title: Semantic relatedness between words in each individual brain: an event-related potential study.
abstract: The relationship between 2 words is judged by the meanings of words. Here, we examined how the semantic relatedness of words is structured in each individual brain. During measurements of event-related potentials (ERPs), participants performed semantic-relatedness judgments of word pairs. For each participant, we divided word pairs into 2 groups--related and unrelated pairs--and compared their ERPs. All of the participants showed a significant N400 effect. However, when we applied an identical grouping of pairs, this effect was observed only in half the number of the participants. These results show that our single-subject analysis of N400 extracted semantic relatedness of words in the individual brain. Future studies using this analysis will clarify the organization of the mental lexicon.
authors: Department of Language Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 1-1 Minami-Osawa, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0397, Japan. hata-masahiro@ed.tmu.ac.jp
authors: Masahiro
authors: M
authors: Hata
authors: Fumitaka
authors: F
authors: Homae
authors: Hiroko
authors: H
authors: Hagiwara
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult