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To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2005.12.003 Byline: Arnout W. Koornneef (a), Jos J.A. Van Berkum (b)(c) Keywords: Language comprehension; Interpersonal verbs; Implicit causality; Pronoun resolution; Immediacy; Prediction Abstract: In two experiments, we examined the recent claim () that verb-based implicit causality information is used during sentence-final clausal integration only. We did so by looking for mid-sentence reading delays caused by pronouns that are inconsistent with the bias of a preceding implicit causality verb (e.g., 'David praised Linda because he...'). In a self-paced reading task, such pronouns immediately slowed down reading, at the two words immediately following the pronoun. In eye tracking, bias-inconsistent pronouns also immediately perturbed the reading process, as indexed by significant delays in various first pass measures at and shortly after the critical pronoun. Hence, readers can recruit verb-based implicit causality information in the service of comprehension rapidly enough to impact on the interpretation of a pronoun early in the subordinate clause. We take our results to suggest that implicit causality is used proactively, allowing readers to focus on, and perhaps even predict, who or what will be talked about next. Author Affiliation: (a) Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands (b) Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (c) FC Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Article History: Received 3 October 2005; Revised 6 December 2005

The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Prediction-inconsistent adjectives elicited a differential ERP effect, which disappeared in a no-discourse control experiment. Furthermore, in self-paced reading, prediction-inconsistent adjectives slowed readers down before the noun. These findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations. Keywords: discourse context, lexical anticipation, prediction-sensitive parsing, grammatical gender, EEG

Insults always sting, but the context in which they are delivered can make the effects even worse. Here we test how the brain processes insults, and whether and how the neurocognitive processing of insults is changed by the presence of a laughing crowd. Event-related potentials showed that insults, compared to compliments, evoked an increase in N400 amplitude (indicating increased lexical-semantic processing) and LPP amplitude (indicating emotional processing) when presented in isolation. When insults were perceived in the presence of a laughing crowd, the difference in N400 amplitude disappeared, while the difference in LPP activation increased. These results show that even without laughter, verbal insults receive additional neural processing over compliments, both at the lexical-semantic and emotional level. The presence of a laughing crowd has a direct effect on the neurocognitive processing of insults, leading to stronger and more elongated emotional processing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]