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N400
About: N400 is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1639 publications have been published within this topic receiving 96819 citations.
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TL;DR: In a sentence reading task, words that occurred out of context were associated with specific types of event-related brain potentials that elicited a late negative wave (N400).
Abstract: In a sentence reading task, words that occurred out of context were associated with specific types of event-related brain potentials. Words that were physically aberrant (larger than normal) elecited a late positive series of potentials, whereas semantically inappropriate words elicited a late negative wave (N400). The N400 wave may be an electrophysiological sign of the "reprocessing" of semantically anomalous information.
4,226 citations
TL;DR: The effectiveness of the N400 as a dependent variable for examining almost every aspect of language processing is emphasized and its expanding use to probe semantic memory is highlighted to determine how the neurocognitive system dynamically and flexibly uses bottom-up and top-down information to make sense of the world.
Abstract: We review the discovery, characterization, and evolving use of the N400, an event-related brain potential response linked to meaning processing. We describe the elicitation of N400s by an impressive range of stimulus types—including written, spoken, and signed words or pseudowords; drawings, photos, and videos of faces, objects, and actions; sounds; and mathematical symbols—and outline the sensitivity of N400 amplitude (as its latency is remarkably constant) to linguistic and nonlinguistic manipulations. We emphasize the effectiveness of the N400 as a dependent variable for examining almost every aspect of language processing and highlight its expanding use to probe semantic memory and to determine how the neurocognitive system dynamically and flexibly uses bottom-up and top-down information to make sense of the world. We conclude with different theories of the N400’s functional significance and offer an N400-inspired reconceptualization of how meaning processing might unfold.
3,164 citations
TL;DR: The amplitude of the N400 component of the e.r.p.ps was found to be an inverse function of the subject's expectancy for the terminal word as measured by its ‘Cloze probability’, which suggests N400 may reflect processes of semantic priming or activation.
Abstract: The neuroelectric activity of the human brain that accompanies linguistic processing can be studied through recordings of event-related potentials (erp components) from the scalp The erps triggered by verbal stimuli have been related to several different aspects of language processing For example, the N400 component, peaking around 400 ms post-stimulus, appears to be a sensitive indicator of the semantic relationship between a word and the context in which it occurs Words that complete sentences in a nonsensical fashion elicit much larger N400 waves than do semantically appropriate words or non-semantic irregularities in a text In the present study, erps were recorded in response to words that completed meaningful sentences The amplitude of the N400 component of the erp was found to be an inverse function of the subject's expectancy for the terminal word as measured by its 'Cloze probability' In addition, unexpected words that were semantically related to highly expected words elicited lower N400 amplitudes These findings suggest N400 may reflect processes of semantic priming or activation
1,971 citations
TL;DR: Findings using an electrophysiological brain component, the N400, that reveal the nature and timing of semantic memory use during language comprehension support a view of memory in which world knowledge is distributed across multiple, plastic-yet-structured, largely modality-specific processing areas, and in which meaning is an emergent, temporally extended process.
1,924 citations
TL;DR: This article found that syntactic ambiguities are sensitive to syntactic anomaly, including anomaly engendered by disambiguating material following erroneous analysis of a syntactically ambiguous string (the "garden path" effect).
1,465 citations