title: On the violation of causal, emotional, and locative inferences: An event-related potentials study.
abstract: Previous event-related potential studies have demonstrated the online generation of inferences during reading for comprehension tasks. The present study contrasted the brainwave patterns of activity to the fulfilment or violation of various types of inferences (causal, emotional, locative). Relative to inference congruent sentence endings, a typical centro-parietal N400 was elicited for the violation of causal and locative inferences. This N400 effect was initially absent for emotional inferences, most likely due to their lower cloze probability. Between 500 and 750ms, a larger frontal positivity (pN400FP) was elicited by inference incongruent sentence endings in the causal condition. In emotional sentences, both inference congruent and incongruent endings exerted this frontally distributed late positivity. For the violation of locative inferences, the larger positivity was only marginally significant over left posterior scalp locations. Thus, not all inference eliciting sentences evoked a similar pattern of ERP responses. We interpret and discuss our results in line with recent views on what the N400, the P600 and the pN400FP brainwave potentials index.
authors.affiliation: Human Brain Mapping Unit, Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Paseo de Juan XXIII 1, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rodríguez-Gómez
authors.affiliation: Human Brain Mapping Unit, Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Paseo de Juan XXIII 1, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sánchez-Carmona
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 E Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
authors.forename: Cybelle
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Human Brain Mapping Unit, Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Paseo de Juan XXIII 1, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Pozo
authors.affiliation: Human Brain Mapping Unit, Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Paseo de Juan XXIII 1, 28040 Madrid, Spain; Facultad de Psicología, Campus de Somosaguas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28223 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: José A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Hinojosa
authors.affiliation: Human Brain Mapping Unit, Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Paseo de Juan XXIII 1, 28040 Madrid, Spain; Facultad de Psicología, Campus de Somosaguas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28223 Madrid, Spain. Electronic address: emmoreno@ucm.es.
authors.forename: Eva M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Moreno
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004585:Electrooculography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011336:Probability; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Event-related potentials; Inference generation; N400; Post-N400 frontal positivity; Sentence processing