National TsingHua University

1 ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN JoVE

Behavior

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Yunlong Huang¹, Minghu Jiang¹, Qian Guo², Yuling Wang¹, Fan-Pei Gloria Yang³

¹Center for Psychology and Cognitive Science, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, ²Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, ³Center for Cognition and Mind Sciences, Lab for Language and Cognitive Neurology, National TsingHua University

We present a protocol to dissociate the intertwining factors of integrative difficulty and unexpectedness in semantically anomalous sentences by applying multiple repetitions to enhance participant's expectancy for anomalous sentences. The dissociation helps to investigate the major contributor of elicited event-related potentials (ERP) effects such as N400 in language studies.