Brain-Language Alignment During Naturalistic Reading and Its Disruption by Mind-Wandering

Abstract

Encoding models offer a principled framework for linking computational representations of language to neural activity, but most electroencephalography (EEG) evidence for brain-language alignment comes from tightly controlled, word-by-word reading paradigms. Whether such alignment is detectable during naturalistic reading, and how it is affected by lapses in attention, remains unclear. We addressed these questions using ROAMM, a multimodal dataset containing simultaneous EEG and eye-tracking recordings with time-resolved mind-wandering (MW) annotations from 44 participants reading naturalistic texts. Ridge regression encoding models were trained to predict fixation-aligned EEG spectral power and fixation-related potentials (FRPs) from five word-embedding models (GloVe, word2vec, BERT, GPT-2, and Llama 3). Using permutation testing with false discovery rate correction, we found statistically reliable brain-language alignment across both feature types, with contextual embeddings outperforming static embeddings. Spectral alignment was strongest in the alpha and low-beta bands over parietal electrodes, while FRP-based alignment peaked 200-300 ms after fixation onset over central and parietal-occipital regions. Leveraging ROAMMs span-level MW annotations, we further show that brain-language alignment is systematically reduced during MW, an effect that was substantially larger for oscillatory (PSD) than for event-related (FRP) features. These findings demonstrate that modern language-model representations are reflected in EEG activity during naturalistic reading despite the modalitys inherent noise, and that fluctuations in attention constitute an underappreciated source of variability in brain-language encoding studies.