Department of Applied Social Sciences, Canterbury Christ Church University Canterbury, UK.
Front Psychol. 2011 Mar 18;2:45. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00045. eCollection 2011.
In an event related potential (ERP) experiment using written language materials only, we investigated a potential modulation of the N400 by the modality switch effect. The modality switch effect occurs when a first sentence, describing a fact grounded in one modality, is followed by a second sentence describing a second fact grounded in a different modality. For example, "A cellar is dark" (visual), was preceded by either another visual property "Ham is pink" or by a tactile property "A mitten is soft." We also investigated whether the modality switch effect occurs for false sentences ("A cellar is light"). We found that, for true sentences, the ERP at the critical word "dark" elicited a significantly greater frontal, early N400-like effect (270-370 ms) when there was a modality mismatch than when there was a modality-match. This pattern was not found for the critical word "light" in false sentences. Results similar to the frontal negativity were obtained in a late time window (500-700 ms). The obtained ERP effect is similar to one previously obtained for pictures. We conclude that in this paradigm we obtained fast access to conceptual properties for modality-matched pairs, which leads to embodiment effects similar to those previously obtained with pictorial stimuli.
在一项仅使用书面语言材料的事件相关电位（ERP）实验中，我们研究了模态转换效应对 N400 的潜在调制作用。模态转换效应发生在第一句话描述了一个基于一种模态的事实之后，紧接着第二句话描述了一个基于另一种模态的第二事实。例如，“地窖是黑暗的”（视觉），前面要么是另一个视觉属性“火腿是粉红色的”，要么是一个触觉属性“手套是柔软的”。我们还研究了模态转换效应是否适用于虚假句子（“地窖是亮的”）。我们发现，对于真实句子，当有模态不匹配时，在关键单词“黑暗”处诱发的 ERP 会产生明显更大的额部、早期 N400 样效应（270-370ms），而当有模态匹配时则不会。对于虚假句子中的关键单词“光”，没有发现这种模式。在较晚的时间窗口（500-700ms）中获得了与负性相似的结果。所获得的 ERP 效应与之前获得的图片相似。我们得出结论，在这个范式中，我们为模态匹配的对快速获取了概念属性，这导致了与之前使用图像刺激获得的类似的体现效应。
