The N400 is Elicited by Meaning Changes but not Synonym Substitutions: Evidence From Persian Phrasal Verbs

Stone, Kate; Khaleghi, Naghmeh; Rabovsky, Milena

Abstract

We tested two accounts of the cognitive process underlying the N400 event-related potential component: one that it reflects meaning-based processing and one that it reflects the processing of specific words. The experimental design utilized separable Persian phrasal verbs, which form a strongly probabilistic, long-distance dependency, ideal for the study of probabilistic processing. In sentences strongly constraining for a particular continuation, we show evidence that between two low-probability words, only the word that changed the expected meaning of the sentence increased N400 amplitude, while a synonym of the most probable target word did not. The findings support an account of the N400 in which its underlying process is driven by the processing of meaning rather than of specific words.

Citation

Stone, K., Khaleghi, N., & Rabovsky, M. (2023). The N400 is Elicited by Meaning Changes but not Synonym Substitutions: Evidence From Persian Phrasal Verbs. Cognitive science, 47(12), Article e13394. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13394

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 22, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Dec 13, 2023
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2023
• Deposit Date: Sep 26, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 26, 2024
• Journal: Cognitive Science
• Print ISSN: 0364-0213
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 47
• Issue: 12
• Article Number: e13394
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13394
• Keywords: ERP; N400; Psycholinguistics; Semantic processing; Lexical processing
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4835654