Schedule of Events | Symposia

Distinct Roles of N300 and N400 in Semantic Priming

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 1 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Grand Ballroom.

Hannah Kim¹, Joseph Dien¹, Donald Bolger¹; ¹University of Maryland, College Park

There has been increasing interest in how the frontal N300 (Franklin, Dien, Neely, Waterson, & Huber, 2007; Frishkoff, 2007; Kumar, Federmeier, & Beck 2021) contrasts with the posterior N400. The N300fz emanates from the posterior cingulate (O’Hare, Dien, Waterson, & Savage, 2008) whereas the N400 has been linked to the left superior temporal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus (van Petten and Lukka, 2006). Intriguingly, a study (Rhodes, & Donaldson, 2008) reported N400 effects only for simultaneous word pairs with associative (versus semantic) relations, but did not consider the N300. In this report, 69-channel EEG data were recorded from 40 participants performing a lexical decision task. The prime-target relations (associative, category coordinates, and semantic similarity) under automatic and controlled conditions were varied blockwise. Behavioral analyses indicated associative and category priming at the short SOA and all three types at the long SOA. The N300fz windowed measure revealed associative and category priming at both SOAs. The N400 windowed measure revealed all three types of priming, but only at the long SOA. We suggest that the N300fz reflects an automatic associative semantic process whereas the N400 reflects a more controlled generalized semantic process. By this account, the N300fz reflects the initial semantic retrieval of the individual words from an ASA semantic network, whereas the N400 reflects a more contextualized semantic assembly process in a connectionistic network, drawing on more sources of information. This differentiation can help inform models of semantic processing and the role of different cortical regions in language comprehension.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic