Recent research has demonstrated that knowledge of real-world eventsplays an important role inguiding online language comprehension. The present study addresses the scope of event knowledge activation during the course of comprehension, specifically investigating whether activation is limited to those knowledge elements that align with the local linguistic context.The present study addresses th...

Previous research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) suggested that phonological processing in visual word recognition occurs rather late, typically after semantic or syntactic processing. Here, we show that phonological activation in visual word recognition can be observed much earlier. Using a lexical decision task, we show that ERPs to pseudohomophones (PsHs) (e.g., ROZE) differed f...

We propose a new concept for analyzing EEG/MEG data. The concept is based on a projection of the spatiotemporal signal into the relevant phase space and the interpretation of the brain dynamics in terms of dynamical systems theory. The projection is obtained by a simultaneous determination of spatial modes and coefficients of differential equations. The resulting spatiotemporal model can be cha...

Recent research has shown that pseudowords created by transposing letters are very effective for activating the lexical representation of their base words (e.g., relovution activates REVOLUTION). Furthermore, pseudoword transpositions of consonants are more similar to their corresponding base words than the transposition of vowels. We report one experiment using pseudowords created by the trans...

Errorless learning, i.e. learning under conditions that prevent the generation of false memory candidates, has been shown to lead to enhanced memory performance during retrieval compared to errorful, trial-and-error, learning. These two learning methods were implemented in a word-stem completion format and contrasted in young healthy subjects with stimulus-locked and response-locked event-relat...

BACKGROUND Emotional responding is sensitive to social context; however, little emphasis has been placed on the mechanisms by which social context effects changes in emotional responding. OBJECTIVE We aimed to investigate the effects of social context on neural responses to emotional stimuli to inform on the mechanisms underpinning context-linked changes in emotional responding. DESIGN We m...

Homophone interference effects in Stroop experiments are often taken as evidence for the hypothesis that semantic access in written Chinese language is mediated by activation of phonological processing. We here aim to test this hypothesis with Chinese single-character words by means of event related potential (ERP) recordings. Using color words, homophones of color words and color-word associat...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in written sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers read sentences in which a drawing depicting a target noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and either agreed or disagreed in gender with that of the preceding article. The gender-agreement violation at the drawing was asso...

Transfer appropriate processing (TAP) accounts propose that memory is a function of the degree to which the same neural processes transfer appropriately from the study experience to the memory test. However, in prior research, study and test stimuli were often similar physically. In two experiments, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to fragmented objects during an indirect mem...