Drs. Matthias Schlesewsky and Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky: CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series

The Centre for Research welcomes Drs. Matthias Schlesewsky (Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz) and Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig) who will present an invited lecture entitled "Mind the gap!" On the interdependence between eye movements and neurophysiological responses
during real time language comprehension."

Abstract:

Over the past decades, research on the temporal properties of real time language
comprehension has drawn primarily upon data from two methods: the monitoring of eye movements (EMs) and the measurement of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). However, progress in psycholinguistic modelling has been impeded by the fact that these two very widely used methods often appear to yield diverging results (cf. Sereno & Rayner, 2003). Hence, a lot of discussion has centred around the issue of which method is to be preferred over the other, rather than focusing on the – scientifically more substantive – question of how the relationship between EM and ERP findings should be envisaged. One reason for this may be that EM research in psycholinguistics has long operated upon the assumption that the "eye-mind gap" is very small, i.e. that EMs directly reflect the neurocognitive computations underlying language comprehension. In
this talk, we will put forward a different proposal, namely that the eye-mind gap is only small when the eyes are serving as an input system to the neural language processing architecture. By contrast, the eyes do not serve as a direct "output channel" for the neural language system. This means that increased processing effort is only reflected in EM measures when EMs may serve in some way to ameliorate the situation, e.g. by regressing to a critical region of a difficult sentence. We will support our hypothesis with findings from concurrent EM-ERP recordings, focusing both on a language-related ERP component (the N400) and a domain-general ERP component (the P300) and their respective EM correlates.