Pre-electoral surveys typically attempt, and sometimes fail, to predict voting behavior on the basis of explicit measures of agreement or disagreement with a candidate or political position. Here, we assessed whether a specific brain signature of disagreement with one's social values, the event-related potential component N400, could be predictive of voting behavior. We examined this possibilit...

To examine the role of meaning in morphological decomposition ({re-}+{play}), researchers have employed the priming paradigm. Perceptually masked primes lead to facilitation both when decomposition is semantically appropriate (hunter-HUNT) and when it is not (corner-CORN), whereas with fully visible primes facilitation is observed only in the former case. We investigated the N400 brain potentia...

Language comprehension studies have identified the N400, an event-related potential (ERP) correlate of the processing of meaning, modulation of which is typically assumed to reflect the activation of semantic information. However, N400 studies of conscious language processing have not clearly distinguished between meaning derived from a semantic relationship and meaning extracted through associ...

Effects of frequency, predictability, and position of words on event-related potentials were assessed during word-by-word sentence reading in 48 subjects in an early and in a late time window corresponding to P200 and N400. Repeated measures multiple regression analyses revealed a P200 effect in the high-frequency range; also the P200 was larger on words at the beginning and end of sentences th...

This longitudinal ERP study investigated changes in children's ability to map novel words to novel objects during the dynamic period of vocabulary growth between 20 and 24 months. During this four-month period the children on average tripled their productive vocabulary, an increase which was coupled with changes in the N400 effect to pseudoword-referent associations. Moreover, productive vocabu...

In a sentence reading task, words that occurred out of context were associated with specific types of event-related brain potentials. Words that were physically aberrant (larger than normal) elecited a late positive series of potentials, whereas semantically inappropriate words elicited a late negative wave (N400). The N400 wave may be an electrophysiological sign of the "reprocessing" of seman...

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Language interpretation is often assumed to be incremental. However, our studies of quantifier expressions in isolated sentences found N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) evidence for partial but not full immediate quantifier interpretation (Urbach & Kutas, 2010). Here we tested similar quantifier expressions in pragmatically supporting discourse contexts (Alex was an unusual toddler. Most...

There is an ongoing controversy regarding the role of gender in modulating components of the human visual-evoked potential (VEP) and event-related potentials (ERPs). Our aim was to further characterize the role of gender on VEPs, ERPs and response performance in an object recognition task. We recorded VEPs and reaction time (RT) in a paradigm wherein subjects responded to a randomly presented "...

This event-related potential (ERP) study explored the behaviour of N400 and post-N400 frontal positivities (pN400FP) during the processing of emotionally biased and unbiased sentences that randomly led to highly expected or unexpected word outcomes. Unexpected outcomes (as determined by sentence completion written tests) elicited significantly larger N400 and pN400FP responses than did highly e...