Dynamic of verbal response preparation and Electroencephalography: A review

Over the last fifteen years, the recording of event-related electroencephalographic (EEG) activity (that is, Event-related potentials, ERP) has become a major tool to study conceptually driven word production. Here we review ERP studies on single word production, adopting an historical and methodological perspective. The first section of the paper presents a general overview of EEG recording and analysis methods. In the second section, we describe different paradigms used in language production studies and their evolution over recent years, focusing on the constraints imposed by EEG recording. Finally, two studies are reported as examples of paradigms employing overt picture naming paradigms. Here the purpose is to show that, while EEG/ERP paradigms do not aim to replace other behavioral measures, they allow the exploration of hypotheses that would otherwise be difficult to test.