The elicitation of phonological and semantic neuromagnetic field components by non-words in human auditory sentence comprehension.
The current research examined whether neuromagnetic field components relating to pre-lexical and semantic analysis would be evoked by non-word violations in Japanese auditory sentence comprehension. Stimuli contained semantically congruent short vowel-duration words, long vowel-duration non-words, and short-duration non-words with a deviant second syllable. Native speakers listened to sentences, while neuromagnetic fields were recorded with a twin 37-channel gradiometer system. The results in the 200-400 ms time window showed that at a peak latency of approximately 300 ms, vowel-lengthening and deviant-syllable violations produced larger magnetic fields than congruent words. In the 450-600 ms time range, the magnetic fields in response to deviant-syllable violations, but not vowel-lengthening violations, were larger than congruent words, with the peak latency at approximately 500 ms. The elicitations of M300 and M500 components in this study support the biphasic hypothesis where a pre-lexical phonological analysis stage precedes a post-lexical semantic integration stage in lexical recognition of a native language.
Inouchi
Mayako
M
English Department, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Kubota
Mikio
M
Ferrari
Paul
P
Roberts
Timothy P L
TP
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001931:Brain Mapping; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D015225:Magnetoencephalography / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*