Word repetition priming-induced oscillations in auditory cortex: a magnetoencephalography study.

Magnetoencephalography was used in a passive repetition priming paradigm. Words in two frequency bins (high/low) were presented to the participants auditorily. Participants' brain responses to these stimuli were analyzed using synthetic aperture magnetometry. The main finding of this study is that single-word repetition of low-frequency word pairs significantly attenuated the post-second word event-related desynchronization in the θ-α (5-15 Hz) bands, at 200-600 ms of post-second word stimulus onset. Peak significance between repeated high and low frequency words was evident at approximately 365-465 ms of posttarget onset. This finding has implications for: (i) the role of θ-α event-related desynchronization in lexical representation and access, (ii) the study of repetition suppression in the spectral-temporal domain, and (iii) the connection of neuronal repetition suppression with behavioral effects of repetition priming.