Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In an event-related potential (ERP) language experiment, we investigated whether variability in the P600 component, amarker of syntactic anomaly, could be accounted for by dispositional affect. Sentences such as (i) The broker plannedto conceal the transaction * was sent to jail vs. (ii) The broker persuaded * to conceal the transaction was sent tojail (critical words are underlined) were read by 25 participants. These stimuli were adapted from Osterhout & Holcomb(1992), an influential early study on the P600 waveform. We expected to replicate previous findings, where P600 effectswere expected at to in (ii) vs. (i) and at was in (i) vs. (ii). The P600 effect at to did not replicate, whereas it didat was . Regarding affect, our results showed a significant positive correlation between positive affect scores and P600amplitude. Results are discussed in terms of the family of P600 components and affect.