Examining the N400 semantic context effect item-by-item: Relationship to corpus-based measures of word co-occurrence

Petten, Cyma Van

doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2014.10.012

Cited by 46 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 84 publications

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“…Concreteness and length are included as control variables because they are correlated with both frequency and orthographic neighborhood. Moreover, concreteness has been shown to be a strong independent predictor of N400 amplitude in a recent single-item ERP investigation of word recognition (Van Petten, 2014). Sentence length is also included as a covariate, because variability in overall length may contribute to the strength of word position as a moderator of lexical effects.…”

Section: Lexico-semantic Modulation Of the N400 In Sentence Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently, studies of visual word recognition in and out of sentence contexts (Holcomb, Grainger, & O'Rourke, 2002; Laszlo & Federmeier, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2014; Vergara-Martínez & Swaab, 2012; Van Petten, 2014) have examined the influence of a word's orthographic neighborhood (the number and features of orthographically similar strings; Coltheart et al, 1977; Yarkoni, Balota & Yap, 2008) on semantic processing. These studies report that N400 amplitudes are larger (more negative) for words with more orthographic neighbors.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Although this is widely known, the practice of signal averaging across many items has often been viewed as necessary in ERP data analyses in order to identify components and improve the signalto-noise ratio. However, a growing number of studies have demonstrated that item-level analyses of EEG/ERPs can result in reliable effects (Dambacher et al, 2006;Delorme, Miyakoshi, Jung, & Makeig, 2014;Frank, Otten, Galli, & Vigliocco, 2015;Gaspar, Rousselet, & Pernet, 2011;Laszlo & Federmeier, 2014;Tremblay & Newman, 2015;Van Petten, 2014), challenging the assumption that the signal-to-noise ratio may be too low to detect ERP effects at the level of single items.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Revisiting the incremental effects of context on word processing: Evidence from single‐word event‐related brain potentials

2015

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The amplitude of the N400— an event-related potential (ERP) component linked to meaning processing and initial access to semantic memory— is inversely related to the incremental build-up of semantic context over the course of a sentence. We revisited the nature and scope of this incremental context effect, adopting a word-level linear mixed-effects modeling approach, with the goal of probing the continuous and incremental effects of semantic and syntactic context on multiple aspects of lexical processing during sentence comprehension (i.e., effects of word frequency and orthographic neighborhood). First, we replicated the classic word position effect at the single-word level: open-class words showed reductions in N400 amplitude with increasing word position in semantically congruent sentences only. Importantly, we found that accruing sentence context had separable influences on the effects of frequency and neighborhood on the N400. Word frequency effects were reduced with accumulating semantic context. However, orthographic neighborhood was unaffected by accumulating context, showing robust effects on the N400 across all words, even within congruent sentences. Additionally, we found that N400 amplitudes to closed-class words were reduced with incrementally constraining syntactic context in sentences that provided only syntactic constraints. Taken together, our findings indicate that modeling word-level variability in ERPs reveals mechanisms by which different sources of information simultaneously contribute to the unfolding neural dynamics of comprehension.

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Section: Lexico-semantic Modulation Of the N400 In Sentence Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Revisiting the incremental effects of context on word processing: Evidence from single‐word event‐related brain potentials

2015

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“…To reduce the variance between 2 experimental versions, we converted, for each version separately, the N400 amplitude values into z-scores [41]. All processing was done in Python, using the NumPy and Pandas packages [42].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

ERP Response Unveils Effect of Second Language Manipulation on First Language Processing

et al. 2016

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Lexical access in bilinguals has been considered either selective or non-selective and evidence exists in favor of both hypotheses. We conducted a linguistic experiment to assess whether a bilingual’s language mode influences the processing of first language information. We recorded event related potentials during a semantic priming paradigm with a covert manipulation of the second language (L2) using two types of stimulus presentations (short and long). We observed a significant facilitation of word pairs related in L2 in the short version reflected by a decrease in N400 amplitude in response to target words related to the English meaning of an inter-lingual homograph (homograph-unrelated group). This was absent in the long version, as the N400 amplitude for this group was similar to the one for the control-unrelated group. We also interviewed the participants whether they were aware of the importance of L2 in the experiment. We conclude that subjects participating in the long and short versions were in different language modes: closer to monolingual mode for the long and closer to bilingual mode for the short version; and that awareness about covert manipulation of L2 can influence the language mode, which in its turn influences the processing of the first language.

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“…For example, the word 'ride' may occur more often in the context around the word 'bicycle' than around 'elephant'. This low-level semantic relationship called semantic similarity [12] may also contribute to activity in the N400 time window (e.g., [13][14][15]) and should therefore be acknowledged as a potential factor influencing processing of words in a sentence context (e.g., [15][16][17]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dissociable effects of prediction and integration during language comprehension: Evidence from a large-scale study using brain potentials

Nieuwland

Barr

Bartolozzi

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Composing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale (N = 334) replication study, by investigating the effects of word predictability and sentence plausibility on the N400, the brain's electrophysiological index of semantic processing. A spatiotemporally fine-grained mixedeffects multiple regression analysis revealed overlapping effects of predictability and plausibility on the N400, albeit with distinct spatiotemporal profiles. Our results challenge the view that the predictability-dependent N400 reflects the effects of either prediction or integration, and suggest that semantic facilitation of predictable words arises from a cascade of processes that activate and integrate word meaning with context into a sentence-level meaning. Keywords Predictability; Plausibility; Semantic Similarity; N400Composing sentence meaning is easier with predictable words than with unpredictable words: for example, 'bicycle' is easier to process than 'elephant' in "You never forget how to ride a bicycle/an elephant once you've learned." This effect of predictability can be observed in behavioural measures of comprehension such as reading times [1] and on amplitude modulation of the N400 ERP component [2]. The N400 is a negative-going and centroparietally distributed component of the ERP, which occurs approximately 200-500 ms after word onset and that is strongly associated with lexico-semantic processing [2-3]. Predictable words elicit smaller N400 amplitude than unpredictable words, suggesting facilitation during semantic processing. However, to what extent is such an effect of predictability driven by other relationships between a word and its context, such as the plausibility of the described event? We addressed this issue by re-analysing data from a large-scale (N=334) replication study [4]. In a temporally fine-grained analysis, we explored whether predictability, plausibility, and semantic similarity have dissociable effects on word-elicited ERP activity and how these effects unfold over time.Word predictability is commonly operationalized as 'cloze probability', the probability of being used in a non-speeded, offline sentence completion test. The correlation between word predictability and N400 amplitude is well-established [5], with some studies reporting correlations as high as or even higher than r = .8 [2,[6][7]. Such results are often considered to demonstrate effects of prediction: people pre-activate a word fully before it appears (as when a specific lexical form can be strongly anticipated in a highly constraining context) or partially (as when some semantic features are activated due to passive spreading of information). Prediction facilitates the semantic activation processes that are initiated when the word appears and are reflected in N400 activity [5].

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Examining the N400 semantic context effect item-by-item: Relationship to corpus-based measures of word co-occurrence

Cited by 46 publications

References 84 publications

Revisiting the incremental effects of context on word processing: Evidence from single‐word event‐related brain potentials

Revisiting the incremental effects of context on word processing: Evidence from single‐word event‐related brain potentials

ERP Response Unveils Effect of Second Language Manipulation on First Language Processing

Dissociable effects of prediction and integration during language comprehension: Evidence from a large-scale study using brain potentials

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