Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of brain activity taken while participants read or listen to language are widely used within the cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics communities as a tool to study language comprehension. Several time-locked stereotyped EEG responses to word-presentations -- known collectively as event-related potentials (ERPs) -- are thought to be markers for semantic or syntactic processes that take place during comprehension. However, the characterization of each individual ERP in terms of what features of a stream of language trigger the response remains controversial. Improving this characterization would make ERPs a more useful tool for studying language comprehension. We take a step towards better understanding the ERPs by fine-tuning a language model to predict them. This new approach to analysis shows for the first time that all of the ERPs are predictable from embeddings of a stream of language. Prior work has only found two of the ERPs to be predictable. In addition to this analysis, we examine which ERPs benefit from sharing parameters during joint training. We find that two pairs of ERPs previously identified in the literature as being related to each other benefit from joint training, while several other pairs of ERPs that benefit from joint training are suggestive of potential relationships. Extensions of this analysis that further examine what kinds of information in the model embeddings relate to each ERP have the potential to elucidate the processes involved in human language comprehension.

Introduction: The cognitive processes involved in human language comprehension are complex and only partially identified. According to the dual-stream model of speech comprehension BIBREF1 , sound waves are first converted to phoneme-like features and further processed by a ventral stream that maps those features onto words and semantic structures, and a dorsal stream that (among other things) supports audio-short term memory. The mapping of words onto meaning is thought to be subserved by widely distributed regions of the brain that specialize in particular modalities — for example visual aspects of the word banana reside in the occipital lobe of the brain and are activated when the word banana is heard BIBREF2 — and the different representation modalities are thought to be integrated into a single coherent latent representation in the anterior temporal lobe BIBREF3 . While this part of meaning representation in human language comprehension is somewhat understood, much less is known about how the meanings of words are integrated together to form the meaning of sentences and discourses. One tool researchers use to study the integration of meaning across words is electroencephelography (EEG), which measures the electrical activity of large numbers of neurons acting in concert. EEG has the temporal resolution necessary to study the processes involved in meaning integration, and certain stereotyped electrical responses to word presentations, known as event-related potentials (ERPs), have been identified with some of the processes thought to contribute to comprehension.  In this work, we consider six ERP components that have been associated in the cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics literature with language processing and which we analyze in the data from BIBREF0 (see Figure FIGREF1 for spatial and temporal definitions of these ERP components). Three of these — the N400, EPNP, and PNP responses — are primarily considered markers for semantic processing, while the other three — the P600, ELAN, and LAN responses — are primarily considered markers for syntactic processing. However, the neat division of the ERP responses into either semantic or syntactic categories is controversial. The N400 response has been very well studied (for an overview see BIBREF4 ) and it is well established that it is associated with semantic complexity, but the features of language that trigger the other ERP responses we consider here are poorly understood. We propose to use a neural network pretrained as a language model to probe what features of language drive these ERP responses, and in turn to probe what features of language mediate the cognitive processes that underlie human language comprehension, and especially the integration of meaning across words.

Question: What datasets are used?
Answer: Answer with content missing: (Whole Method and Results sections) The primary dataset we use is the ERP data collected and computed by Frank et al. (2015), and we also use behavioral data (eye-tracking data and self-paced reading times) from Frank et al. (2013) which were collected on the same set of 205 sentences.
Select:
- ERP data collected and computed by Frank et al. (2015)
- behavioral data (eye-tracking data and self-paced reading times) from Frank et al. (2013)