Disentangling perceptual and psycholinguistic factors in syntactic processing: Tone monitoring via ERPs

Franco, Gaillard, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz (Behavior Research Methods, 47, 1393–1403, 2015), in a study on statistical learning employing the click-detection paradigm, conclude that more needs to be known about how this paradigm interacts with statistical learning and speech perception. Past results with this monitoring technique have pointed to an end-of-clause effect in parsing—a structural effect—but we here show that the issues are a bit more nuanced. Firstly, we report two Experiments (1a and 1b), which show that reaction times (RTs) are affected by two factors: (a) processing load, resulting in a tendency for RTs to decrease across a sentence, and (b) a perceptual effect which adds to this tendency and moreover helps neutralize differences between sentences with slightly different structures. These two factors are then successfully discriminated by registering event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a monitoring task, with Experiment 2 establishing that the amplitudes of the N1 and P3 components—the first associated with temporal uncertainty, the second with processing load in dual tasks—correlate with RTs. Finally, Experiment 3 behaviorally segregates the two factors by placing the last tone at the end of sentences, activating a wrap-up operation and thereby both disrupting the decreasing tendency and highlighting structural effects. Our overall results suggest that much care needs to be employed in designing click-detection tasks if structural effects are sought, and some of the now-classic data need to be reconsidered.