Word class and word frequency in the MMN looking glass
Publication date
2021-05-05
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Organisational unit
ISSN
Series or journal
Brain and Language
Periodical volume
218
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Keyword
Speech comprehension
Mental lexicon
Attention
Event-related potentials
Mismatch negativity
Abstract
The effects of lexical meaning and lexical familiarity on auditory deviance detection were investigated by presenting oddball sequences of words, while participants ignored the stimuli. Stimulus sequences were composed of words that were varied in word class (nouns vs. functions words) and frequency of language use (high vs. low frequency) in a factorial design with the roles of frequently presented stimuli (Standards) and infrequently presented ones (Deviants) were fully crossed. Deviants elicited the Mismatch Negativity component of the event-related brain potential. Modulating effects of lexical meaning were obtained, revealing processing advantages for denotationally meaningful items. However, no effect of word frequency was observed. These results demonstrate that an apparently low-level function, such as auditory deviance detection utilizes information from the mental lexicon even for task-irrelevant stimuli.
Version
Published version
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