Text type attribution modulates pre-stimulus alpha power in sentence reading

• Published in: Brain and language Vol. 214; p. 104894
• Main Authors: Blohm, Stefan, Schlesewsky, Matthias, Menninghaus, Winfried, Scharinger, Mathias
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier Inc 01.03.2021; Academic Press
• Subjects: Attention; Brain; Cognition; Comprehension; EEG; Frequency range; Genre; Oscillations; Poetry; Reading; Reading processes; Sentences; Speech perception; Syntactic processing; Oscillations; Reading; Poetry; EEG; Attention
• ISSN: 0093-934X; 1090-2155
• DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2020.104894

•Brain oscillations reveal genre-dependent attentional adjustments prior to reading.•Genre-specific comprehension strategies involve anticipatory gating of information.•Stimulus/text categorization specifies (un)expectable properties of expected input.•Genre expectations lead to suppression of irrelevant information processing. Prior knowledge and context-specific expectations influence the perception of sensory events, e.g., speech, as well as complex higher-order cognitive operations like text reading. Here, we focused on pre-stimulus neural activity during sentence reading to examine text type-dependent attentional bias in anticipation of written stimuli, capitalizing on the functional relevance of brain oscillations in the alpha (8–12 Hz) frequency range. Two sex- and age-matched groups of participants (n = 24 each) read identical sentences on a screen at a fixed per-constituent presentation rate while their electroencephalogram was recorded; the groups were differentially instructed to read “sentences” (genre-neutral condition) or “verses from poems” (poetry condition). Relative alpha power (pre-cue vs. post-cue) in pre-stimulus time windows was greater in the poetry condition than in the genre-neutral condition. This finding constitutes initial evidence for genre-specific cognitive adjustments that precede processing proper, and potentially links current theories of discourse comprehension to current theories of brain function.