Electrophysiological dynamics of Social Concept Processing: Preliminary Results from a Semantic Priming Paradigm

Emerging evidence suggests that social language processing (e.g., isolated words such as “greet”) recruits socioemotional circuits, including the right insula and anterior temporal lobe. Such recruitment can be assessed through event-related potentials (ERPs), particularly the N400, and oscillatory analyses. This study examined, using a semantic priming paradigm, whether implicit interactions between social and action verbs are reflected in semantic integration indices, measured through cluster-based spatiotemporal ERP analysis. Exploratory analyses also assessed oscillations in the mu (8–14 Hz) and beta (12–30 Hz) bands, considered indices of motor simulation and sociocognitive processing, respectively. Results revealed a cluster around 400 ms for both social and action verbs, characterized by larger negative deflections for incongruent pairs in both conditions, with a stronger effect for social pairs. Complementarily, time-frequency analysis showed an early (~200 ms) desynchronization in the mu band for action pairs and in the beta band for social pairs. Overall, these findings suggest general semantic integration mechanisms shared across both conditions, alongside modality-specific oscillatory modulations for each semantic domain.