On the violation of causal, emotional, and locative inferences: An event-related potentials study

Abstract

Previous event-related potential studies have demonstrated the online generation of inferences during reading for comprehension tasks. The present study contrasted the brainwave patterns of activity to the fulfilment or violation of various types of inferences (causal, emotional, locative). Relative to inference congruent sentence endings, a typical centro-parietal N400 was elicited for the violation of causal and locative inferences. This N400 effect was initially absent for emotional inferences, most likely due to their lower cloze probability. Between 500 and 750ms, a larger frontal positivity (pN400FP) was elicited by inference incongruent sentence endings in the causal condition. In emotional sentences, both inference congruent and incongruent endings exerted this frontally distributed late positivity. For the violation of locative inferences, the larger positivity was only marginally significant over left posterior scalp locations. Thus, not all inference eliciting sentences evoked a similar pattern of ERP responses. We interpret and discuss our results in line with recent views on what the N400, the P600 and the pN400FP brainwave potentials index.