TY - JOUR
T1 - An ERP study of low and high relevance semantic features
AU - Sartori, Giuseppe
AU - Mameli, Francesca
AU - Polezzi, David
AU - Lombardi, Luigi
PY - 2006/3/31
Y1 - 2006/3/31
N2 - It is believed that the N400 elicited by concepts belonging to living is larger than N400 to non-living. This is considered as evidence that concepts are organized, in the brain, on the basis of categories. We conducted a feature-verification experiment where living and non-living concepts were matched for relevance of semantic features. Relevance is a measure of the contribution of semantic features to the "core" meaning of a concept. We found that when relevance is low the N400 is large. In addition, we found that when the two categories of living and non-living are equated for relevance the seemingly category effect at behavioral and neural level disappeared. In sum, N400 is sensitive, rather than to categories, to semantic features, thus showing that previously reported effects of semantic categories may arise as a consequence of the differing relevance of concepts belonging to living and non-living categories.
AB - It is believed that the N400 elicited by concepts belonging to living is larger than N400 to non-living. This is considered as evidence that concepts are organized, in the brain, on the basis of categories. We conducted a feature-verification experiment where living and non-living concepts were matched for relevance of semantic features. Relevance is a measure of the contribution of semantic features to the "core" meaning of a concept. We found that when relevance is low the N400 is large. In addition, we found that when the two categories of living and non-living are equated for relevance the seemingly category effect at behavioral and neural level disappeared. In sum, N400 is sensitive, rather than to categories, to semantic features, thus showing that previously reported effects of semantic categories may arise as a consequence of the differing relevance of concepts belonging to living and non-living categories.
KW - N400
KW - Semantic memory
KW - Semantic relevance
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U2 - 10.1016/j.brainresbull.2005.11.021
DO - 10.1016/j.brainresbull.2005.11.021
M3 - Article
C2 - 16533668
AN - SCOPUS:33644850978
VL - 69
SP - 182
EP - 186
JO - Brain Research Bulletin
JF - Brain Research Bulletin
SN - 0361-9230
IS - 2
ER -