Integrating the meaning of person names into discourse context: an event-related potential study.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 24349462.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0083206 and PMC identifier PMC2741605.
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Abstract
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.