Written-Word Concreteness Effects in Non-attend Conditions: Evidence From Mismatch Responses and Cortical Oscillations

It has been widely reported that concrete words have processing advantages over abstract words in terms of speed and efficiency of processing, a phenomenon known as the concreteness effect. However, little is still known about the early time-course of processing concrete and abstract words and whether this concreteness effect can still persist in conditions where attention is not focused on the words presented (automatic processing). This study aimed to shed light on these issues by examining the electrophysiological brain responses to concrete and abstract words. While participants were engaged in a non-linguistic color tracking task presented in the center of the monitor screen, matched Chinese concrete and abstract single-character words appeared within a passive oddball paradigm, out of the focus of attention. In calculating visual Mismatch Negativity (vMMN), Event-related potentials (ERPs) to words of the same semantic category were compared when these words were presented as deviants and standards. Before 320 ms, both abstract and concrete words yielded vMMN with left-lateralized distribution, suggesting similar verbal processing at an initial processing stage. After 320 ms, only concrete words additionally elicited vMMN with a central distribution. Time frequency (TF) analysis of the results also revealed larger theta power increase (200–300 ms) and theta power phase locking (200–450 ms) for concrete than for abstract words. Interestingly, there was more alpha power decrease for abstract than for concrete words from 300 to 450 ms. This may reflect the greater difficulty in processing abstract meaning. Taken together, our ERP and TF results point to the existence of different neural mechanisms underlying non-attentive processing of abstract and concrete words.

When "He" Can Also Be "She": An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese

The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive "/self" (/himself and /herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun) during reflexive pronoun resolution. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, gender congruity between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent was studied by manipulating the gender type of antecedents and the gender specificity of reflexive pronouns (default: /himself vs. specific: /herself). Results included a P200 "attention related" congruity effect for /himself and a P600 "integration difficulty" congruity effect for /herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of /himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of /herself supports a two-stage model for anaphor resolution. While both reflexive pronouns are evaluated at the bonding stage, the processing of the gender-specific reflexive pronoun is completed in the resolution stage.

Anatomical connectivity changes in the bilingual brain

How the brain deals with more than one language and whether we need different or extra brain language sub-networks to support more than one language remain unanswered questions. Here, we investigate structural brain network differences between early bilinguals and monolinguals. Using diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI) tractography techniques and a network-based statistic (NBS) procedure, we found two structural sub-networks more connected by white matter (WM) tracts in bilinguals than in monolinguals; confirming WM brain plasticity in bilinguals. One of these sub-networks comprises left frontal and parietal/temporal regions, while the other comprises left occipital and parietal/temporal regions and also the right superior frontal gyrus. Most of these regions have been related to language processing and monitoring; suggesting that bilinguals develop specialized language sub-networks to deal with the two languages. Additionally, a complex network analysis showed that these sub-networks are more graph-efficient in bilinguals than monolinguals and this increase seems to be at the expense of a whole-network graph-efficiency decrease.

Are Vowels and Consonants Processed Differently? Event-related Potential Evidence with a Delayed Letter Paradigm

To investigate the neural bases of consonant and vowel processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed in three different conditions: (i) simultaneous presentation of all letters (baseline condition); (ii) presentation of all letters, except that two internal consonants were delayed for 50 msec (consonants-delayed condition); and (iii) presentation of all letters, except that two internal vowels were delayed for 50 msec (vowels-delayed condition). The behavioral results showed that, for words, response times in the consonants-delayed condition were longer than in the vowels-delayed condition, which, in turn, were longer than in the baseline condition. The ERPs showed that, starting as early as 150 msec, words in the consonants-delayed condition produced a larger negativity than words in vowels-delayed condition. In addition, there were peak latency differences and amplitude differences in the P150, N250, P325, and N400 components between the baseline and the two letter-delayed conditions. We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual-word recognition and reading.