Table 1.

Example stimuli and characteristics.

Scenario Type (n=45 per condition)	Example	SSV of critical word‡	Cloze*	Constraint*	Coherence ratings^
1. Coherent	Elizabeth had a history exam on Monday. She took the test and aced it. She went home and celebrated wildly.	0.179 [0.078]	0.42 [0.32]	0.52 [0.26]	4.8 [0.2]
2. Incoherent	Elizabeth had a history exam on Monday. She took the test and failed it. She went home and celebrated wildly.	0.174 [0.079]	0.03 [0.09]	0.40 [0.24]	1.7 [0.4]
3. Even-so Coherent	Elizabeth had a history exam on Monday. She took the test and failed it. Even so, she went home and celebrated wildly.	0.174 [0.079]	0.31 [0.28]	0.44 [0.25]	3.3. [1.0]
4. Even-so Incoherent	Elizabeth had a history exam on Monday. She took the test and aced it. Even so, she went home and celebrated wildly.	0.179 [0.078]	0.04 [0.11]	0.40 [0.24]	2.4 [1.0]

Means are shown with standard deviations in square parentheses. The critical word in each of the example sentences is underlined (although this was not the case in the experiment itself).

^‡LSA was used to calculate Semantic Similarity Values (SSVs) between the critical word and its preceding content words.

^*Cloze probability and constraint are represented as the proportion of total responses from 40 participants.

^{^}Coherence ratings, on a 1-5 scale, were collected during the ERP recording session in Experiment 1. 5: very coherent; 1: incoherent.