Going the Extra Mile: Effects of Discourse Context on Two Late Positivities During Language Comprehension.

During language comprehension, online neural processing is strongly influenced by the constraints of the prior context. While the N400 ERP response (300-500ms) is known to be sensitive to a word's semantic predictability, less is known about a set of late positive-going ERP responses (600-1000ms) that can be elicited when an incoming word violates strong predictions about upcoming content () or about what is possible given the prior context (). Across three experiments, we systematically manipulated the length of the prior context and the source of lexical constraint to determine their influence on comprehenders' online neural responses to these two types of prediction violations.