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Abstract

Event-related brain potential (ERP) studies have shown distinct ERP components reliably related to semantic anomalies (N400) and to syntactic anomalies (P600). Recent ERP studies have challenged these well-defined components in which P600 effects were triggered by semantic reversal or thematic anomalies (Van Herten et al. 2005, Hoeks et al. 2004). ERP correlates to the processing of verbal irony are in accordance with these current findings. Sentences like "That's really rich" achieved an ironic meaning when they were embedded in negative contexts thereby contradicting its literal meaning (i.e. receiving a very small dish). Compared to their literal sentence meaning, ironic sentences evoked a posterior positivity between 500-900 ms in the absence of syntactic difficulties. Thus, it may reflect semantic-pragmatic processes necessary for the comprehension of irony, i.e. derivation of an appropriate message-level representation. In the present ERP study we investigated in how far the irony related positivity can be dissociated from the syntax-related positivity. Discourses ending in an ironic or non-ironic target sentence were presented visually. The target sentence final word was also manipulated morphosyntactically having either a correct or an incorrect morphosyntactic word ending, e.g. "rich/richs". Between 500-900 ms, ERPs on the sentence final word revealed two distinct late positivities differing in their morphology. Ironic discourses evoked an anteriorly distributed positivity, whereas morphosyntactic violations elicited a broadly distributed positivity. These findings support a dissociation of both late positivites being independently involved in the processing of grammatical and semantic information.