Related Experiment Videos
Electrophysiological manifestations of typicality judgment
D T Stuss1, T W Picton, A M Cerri
1School of Medicine (Neurology), University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Brain and Language
|March 1, 1988
Abstract:
Ten male subjects participated in an event-related potential study of typicality judgment of words that were of either high or low frequency of usage. The amplitude of a negative wave with an average peak latency of 490 msec (N400) correlated with the goodness-of-fit of a word to a particular category independent of frequency, with poor examples of the category evoking a significantly more negative waveform. The relative insensitivity of the N400 to word frequency suggests that the N400 reflects some postlexical evaluation rather than lexical access.