Related Experiment Videos
ERPs reflect lexical identification in word fragment priming
Claudia K Friedrich1, Sonja A Kotz, Angela D Friederici
1Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. Claudia.Friedrich@uni-konstanz.de
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
|May 29, 2004
Summary
Spoken word recognition activates multiple mental lexicon entries. The P350 event-related potential (ERP) effect reflects this lexical identification, even across different sensory inputs.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Spoken word recognition involves activating multiple lexical entries.
- Cross-modal word fragment priming (CMWP) demonstrates this phenomenon.
- Event-related potentials (ERPs) can reveal neural correlates of word recognition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate ERPs associated with lexical identification in CMWP.
- To determine if ERP effects are modality-independent.
- To identify ERP correlates of lexical access in the mental lexicon.
Main Methods:
- Auditory primes followed by visual targets in a CMWP paradigm.
- EEG recording to measure ERPs (P350, N400, frontal negativities).
- Experiment 2 used visual primes to test modality independence.
Main Results:
- P350, frontal negativities, and N400 were sensitive to prime-target congruency in Experiment 1.
- Only the P350 effect was replicated across different fragment lengths in Experiment 2.
- The P350 effect suggests modality-independent lexical identification.
Conclusions:
- The P350 ERP component is a correlate of lexical identification.
- Lexical identification processes appear to be modality-independent.
- CMWP is a useful paradigm for studying the mental lexicon.