Examinando por Autor "Casado, Pilar"

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    Publicación
    Syntactic expectancy: an event-related potentials study
    (Elsevier, 2005-04-11) Hinojosa, José Antonio; Casado, Pilar; Pozo García, Miguel Ángel; Moreno Bella, Eva; Muñoz Ibáñez, Francisco Javier
    Although extensive work has been conducted in order to study expectancies about semantic information, little effort has been dedicated to the study of the influence of expectancies in the processing of forthcoming syntactic information. The present study tries to examine the issue by presenting participants with grammatically correct sentences of two types. In the first type the critical word of the sentence belonged to the most expected word category type on the basis of the previous context (an article following a verb). In the second sentence type, the critical word was an unexpected but correct word category (an article following an adjective) when a verb is highly expected. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured to critical words in both sentence types. Brain waves evoked by the correct but syntactically unexpected word revealed the presence of a negativity with a central distribution around 300–500 ms after stimuli onset, an N400, that was absent in the case of syntactically expected words. No differences were present in previous time windows. These results support models that differentiate between the processing of expected and unexpected syntactic structures.
  • Miniatura
    Publicación
    Tell me sweet little lies: An event-related potentials study on the processing of social lies
    (Springer Nature, 2016-03-23) Casado, Pilar; Martín Loeches, Manuel; Moreno Bella, Eva
    In reading tasks, words that convey a false statement elicit an enhanced N400 brainwave response, relative to words that convey a true statement. N400 amplitude reductions are generally linked to the online expectancy of upcoming words in discourse. White lies, contrary to false statements, may not be unexpected in social scenarios. We used the event-related potential (ERP) technique to determine whether there is an impact of social context on sentence processing. We measured ERP responses to target words that either conveyed a social “white” lie or a socially impolite blunt truth, relative to semantic violations. Word expectancy was controlled for by equating the cloze probabilities of white lying and blunt true targets, as measured in previous paper-and-pencil tests. We obtained a classic semantic violation effect (a larger N400 for semantic incongruities relative to sense making statements). White lies, in contrast to false statements, did not enhance the amplitude of the N400 component. Interestingly, blunt true statements yielded both a late frontal positivity and an N400 response in those scenarios particularly biased to white lying. Thus, white lies do not interfere with online semantic processing, and they do not engage further reanalysis processes, which are typically indexed by subsequent late positivity ERP effects. Instead, an N400 and a late frontal positivity obtained in response to blunt true statements indicate that they were treated as unexpected events. In conclusion, unwritten rules of social communicative behavior influence the electrical brain response to locally coherent but socially inappropriate statements.