Automatic processing of pragmatic information in the human brain: a mismatch negativity study

Language comprehension involves pragmatic information processing, which allows world knowledge to influence the interpretation of a sentence. This study explored whether pragmatic information can be automatically processed during spoken sentence comprehension. The experiment adopted the mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm to capture the neurophysiological indicators of automatic processing of spoken sentences. Pragmatically incorrect ('Foxes have wings') and correct ('Butterflies have wings') sentences were used as the experimental stimuli. In condition 1, the pragmatically correct sentence was the deviant and the pragmatically incorrect sentence was the standard stimulus, whereas the opposite case was presented in condition 2. The experimental results showed that, compared with the condition that the pragmatically correct sentence is the deviant stimulus, when the condition that the pragmatically incorrect sentence is the deviant stimulus MMN effects were induced within 60–120 and 220–260 ms. The results indicated that the human brain can monitor for incorrect pragmatic information in the inattentive state and can automatically process pragmatic information at the beginning of spoken sentence comprehension. *Ming Zhao and Tao Liu contributed equally to the writing of this article. Correspondence to Feiyan Chen, PhD, Bio-X Laboratory, Department of Physics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, People's Republic of China Tel: +86 138 5210 7206; fax: +86 571 8795 3997; e-mail: chenfy@zju.edu.cn Received February 17, 2018 Accepted February 22, 2018 © 2018 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

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