Munding Márton, Forgács Bálint, Lukics Krisztina Sára, Lukács Ágnes
Doctoral School of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Psychophysiology. 2025 Aug;62(8):e70125. doi: 10.1111/psyp.70125.
Recent empirical results have linked the N400 ERP with predictive language comprehension processes based on statistical learning (SL). However, links between SL abilities and N400 on the level of individual differences have so far been underexplored. The present study tested SL performance in 29 participants using speech segmentation and artificial grammar learning tasks, followed by EEG recordings of their N400 responses to sentences varying in cloze probability (high, intermediate, low). Mixed-effects models revealed that better online SL performance (SL-ON) was associated with larger N400 amplitudes across conditions. Additionally, working memory showed a significant main effect and interacted with SL-ON in modulating N400 amplitude, while cloze probability also had a robust, independent effect on it. These results demonstrate that individual differences in SL abilities contribute to N400 response variability, supporting the view that the semantic operations reflected by the N400 may involve some form of statistical learning as well. Our findings also raise the possibility that SL and CP tap into distinct levels of predictive mechanisms in language comprehension.
近期的实证研究结果已将N400事件相关电位与基于统计学习（SL）的预测性语言理解过程联系起来。然而，到目前为止，在个体差异层面上，统计学习能力与N400之间的联系尚未得到充分探索。本研究对29名参与者进行了言语分割和人工语法学习任务，以此测试他们的统计学习表现，随后记录他们对不同完形概率（高、中、低）句子的N400反应的脑电图。混合效应模型显示，更好的在线统计学习表现（在线SL）与各条件下更大的N400波幅相关。此外，工作记忆显示出显著的主效应，并且在调节N400波幅时与在线SL存在交互作用，而成形概率对其也有强大的独立影响。这些结果表明，统计学习能力的个体差异导致了N400反应的变异性，支持了N400所反映的语义操作可能也涉及某种形式的统计学习这一观点。我们的研究结果还提出了一种可能性，即统计学习和完形概率涉及语言理解中不同层次的预测机制。
