title: 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) elecited 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.
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D007802:Language; D011932:Reading