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.
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Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used for decades to study perception, cognition, emotion, neurological and psychiatric disorders, and lifespan development. ERPs consist of multiple components and reflect a specific neurocognitive process. In the past, there was no single source that could be consulted to learn about all the major ERP components; learning about a single ERP component required reading dozens or even hundreds of separate journal articles and book chapters. The Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components fills this void with a detailed review of the major ERP components. The book looks at the fundamental nature of ERP components, including essential information about how ERP components are defined and isolated. It explains in detail individual components, such as the N170, P300, and ERN. It further examines groups of related components within specific research domains, such as language, emotion, and memory. Finally, it analyses ERP components in special populations, including children, the elderly, nonhuman primates, and patients with neurological disorders, affective disorders, and schizophrenia.
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