The neural dynamics of political socio-pragmatic violations: an ERP study

Pragmatic violations are known to elicit reliable N400 modulations in event related potentials of electroencephalographic recordings. While this effect has been extensively documented in linguistic contexts, evidence from political discourse remains limited. To address this gap, the present study investigated neural responses to socio-pragmatic coherence in politically framed statements.

Participants read political utterances containing critical target words that were either coherent or incoherent with a preceding description of the producer. To examine whether pragmatic processing could be altered by typographic cues, target words were presented either unmarked or enclosed in quotation marks.

Consistent with prior findings, pragmatically incoherent target words elicited a larger negative deflection peaking around 400 ms post-onset than coherent words. Notably, this pattern was reversed when target words were presented in quotation marks.

We interpret this reversal as evidence that quotation marks signal a rejection or distancing from a word's conventional meaning, thereby altering contextual integration demands. While rejecting the meaning of incoherent terms (e.g., "climate terrorists") may facilitate integration when aligned with the speaker's stance, rejecting the meaning of coherent terms (e.g., "climate activists") appears to increase processing difficulty. These findings demonstrate that typographic cues can modulate socio-pragmatic interpretation in political language, with measurable neural consequences.