False hearing and the N400: the effects of linguistic context on language perception

False hearing is a phenomenon where one mishears what has been said to them based on linguistic contextual cues used to make a prediction (Rogers et al., 2012). The incorrect hearing usually has similar phonemic properties to other likely words and syntactic relation to what was said prior. Our study used methods from audiology and electrophysiology to analyze how linguistic contextual predictions impact perception in hearing. We observed the N400 response (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980) to incongruent phonologic lures used as target words that were presented in noise at a + 3dB SNR. We used the phonologic lure (PL) condition to collect data in instances where false hearing occurred (FH+) to compare to non-false hearing trails (FH-) as well as trials that used congruent (CON) or incongruent baseline (IB) words. We found a larger N400 effect in the IB condition compared to CON, and an intermediate N400 to the PL condition. Although our findings were not statistically significant, we did observe a trend of a decrease in amplitude in FH+ trials when contrasted to FH- trials. This may indicate that in false hearing, the participants response is somewhere in between hearing the congruent and the incongruent word with a very small threshold for choosing the word with a strong semantic fit to the perceived cue word over the actual incongruent phonologically similar target word. This suggests that false hearing may have a perceptual rather than a postperceptual locus.