Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Cognitive Science

Neural correlates in the time course of inferences: costs and benefits for less-skilled readers at the university level

Provisionally accepted
MABEL URRUTIAMABEL URRUTIA1*Esteban J. PinoEsteban J. Pino2María Troncoso-SeguelMaría Troncoso-Seguel2Claudio BustosClaudio Bustos3Pamela GuevaraPamela Guevara2Karina TorresKarina Torres4Sandra MariángelSandra Mariángel5,6Yang FuYang Fu7Hipólito MarreroHipólito Marrero8
  • 1FACULTAD DE EDUCACIÓN, UNIVERSIDAD DE CONCEPCIÓN, Concepción, Chile
  • 2Universidad de Concepcion Facultad de Ingenieria, Concepción, Chile
  • 3Universidad de Concepcion Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Concepción, Chile
  • 4Universidad de Concepcion Facultad de Humanidades y Arte, Concepción, Chile
  • 5Faculty of Education, Universidad Católica de la Santísima, Concepción, Chile
  • 6Faculty of Communications and Arts, Universidad de las Américas, Región Metropolitana, Chile
  • 7Zhejiang International Studies University, Hangzhou, China
  • 8Universidad de La Laguna Facultad de Psicologia y Logopedia, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Select one of your emails

You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:

Notify me on publication

Please enter your email address:

If you already have an account, please login

You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here

This study investigates the costs and benefits of inference processing in university students with reading comprehension difficulties. Inferences, which combine implicit and explicit information, are seen as an indicator of better reading comprehension. The study focuses on three loci during narration: the last words of the first and second phrases, and a target word in a lexical decision task. Brain activity was recorded using event-related potentials (ERP) from 63 students as they read familiar, less-familiar, and neutral stories. The results revealed a slow negativity component at the first locus, with greater negativity for words from familiar contexts compared to less-familiar and neutral contexts. At the second locus, N400 and Post-N400 components reflected greater negativity for familiar contexts. At the third locus, FN400 and N400 components were observed for pseudowords. These findings suggest a bottom-up processing strategy, characterized by lexical access difficulties in less-skilled readers.

Keywords: Event-related potentials, FN400, inferences, less-skilled readers, N400, Post N400, slow negativity potential

Received: 25 Aug 2025; Accepted: 04 Feb 2026.

Copyright: © 2026 URRUTIA, Pino, Troncoso-Seguel, Bustos, Guevara, Torres, Mariángel, Fu and Marrero. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: MABEL URRUTIA

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material