HOW DOES EVERY+ THING BECOME EVERYTHING? ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL STUDY OF WORD LEARNING IN DUTCH

KACZER LAURA; TIMMER KALINKA; SCHILLER NIELS

Huerta Grande

Congreso; XXVIII Congreso anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigacion en Neurociencias; 2013

The general aim of this work is to compare the processing of novel compoundwords with that of words already established in the mental lexicon. During a firstsession, adult Dutch subjects learn a series of novel compound words andimmediately after they perform a morphological priming task involving speechproduction. In this procedure, the targets are pictures (e.g., an apple) and theprimes are compound words morphologically related to the target, either Familiar(e.g. appelmoes, ?applesauce?) or Novel (e.g. appelgezicht, ?apple-face?). A secondsession took place two days after the first one, where they perform the samepriming task. Target?s naming latencies and event-related potentials (ERPs) datawere collected in both sessions. Our results show that Novel compounds haveinitially a stronger priming effect (i.e., reduced naming latencies) than Familiarcompounds, respect to an Unrelated condition, while this difference is reduced 48hlater. ERPs reveal a decrease in the N400 amplitude for the Novel condition respectto the Familiar and Unrelated. This effect is expressed in the centroparietal region,only during Session 2. Our results suggest that the novel compounds would beinitially processed as separate constituents, while the change through sessionscould reflect a consequence of the memory consolidation process that may help toassembly two initially separate words into a single unit