ABSTRACT
Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated whether processing good-fit anomalies is modulated by contextual accessibility during discourse comprehension. Five-sentence discourses were used as the materials. The fifth sentence of each discourse contained a critical word that was highly semantically associated with the local sentence context. Three conditions were constructed: congruent, incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions. For the incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions, the critical words were semantically incongruent with the contextual information in the third and first sentence of the discourse, respectively. The results showed that the incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions failed to elicit the N400 effect compared to the congruent condition. Moreover, a post-N400 positivity effect was found in the incongruent/short-distance condition, and this effect was strongly reduced in the incongruent/long-distance condition, indicating that the good-fit anomalies were ultimately detected and that lower contextual accessibility could lead to more difficulty in detecting semantic incongruence.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).