Evoking the N400 Event-related Potential (ERP) Component Using a Publicly Available Novel Set of Sentences with Semantically Incongruent or Congruent Eggplants (Endings)

Abstract

During speech comprehension, the ongoing context of a sentence is used to predict sentence outcome by limiting subsequent word likelihood. Neurophysiologically, violations of context-dependent predictions result in amplitude modulations of the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component. While the N400 is widely used to measure semantic processing and integration, no publicly-available auditory stimulus set is available to standardize approaches across the field. Here, we developed an auditory stimulus set of 442 sentences that utilized the semantic anomaly paradigm, measured cloze probability for all stimuli, and was made for both children and adults. With 20 neurotypical adults, we validated that this set elicits robust N400′s, as well as two additional semantically-related ERP components: the recognition potential (∼ 250 ms) and the late positivity component (∼ 600 ms). This stimulus set (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9ghx3ffkg) and the 20 high-density (128-channel) electrophysiological datasets (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6wwpzgmx4) are made publicly available to promote data sharing and reuse. Future studies that use this stimulus set to investigate sentential semantic comprehension in both control and clinical populations may benefit from the increased comparability and reproducibility within this field of research.