OBJECTIVE: The main goal of the present study was to dissociate the effects on reading of frequency, age of acquisition (AoA) and imageability using the evoked response potential paradigm. METHOD: Twenty participants read words from three experimental conditions: high and low frequency, late and early age of acquisition and high and low imageability. RESULTS: High frequency words produced more positive mean amplitude than low frequency words in the 175-360 ms post-stimulus onset time window and late AoA produced more negative amplitudes than early AoA in the 400-610 ms window. Imageability did not produce any effect in any time window tested. Brain electromagnetic tomography showed the most activated cortical areas for each category of stimuli. CONCLUSIONS: The lexical frequency of words seems to affect an early phase in the recognition process, perhaps at the level of the orthographic input lexicon, while AoA was observed at a later stage, indicating that this variable influence processing at a semantic level or at the links between semantics and phonology. SIGNIFICANCE: EEG permits the researcher to investigate the time course, and approximate location in the brain, of psycholinguistic variables.
OBJECTIVE: The main goal of the present study was to dissociate the effects on reading of frequency, age of acquisition (AoA) and imageability using the evoked response potential paradigm. METHOD: Twenty participants read words from three experimental conditions: high and low frequency, late and early age of acquisition and high and low imageability. RESULTS: High frequency words produced more positive mean amplitude than low frequency words in the 175-360 ms post-stimulus onset time window and late AoA produced more negative amplitudes than early AoA in the 400-610 ms window. Imageability did not produce any effect in any time window tested. Brain electromagnetic tomography showed the most activated cortical areas for each category of stimuli. CONCLUSIONS: The lexical frequency of words seems to affect an early phase in the recognition process, perhaps at the level of the orthographic input lexicon, while AoA was observed at a later stage, indicating that this variable influence processing at a semantic level or at the links between semantics and phonology. SIGNIFICANCE: EEG permits the researcher to investigate the time course, and approximate location in the brain, of psycholinguistic variables.