Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24-25, 14476, Potsdam, Germany.
Neuropsychologia. 2020 Jun;143:107466. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107466. Epub 2020 Apr 18.
Increased N400 amplitudes on indefinite articles (a/an) incompatible with expected nouns have been initially taken as strong evidence for probabilistic pre-activation of phonological word forms, and recently been intensely debated because they have been difficult to replicate. Here, these effects are simulated using a neural network model of sentence comprehension that we previously used to simulate a broad range of empirical N400 effects. The model produces the effects when the cue validity of the articles concerning upcoming noun meaning in the learning environment is high, but fails to produce the effects when the cue validity of the articles is low due to adjectives presented between articles and nouns during training. These simulations provide insight into one of the factors potentially contributing to the small size of the effects in empirical studies and generate predictions for cross-linguistic differences in article induced N400 effects based on articles' cue validity. The model accounts for article induced N400 effects without assuming pre-activation of word forms, and instead simulates these effects as the stimulus-induced change in a probabilistic representation of meaning corresponding to an implicit semantic prediction error.
不定冠词（a/an）与预期名词不兼容时，N400 振幅增加，最初被视为语音词形概率预先激活的有力证据，但最近因其难以复制而备受争议。在这里，我们使用以前用于模拟广泛的经验 N400 效应的句子理解神经网络模型来模拟这些效应。当学习环境中冠词对即将出现的名词意义的线索有效性高时，该模型会产生这些效应，但当冠词的线索有效性由于训练期间冠词和名词之间的形容词而较低时，该模型无法产生这些效应。这些模拟提供了对导致经验研究中效应规模较小的一个因素的深入了解，并基于冠词的线索有效性对跨语言冠词诱导的 N400 效应差异提出了预测。该模型在不假设词形预先激活的情况下解释了冠词诱导的 N400 效应，而是将这些效应模拟为与隐含语义预测错误相对应的意义概率表示的刺激诱导变化。
