A nurse should not be careless: processing presupposed meanings triggered by connectives

Connectives are crucial in constructing coherent discourse by signalling relationships across sentences and triggering presuppositions. This event-related potential study investigated how the type and presence of connectives influence sentence processing. Participants read sentences with because, although, or no connective, where critical words were either congruent or incongruent with the clausal relation specified by connectives. Incongruent words elicited a larger N400 than congruent words, regardless of the connective type or its presence. In later processing stages, incongruency induced an extended N400 effect in concessive contexts but a P600 effect in causal and no-connective contexts. Additionally, a larger P600 was observed in concessive-congruent versus causal-congruent conditions, indicating a greater effort to reconcile the concessive-triggered presupposition with the proposition. These findings suggest that connective-triggered presuppositions constrain both the initial evaluation of language input against broad contextual knowledge and the subsequent integration into discourse representation, supporting an Evaluation and Integration model of presupposition processing.