Investigating speech perlocutionary effects in EEG/ERP-based neuropragmatic studies

This review contains a search for neuropragmatic studies related to the perlocutionary effects of speech acts on linguistic representations in the brain. This review study investigates the use of the electroencephalograph (EEG) with the event-related potentials (ERP) approach (method). This search was carried out by applying a number of criteria to the selection of articles using several search keywords, especially those related to the perlocutionary effects of speech acts and EEG/ERP. Of the 1,737 articles, 30 of them met the predetermined criteria. The results of this review are that there are three focuses of EEG/ERP-based neuropragmatic studies related to (1) the effect of stimulation of short sentences/speech in the context of conversation; (2) the effect of stimulation of literal and non-literal speech acts (irony and metaphor), and (3) the effect of stimulation of continuous speech acts in the context of discourse.