大的样本量(120名受试者),但我们的预注册和探索性分析均未能得出支持或反对预激活效果的确凿证据。但是,影响的迹象是在预期的方向上:确定者的性别越出乎意料,负值越大。Nieuwland等人最近的不确定性复制尝试。(2018)等人也显示了预期方向的迹象。我们使用我们的数据和这些近期复制尝试中的公开数据进行了贝叶斯随机效应荟萃分析。我们的荟萃分析显示了一个相对清晰但非常小的效应,与激活前的帐户相符,并且证明了贝叶斯数据分析方法的一个非常重要的优势:我们可以逐步积累证据以获得对效应的越来越精确的估计。我们使用我们的数据和这些近期复制尝试中的公开数据进行了贝叶斯随机效应荟萃分析。我们的荟萃分析显示了一个相对清晰但非常小的效应,与激活前的帐户相符,并且证明了贝叶斯数据分析方法的一个非常重要的优势:我们可以逐步积累证据以获得对效应的越来越精确的估计。我们使用我们的数据和这些近期复制尝试中的公开数据进行了贝叶斯随机效应荟萃分析。我们的荟萃分析显示出一个相对清晰但非常小的效应,与激活前的帐户一致,并且证明了贝叶斯数据分析方法的一个非常重要的优势:我们可以逐步积累证据以获得对效应的越来越精确的估计。