The contributions of lexico-semantic and discourse information to the resolution of ambiguous categorical anaphors

The present studies employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time course for the integration of lexico-semantic and discourse information during the resolution of categorical anaphors. Scenarios were constructed to include three potential antecedents. Anaphors were semantically ambiguous in that two of the potential antecedents were exemplars of the anaphor. Final sentences resolved the anaphor with the correct ( associatively related/contextually appropriate), incorrect ( associatively related/contextually inappropriate), or control antecedent ( associatively unrelated/contextually inappropriate). We examined the amplitude of the N400 component, which is thought to reflect the ease of semantic integration, at several points following the anaphor. The smallest N400 was evoked when the text referred back to a correct antecedent following an anaphor; an intermediate N400 was evoked by incorrect antecedents and the largest N400 was evoked by reinstating the control antecedent following an anaphor. Results demonstrated that, following an ambiguous anaphor, readers are able to use both lexico-semantic and discourse-level information to semantically integrate an antecedent into its larger discourse context.