Department of Cognitive Science, Center for Research in Language, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA.
Annu Rev Psychol. 2011;62:621-47. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.131123.
We review the discovery, characterization, and evolving use of the N400, an event-related brain potential response linked to meaning processing. We describe the elicitation of N400s by an impressive range of stimulus types--including written, spoken, and signed words or pseudowords; drawings, photos, and videos of faces, objects, and actions; sounds; and mathematical symbols--and outline the sensitivity of N400 amplitude (as its latency is remarkably constant) to linguistic and nonlinguistic manipulations. We emphasize the effectiveness of the N400 as a dependent variable for examining almost every aspect of language processing and highlight its expanding use to probe semantic memory and to determine how the neurocognitive system dynamically and flexibly uses bottom-up and top-down information to make sense of the world. We conclude with different theories of the N400's functional significance and offer an N400-inspired reconceptualization of how meaning processing might unfold.
我们回顾了 N400 的发现、特征和不断发展的应用，N400 是一种与意义处理相关的事件相关脑电位反应。我们描述了通过各种令人印象深刻的刺激类型来引出 N400，包括书面、口头和手语单词或伪词；面部、物体和动作的图片、照片和视频；声音；以及数学符号，并概述了 N400 幅度（因为其潜伏期非常稳定）对语言和非语言操作的敏感性。我们强调了 N400 作为一个因变量，可用于研究语言处理的几乎所有方面，并突出了其扩展用途，用于探测语义记忆并确定神经认知系统如何动态和灵活地使用自下而上和自上而下的信息来理解世界。最后，我们对 N400 的功能意义进行了不同的理论探讨，并提出了一种受 N400 启发的重新概念化，说明意义处理可能是如何展开的。
