Reading senseless sentences: Brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity

Abstract

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) elicited 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 semantically anomalous information. Copyright © 1980 AAAS.