When the polar bear encounters many polar bears: event-related potential context effects evoked by uniqueness failure

Abstract

When essential context information is not given in a discourse, understanding mostly fails. By means of event-related brain potentials we investigated what happens when the definite determiner does not find a unique referent in the context or when the appropriate use of the indefinite determiner is violated by the presence of an already introduced referent. The misuse of the determiners evoked an N400/P600 complex immediately upon reading the determiners. Since this result was the same for both determiners, we suggest that initial cognitive processes are similar and include the detection of a mismatch, triggering an N400, followed by a top-down monitoring process, indexed by a P600. This latter process presumably involves the evaluation of possible alternative sentence interpretations which might preserve the sentence's meaning. We hypothesise that theoretically assumed processing differences between the two determiners might occur at a later time point in processing.