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Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 17:1 (2022) ► pp.104–131

A N400 event-related potential elicitation paradigm for Canadian French speakers [*] *

| McGill University | Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal (CRIR – Jewish Rehabilitation Hospital (JRH) of the CISSS de Laval) | Université de Montréal | Research Centre, Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (CRIUGM) of the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île de-Montréal
| McGill University
| McGill University
| McGill University
| McGill University
| McGill University | Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal (CRIR – Jewish Rehabilitation Hospital (JRH) of the CISSS de Laval)
| McGill University | Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal (CRIR – Jewish Rehabilitation Hospital (JRH) of the CISSS de Laval)
| McGill University | Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal (CRIR – Jewish Rehabilitation Hospital (JRH) of the CISSS de Laval)

The N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) can be used to evaluate language comprehension, and may be a particularly powerful tool for the assessment of individuals who are behaviourally unresponsive. This study presents a set of semantic violation sentences developed in Canadian French and characterizes their ability to elicit an N400 effect in healthy adults. A novel set of 100 French sentences were created and normed through two surveys that assessed sentence cloze probability (n = 98) and semantic plausibility (n = 99). The best 80 sentences (40 congruent; 40 incongruent) were selected for the final stimulus set and tested for their ability to elicit N400 effects in 33 French-speaking individuals. The final stimulus set successfully generated an N400 effect in the grand-average across all individuals, and in the grand-average within age groups (young, middle-age, and older adults). On a single-subject level, the final stimulus set elicited N400 effects in 76% of the participants. The feasibility of using this stimulus set to assess semantic processing in behaviourally unresponsive individuals was demonstrated in a case example of a French individual in a disorder of consciousness. These sentences enable the inclusion of Canadian French speakers in this simple assessment of language comprehension abilities.

Keywords: N400 ERP component, cloze probability, semantic plausibility rating, Canadian French N400 elicitation paradigm, Canadian French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Phase 1: Sentence creation and norming
    • 2.1Materials and method
      • 2.1.1Sentence creation
      • 2.1.2Sentence norming
      • 2.1.3Participants
    • 2.2Results
      • Participant characteristics
      • Prospective N400 sentences characteristics
  • 3.Phase 2: N400 event-related potential validation
    • 3.1Materials and methods
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Stimulus presentation
      • 3.1.3Electroencephalographic recording and pre-processing
      • 3.1.4Event-related potential analysis
    • 3.2Results
      • 3.2.1Participants correctly identified the congruent and incongruent sentences
      • 3.2.2The final stimulus sentences set generated N400 event-related potentials
      • 3.2.3The final stimulus set generated N400 ERPs across all age groups
      • 3.2.4Individual responses to sentences varied between age groups
  • 4.Case application: Disorders of consicousness
    • 4.1Materials and methods
    • 4.2Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 25 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.20032.aze
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