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Abstract
Eighteen subjects listened to sentences ending with semantically congruent or incongruent
words. Each congruent sentence was embedded at the end of a short story so that the
final word was semantically acceptable at the sentence level but incongruent in terms
of discourse context. The same stories were also presented with congruent endings.
Auditory ERPs elicited by the final words in these sentences and stories were compared.
Both sentence- and discourse-level semantic integration were associated with N400
and Late Positive Component (LPC) effects in addition to a new component, P550. Local
and global semantic processing, although evoking the same components, were characterized
by differential effects on ERP amplitudes according to the amount of text integrated
and its congruence. These results indicate similar cognitive processes of context
build up, underlying sentence- and discourse-semantic processing.