Distinct effects of semantic plausibility and semantic composition in MEG

To date, research on the neurobiology of semantic processing has focused almost entirely on the processing of semantic anomaly, inspired by Kutas & Hillyard’s (1980) discovery of an electrophysiological anomaly detector, the N400 ERP. As a consequence, little progress has been made in understanding how the brain computes the meanings of well-formed plausible expressions. In this study we contrasted semantically implausible and semantically plausible but difficult sentences with control sentences in MEG, in order to elucidate the neural bases of “normal” semantic processing outside the classic semantic violation paradigm. Plausibility, but not semantic composition effort, affected the amplitudes of a left temporal source at 300-400ms (M350), consistent with previous MEG results. In contrast, semantic composition effort, but not plausibility, affected the amplitudes of an anterior midline field (AMF) at 350-500ms. The N400 is commonly hypothesized to reflect semantic “integration.” But these results show that when semantic composition/integration is manipulated in well-formed plausible expressions, effects occur in the frontal lobe and not in the generator of the N400 effect.

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