When a sunny day gives you butterflies: an electrophysiological investigation of concreteness and context effects in semantic word processing

Abstract

Empirical evidence from a cueing paradigm led to the controlled semantic cognition framework, according to which word concreteness and context interact during semantic word processing. Methodological approaches and findings on how this interaction manifests at the electrophysiological level are heterogenous. We measured event-related potentials applying the same cueing paradigm with 19 healthy participants, who judged synonyms of concrete and abstract words (e.g., butterfly and tolerance) after reading contextual and irrelevant sentential cues. Data-driven analyses showed that concreteness increased and context decreased negative-going deflections in broadly distributed bilateral clusters covering the N400 and N700/late positive component time range. Crucially, within a fronto-temporal cluster in the N400 time range, contextual (vs. irrelevant) information reduced negative-going amplitudes in response to concrete but not abstract words. The N400 amplitudes did not explain additional variance in the reaction time data, which showed a stronger contextual facilitation for abstract than concrete words. Our results support separate but interacting effects of concreteness and context on automatic and controlled stages of contextual semantic processing and suggest that effects on the electrophysiological vs. behavioral level obtained with this paradigm are dissociated.