When a causal assumption is not satisfied by reality: differential brain responses to concessive and causal relations during sentence comprehension

Abstract

A concessive construction like Grandma moved from Southern to Northern China although she likes the South, where the winter is warm implies a causal assumption that is based on one's real world knowledge but is inconsistent with the asserted fact. This study investigated to what extent the processing of a concessive construction differs from the processing of a causal construction with an explicit marker because, in which a causal assumption is stated and approved by the fact. The critical word in the subordinate clause was congruent or incongruent with the discourse context. The incongruent word elicited a larger N400 followed by a larger P600 for the causal construction but a larger N400 followed by a larger late negativity for the concessive construction, suggesting that the re-establishment of the conjunctive relations and the underlying brain responses are differentially affected by the conjunction type and by the viability of pragmatic meaning enrichment.

Keywords:

• causal conjunction
• concessive conjunction
• world knowledge
• N400
• P600

Acknowledgements

We thank Drs. Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda Thornburg and one anonymous reviewer for suggestions concerning earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This construction has similar functions as a concessive conjunction, since it encodes anti-prediction statement.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by grants from the Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31300929] and the Natural Science Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Jiangsu Province [grant number 12KJB180007] to Xiaodong Xu, and by grants from the Social Science Foundation of China [grant number 12& ZD119] and Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31470976] to Xiaolin Zhou. It was also supported by the Academic Development Priority Program of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions [grant number 20110101] awarded to Jie Zhang, School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University.