Subjects were shown the terms of simple sentences in sequence (e.g., “A sparrow / is not / a vehicle”) and manually indicated whether the sentence was true or false. When the sentence form was affirmative (i.e., “X is a Y”), false sentences produced scalp potentials that were significantly more negative than those for true sentences, in the region of about 250 to 450 msec following presentation of the sentence object. In contrast, when the sentence form was negative (i.e., “X is not a Y”), it was the true statements that were associated with the ERP negativity. Since both the false‐affirmative and the true‐negative sentences consist of “mismatched” subject and object terms (e.g., sparrow / vehicle), it was concluded that the negativity in the potentials reflected a semantic mismatch between terms at a preliminary stage of sentence comprehension, rather than the falseness of the sentence taken as a whole. Similarities between the present effects of semantic mismatches and the N400 associated with incongruous sentences (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980) are discussed. The pattern of response latencies and of ERPs taken together supported a model of sentence comprehension in which negatives are dealt with only after the proposition to be negated is understood.

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Completion responses were collected for two sets of sentence contexts, which were designed to produce different distributions of probabilities for the primary responses. The subje~t population consisted of undergraduate college students. For each context, responses and their respective probability of occurrence are listed, and an index of the primary responses is provided. It is hoped that these normative materials will facilitate comparison among future studies of the effects of sentence contexts on word processing.Meaning is conveyed in language through sequences of words. The study of the relationship between comprehension of meaning and the processing of individual words has taken several forms in contemporary psychological research. A common method involves presenting literate subjects with contexts in the form of incomplete sentences. In educational research, Taylor's (1953) "doze" method has been widely used: Readers are presented prose passages of one or more sentences from which a number of words have been omitted. The reader's task is to fill in the word or words that seem the most appropriate completions of the context. Generally, as the context becomes more informative, in the sense of reducing uncertainty about possible alternative completions (Shannon, 1948), the range of responses elicited from a sample of readers becomes smaller, and anyone reader's ability to predict the most probable response increases. This simple procedure has been used to derive measures of text readability (e.g., Bormuth, 1975), assess the amount of information gained from reading a passage (e.g., Coleman & Miller, 1968;Rubenstein & Aborn, 1958), and assess the ability of readers of a certain grade level (e.g., Rankin & Overholzer, 1969) or reading level (e.g., Neville & Pugh, 1976-1977 to make use of contextual cues in reading.In psychology, use of doze-like procedures naturally followed the acceptance within psychology of the concepts of information theory. Miller and Selfridge (1950) had subjects generate sentence-like "approximations to English" in which the words in a sequence were constrained by a variable number of preceding words (n). As the level of constraint increased, acquisition and retention of the passages improved regularly up to about n = 7. Similarly, Aborn, Rubenstein, and Sterling (1959) showed that most of the information used in generating doze completions typically came from within seven or eight words preceding the missing word.Several studies of word recognition demonstratedWe would like to thank Karen Bryant for her assistance in data collection. Requests for reprints should be addressed to

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Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic—across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutionary perspective can help us understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic. Here, a diverse group of scientists, with expertise from evolutionary medicine to cultural evolution, provide insights about the pandemic and its aftermath. At the most granular level, we consider how viruses might affect social behavior, and how quarantine, ironically, could make us susceptible to other maladies, due to a lack of microbial exposure. At the psychological level, we describe the ways in which the pandemic can affect mating behavior, cooperation (or the lack thereof), and gender norms, and how we can use disgust to better activate native “behavioral immunity” to combat disease spread. At the cultural level, we describe shifting cultural norms and how we might harness them to better combat disease and the negative social consequences of the pandemic. These insights can be used to craft solutions to problems produced by the pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a scientific agenda to capture and understand what has become, in effect, a worldwide social experiment.