Processing good-fit anomalies is modulated by contextual accessibility during discourse comprehension: ERP evidence

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.

KEYWORDS:

• good-fit anomalies
• contextual accessibility
• distance
• ERP
• discourse comprehension

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the State Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61433018 and 31871108] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Beijing Sport University [grant number 2019QD017 and 2020028].