Investigating reading comprehension through EEG

The advances in technologies for the past decades have provided researchers with several possibilities to investigate what goes on in one's brain since their eyes meet the page until comprehension is achieved. Since the mid-80's, numerous studies have been conducted with the use of the electroencephalogram (EEG) to investigate the process of reading, through the analysis of different components - N400, N100 or N1, P2, among others. The refinement of technology in the past years has contributed to the advances in tools that provide a clearer picture to the understanding of what occurs in one's brain while they are performing a cognitive task, such as language production and comprehension. Besides offering precise information about lesion sites in living patients, techniques such as neuroimaging (Positron Emission Tomography- PET, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-fMRI, near-infrared spectroscopy-NIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) allow researchers to work with normal subjects when investigating brain processing and language-related tasks. According to these authors, since bridging inferences tend to be more constrained by the text, it is possible that the LH shows greater involvement than the RH in the process of semantic information, i.e., content words. [...]given the structure of the expository type of text and that subjects were in the process of generating a possible conclusion in sentence three, as argued above, it seems reasonable to assume that the LH had a greater participation in this process in exposition, as demonstrated by the similar N1s for both content and function words. [...]since the RH is specialized in global processing, it seems reasonable to conclude that this hemisphere had to take the lead in sentence four, once subjects had to consider the information presented in the whole paragraph, in order to decide whether the last sentence fit the overall semantics of the just read text.