Journal
NEUROREPORT
Volume 21, Issue 11, Pages 791-795Publisher
LIPPINCOTT WILLIAMS & WILKINS
DOI: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e32833cae0d
Keywords
anaphora; event-related potentials; hypothetical events; modal auxiliary; N400; P600; pronouns; semantics; spoken language; syntax
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Funding
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) [410-2006-1748, 410-2007-1501]
- Canada Research Chair program
- Canada Foundation for Innovation (CRC/CFI) [201876]
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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. NeuroReport 21:791-795 (C) 2010 Wolters Kluwer Health vertical bar Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
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