Is the LAN effect in morphosyntactic processing an ERP artifact?

Abstract

HighlightsWe studied whether the LAN effect is due to component overlap.A large ERP dataset was considered (80 participants, 120 items).The LAN effect was consistently observed at the individual level.Most individual ERP responses were biphasic.Adding individual variability terms did not improve the LAN model fit. Abstract The left anterior negativity (LAN) is an ERP component that has been often associated with morphosyntactic processing, but recent reports have questioned whether the LAN effect, in fact, exists. The present project examined whether the LAN effect, observed in the grand average response to local agreement violations, is the result of the overlap between two different ERP effects (N400, P600) at the level of subjects (n = 80), items (n = 120), or trials (n = 6160). By‐subject, by‐item, and by‐trial analyses of the ERP effect between 300 and 500 ms showed a LAN for 55% of the participants, 46% of the items, and 49% of the trials. Many examples of the biphasic LAN‐P600 response were observed. Mixed‐linear models showed that the LAN effect size was not reduced after accounting for subject variability. The present results suggest that there are cases where the grand average LAN effect represents the brain responses of individual participants, items, and trials.