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Neural Underpinnings of Semantic Processing

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Language Electrified

Part of the book series: Neuromethods ((NM,volume 202))

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Abstract

The N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP) is the most widely used brain signal in research on semantic processing. It has been discovered now more than 30 years ago, in 1980, as a larger negativity for semantically incongruent sentence continuations such as “I take my coffee with cream and dog” (as compared to congruent continuations such as “sugar”). The N400 has meanwhile been shown to be modulated by a very wide variety of lexical and semantic variables and has taught us a lot about how meaning is processed in language and beyond. This chapter reviews the literature on the N400 component including its relationship to the subsequent P600 component and discusses implications for the neurocognition of semantic processing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cloze probability refers to the rate of participants completing a sentence fragment with a specific word in offline sentence completion tasks; for instance, most participants complete the sentence fragment “I take my coffee with cream and…” with “sugar,” while some, but fewer participants, may complete the sentence, e.g., with “sweetener.”

  2. 2.

    How are concepts represented in the mind and brain? This is an actively debated issue, but one perspective is that concepts are represented based on semantic features. For example, the semantic features for the concept “mouse” could be: is an animal, is furry, is small, has a tail, has four legs, likes cheese, fears cats, etc. Empirical semantic feature production norms have been collected for large sets of concepts by asking large groups of participants to generate semantic features for living and nonliving things [41]. Based on these norms, it has been shown that semantic features play an important role in language and meaning processing. For instance, the number of a concept’s semantic features [4, 122], the intercorrelation of a concept’s features [123, 124], as well as overlap of semantic features between two concepts [125, 126] all modulate performance in lexical and semantic tasks.

  3. 3.

    There is an interesting interaction of this effect with the visual hemifield in which the stimuli are presented, indicating that the effect of semantic feature overlap may primarily rely on processes in the left hemisphere ([29]; see Fig. 1, row 2).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Emmy Noether Grant No. RA 2715/2-1 by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) to Milena Rabovsky.

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  1. University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Milena Rabovsky

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  1. Milena Rabovsky
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Correspondence to Milena Rabovsky .

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  1. Centro di Ricerca Interdisciplinare sul Linguaggio (CRIL), University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Mirko Grimaldi

  2. Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Elvira Brattico

  3. Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Yury Shtyrov

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Rabovsky, M. (2023). Neural Underpinnings of Semantic Processing. In: Grimaldi, M., Brattico, E., Shtyrov, Y. (eds) Language Electrified. Neuromethods, vol 202. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3263-5_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3263-5_16

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  • Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-0716-3262-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-0716-3263-5

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