title: Pre-Activation Negativity (PrAN) in Brain Potentials to Unfolding Words.
abstract: We describe an event-related potential (ERP) effect termed the "pre-activation negativity" (PrAN), which is proposed to index the degree of pre-activation of upcoming word-internal morphemes in speech processing. Using lexical competition measures based on word-initial speech fragments (WIFs), as well as statistical analyses of ERP data from three experiments, it is shown that the PrAN is sensitive to lexical competition and that it reflects the degree of predictive certainty: the negativity is larger when there are fewer upcoming lexical competitors.
authors: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University Lund, Sweden.
authors: Pelle
authors: P
authors: Söderström
authors: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University Lund, Sweden.
authors: Merle
authors: M
authors: Horne
authors: Humanities Laboratory, Lund University Lund, Sweden.
authors: Johan
authors: J
authors: Frid
authors: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University Lund, Sweden.
authors: Mikael
authors: M
authors: Roll
keywords: ERP; PRAN; lexical competition; pre-activation; prediction; speech processing; word-initial fragment