Open AccessIntegrating the Meaning of Person Names into Discourse Context: An Event-Related Potential Study
Author(s) -
Wang Lin,
Yufang Yang
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0083206
Subject(s) - p600 , meaning (existential) , n400 , context (archaeology) , sentence , linguistics , congruence (geometry) , psychology , event (particle physics) , event related potential , social psychology , history , philosophy , cognition , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , neuroscience , psychotherapist
The meaning of person names is determined by their associated information. This study used event related potentials to investigate the time course of integrating the newly constructed meaning of person names into discourse context. The meaning of person names was built by two-sentence descriptions of the names. Then we manipulated the congruence of person names relative to discourse context in a way that the meaning of person names either matched or did not match the previous context. ERPs elicited by the names were compared between the congruent and the incongruent conditions. We found that the incongruent names elicited a larger N400 as well as a larger P600 compared to the congruent names. The results suggest that the meaning of unknown names can be effectively constructed from short linguistic descriptions and that the established meaning can be rapidly retrieved and integrated into contexts.