Sense combinations influence the neural mechanism of L2 comprehension in semantically violated sentences: Insights from emotioncy

The influence of senses and their combinations has already proven invaluable to language comprehension studies; however, it is not clear to what extent they may add to the functional characteristics of the biphasic, language-related electrophysiological markers. Therefore, to integrate information from different sensory modalities and investigate how sense combinations modulate the N400 and LPC during L2 sentence processing, we used the emotioncy model. Based on the model, we instructed a number of unknown English words to 30 participants using a combination of three (exvolvement) and five senses (involvement). Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and a visual acceptability judgment task (with 216 English sentences under non-violated and semantically violated conditions), the participants' behavioral and neural responses to the words were examined. The results revealed that, taking the retrieval-integration (RI) account, different sense combinations modulated the LPC responses to semantically violated sentences, yet left the N400 unchanged. Thus, to boost comprehension and reduce the cognitive load during the integration and reinterpretation process, multisensory properties of the input need to be enriched. •Semantically violated L2 sentences form a biphasic ERP pattern.•Sense combinations modulated the LPC responses to semantically violated sentences.•Sense combinations left the N400 unchanged.•Rich multisensory information reduces cognitive load during the integration process.