Scientists at the HSE Center for Language and Brain discovered whether the brain makes an effort to process words that don’t fit the style of the whole sentence. This was reported to socialbites.ca at the Higher School of Economics.
At the same time, the inconsistency between the interlocutor’s style of speech and his communication situation – the use of slang expressions in working communication – often leads to misunderstandings and bewilderment. Exactly how the brain processes such inconsistencies has not been investigated until now.
The study included 48 people. All listened to 40 pairs of sentences: one of them contained a word that did not fit the style of the sentence. While the participants listened to the sentences, their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG).
Analysis of data on the electrical activity of the brain showed that listening to sentences by switching between language styles led to the emergence of the so-called N400 component.
It occurs when people encounter an unexpected, inappropriate word or semantic abnormality in a sentence (for example, “The boy washed the return to the sea”). Presumably, this component reflects additional efforts to associate the unexpected word with the context before it.
This result suggests that if a word is formally out of context, it requires more effort to include it in the context of the sentence, just as one does when processing semantic anomalies.