When A Man Says He Is Pregnant: ERP Evidence for A Rational Account of Speaker-contextualized Language Comprehension

Spoken language is often, if not always, understood in a context that includes the identities of speakers. For instance, we can easily make sense of an utterance such as "I'm going to have a manicure this weekend" or "The first time I got pregnant I had a hard time" when the utterance is spoken by a woman, but it would be harder to understand when it is spoken by a man. Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown mixed results regarding the neurophysiological responses to such speaker-mismatched utterances, with some reporting an N400 effect and others a P600 effect. In an experiment involving 64 participants, we showed that these different ERP effects reflect distinct cognitive processes employed to resolve the speaker-message mismatch. When possible, the message is integrated with the speaker context to arrive at an interpretation, as in the case of violations of social stereotypes (e.g., men getting a manicure), resulting in an N400 effect. However, when such integration is impossible due to violations of biological knowledge (e.g., men getting pregnant), listeners engage in an error correction process to revise either the perceived utterance or the speaker context, resulting in a P600 effect. Additionally, we found that the social N400 effect decreased as a function of the listener's personality trait of openness, while the biological P600 effect remained robust. Our findings help to reconcile the empirical inconsistencies in the literature and provide a rational account of speaker-contextualized language comprehension.