Abstract
The acquisition of new vocabulary is usually mediated by previous experience with language. In the visual domain, the representation of orthographically unfamiliar words at the phonological or conceptual levels may facilitate their orthographic learning. The neural correlates of this advantage were investigated by recording EEG activity during reading novel and familiar words across three different experiments (n = 22 each), manipulating the availability of previous knowledge on the novel written words. A different pattern of event-related potential (ERP) responses was found depending on the previous training, resembling cross-level top-down interactive effects during vocabulary acquisition. Thus, whereas previous phonological experience caused a modulation at the post-lexical stages of the visual recognition of novel written words (~520 ms), additional semantic training influenced their processing at a lexico-semantic stage (~320 ms). Moreover, early lexical differences (~180 ms) elicited in the absence of previous training did not emerge after both phonological and semantic training, reflecting similar orthographic processing and word-form access.
Highlights
Extensive vocabularies of tens of thousands of words and their continuous build-up throughout the entire life span are unique features of human linguistic communication
This P200 lexicality effect is similar to that found in previous studies [31,32,33,34,35] and reflects the differences between known, frequent words and completely unknown words at early stages of their lexical processing, which may be related to the process of whole-form lexical access
This experiment was aimed to determine whether novel word training in spoken domain would cause a facilitation in the visual recognition of the respective orthographic stimuli at early stages of their reading, underpinned by the activation of previously trained phonological codes
Summary
Extensive vocabularies of tens of thousands of words and their continuous build-up throughout the entire life span are unique features of human linguistic communication. According to some suggestions [1,2], the more levels at which a novel word gains activation there are, the more interactive its processing will be, contributing to its faster lexicalization. The lexicalization of novel word-forms refers to the development of fully fledged representations involving activations across different levels of analysis, which, crucially, show dynamic interactions with other word representations. This process is important for the efficient use of new vocabulary [3,4]. Brain Sci. 2020, 10, 717; doi:10.3390/brainsci10100717 www.mdpi.com/journal/brainsci
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