Time­course of cognitive processes during proverb reading

BIANCHI B; SHALOM DE; KAMIENKOWSKI JE

Huerta Grande, Cordoba

Congreso; XXX Reunión Anual de Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias; 2015

As we read our brain performs a series of processes that allow the recognition of words in different levels of analysis: grapheme decoding, conversion to phonemes, meaning acquisition, context integration, etc. In most of sentence-reading EEG studies, it is proposed that the integration processes occur only at long latencies after each word was seen, presenting differences in N400 and P600 potentials. However, these times are not consistent with results from eye movements studies, where interaction of context-dependent variables (such as predictability of the word) and the word recognition itself are visibles in shorter times (before 300ms). In the present study we aimed to analyze the time-course and the interaction of the context with word recognition in Proverbs, as a extreme case of context-dependent processing. To achieve this goal, EEG recordings were made on participants during foveated word-by-word reading of three types sentences: Proverbs and high and low predictability sentences. As expected we found an early effect of the variables associated with word recognition (frequency on the lexicon) and later effect for integration with the context (predictability). On the other hand, both sentence type and the word position in the sentence also have effects on the ERPs, that could not be explained by a predictability effect alone.