Brain Error–monitoring Activity is Affected by Semantic Relatedness: An Event-related Brain Potentials Study

Abstract

Abstract& Speakers continuously monitor what they say. Sometimes, self-monitoring malfunctions and errors pass undetected and uncorrected. In the field of action monitoring, an event-related brain potential, the error-related negativity (ERN), is associated with error processing. The present study relates the ERN to verbal self-monitoring and investigates how the ERN is affected by auditory distractors during verbal monitoring. We found that the ERN was largest following errors that occurred after semantically related distractors had been presented, as compared to semantically unrelated ones. This result demonstrates that the ERN is sensitive not only to response conflict resulting from the incompatibility of motor responses but also to more abstract lexical retrieval conflict resulting from activation of multiple lexical entries. This, in turn, suggests that the functioning of the verbal self-monitoring system during speaking is comparable to other performance monitoring, such as action monitoring. &

Auditory context effects in picture naming investigated with event-related fMRI

“…Given that the ACC has been implicated in conflict monitoring across a variety of cognitive tasks (Botvinick, Cohen, & Carter, 2004), it seems plausible that this activation could represent monitoring of competition among multiple lexical representations during speech production (see de Zubicaray et al, 2001). ERP studies of naming errors have also shown that the error-related negativity elicited by the ACC is larger following distractors that are semantically related to a target picture (e.g., Ganushchak & Schiller, 2008). Alternatively, the involvement of the ACC in language production might reflect the operation of an executive system that sets and maintains the overall task goal, an operation that is made more or less difficult by the presentation of a semantically or phonologically related distractor word (Roelofs, 2003).…”

Verbal self-monitoring in individuals with schizotypal personality traits: An exploratory ERP study

“…In this study, we adopted a phoneme monitoring Go/No-Go task, previously used in language production and verbal monitoring research (Ganushchak and Schiller, 2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2009. The details of the phoneme-monitoring task were similar to the control condition in Ganushchak and Schiller's (2006) study.…”

“…ERN peaks approximately 0-160 ms following an erroneous response (Falkenstein et al, 1991;Gehring et al, 1993). Several studies have shown that ERN can be elicited by speech errors in healthy individuals (Ganushchak and Schiller, 2006, 2008a, 2008b, 2009Masaki et al, 2001;Nú ria Sebastian-Gallé s et al, 2006). For instance, Masaki et al (2001) found that ERN occurred in response to vocal slips in the Stroop Color-Word task.…”

“…For instance, Masaki et al (2001) found that ERN occurred in response to vocal slips in the Stroop Color-Word task. Ganushchak and Schiller (2006, 2008a, 2008b, 2009) conducted a series of studies on verbal error monitoring and obtained robust ERN effects following verbal errors. It has been suggested that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a potential generator of ERN based on findings from dipole source analyses (Dehaene et al, 1994;Luu et al, 2000) and fMRI studies (Kiehl et al, 2000).…”

“…In particular, we adopted a phoneme monitoring Go/No-Go paradigm, which has been widely used in verbal monitoring research (Ganushchak and Schiller, 2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, and focused on ERN and Pe between individuals with schizotypal personality traits and healthy controls.…”