In two ERP experiments, we investigated whether readers prioritize animacy over real-world event-knowledge during sentence comprehension. We used the paradigm of Paczynski and Kuperberg (2012), who argued that animacy is prioritized based on the observations that the ‘related anomaly effect’ (reduced N400s for context-related anomalous words compared to unrelated words) does not occur for animacy violations, and that animacy violations but not relatedness violations elicit P600 effects. Participants read passive sentences with plausible agents (e.g., The prescription for the mental disorder was written by the psychiatrist) or implausible agents that varied in animacy and semantic relatedness (schizophrenic/guard/pill/fence). In Experiment 1 (with a plausibility judgment task), plausible sentences elicited smaller N400s relative to all types of implausible sentences. Crucially, animate words elicited smaller N400s than inanimate words, and related words elicited smaller N400s than unrelated words, but Bayesian analysis revealed substantial evidence against an interaction between animacy and relatedness. Moreover, at the P600 time-window, we observed more positive ERPs for animate than inanimate words and for related than unrelated words at anterior regions. In Experiment 2 (without judgment task), we observed an N400 effect with animacy violations, but no other effects. Taken together, the results of our experiments fail to support a prioritized role of animacy information over real-world event-knowledge, but they support an interactive, constraint-based view on incremental semantic processing.

在两个ERP实验中，我们调查了句子理解过程中读者是否优先考虑动画效果而不是现实世界的事件知识。我们使用了Paczynski和Kuperberg（2012）的范式，他们基于以下观察论证，对动画性进行了优先排序：观察到“相关异常效应”（与上下文无关的词比与无关的词相比，N400减少了）对于违反动画性没有发生， P600效果会受到违反动画性而非违反关联性的影响。参加者阅读带有合理动因的被动句（例如，精神障碍的处方由精神病医生撰写）或因生气和语义相关性不同而令人难以置信的动因（精神分裂症/后卫/药片/围栏））。在实验1（带有合理性判断任务）中，与所有类型的令人难以置信的句子相比，合理的句子引出了较小的N400。至关重要的是，有生命的单词所引起的N400小于无生命的单词，而相关的词语所引起的N400则比无相关的单词小，但是贝叶斯分析揭示了有力的证据表明，生命力和相关性之间没有相互作用。此外，在P600的时间窗口中，我们在前部区域看到的无生命词比无生命词和相关词比不相关词的ERP阳性数更多。在实验2中（没有判断任务），我们观察到N400效果带有违反动画效果，但没有其他效果。综上所述，我们的实验结果不能支持动画信息的优先作用，而不是真实的事件知识，但它们支持交互式，