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Updated: Jun 17, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
Electrophysiological evidence of interaction between contextual expectation and semantic integration during the
Nicola Molinaro1, Manuel Carreiras
1BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 20009 Donostia, Spain. n.molinaro@bcbl.eu
Abstract:
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 300ms 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 400ms, 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.
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