Predictability, Plausibility, and Two Late ERP Positivities During Written Sentence Comprehension

Overview

Journal Neuropsychologia

Specialties Neurology
Psychology

Date 2014 Jun 24

PMID 24953958

Citations 67

Authors

Katherine A DeLong

Laura Quante

Marta Kutas

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Van Petten and Luka's (2012, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 83(2), 176-190) literature survey of late positive ERP components elicited by more or less predictable words during sentence processing led them to propose two topographically and functionally distinct positivities: a parietal one associated with semantically incongruent words related to semantic reanalysis and a frontal one with unknown significance associated with congruent but lexically unpredicted words. With the goal of testing this hypothesis within a single set of experimental materials and participants, we report results from two ERP studies: Experiment 1, a post-hoc analysis of a dataset that varied on dimensions of both cloze probability (predictability) and plausibility, and Experiment 2, a follow-up study in which these factors were manipulated in a controlled fashion. In both studies, we observed distinct post-N400 positivities: a more anterior one to plausible, but not anomalous, low cloze probability sentence medial words, and a more posterior one to semantically anomalous sentence continuations. Taken together with an observed canonical cloze-modulated N400, these dual positivities indicate a dissociation between brain processes relating to written words׳ sentential predictability versus plausibility, clearly an important distinction for any viable neural or psycholinguistic model of written sentence processing.

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