When peanuts fall in love: N400 evidence for the power of discourse.

Full Abstract

In linguistic theories of how sentences encode meaning, a distinction is often made between the context-free rule-based combination of lexical-semantic features of the words within a sentence ("semantics"), and the contributions made by wider context ("pragmatics"). In psycholinguistics, this distinction has led to the view that listeners initially compute a local, context-independent meaning of a phrase or sentence before relating it to the wider context. An important aspect of such a two-step perspective on interpretation is that local semantics cannot initially be overruled by global contextual factors. In two spoken-language event-related potential experiments, we tested the viability of this claim by examining whether discourse context can overrule the impact of the core lexical-semantic feature animacy, considered to be an innate organizing principle of cognition. Two-step models of interpretation predict that verb-object animacy violations, as in "The girl comforted the clock," will always perturb the unfolding interpretation process, regardless of wider context. When presented in isolation, such anomalies indeed elicit a clear N400 effect, a sign of interpretive problems. However, when the anomalies were embedded in a supportive context (e.g., a girl talking to a clock about his depression), this N400 effect disappeared completely. Moreover, given a suitable discourse context (e.g., a story about an amorous peanut), animacy-violating predicates ("the peanut was in love") were actually processed more easily than canonical predicates ("the peanut was salted"). Our findings reveal that discourse context can immediately overrule local lexical-semantic violations, and therefore suggest that language comprehension does not involve an initially context-free semantic analysis.

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Author information

Author/s: Nieuwland, Mante S (MS); Van Berkum, Jos J A (JJ);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. m.s.nieuwland(-atsign-)uva.nl

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of cognitive neuroscience (J Cogn Neurosci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Jul; vol 18 (issue 7) : pp 1098-111

Dates: Created 2006/07/14; Completed 2006/10/10; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 16839284, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Acoustic Stimulation - methods
Adult
Electroencephalography - methods
Evoked Potentials, Auditory - physiology
Female

Humans
Language
Linguistics - methods
Love
Male

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