Journal
BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 83, Issue 3, Pages 176-190Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2009.12.006
Keywords
ERPs; P300; N400; Collocation; Predictive mechanism; Semantic integration
Funding
- Spanish Ministry of Education and Science [SEJ2006-09238]
- CONSOLIDER-INGENIO [CSD2008-00048]
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Despite the potentially infinite creativity of language, many words are patterned in ordered strings called collocations. Final words of these clusters are highly predictable: in addition, their overall meaning can vary on the literality dimension, ranging from (figurative) idiomatic strings to literal strings. These structures thus offer a natural linguistic scenario to contrast ERP correlates of contextual expectation and semantic integration processes during comprehension. In this study, expected endings elicited a positive peak around 300 ms compared to less expected synonyms, suggesting that the earlier recognition of the string leads to the specific pre-activation of the lexical items that conclude the expression. On the other hand, meaning variations of these fixed strings (either a literal or a figurative whole meaning) affected ERPs only around 400 ms, i.e. in the frontal portion of the N400. These findings are discussed within a more general cognitive framework as outlined in Kok's (2001) dual categorization model. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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