Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

During language comprehension, young adults routinely predict upcoming words, which is believed to facilitate processing. The cognitive operations involved in recovery from dis-confirmed predictions are not yet well understood. Here, we asked whether the degree to which a sentence meaning might change upon the encountering of an unexpected (plausible) word in strongly constraining contexts might impact the dynamics of predictive processing. We examined two ERP components believed to index aspects of prediction confirmation and disconfirmation, frontal negativities and late frontal positivities respectively. We collected behavioral ratings comparing sentences with the most expected continuation vs. an unexpected but plausible alternative. Surprisingly, these ratings modulated the amplitude of frontal negativities to expected continuations, but there was no evidence for a relationship between these ratings and LFPs . These findings add to research showing that individuals track aspects of the meaning of never-encountered but plausible alternatives as they understand language in real time.