Taxonomically-related Word Pairs Evoke both N400 and LPC at Long SOA in Turkish

Abstract

Semantic priming in Turkish was examined in 36 right-handed healthy participants in a delayed lexical decision task via taxonomic relations using EEG. Prime-target relations included related- unrelated- and pseudo-words. Taxonomically related words at long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were shown to modulate N400 and late positive component (LPC) amplitudes. N400 semantic priming effect in the time window of 300-500 ms was the largest for pseudo-words, intermediate for semantically-unrelated targets, and smallest for semantically-related targets as a reflection of lexical-semantic retrieval. This finding contributes to the ERP literature showing how remarkably universal the N400 brain potential is, with similar effects across languages and orthography. The ERP data also revealed different influences of related, unrelated, and pseudo-word conditions on the amplitude of the LPC. Attention scores and mean LPC amplitudes of related words in parietal region showed a moderate correlation, indicating LPC may be related to relationship-detection process.