Electrophysiological markers of syllable frequency during written word recognition in French

Abstract

a b s t r a c tSeveral empirical lines of investigation support the idea that syllable-sized units may be involved in visual word recognition processes. In this perspective, the present study aimed at investigating further the nature of the process that causes syllabic effects in reading. To do so, the syllable frequency effect was investigated in French using event related potentials while participants performed a lexical decision task (Experiment 1). Consistent with previous studies, manipulating the frequency of the first syllable in words and pseudowords yielded two temporally distinct effects. Compared to items with a first syllable of low frequency, items with a syllable of high frequency elicited a weaker P200 component, reflecting early sub-lexical facilitation, and a larger N400 component, supposed to ensue from competition between syllabic neighbours. To examine which factors determine the strength of interference during lexical access, regression analyses were conducted on the late temporal window potentials. The inhibitory syllable frequency effect was best predicted by leader strength, that is, the frequency ratio between the most frequent syllabic neighbour and the others. When this variable was directly manipulated while controlling for syllable frequency and number of higher frequency syllabic neighbours (Experiment 2), electrophysiological data confirmed the impact of leader strength. The results are discussed in the context of interactive activation-based models augmented with syllabic representations.

Early MEG markers for reading Chinese phonograms: Evidence from radical combinability and consistency effects

“…For example, Holcomb, Grainger, and O'Rourke (2002) demonstrated that words with small neighborhood size elicited larger amplitude in P200 than words with large neighborhood size did, and reading words with large neighborhood size elicited larger amplitude in N400 than reading words with small neighborhood size. Similar results have been demonstrated in studies of reading disyllabic words in Spanish, French and Basque (Barber, Vergara, & Carreiras, 2004;Chetail, Colin, & Content, 2012;VergaraMartinez, Dunabeitia, Laka, & Carreiras, 2009), and in reading Chinese characters (Hsu et al, 2009;Kong et al, 2010;Lee et al, 2007;Su, Mak, Cheung, & Law, 2012;Wu, Mo, Tsang, & Chen, 2012). In summary, these findings imply that the P200 might be associated with the early activation of orthographically/ phonologically similar words in the sublexical process.…”

“…The times between 150 and 300 ms were chosen to span a window within which effects have been associated with processing sublexical orthography and phonology, as reported in the electrophysiology literature (e.g. Chetail et al, 2012). Next, the response latency for the ROIs was defined as the latency with the largest dSPM values, and we employed the Desikan-Killiany gyral atlas (Desikan et al, 2006) to identify the anatomical location for each ROIs.…”

Increased Neural Efficiency in Visual Word Recognition: Evidence from Alterations in Event-Related Potentials and Multiscale Entropy

“…amplitudes observed in the current study are consistent with the interpretation that the requirement for attentional processing decreases over time with LDT learning. Alternatively, drawing from evidence of sublexical processing P200 effects [65][66][67] , our results may indicate altered reliance on sublexical processing during visual word recognition. These possibilities should be considered in future research.…”

“…Studies have found an inverse relationship between frontal P200 amplitude and the degree of supposed lexical activation that stems from early sublexical/syllable processing 62,[65][66] . For example, words with higher-frequency initial syllables are associated with weaker P200 amplitudes, compared to words with lowfrequency initial syllables, and are assumed to activate more of the lexicon during word recognition 65,67 . Conversely, greater P200 amplitudes were found when the colour boundary of a multicoloured word was mismatched from the syllable boundary, suggesting hindered syllable parsing and lexical activation 66 .…”

Temporal dynamics of early visual word processing – Early versus late N1 sensitivity in children and adults

“…While it has been shown that sublexical characteristics like syllable-frequency as well as orthographic and phonological neighbourhood may affect the time course of print processing (e.g., Barber, Vergara, & Carreiras, 2004;Bürki, Cheneval, & Laganaro, 2015;Chetail, Colin, & Content, 2012;Hutzler et al, 2004), being restricted to a very small number of English words (see also Methods), we could not have controlled for all these potentially important linguistic factors of the stimuli. Hence, while studying early print processing we found it of utmost importance to control for lexical familiarity and visual complexity of the stimuli presented.…”