COMPLETION NORMS FOR 744 FRENCH LINGUISTI C CONTEXTS OF DIFFERING FORMATS

In 1980, Kutas and Hillyard (1980) reported that the presentation of a n unexpected, or incongruous, word within a sentence context is associ ated with a negative component, peaking 400 ms after word onset: the N 400 component. Numerous studies have been aimed at determining the fun ctional significance of this N400 component of the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) and at testing models derived from psycholinguistic research. Results of these experiments have added important informati on in the area of word recognition, repetition and context effects, an d language impairment research. Almost all of these experiments have b een conducted in English and have used standardized materials, thus al lowing comparison between results obtained in different laboratories. The aim of the study reported here is to provide such materials in Fre nch. A total of 744 sentences were constructed and presented to 52 nat ive French speakers. The last word of each sentence was omitted and su bjects were asked to complete the sentence context with the first word that came to mind that was syntactically and semantically appropriate . The Cloze probability (Taylor, 1953), that is the probability of a w ord being given to complete a sentence context, was computed for each sentence. Results are presented as a function of the number of words p er sentence. Three set of sentences were created depending upon the te rminal word's Cloze probability: low (n = 576), high (n = 58) and very high (proverbs, n = 110). The use of these sentences in experiments o n the electrophysiology of language processing and as a database in ps ychololinguistics and cognitive neuropsychology is discussed.