Context and complexity in incremental sentence interpretation - An ERP study on temporal quantification

The present event-related potentials (ERP) study used picture-sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the on-line processing of compositional-semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification. We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present study replicated previous results on quantifying over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting the upcoming sentence. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible.