The Immediate Effect of Pragmatic Plausibility in Reanalysis: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Abstract

Abstract Previous studies on reanalysis in sentence processing have shown that the processing load of reanalysis increases in proportion to the difficulty in revising the existing structure. The present study, on the other hand, argues that the processing load of reanalysis also increases when the pragmatic plausibility of the interpretation of the revised structure turns out to be pragmatically less plausible. This paper reports the results of two experiments: The results of Experiment 1 (a self-paced reading study) indicate that the pragmatically less plausible interpretation of the revised structure immediately affects the processing load of the reanalysis. Experiment 2 further addresses the issue of the immediate impact of the effect of the pragmatic plausibility by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results revealed that a large N400 effect was observed at the pragmatically less plausible words, while the response to the effect of the structural revision resulted in a P600 effect. Furthermore, we found the nearly perfect linear summation between the N400 and P600 effects, suggesting that the difficulty in the pragmatic integration process did not affect the difficulty in the structural revision process. In addition, we found that the onset of the P600 effect reflecting the cost of revising the existing structure was relatively earlier than that of the N400 effect reflecting the pragmatic implausibility. The present study provides us with some implications for a theory of reanalysis and consideration of the time course of reanalysis.