NeuroPred · Identification of different neuro-cognitive mechanisms of prediction in language comprehension
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-04-01 → 2022-03-31
- EU contribution
- €260,930
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-GF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Identification of different neuro-cognitive mechanisms of prediction in language comprehension
People are able to comprehend language at an amazing speed. Sports commentators sometimes utter more than 300 words per minute (five words per second) but usually, we have no problem following their commentary. This happens even despite the fact that language is highly ambiguous at the lexical level (for example, "bank" may correspond to a shore of a river or a financial institution), but also at the phonemic level (the same speech sound can correspond to very different phonemes, depending on the context). Finally, in typical situations, we do not hear speech in absolute silence but rather we struggle to pick out the words from a background noise that is often louder than the speech itself. In sum, successful language comprehension requires a lot of reconstruction and making informed guesses about the message intended by the speaker. This is possible to a large extent because we, as listeners, predict incoming language. Based on our extensive knowledge about the world, language, the speaker, and the context of a conversation, we are able to predict that some words are more likely to be uttered by this speaker in this context at a given position in a sentence. Thanks to this, when a soccer commentator mentions a "ball", our brains expect him to talk about a spherical game accessory that all players are running after, not a social gathering for dancing. The overarching aim of this line of research is to better understand the mechanisms of predictive processing. What specific types of information are used to inform predictions? How are the different sources of information combined to form unified predictions? What are the brain mechanisms involved? These are fundamental questions about the computations involved in human language comprehension. In the longer perspective, this line of research may translate to more practical applications: how we teach language, how well we understand different language impairments, and how well we can rehabilitate individuals who suffer from them?
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Predictions were recently proposed to be the core mechanism organizing brain functioning at all levels and in all domains. However, in contrast, within language comprehension, evidence for predictions has not been ubiquitous across participants, tasks, and materials. In my earlier research I showed that this discrepancy can be reconciled by positing the existence of at least two different neurocognitive mechanisms of prediction: active prediction that is restricted to highly informative contexts and to speakers who can rapidly exploit that informativity, and passive prediction, which is part-and-parcel of language comprehension. The objective of this project is to better understand the different mechanisms involved at the cognitive and at the neural level. I will be trained in 3 specialized techniques: Event-Related Optical Signal, eye-tracking, and magnetoencephalography, as well as new data-analysis methods. This training will enable me to establish, for both types of prediction, the time-course and associated ERP-components, underlying brain structures, their behavioural markers during free reading of texts, and patterns of connectivity and causal exchange of information between involved brain areas. An important novelty lies in the materials used in the project: fully naturalistic stories parametrized using recurrent neural networks. NeuroPred brings together two excellent laboratories: Prof. Kara Federmeier, a pioneer and one of the leading researchers in studying prediction in language comprehension, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Prof. Peter Hagoort at the Donders Center for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, a renowned expert in the neurocognition of language. The research bridges psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience and computer science. Thanks to this interdisciplinary approach, NeuroPred will provide me with excellent 'training through research' and enable me to transfer newly obtained skills back to the EU.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT · NijmegenCoordinatorNetherlands
- THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS · UrbanaUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union