Evoking the N400 Event-Related Potential (ERP) component using a publicly available novel set of sentences with semantically incongruent or congruent eggplants (endings)

During speech comprehension, the ongoing context of a sentence is used to
predict sentence outcome by limiting subsequent word likelihood.
Neurophysiologically, violations of context-dependent predictions result
in amplitude modulations of the N400 event-related potential (ERP)
component. While N400 is widely used to measure semantic processing and
integration, no publicly-available auditory stimulus set is available to
standardize approaches across the field. Here, we developed an auditory
stimulus set of 442 sentences that utilized the semantic anomaly paradigm,
provided cloze probability for all stimuli, and was developed for both
children and adults. With 20 neurotypical adults, we validated that this
set elicits robust N400’s, as well as two additional semantically-related
ERP components: the recognition potential (~250 ms) and the late
positivity component (~600 ms). This stimulus set
(https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9ghx3ffkg) and the 20 high-density
(128-channel) electrophysiological datasets
(https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6wwpzgmx4) are made publicly available to
promote data sharing and reuse. Future studies that use this stimulus set
to investigate sentential semantic comprehension in both control and
clinical populations may benefit from the increased comparability and
reproducibility within this field of research.