The Social N400, how and where does it come from? An EEG pilot study
Résumé
The N400 is an event-related potential reflecting meaning processing in the brain. Since its discovery thirty years ago, it has been widely studied to understand its origin and functional basis. Nonetheless, most of these studies focused on participants comprehending in isolation, while language comprehension often happens in a social context. As a first step to investigate the Social N400, this pilot study aimed to evoke a classical N400 response and then neutralize it using a discourse context. Participants had an electroencephalographic (EEG) scan while listening to context and target sentences. The target sentences were either plausible or implausible regardless of the context sentence, or context-dependent: meaning implausible on their own and plausible with the context sentence. Though previous research on the N400 mostly studied it using written stimuli, the current project used only auditory stimuli. This resulted in a more naturalistic design and set the ground to scale up the design to an interactive EEG experiment. By evoking an N400 only for the implausible condition, the experimental stimuli translated to Dutch, from Jouravlev et al. (2019), were validated. Thus, the results of this project pave the way to further study how and where the Social N400 comes from.
