title: Antonym canonicity: temporal and contextual manipulations.
abstract: Previous research on antonyms has shown that some pairings form more felicitous couplings than others. Following up on that research, we conducted two semantic categorization experiments using Event Related Potentials to establish whether there are neurophysiological differences related to levels of antonym canonicity. In Experiment 1, the members of canonical antonym pairs (e.g. black-white), non-canonical antonym pairs (e.g. white-dark) and unrelated word pairs (e.g. bumpy-small) were presented in isolation separated either by a short (200 ms) or a long (800 ms) time interval. The canonical antonyms gave rise to significantly lower N400 amplitudes than both non-canonical antonyms and unrelated pairs, but no significant difference in N400 amplitudes for non-canonical and unrelated pairs was found. In Experiment 2, the same pairs were presented in a congruent context. Significant differences in N400 amplitudes across all three conditions were found, also between non-canonical antonyms and unrelated word pairs.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, 221 00 Lund, Sweden. Electronic address: vdweijer@ling.lu.se.
authors.forename: Joost
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: van de Weijer
authors.affiliation: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, 221 00 Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Carita
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Paradis
authors.affiliation: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, 221 00 Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Willners
authors.affiliation: Dep. of Psychology, Lund University, Box 213, 221 00 Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Magnus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lindgren
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Adjectives; Antonymy; Context; Lexical; N400; Nouns; SOA; Semantics; Swedish