Processing good-fit anomalies is modulated by contextual accessibility during discourse comprehension: ERP evidence

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated whether processing good-fit anomalies is modulated by contextual accessibility during discourse comprehension. Five-sentence discourses were used as the materials. The fifth sentence of each discourse contained a critical word that was highly semantically associated with the local sentence context. Three conditions were constructed: congruent, incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions. For the incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions, the critical words were semantically incongruent with the contextual information in the third and first sentence of the discourse, respectively. The results showed that the incongruent/short-distance and incongruent/long-distance conditions failed to elicit the N400 effect compared to the congruent condition. Moreover, a post-N400 positivity effect was found in the incongruent/short-distance condition, and this effect was strongly reduced in the incongruent/long-distance condition, indicating that the good-fit anomalies were ultimately detected and that lower contextual accessibility could lead to more difficulty in detecting semantic incongruence.