Abstract
Lexical decision (LD) – judging whether a sequence of letters constitutes a word – has been widely investigated. In a typical lexical decision task (LDT), participants are asked to respond whether a sequence of letters is an actual word or a nonword. Although behavioral differences between types of words/nonwords have been robustly detected in LDT, there is an ongoing discussion about the exact cognitive processes that underlie the word identification process in this task. To obtain data-driven evidence on the underlying processes, we recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) data and applied a novel machine-learning method, hidden semi-Markov model multivariate pattern analysis (HsMM-MVPA). In the current study, participants performed an LDT in which we varied the frequency of words (high, low frequency) and “wordlikeness” of non-words (pseudowords, random non-words). The results revealed that models with six processing stages accounted best for the data in all conditions. While most stages were shared, Stage 5 differed between conditions. Together, these results indicate that the differences in word frequency and lexicality effects are driven by a single cognitive processing stage. Based on its latency and topology, we interpret this stage as a Decision process during which participants discriminate between words and nonwords using activated lexical information.
Highlights
Language encompasses our daily life — whether it is a simple chat with family or friends, a more formal presentation at work, or reading the newspaper
While the lexical decision task (LDT) task has been widely investigated and has yielded robust behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) findings, there has been an ongoing debate on the cognitive interpretation of these findings, in particular about the origin of the word frequency and nonword lexicality effects
Our study showed that these components should be studied together, as the latency between those components seems to be responsible for the overall reaction times (RT) effects in lexical decision
Summary
Language encompasses our daily life — whether it is a simple chat with family or friends, a more formal presentation at work, or reading the newspaper. One aspect involved in language processing is recog nizing words from a sequence of phonemes or a string of letters. A common paradigm for studying word recognition is a lexical decision task (LDT; Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). In this paradigm, participants are asked to indicate whether a combination of letters presented on the screen is an existing word or a nonword. There is an ongoing discussion about the cognitive processes that cause these differences
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