The role of temporal prediction in guiding attention through time during language comprehension.

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Project Summary/Abstract Spoken language rapidly conveys information over time. Current theories hold that listeners make continuous predictions about the importance and the timing of information as it arrives. Prior psycholinguistic studies have investigated whether listeners pre-allocate attention to points in time when important information is predicted to occur, but the results have not been consistent, and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remain unclear. Non-linguistic studies of auditory and visual perception have shown that people use temporal predictions to guide attention in time to behaviorally relevant events. This is achieved through two primary mechanisms: rhythm-based and memory-based predictions. This proposal will take an interdisciplinary approach, by investigating the role of these perceptual temporal attention mechanisms in language comprehension through a psycholinguistic theoretical framework. Candidate sources of temporal prediction in language are the rhythmic regularity of speech (the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables) and discourse cues (introduced by the linguistic context). This project will contribute to the lively contemporary debate in speech neuroscience concerning the importance of neural entrainment, a mechanism of temporal prediction. There are three specific aims: (1) Examine if rhythm-based temporal predictions arise from greater rhythmic regularity in speech. (2) Determine whether memory-based temporal predictions are elicited by discourse cues. (3) Elucidate the respective effects of speech rhythmic regularity and discourse cues on semantic processing, a core component of language comprehension. Two experiments will employ electrophysiological (EEG) measures of neural activity to characterize these mechanisms. The fellowship applicant’s primary training goal is the acquisition of electrophysiological skills for cognitive neuroscience research, including experimental design, data collection, analysis and interpretation. She will be supervised by sponsors Drs. Mangun and Swaab, world leaders in the use of EEG methods to study attention and language, respectively. Dr. Mangun is the Director of the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain (CMB), an acclaimed hub for research, methods development, and training using EEG to study cognition. The applicant will benefit from the rich research and training environment at the CMB, including the NIMH-supported summer training programs in electrophysiology (led by consultant Dr. Luck) and cognitive neuroscience (led by Dr. Mangun). She will also be trained in computational modelling by the consultants Drs. Oganian and Breska during a 3- month visit to Tübingen, Germany. This project will provide a better understanding of the role of temporal prediction and attention in language comprehension, contributing to theoretical models and methodological advancements in the cognitive neuroscience of language by reconciling diverging lines of research. Elucidating the role of temporal prediction in language comprehension in healthy individuals is vital for understanding the cognitive-neural bases of language disorders, which will inform the development of effective forms of therapy.