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The cheese was green with… envy: An EEG study on minimal fictional descriptions

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Kotz,  Sonja A.       
Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University, the Netherlands;
Department Neuropsychology, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Soares, S., Frade, S., Jerónimo, R., & Kotz, S. A. (2023). The cheese was green with… envy: An EEG study on minimal fictional descriptions. Brain and Language, 236: 105218. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2022.105218.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000C-2115-7
Abstract
Inconsistent information can be hard to understand, but in cases like fiction readers can integrate it with little to no difficulties. The present study aimed at examining if perspective switching can take place when only a minimal fictional description is provided (fictional world condition), as compared with general world knowledge (real world condition). Participants read sentences where food items had animated or inanimate features while EEG was recorded and performed a sentence completion task to evaluate recall. In the real-world condition, the N400 was significantly larger for sentences incongruent, rather than congruent, with general world knowledge. In the fictional world condition, the N400 elicited by congruent and incongruent sentences did not differ, confirming that the minimal description impacted online information processing. Information consistent with general knowledge was better recalled in both conditions. The current results highlight how contextual information is integrated during sentence comprehension.