Event-related brain potentials evoked by verbs and nouns in a primed lexical decision task

• Published in: Psychophysiology Vol. 38; no. 4; pp. 694 - 703
• Main Authors: RÖSLER, FRANK, STREB, JUDITH, HAAN, HUBERTUS
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Cambridge University Press 01.07.2001; Blackwell Publishing; Blackwell
• Subjects: Adult; Arousal - physiology; Behavioral psychophysiology; Biological and medical sciences; Brain Mapping; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Decision Making - physiology; Electrophysiology; ERP; Evoked Potentials, Auditory - physiology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Lexical decision; Male; N400; Nouns; Phonetics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time - physiology; Semantic priming; Semantics; Speech Perception - physiology; Verbs; N400; ERP; Semantic priming; Nouns; Lexical decision; Verbs; Human; Semantic relation; Language; Priming effect; Central nervous system; Verb; Electrophysiology; Cognition; Event evoked potential; Brain (vertebrata); Noun
• ISSN: 0048-5772; 1540-5958; 1469-8986
• DOI: 10.1111/1469-8986.3840694

We investigated whether verbs and nouns evoke comparable behavioral and N400 effects in a primed lexical decision task. Twenty-nine students were tested, 13 in a pilot study in which only response times and error rates were collected and 16 in a study in which ERPs were recorded from 124 scalp electrodes. Stimuli were noun–noun and verb–verb pairs with the targets bearing either a strong, a moderate, or no semantic association to the prime or being a pseudoword. Behavioral data revealed comparable priming effects for both word categories. These proved to be independent from the SOA (250 and 800 ms) and they followed the well-known pattern of decreasing response times and error rates with increasing relatedness between target and prime. ERPs revealed pronounced N400 effects for both word categories with a larger amplitude for noun than for verb pairs. A systematic analysis of topographic differences between noun- and verb-evoked ERPs and N400 effects, respectively, gave no convincing support to the hypothesis that the two word categories activate distinct neuronal networks.