Two neurodevelopmental disorders, Williams syndrome (WS) and autism, are both commonly described as having opposite social profiles: social avoidance in autism vs hypersociability in individuals with WS. The goal of this study was to contrast the brain activity associated with language processing in these two populations, in order to understand the very likely interplay between the use of langu...

Meaningful and meaningless hand postures were presented to subjects who had to carry out a semantic discrimination task while electrical brain responses were recorded. Both meaningful and control sets of hand postures were matched as closely as possible. The ERPs elicited by meaningless hand postures showed an anteriorly distributed N300 and a centro-posteriorly distributed N400 component. The ...

We report a random-effects analysis of an event-related fMRI study (n = 28) of cerebral activity during the reading of sentences that ended with a word that was either congruent or incongruent with the previous sentence context. Event-related potential studies have shown that this task elicits a late negativity peaking around 400 ms poststimulus (N400) that is larger for incongruent than for co...

The authors assessed immediate repetition effects on event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants performed familiarity decisions for written personal names. For immediately repeated familiar names, the authors observed 3 distinct ERP modulations. At 180-220 ms, a posterior N200 effect occurred for names preceded by same-font primes only. In addition, an increased left temporal negativity...

Why do neural responses decrease with practice? We used a predictive neural network model of sentence processing (St. John &McClelland, 1990) to simulate neural responses during language understanding, and examined the model’s correlate of neural responses (specifically, the N400 component), measured as stimulus-induced change in hidden layer activation, across training. N400 magnitude first in...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects read sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. Words which were inconsistent with the "preferred" sentence structure elicited a brain potential (P600) quite distinct from the potential previously observed following contextually inappropriate words (N400). Furthermore, final words in sentences typically...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while subjects silently read several prose passages, presented one word at a time. Semantic anomalies and various grammatical errors had been inserted unpredictably at different serial positions within some of the sentences. The semantically inappropriate words elicited a large N400 component in the ERP, whereas the grammatical errors were ass...

In two experiments, direct and indirect semantic priming were measured using event-related potentials. In Experiment 1, participants rated the relatedness between prime and target on a seven-point scale. In Experiment 2, participants simply read the primes and targets as they monitored for a semantic category in probe filler items. Significant direct and indirect N400 priming effects were obser...

EEG was recorded as adults watched short segments of spontaneous discourse in which the speaker's gestures and utterances contained complementary information. Videos were followed by one of four types of picture probes: cross-modal related probes were congruent with both speech and gestures; speech-only related probes were congruent with information in the speech, but not the gesture; and two s...

Past research on spontaneous trait inferences using event related potentials (ERPs) has consistently reported increased late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes following social expectancy violations, but no N400 modulation. In the present study, participants read scenarios describing behaviors of unknown actors. They entailed descriptions of several positive trait implying behaviors, followed ...