Reversing expectations during discourse comprehension.
In two ERP experiments, we asked whether comprehenders used the concessive connective,even so, to predict upcoming events. Participants read coherent and incoherent scenarios, with and withouteven so, e.g. "Elizabeth had a history exam on Monday. She took the test and aced/failed it. (Even so), she went home and celebrated wildly.", as they rated coherence (Experiment 1) or simply answered intermittent comprehension questions (Experiment 2). The semantic function ofeven sowas used to reverse real-world knowledge predictions, leading to an attenuated N400 to coherent versus incoherent target words ("celebrated"). Moreover, its pragmatic communicative function enhanced predictive processing, leading to more N400 attenuation to coherent targets in scenarios with than withouteven so. This benefit however, did not come for free: the detection of failed event predictions triggered a later posterior positivity and/or an anterior negativity effect, and costs of maintaining alternative likelihood relations manifest as a sustained negativity effect on sentence-final words.
Language and Processing Lab, Linguistics Department, University of Chicago, IL, 60615.
Ming
M
Xiang
NeuroCognition Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, 02155 ; Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Bldg 149, 13th Street, Charlestown, MA, 02129.
Gina
G
Kuperberg
Discourse processing; ERP; N400; P600; concessive connectives; event structures; late negativity; prediction