Dear colleagues,
Our experiment is looking at the impact of the linguistic manipulation of evidential adverbs on the belief of declarative statements.
For example:
'Despite a lengthy divorce, they remain on good terms' [Control]
'Despite a lengthy divorce, they are evidently still on good terms' [Positive]
'Despite a lengthy divorce, they are allegedly still on good terms' [Negative]
I'm looking to add EEG to the existing setup of eye-tracking + subjective interpretation measures to investigate if participants question the truthfulness of the content of statements across different conditions of polarity - e.g. one would expect the use of 'allegedly' in our example above would cause the reader to pose such a question.
Which features of EEG could be used to ascertain one's questioning of the truthfulness of the content in a given statement?
Douglas et al. (2013) use sub-bands to distinguish between participants' belief and disbelief of given statements [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3728485/#B19] and the approach of Reiser et al. (2012) to measure beta coherence between prefrontal and posterior cortical regions might be applicable in terms of incoherence signalling dissociation [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22750775]. Or one could possibly look for N400 / P600 effects.
Any advice and references are greatly appreciated!
Stephen
Hi Stephen, below are few other related ERP studies. A student in my lab just finished a study on logical contradictions/hyponymy violations simliar to Shao & Neville 1998 (e.g., Because Sarah loves/hates all vegetables, she decided to buy carrots at the store) and found main effects of truth value at the end of the sentence. So it may be worth looking a bit further downstream as well.
Drury, J. & Steinhauer, K. (2009). Brain potentials for logical semantics/pragmatics. In U. Sauerland & K. Yatsushiro (eds.), Semantics and pragmatics (pp. 186-215). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fischler, I., Bloom, P., Childers, D., Roucos, S., Perry, N. (1983). Brain potentials related to stages of sentence verification. Psychophysiology, 20(4), 400-409.
Kounios, J. & Holcomb, P. (1992). Structure and process in semantic memory: Evidence from event-related brain potentials and reaction times. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121(4), 459-479.
Panizza, D. (2012). Formal neurosemantics: Logic, meaning and composition in the brain. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 25(5), 460-488.
Shao, J. & Neville, H. (1998). Analyzing semantic processing using event-related brain potentials. The Newsletter of the Center for Research in Language, 11(5), 3-20.
Steinhauer, K., Drury, J., Portner, P., Walenski, M., & Ullman, M. (2010). Syntax, concepts, and logic in the temporal dynamics of language comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials. Neuropsychologia, 48(6), 1525-1542.
Hi Karsten, thanks so much ffor sharing these references and your student's research - these are all excellent ideas and sources!
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