Basic Electroencephalography (EEG) Guidelines for Language Researchers

There are approximately 86 billion neurons in the human brain that carry out a significant amount of brain communication. The nature of the language that the brain’s nervous system uses for communication is electrochemical. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a beneficial technique that gives us the opportunity to record brain activity over time to study various cognitive processes, including language processing in different levels and aspects, with millisecond precision. The purpose of the present paper is to help undergraduate students who might be interested in pursuing language research and provide basic knowledge for performing EEG recordings in the domain of Psycholinguistics. To this aim, this paper starts with a short introduction to EEG along with its pros and cons and then focuses on some general guidelines for designing, recording, analyzing, and reporting EEG data. In the end, some suggestions are provided to overcome the limitations of EEG and use it in a more efficient way.