Department of Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Center for Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk (IDeA), Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Psychophysiology. 2022 Mar;59(3):e13970. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13970. Epub 2021 Nov 23.
To a crucial extent, the efficiency of reading results from the fact that visual word recognition is faster in predictive contexts. Predictive coding models suggest that this facilitation results from pre-activation of predictable stimulus features across multiple representational levels before stimulus onset. Still, it is not sufficiently understood which aspects of the rich set of linguistic representations that are activated during reading-visual, orthographic, phonological, and/or lexical-semantic-contribute to context-dependent facilitation. To investigate in detail which linguistic representations are pre-activated in a predictive context and how they affect subsequent stimulus processing, we combined a well-controlled repetition priming paradigm, including words and pseudowords (i.e., pronounceable nonwords), with behavioral and magnetoencephalography measurements. For statistical analysis, we used linear mixed modeling, which we found had a higher statistical power compared to conventional multivariate pattern decoding analysis. Behavioral data from 49 participants indicate that word predictability (i.e., context present vs. absent) facilitated orthographic and lexical-semantic, but not visual or phonological processes. Magnetoencephalography data from 38 participants show sustained activation of orthographic and lexical-semantic representations in the interval before processing the predicted stimulus, suggesting selective pre-activation at multiple levels of linguistic representation as proposed by predictive coding. However, we found more robust lexical-semantic representations when processing predictable in contrast to unpredictable letter strings, and pre-activation effects mainly resembled brain responses elicited when processing the expected letter string. This finding suggests that pre-activation did not result in "explaining away" predictable stimulus features, but rather in a "sharpening" of brain responses involved in word processing.
在很大程度上，阅读效率源于这样一个事实，即在预测语境中视觉单词识别更快。预测编码模型表明，这种促进作用源于在刺激出现之前，多个表示水平上的可预测刺激特征的预先激活。尽管如此，人们还没有充分理解在阅读过程中激活的丰富语言表示的哪些方面——视觉、正字法、语音和/或词汇语义——有助于上下文促进作用。为了详细研究在预测语境中哪些语言表示被预先激活，以及它们如何影响随后的刺激处理，我们结合了一个控制良好的重复启动范式，包括单词和伪词（即可发音的非词），以及行为和脑磁图测量。对于统计分析，我们使用了线性混合建模，与传统的多元模式解码分析相比，我们发现它具有更高的统计能力。来自 49 名参与者的行为数据表明，单词可预测性（即语境存在与不存在）促进了正字法和词汇语义过程，但不促进视觉或语音过程。来自 38 名参与者的脑磁图数据显示，在处理预测刺激之前的间隔内，正字法和词汇语义表示持续激活，这表明正如预测编码所提出的，在语言表示的多个层次上存在选择性预先激活。然而，当处理可预测的而不是不可预测的字母串时，我们发现更稳健的词汇语义表示，并且预先激活效应主要类似于处理预期字母串时引起的大脑反应。这一发现表明，预先激活并没有导致“解释掉”可预测的刺激特征，而是“增强”了参与单词处理的大脑反应。
