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Does the N400 Also Reflect Semantic Integration?
Poster Session C, Saturday, September 13, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Geoffrey Lizar1,2, Charles Perfetti1,2, Weiqi Wang1,2, Anne Helder3; 1University of Pittsburgh, 2Learning Research and Development Center, 3Leiden University
The link between the N400 ERP component and semantic retrieval is well-established; however, recent challenges have been made to the claim that it is also sensitive to semantic integration. Delogu et al. (2019) performed an experiment that kept semantic priming constant, but presented a situation in which a target noun would be easier or harder to integrate; e.g., with a character either entering or exiting a restaurant, then opening a menu. They did not find an N400 effect—only a P600. From these null results and previous findings, they asserted that the N400 is only sensitive to retrieval effects, and the P600 is only sensitive to integration. Further work from the same lab (e.g., Delogu et al., 2021 and others) has continued to build on this claim. The present semi-replication builds on the work of Wang et al. (2025) to investigate whether the differences between Delogu et al.’s (2019) conditions may have too subtle to elicit an N400 effect. In contrast to Delogu et al.’s experiment, where the difference between conditions was a single word, our stimuli’s between-condition differences were multiple words long (and thus harder to mentally correct/ignore); across conditions, sentence 2 contained the target word, sentence 1 contained a semantically related prime, and other words prior to the target were kept as neutral as possible to minimize lexical association effects. Participants read an equal mix of stories where the target was either consistent or inconsistent with the situation, answering comprehension questions about each story while EEG data was recorded. In contrast to Delogu et al.’s (2019) main finding, this study did find an N400 effect between conditions in addition to a P600 effect, indicating that the N400 can be sensitive to semantic integration effects. Taken in context with other studies that have found N400 effects when manipulating integration difficulty (e.g., Van Berkum et al., 1999), the truth is unlikely to be as simple as Delogu et al. (2019) suggests, where the N400 indicates only semantic retrieval processes and the P600 indicates only semantic integration effects. Instead, it is likely that there is some overlap between the two processes, and that both ERP components are at some level sensitive to both processes. References: Delogu, F., Brouwer, H., & Crocker, M. W. (2019). Event-related potentials index lexical retrieval (N400) and integration (P600) during language comprehension. Brain and Cognition, 135, 103569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2019.05.007 Delogu, F., Brouwer, H., & Crocker, M. W. (2021). When components collide: Spatiotemporal overlap of the N400 and P600 in language comprehension. Brain Research, 1766, 147514. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147514 Van Berkum, J. J. A., Hagoort, P., & Brown C. M. (1999). Semantic Integration in Sentences and Discourse: Evidence from the N400. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 11(6), 657–671. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892999563724 Wang, W., Perfetti, C., & Helder, A. (2025). Getting to the situation: The N400 can indicate meaning integration beyond word priming. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 40(2), 177–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2024.2409905
Topic Areas: Reading,