Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

We predict the amplitude of the N400 during naturalistic sentence processing by using the updates of the internal representations of a Sentence Gestalt Model and a next-word prediction Language Model trained on the same corpus. The findings showed that changes in N400 amplitude correspond to the update in the implicit predictive representation of meaning during sentence comprehension. The comparison between the Sentence Gestalt Model activity and lexical surprisal might indicate two distinct but closely related sub-processes contributing to sentence processing.