Contextual Semantic Relevance and Word Surprisal Predict N400 and P600 Dynamics During Naturalistic Reading
Word surprisal is a well-established computational predictor of human neural responses during language comprehension, but it remains less clear whether local semantic fit explains neural response variation beyond lexical expectation during naturalistic reading. Using the Dublin EEG-based Reading Experiment Corpus (DERCo), this study examined whether contextual semantic relevance predicts word-locked EEG activity in the N400 and P600 windows. Contextual semantic relevance was computed as an attention-aware measure of how strongly a target word is semantically connected to its recent discourse context, and it was compared with GPT-based word surprisal. Across 22 participants and 32 EEG chan...
| Authors | Kun Sun, Rong Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 July 2026 |
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