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. 2018 Aug 27;8:12838. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-31038-9

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Task Design. The speaker (person A) is instructed to fill in a sentence with a humorous (i.e. unexpected) ending (a) (2000 ms), followed by a sentence with an open ending (b) (e.g. “I took my dog for a ____” (4000 ms). The speaker is prompted to read the sentence aloud to the listener when it turns green (c), including the unexpected ending (e.g. “I took my dog for a party”). As denoted underneath the pictures of the participants, the spectral responses of the listener during initial preparation (a) are compared with the ERP response to the unexpected word within the listener (c). The “humorous” prompt in (a) is replaced by the word “serious” during the “expected” condition, when the speaker prepares the expected ending of the sentence (i.e. “I took my dog for a walk”).