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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Dissociable Neural Signatures for Surprisal and Entropy Reduction in Mandarin Speech Comprehension

Qifei Wang¹, Eva Berlot, Jakub Szewczyk, Floris P De Lange²; ¹Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, ²Radboud University

Presenter: Qifei Wang

The neural response to words is modulated by the amount of information conveyed by the words. For example, it is well established that neural activity monotonically increases as a function of the surprisal of a word. Another important information-theoretic measure, entropy reduction (ER), quantifies how each incoming word constrains subsequent content interpretations. Here we examined whether and when surprisal and ER modulated neural activity during naturalistic speech comprehension. Through magnetoencephalographic recordings (MEG) of naturalistic Mandarin comprehension, we demonstrate that ER accounts for neural responses that cannot be explained by surprisal alone. Initial observations show that ER elicits a later (400-600 ms) cortical response compared to the N400 surprisal effect. These preliminary results suggest that ER may involve neural computations distinct from those underlying surprisal, with early resolution of surprisal followed by later ER. Our findings extend predictive processing frameworks to tonal languages and highlight entropy reduction as a key component of neural language models, operating beyond surprisal.

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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