Even a rich man can afford that expensive house: ERP responses to construction-based pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension

A linguistic construction is typically viewed as encoding the pairing of syntactic form and semantic information that is independent of the meaning of constituent words. Here with the event-related potentials (ERPs) we demonstrate that such a construction can also encode pragmatic constraints (event likelihood) that immediately influence online sentence comprehension and the associated neural activity. The lian…dou…construction in Chinese (similar to even in English) normally describes an event of low expectedness (a semantic constraint); it also introduces a pragmatic scale implying that any event with a higher likelihood than the event described must occur (pragmatic inference). By embedding a highly likely event (a rich man buying a house) or an underspecified event (a man buying a house) in the construction, we created an incongruent condition and an underspecified condition and compared both with a control condition in which an event of low expectedness (a poor man buying a house) was described. ERPs on the main verb phrases showed an N400 with a maximum in the right hemisphere followed by a late negativity with an anterior maximum for both the incongruent and underspecified conditions, with a larger N400 effect for the former than for the latter. ERPs on the sentence-final phrases showed a sustained negativity for the incongruent, but not for the underspecified condition. The N400 effect may reflect the increased difficulty in unifying the current event into the lian…dou… construction. The late negativity may reflect a second-pass revision according to the likelihood scale to satisfy the pragmatic constraints of the construction.