I'll be here on Friday 12-2pm EDT: https://bluejeans.com/767230868
The anterior post-N400 ERP positivity (PNP) has received recent attention as
a possible index of the cost of recovery from violated predictions. Previous
studies have found that the PNP is larger at unexpected words in strongly
vs. weakly constraining contexts, but crucially, only when the unexpected
word was still plausible. Contrary to these findings, in a previous
experiment, we found evidence for the same constraint-based PNP effect in
separable verb-particle constructions even though the target particle was
completely implausible. We attempted to replicate our finding in a
pre-registered study of 100 participants, but were unable to replicate the
effect. Our results therefore support previous research suggesting the PNP
is not sensitive to constraint at implausible words. This unfortunately also
means that the PNP was not sensitive to our constraint manipulation and
therefore that
we could not tell whether readers predicted the verb particle or not.