Abstract
The concreteness effect (CE) describes a processing advantage for concrete over abstract words. Electrophysiologically, the CE manifests in higher N400 and N700 amplitudes for concrete words. The contribution of the stimulus-inherent imageability to the electrophysiological correlates of the CE is not yet fully unraveled. This EEG study focused on the role of imageability irrespective of concreteness by examining the effects of training-induced visual imageability on the processing of novel words. In two training sessions, 21 healthy participants learned to associate novel words with pictures of novel objects as well as electron-microscopical structures and were additionally familiarized with novel words without any picture association. During a post-training EEG session, participants categorized trained novel words with or without picture association, together with real concrete and abstract words. Novel words associated with novel object pictures during the training elicited a higher N700 than familiarized novel words without picture-association. Crucially, this training-induced N700 effect resembled the CE found for real words. However, a CE on the N400 was found for real words, but no effect of imageability in novel words. The results suggest that the N400 CE for real words depends on the integration of multiple semantic features, while mere visual imageability might contribute to the CE in the N700 time window.
Highlights
Language processing requires an association of a word’s form with its referent’s conceptual representation in semantic memory
In order to check how well participants learned the novel words, a Category (OPic, SPic, no pictures (NoPic)) × Session repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on the performance in the free reproduction task
This study investigated the effect of visual imageability on linguistic processing untainted of lexical concreteness
Summary
Language processing requires an association of a word’s form with its referent’s conceptual representation in semantic memory. Conceptual representations combine information taken from learning experience with the word and/or its referent and provide this information in the course of conceptual processing [1,2]. Depending on experiential differences concerning the words’ referents, words are often classified as either concrete or abstract (for a review see [3]). Concrete words’ referents (e.g., hammer) are perceivable with the external bodily senses. Abstract words refer to states or entities (e.g., harmony), which are not directly perceivable via external bodily senses, but rather arise from lexical information [4] or internal bodily senses (e.g., mental or emotional experience) [3,5,6,7]. The dual-coding theory [4]
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