A thousand words are worth a picture: Snapshots of printed word processing in an ERP megastudy

摘要

Approximately 1000 words were presented to 75 participants in a goo-go lexical decision task while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). Partial correlations were computed for variables selected to reflect orthographic, lexical, and semantic processing, as well as a novel measure of the visual complexity of written words. Correlations were based on the item-level ERPs at each electrode site and time slice while applying a False Discovery Rate correction. Early effects of visual complexity were seen around 50 ms post-word onset, followed by the earliest sustained orthographic effects around 100-150 ms, and with the bulk of orthographic and lexical influences arising after 200 ms post-word onset. Effects of a semantic variable (concreteness) emerged later, at around 300 ms post-word onset. The overall time-course of these ERP effects is in line with hierarchical, cascaded, interactive accounts of word recognition in which fast feed-forward influences are consolidated by top-down feedback via recurrent processing loops.