School of Foreign Languages, Southwest University of Political Science and Law.
College of Foreign Languages, Chongqing Medical University.
Neuroreport. 2024 Nov 6;35(16):1030-1034. doi: 10.1097/WNR.0000000000002095. Epub 2024 Sep 25.
Much behavioral research has revealed interactive effects between stimulus quality and semantic priming in visual word recognition, practically in favor of the interactive activation model. However, the limited number of event-related brain potential (ERP) studies have yielded inconsistent results considering this interaction's impact on N400 amplitude. The current ERP study aimed to examine whether the joint effects of stimulus quality and semantic priming were specific to the lexical decision task. We used both behavioral measures and ERP recordings to evaluate the joint effects of stimulus degradation (i.e. highly vs. slightly degraded) and semantic priming (i.e. semantically related vs. unrelated) in a lexical decision task involving visual recognition of Chinese characters. The results showed significant degradation-by-priming interactions on response times and N400 amplitude ( P < 0.05), with larger semantic priming effects on slightly degraded targets. These converging behavioral and electrophysiological findings provide evidence in accordance with the interactive activation models of visual word recognition, in which the early-stage visual processing (i.e. degradation) cascades into the later-stage semantic processing (i.e. priming), thus yielding interactions observed in N400 amplitude.
大量行为研究揭示了刺激质量和语义启动在视觉词汇识别中的相互作用，实际上支持了交互式激活模型。然而，考虑到这种相互作用对 N400 幅度的影响，为数不多的事件相关脑电位 (ERP) 研究得出了不一致的结果。本 ERP 研究旨在检验刺激质量和语义启动的联合效应是否特定于词汇判断任务。我们使用行为测量和 ERP 记录来评估刺激退化（即高度退化与轻度退化）和语义启动（即语义相关与不相关）在汉字视觉识别中的词汇判断任务中的联合效应。结果表明，在反应时间和 N400 幅度上存在显著的退化-启动交互作用（P<0.05），在轻度退化的目标上，语义启动的效果更大。这些行为和电生理发现的一致性提供了与视觉词汇识别的交互式激活模型一致的证据，其中早期的视觉处理（即退化）级联到后期的语义处理（即启动），从而产生了在 N400 幅度上观察到的相互作用。
