6533b82cfe1ef96bd1290091
RESEARCH PRODUCT
ERP correlates of letter identity and letter position are modulated by lexical frequency
Manuel PereaPablo GomezTamara Y. SwaabMarta Vergara-martínezsubject
MaleLinguistics and LanguageAdolescentCognitive NeuroscienceSpeech recognitionExperimental and Cognitive PsychologySemanticsArticleLanguage and LinguisticsYoung AdultSpeech and HearingLexical decision taskHumansEvoked PotentialsBrainContrast (statistics)ElectroencephalographyN400LinguisticsPseudowordWord lists by frequencyPattern Recognition VisualReadingCategorizationWord recognitionFemalePsychologydescription
The encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created two pseudowords: A transposed-letter (TL: BRIGDE) and a replaced-letter pseudoword (RL: BRITGE). ERPs were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in two tasks: Semantic categorization (Experiment 1) and lexical decision (Experiment 2). For high-frequency stimuli, similar ERPs were obtained for words and TL-pseudowords, but the N400 component to words was reduced relative to RL-pseudowords, indicating less lexical/semantic activation. In contrast, TL- and RL-pseudowords created from low-frequency stimuli elicited similar ERPs. Behavioral responses in the lexical decision task paralleled this asymmetry. The present findings impose constraints on computational and neural models of visual-word recognition.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-04-01 | Brain and Language |