{"pk":28919,"title":"Bayesian Pragmatics Provides the Best Quantitative Model of Context Effects on\nWord Meaning in EEG and Cloze Data","subtitle":null,"abstract":"We contrast three views of how words contribute to a listener’s\nunderstanding of a sentence and compare corresponding\nquantitative models of how the listener’s probabilistic prediction on\nsentence completion is affected in online comprehension. The\nSemantic Similarity Model presupposes that the predictor of a word\ngiven a preceding discourse is their semantic similarity. The\nRelevance Model maintains that utterances are chosen to maximize\nrelevance. The Bayesian Pragmatic Model assumes a relevance-\nguided modulation of a word’s lexical meaning that can be regarded\nas a Bayesian update of statistical regularities stored in memory. In\naddition to a Cloze test, we perform an EEG study, recording the\nevent-related potential on the predicted word and take the N400\ncomponent to be inversely correlated with the word’s predictive\nprobability. In a multiple regression analysis, we compare the three\nmodels with regard to Cloze values and N400 amplitudes. The\nBayesian Pragmatic Model best explains the data.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Bayesian Pragmatics"},{"word":"EEG"},{"word":"N400"},{"word":"Cloze Test"},{"word":"Semantic\nSimilarity"},{"word":"Relevance"},{"word":"Generative Lexicon"},{"word":"Probabilistic Prediction"},{"word":"Online Comprehension"},{"word":"modulation"},{"word":"Predictive Completion Task"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mk6t8p9","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Markus","middle_name":"","last_name":"Werning","name_suffix":"","institution":"Ruhr University Bochum","department":""},{"first_name":"Matthias","middle_name":"","last_name":"Unterhuber","name_suffix":"","institution":"Ruhr University Bochum","department":""},{"first_name":"Gregor","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wiedemann","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Hamburg","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28919/galley/18790/download/"}]}