New insights into name category-related effects: is the Age of Acquisition a possible factor?
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BioMed Central
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New insights into name category-related effects: is the Age of Acquisition a possible factor? Roberta Adorni* and Alice Mado Proverbio Address: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Viale dell'Innovazione 11, 20125, Milan, Italy Email: Roberta Adorni* - [email protected]; Alice Mado Proverbio - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 29 July 2009 Behavioral and Brain Functions 2009, 5:33
doi:10.1186/1744-9081-5-33
Received: 3 February 2009 Accepted: 29 July 2009
This article is available from: http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/5/1/33 © 2009 Adorni and Proverbio; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: Electrophysiological, hemodynamic and neuropsychological studies have provided evidence of dissociation in the way words belonging to different semantic categories (e.g., animals, tools, actions) are represented in the brain. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether a word's semantic domain may affect the amplitude and latency of ERP components, independently of any other factor. Methods: EEGs were recorded from 16 volunteers engaged in a lexical decision task (word/nonword discrimination) involving 100 words (flora and fauna names). This task allowed us to evaluate differences in processing between words belonging to different categories (fauna vs. flora) independently of task demands. All stimuli were balanced in terms of length, frequency of occurrence, familiarity and imageability. Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA) was performed on ERP difference waves of interest. Results: Our findings showed that the two categories were discriminated as early as 200 ms poststimulus, with larger responses to flora names over the left occipito-temporal areas, namely BA37 and BA20. Category-related ERP differences were also observed in the amplitudes of the later centro-parietal N400, posterior P300 and anterior LP components. Behavioral responses to words denoting fauna were more accurate than to words denoting flora. Conclusion: Overall, it seems that it was easier to access the lexical properties of fauna, probably because of their biologically relevant status. The results are discussed in the light of the possible role played by different factors.
Background Word comprehension requires access to semantic knowledge. How concepts are organized in the brain is a central theme of cognitive neuroscience in which at least two classes of debates interweave: the first about the existence of a single amodal semantic system vs. multiple semantic systems; the second about the existence of specific semantic category neural circuits, rather than cerebral activations
emerging from the distinctive features of the various concep
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