Ignoring the alternatives: The N400 is sensitive to stimulus preactivation alone

Abstract

The N400 component of the event-related brain potential is a neural signal of processing difficulty. In the language domain, it is widely believed to be sensitive to the degree to which a given word or its semantic features have been preactivated in the brain based on the preceding context. However, it has also been shown that the brain often preactivates many words in parallel. It is currently unknown whether the N400 is also affected by the preactivations of alternative words other than the stimulus that is actually presented. This leaves a weak link in the derivation chain—how can we use the N400 to understand the mechanisms of preactivation if we do not know what it indexes? This study directly addresses this gap. We estimate the extent to which all words in a lexicon are preactivated in a given context using the predictions of contemporary large language models. We then directly compare two competing possibilities: that the amplitude of the N400 is sensitive only to the extent to which the stimulus is preactivated, and that it is also sensitive to the preactivation states of the alternatives. We find evidence of the former. This result allows for better grounded inferences about the mechanisms underlying the N400, lexical preactivation in the brain, and language processing more generally.