Event-related potentials of children and adults elicited by listening to semantically incongruent sentences

Abstract

Event-related potential (ERP) studies in adults have shown that semantically incongruent words elicit larger negative waves (N400) than congruent words. Also positive waves following N400 (late positive component (LPC)) have been reported to be sensitive to semantic congruity. In this study, we investigated the incongruity effects in adults and 4-year-old children during listening to semantically congruent and incongruent sentences. The N400 effect was found for both groups. The negative waves in the children, however, had larger amplitudes, longer peek latencies, and longer durations than those in the adults. The N400s in the children distributed larger over the left frontal scalps, while those of the adults tended to be centrally distributed. The LPCs were observed only in the adults. The results suggest that the semantic processing in children seems to be slower than that in adults, and the EEG topographies related to the semantic processing tend to be different between children and adults.