ERIC Number: EJ1006338
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Apr
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0093-934X
EISSN: N/A
ERP Correlates of Letter Identity and Letter Position Are Modulated by Lexical Frequency
Vergara-Martinez, Marta; Perea, Manuel; Gomez, Pablo; Swaab, Tamara Y.
Brain and Language, v125 n1 p11-27 Apr 2013
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. (Contains 4 tables and 9 figures.)
Descriptors: Semantics, Word Recognition, Stimuli, Diagnostic Tests, Brain Hemisphere Functions, Correlation, Models, Classification, Alphabets, Word Frequency, Decision Making, Computational Linguistics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A