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Journal Article

Discourse-level semantic coherence influences beta oscillatory dynamics and the N400 during sentence comprehension

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Lewis,  Ashley Glen
Neurobiology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, External Organizations;
Haskins Laboratories;
International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Schoffelen,  Jan-Mathijs
Neurobiology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, External Organizations;

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Bastiaansen,  Marcel C. M.
Neurobiology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Academy for Leisure, NHTV University of Applied Sciences, Breda, The Netherlands;

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Citation

Lewis, A. G., Schoffelen, J.-M., Hoffmann, C., Bastiaansen, M. C. M., & Schriefers, H. (2017). Discourse-level semantic coherence influences beta oscillatory dynamics and the N400 during sentence comprehension. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 32(5), 601-617. doi:10.1080/23273798.2016.1211300.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002D-4FCF-1
Abstract
In this study, we used electroencephalography to investigate the influence of discourse-level semantic coherence on electrophysiological signatures of local sentence-level processing. Participants read groups of four sentences that could either form coherent stories or were semantically unrelated. For semantically coherent discourses compared to incoherent ones, the N400 was smaller at sentences 2–4, while the visual N1 was larger at the third and fourth sentences. Oscillatory activity in the beta frequency range (13–21 Hz) was higher for coherent discourses. We relate the N400 effect to a disruption of local sentence-level semantic processing when sentences are unrelated. Our beta findings can be tentatively related to disruption of local sentence-level syntactic processing, but it cannot be fully ruled out that they are instead (or also) related to disrupted local sentence-level semantic processing. We conclude that manipulating discourse-level semantic coherence does have an effect on oscillatory power related to local sentence-level processing.