A psychophysiological study of pragmatic inference: contextual and conversational implicatures

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This study psychophysiologically examined the neural basis of deduction and abduction in verbal communication by the pragmatic manipulation of Japanese conversation. As for the ERPs, the amplitude of the N400 elicited by abduction was significantly greater than that by deduction. Since N400 is generally understood as an indication of semantic processing, this difference suggested that abduction involved more complex processing than deduction. Further, time-frequency analyses of their EEG indicate that the power for the two inferences differ depending on latency and frequency range.