Czypionka Anna, Reimer Laura, Kharaman Mariya, Eulitz Carsten
University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
University of Münster, Münster, Germany.
PLoS One. 2025 May 21;20(5):e0321953. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0321953. eCollection 2025.
The processing of context-dependent expressions has mostly been studied using metaphors, irony or indirect requests. We add to the literature by monitoring the processing of modal particles (MPs) like German ruhig. These lexemes are ambiguous between a modal particle reading and a counterpart reading. While the counterpart contributes at-issue or propositional meaning to the sentence and affects truth conditions, the modal particle contributes non-at-issue meaning, expressing speaker attitudes or linking the sentence to the discourse. In the present study we disambiguated the readings via a preceding context and analysed event-related potentials and the oscillatory brain responses to critical sentences with identical surface forms. Our results show that in comparison to their counterparts, modal particles are associated with enhanced P600 amplitudes on the target lexemes and in the spillover region, and with enhanced P200 amplitudes on target lexemes. In addition, modal particles do not show the gamma power enhancement visible for counterparts. We interpret our findings as showing increased processing cost for modal particles due to them contributing to a higher dimension of meaning. The differences in oscillatory brain activity between both readings may reflect the lack of at-issue meaning contribution for modal particles. Our findings are in line with reports of enhanced P600 amplitudes for semantically and pragmatically complex readings in the literature on context-dependent expressions, and open various future ways of research to check the claims of different models on the processing of complex semantic and pragmatic information.
语境依赖表达式的处理大多是通过隐喻、反讽或间接请求来进行研究的。我们通过监测德语ruhig等语气词（MPs）的处理过程，为这一文献领域增添了内容。这些词元在语气词解读和对应解读之间存在歧义。对应词为句子贡献了争议性或命题性意义，并影响真值条件，而语气词则贡献非争议性意义，表达说话者的态度或将句子与语篇联系起来。在本研究中，我们通过前文语境消除了这些解读的歧义，并分析了与事件相关的电位以及对具有相同表面形式的关键句子的脑电振荡反应。我们的结果表明，与对应词相比，语气词在目标词元和溢出区域与增强的P600振幅相关联，在目标词元上与增强的P200振幅相关联。此外，语气词没有表现出对应词可见的伽马功率增强。我们将研究结果解释为表明语气词由于其对更高维度意义的贡献而导致处理成本增加。两种解读之间脑电振荡活动的差异可能反映了语气词缺乏争议性意义贡献。我们的研究结果与文献中关于语境依赖表达式的语义和语用复杂解读中P600振幅增强的报道一致，并为未来各种研究方式打开了大门，以检验不同模型对复杂语义和语用信息处理的主张。
