Paying attention to meaning

Several paradigms show that responses to one event compromise responses to a second event for around 500 ms. Such effects are generally attributed to attentional capacity limitations associated with processing information in the first event. In a task in which targets could be distinguished only by their meaning, we varied the semantic relationship between distractors and targets following at different lags. Semantic relatedness alone produced a classic attentional blink. We conclude by discussing how attention theory might best accommodate these new effects

Do syllables play a role in German speech perception? Behavioral and electrophysiological data from primed lexical decision.

Copyright © 2015 Bien, Bölte and Zwitserlood. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.We investigated the role of the syllable during speech processing in German, in an auditory-auditory fragment priming study with lexical decision and simultaneous EEG registration. Spoken fragment primes either shared segments (related) with the spoken targets or not (unrelated), and this segmental overlap either corresponded to the first syllable of the target (e.g., /teis/ - /teisti/), or not (e.g., /teis/ - /teistləs/). Similar prime conditions applied for word and pseudoword targets. Lexical decision latencies revealed facilitation due to related fragments that corresponded to the first syllable of the target (/teis/ - /teisti/). Despite segmental overlap, there were no positive effects for related fragments that mismatched the first syllable. No facilitation was observed for pseudowords. The EEG analyses showed a consistent effect of relatedness, independent of syllabic match, from 200 to 500 ms, including the P350 and N400 windows. Moreover, this held for words and pseudowords that differed however in the N400 window. The only specific effect of syllabic match for related prime-target pairs was observed in the time window from 200 to 300 ms. We discuss the nature and potential origin of these effects, and their relevance for speech processing and lexical access

Proceedings of the Workshop Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation (SCAR) 2007

This is the proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation, held in conjunction with NODALIDA 2007, on May 24 2007 in Tartu, Estonia.</p

Which Way to Integration? Examining Directional Association in Word-to-Text Integration Using ERPs

Skilled reading proceeds in a largely incremental manner, with readers attempting to integrate linguistic information from each word as it is encountered. The degree to which prospective and retrospective integration processes are functional in driving incrementally remains an open area of inquiry. In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to explore on-line lexico-semantic integration in conditions in which prospective and retrospective processing was more or less likely to occur, through the manipulation of the direction of lexical association between word in isolation and embedded in two-sentence texts. The N400 ERP component, an index of lexico-semantic processing, was examined across forward and backward association conditions. In both a word relatedness judgment (RJ) task and text comprehension (TC) task, reduced N400 amplitudes were seen over central scalp electrodes in conditions in which word pairs were either forward associated or backward associated, relative to conditions in which word pairs were unrelated (RJ) or lacking one word of the pair (TC). Additionally, a reduced negativity was found for forward associated pairs over right parietal electrodes in RJ, and an increased positivity was found for the backward associated condition over left parietal electrodes in TC. The evidence from central electrodes suggests that retrospective integration processes, and not simply prospective expectancy processes, modulate the N400 in incremental text processing. Additionally, the results suggest an enhanced role for expectancy in modulating ERPs at right parietal sites, and, potentially, an engagement of memory resonance processes in text processing over left parietal sites