A lexical decision experiment was conducted while event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The word frequency and the first syllable frequency of each word were manipulated. Results showed that, while high frequency words produced less negative amplitudes in the N400 time window than low frequency words, the inverse pattern was found for syllable frequency. Words containing high frequency syllables produced more negative amplitudes than words containing low frequency syllables. Importantly, a significant syllable frequency effect was also obtained at the P200 time window. The results are interpreted in the framework of an interactive activation model, in which high frequency syllables produce the initial activation of a larger number of lexical candidates during the analysis of orthographic or phonological representations, which have to be inhibited later to allow the identification of a unique word. These findings support the idea that, at least in languages with clear syllabic boundaries, syllables are functional sublexical units during visual word recognition.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyntactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were collected from 22 English-Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2 present or not present in the first language (number and gender agreement, respectively) were manipulated at two different sentence positions-within and across phrases. The results for a control group of age-matched native-speaker Spanish participants included an ERP pattern of LAN-type early negativity followed by P600 effect in response to both agreement violations and for both sentence positions. The late L2 learner results included a similar pattern, consisting of early negativity followed by P600, in the first sentence position (within-phrase agreement violations) but only P600 effects in the second sentence position (across-phrase agreement violation), as well as significant amplitude and onset latency differences between the gender and the number violation effects in both sentence positions. These results reveal that highly proficient learners can show electrophysiological correlates during L2 processing that are qualitatively similar to those of native speakers, but the results also indicate the contribution of factors such as age of acquisition and transfer processes from first language to L2.

Abstract& A number of behavioral studies have suggested that syllables might play an important role in visual word recognition in some languages. We report two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using a new paradigm showing that syllabic units modulate early ERP components. In Experiment 1, words and pseudowords were presented visually and colored so that there was a match or a mismatch between the syllable boundaries and the color boundaries. The results showed color-syllable congruency effects in the time window of the P200. Lexicality modulated the N400 amplitude, but no effects of this variable were obtained at the P200 window. In Experiment 2, high-and low-frequency words and pseudowords were presented in the congruent and incongruent conditions. The results again showed congruency effects at the P200 for low-frequency words and pseudowords, but not for high-frequency words. Lexicality and lexical frequency effects showed up at the N400 component. The results suggest a dissociation between syllabic and lexical effects with important consequences for models of visual word recognition. &

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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 transposition of two consonants, two vowels, and their corresponding control conditions (i.e., the replacement of two consonants or two vowels) in a lexical decision task while Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The results showed a modulation of the amplitude of the N400 component as a function of the type of pseudoword (transposed-letter versus replacement letter pseudowords), and this modulation was different for transposed consonants and vowels. These results suggest that consonants and vowels play a different role during word processing. © 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.Keywords: Visual-word recognition; Transposed-letters; ERPs; Consonants and vowels When we read it is common to misread words like causal and casual. A growing number of studies have shown that, during the recognition of any given word, not only is the representation of the word itself activated, but also the representations of similarly spelled words ("neighbors"). Although the majority of "neighborhood" experiments have focused on one specific type of neighbor: one-letter different neighbors (e.g., trail and train), recent research has shown that transposed-letter neighbors may be even more perceptually similar to the target stimulus than oneletter different neighbors (trail and trial; [28,31]). Most notably, the presence of transposed-letter effects has critical implications for the choice of an input coding-scheme in visual-word recognition. Most current computational models of visual-word recognition [7,13,20] assume that each letter is encoded in a different "letter-channel", and hence they cannot accommodate the presence of transposed-letter effects.To overcome the limitations of a channel-specific codingscheme, a number of input coding-schemes have been proposed (SERIOL model [34] [14]; overlap model [12]). Although the basic mechanisms of how letter position is encoded differ across these models, they all predict that transposed-letter neighbors like casual and causal are perceptually very similar. There is one caveat, however: for simplicity's sake, these models assume that consonants and vowels are processed in the same way. As shown in the present paper, this assumption may be an oversimplification. Recent transposed-letter experiments [28,27] have shown that consonants and vowels play a different role in visual-word recognition. In particular, Perea and Lupker [28] obtained masked priming effects for consonant transpositions (relovución-REVOLUCIÓN versus retosución-REVOLUCIÓN), but not for vowel transpositions (reluvoción-REVOLUCIÓN versus relavición-REVOLUCIÓN). Furthermore, these findings have been extended...