ERPs reveal sensitivity to hypothetical contexts in spoken discourse

We used event-related potentials to examine the interaction between two dimensions of discourse comprehension(i) referential dependencies across sentences (e.g. between the pronoun ‘it’ and its antecedent ‘a novel’ in‘John is reading a novel. It ends quite abruptly’), and (ii) the distinction betwee...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:Neuroreport 2010-08, Vol.21 (11), p.791-795
Hauptverfasser: Dwivedi, Veena D, Drury, John E, Molnar, Monika, Phillips, Natalie A, Baum, Shari, Steinhauer, Karsten
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:Volltext
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:We used event-related potentials to examine the interaction between two dimensions of discourse comprehension(i) referential dependencies across sentences (e.g. between the pronoun ‘it’ and its antecedent ‘a novel’ in‘John is reading a novel. It ends quite abruptly’), and (ii) the distinction between reference to events/situations and entities/individuals in the real/actual world versus in hypothetical possible worlds. Cross-sentential referential dependencies are disrupted when the antecedent for a pronoun is embedded in a sentence introducing hypothetical entities (e.g. ‘John is considering writing a novel. It ends quite abruptly’). An earlier event-related potential reading study showed such disruptions yielded a P600-like frontal positivity. Here we replicate this effect using auditorily presented sentences and discuss the implications for our understanding of discourse-level language processing.
ISSN:0959-4965
1473-558X
DOI:10.1097/WNR.0b013e32833cae0d