Predictive processing and pragmatic inferencing: How does the brain deal with Dutch 'eigenlijk'?

Abstract

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the effect of the Dutch expectation-managing discourse particle eigenlijk on predictive processing during incremental language comprehension. Subjects read short conversations with a constraining context sentence and a question. The answer which followed contained either eigenlijk or a neutral adverb, and a critical word which was discourse-coherent or discourse-incoherent. We found an N400 for incoherent versus coherent critical words, but this effect was unaffected by the presence of eigenlijk. For late posterior positivities, on the other hand, we found more positive amplitudes for critical words which were preceded by eigenlijk versus those preceded by a neutral adverb. We argued that this P600 effect could reflect pragmatic inferencing to uncover the speaker’s intended meaning. Together these results seem to indicate that even though eigenlijk does not facilitate lexical-semantic processing, it does induce the updating of discourse representations in terms of socio-pragmatic inferences.