Influencing the N400: A study on factors that affect the N400 ERP component during sentence comprehension
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2014-08-29
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en
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Abstract
Effects of sentence position, word position, length, frequency, surprisal, LSA, concreteness, valence and arousal of nouns on the amplitude of the N400 ERP component were assessed during word-by-word rapid serial visual presentation of 205 sentences in 24 subjects. Linear mixed effects regression analyses revealed significant main effects for word position, length, surprisal, LSA, concreteness and valence. Interactions between length
and frequency and between word position and surprisal revealed to have significantly influence
on the size of the amplitude of the N400 component. The main effect of valence
showed that nouns characterized as unhappy evokes smaller N400 amplitudes than nouns
that are characterized as happy. The main effect of concreteness demonstrated that nouns
with an increased concreteness produce bigger N400s than abstract words. The main effect
of LSA showed that nouns that have a strong semantic relation with the preceding
context evokes a drop in the amplitude of the N400. This last finding lead to the thought
that word recognition takes place in a relatively late stage of the language processing
stream.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen