Neurobehavioural Correlates of Surprisal in Online Comprehension (A01)

• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 232722074

A1 investigates the neurophysiological basis of surprisal, and its relation to reading time measures, by combining experimental research with computational modelling. Starting from our hypothesis that the N400 indexes expectation-driven lexical retrieval, while the P600 is primarily sensitive to meaning-centric surprisal, the overarching goal of the third phase is to generalize our previous findings to the processing of more naturalistic texts, and further to identify factors that may dynamically determine surprisal “in flux”, such as depth of processing and domain knowledge.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding
• Applicant Institution: Universität des Saarlandes
• Project Heads: Harm Brouwer, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Matthew W. Crocker