Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Representations formed during language comprehension do not always accurately reflect the linguistic input, but aresometimes just good enough (Ferreira et al., 2003). Here, we examined the electrophysiological correlates of such heuristicprocessing. Participants were presented with passive sentences where the plausibility of the fillers of the agent and patientthematic roles was manipulated. As expected, they made more errors in the interpretation of implausible sentences (e.g.,The doctor was treated by the patient). Intriguingly, N400 amplitudes patterned with (mis)interpretation, with increasedamplitudes to the second noun in correctly processed implausible sentences, and equally small amplitudes in plausiblesentences and in incorrectly interpreted implausible sentences. These results are in line with the view that N400 amplitudesreflect the change in an initial heuristic representation of sentence meaning (Rabovsky et al., 2018), but seem difficult toexplain by accounts suggesting that the N400 reflects lexical retrieval (Brouwer et al., 2017).