Processing temporal presuppositions: an event-related potential study

• Main Authors: Stearns, Laura (Author), Eddy, Marianna (Author), Jouravlev, Olessia (Contributor), Bergen, Leon (Contributor), Gibson, Edward A (Contributor), Fedorenko, Evelina G (Contributor)
• Other Authors: McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT (Contributor), Gibson, Edward (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge, 2018-01-16T18:51:44Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 The ability to efficiently process presuppositions, which contain information that the speaker believes to be in the background to the conversation, is essential for effective communication. To get a deeper understanding of the nature and the time-course of temporal presupposition processing, we examined event-related potential evoked by the word again in two types of sentence contexts. The word again was presented in contexts that supported a presupposition (e.g. Jake had tipped a maid at the hotel once before. Today he tipped a maid at the hotel again ... ) or violated it (e.g. Jake had never tipped a maid at the hotel before. Today he tipped a maid at the hotel again ... ). The presupposition violation was associated with increased amplitudes of the P3b/P600 but not the N400 component. We argue for the centrality of the P3b/P600 component for presupposition processing. These findings demonstrate rapid integration of lexical presuppositions with contextual knowledge. KEYWORDS: Temporal presupposition, ERPs, P3b/P600, N400, presupposition violation