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. 2009 May 13:1270:45-53.
doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2009.02.080. Epub 2009 Mar 12.

An ERP investigation of orthographic priming with relative-position and absolute-position primes

Jonathan Grainger  1 , Phillip J Holcomb
Affiliations

An ERP investigation of orthographic priming with relative-position and absolute-position primes

Jonathan Grainger et al. Brain Res. .

Abstract

The present study used event-related potentials to examine the time-course of relative-position and absolute-position orthographic priming. Relative-position priming was examined using primes formed by a concatenated subset of the target word's letters (e.g., cllet/COLLECT vs. dlema/COLLECT), and absolute-position priming was investigated using hyphenated versions of these primes (c-lle-t/COLLECT vs. d-lem-a/COLLECT). Both manipulations modulated the ERP waveform starting at around 100 ms post-target onset and extending into the N400 component. The first clear manifestation of priming was found in the N250 component, where hyphenated primes were found to have an earlier, more robust and more widely distributed effect than the concatenated primes. On the other hand, both prime types had similar effects on N400 amplitude. These results provide important information about the time-course of activation of location-specific and location-invariant (word-centered) orthographic representations during visual word recognition.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Linking ERP components to orthographic processing within the framework of Grainger and van Heuven’s (2003) model. A bank of parallel, independent, location-specific letter detectors (alphabetic array) send activation onto a location-invariant, word-centered, prelexical orthographic code (relative-position map), and from there onto whole-word orthographic representations. This corresponds to only part of the larger framework for word recognition described in the bi-modal interactive-activation model (see, Grainger & Holcomb, 2009; Holcomb & Grainger, 2007).
Figure 2
Figure 2
ERPs time locked to target onset in the concatenated (top) and hyphenated (bottom) priming conditions over-plotted with their respective unrelated control conditions. Target onset is marked by the vertical calibration bar and each tic mark represents 100 ms. Negative values plotted up.
Figure 2
Figure 2
ERPs time locked to target onset in the concatenated (top) and hyphenated (bottom) priming conditions over-plotted with their respective unrelated control conditions. Target onset is marked by the vertical calibration bar and each tic mark represents 100 ms. Negative values plotted up.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Voltage maps calculated by subtracting target ERPs from the concatenated related condition from their control ERPs (top) and the hyphenated related ERPs from their controls (bottom).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Electrode montage. The nine sites used for ANOVA are interconnected with grey lines.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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