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This study investigated whether form and meaning relatedness modulate the processing of morphologically related German verbs. In two overt visual priming experiments, we compared responses for verb targets (kommen, come) that were preceded by a purely semantically related verb (nahen, approach), by a morphologically and semantically related verb (mitkommen, come along), by a purely morphologically related verb (umkommen, perish), or by an unrelated verb (schaden, harm). In Experiment 1, morphological relatedness produced robust facilitation, which was not influenced by semantic relatedness. Moreover, this morphological facilitation was far stronger than the priming by purely semantically related verbs. In Experiment 2, orthographically similar primes (kämmen, comb) produced interference effects and thus indicated that the morphological facilitation effects were not the result of sheer form overlap between primes and targets. These findings argue for a single system that processes morphological relations independently of form and meaning relatedness.

Adult ADHD subjects display significantly poorer functioning versus healthy controls on complex but not on simple tasks of attention, and the degree of impairment varies with gender, with males displaying a higher level of impairment.

To our knowledge, this is the first meta-analysis of P3 characteristics in adults with ADHD. It reveals a significantly decreased P3 amplitude during target detection. Our result that the reduction in P3 amplitude increases with age is interpreted in a neurodevelopmental context.

Background and ObjectivesMismatch negativity (MMN) is an event-related potential (ERP) measure of preattentional sensory processing. While deficits in the auditory MMN are robust electrophysiological findings in schizophrenia, little is known about visual mismatch response and its association with social cognitive functions such as emotion recognition in schizophrenia. Our aim was to study the potential deficit in the visual mismatch response to unexpected facial emotions in schizophrenia and its association with emotion recognition impairments, and to localize the sources of the mismatch signals.Experimental DesignThe sample comprised 24 patients with schizophrenia and 24 healthy control subjects. Controls were matched individually to patients by gender, age, and education. ERPs were recorded using a high-density 128-channel BioSemi amplifier. Mismatch responses to happy and fearful faces were determined in 2 time windows over six regions of interest (ROIs). Emotion recognition performance and its association with the mismatch response were also investigated.Principal ObservationsMismatch signals to both emotional conditions were significantly attenuated in patients compared to controls in central and temporal ROIs. Controls recognized emotions significantly better than patients. The association between overall emotion recognition performance and mismatch response to the happy condition was significant in the 250–360 ms time window in the central ROI. The estimated sources of the mismatch responses for both emotional conditions were localized in frontal regions, where patients showed significantly lower activity.ConclusionsImpaired generation of mismatch signals indicate insufficient automatic processing of emotions in patients with schizophrenia, which correlates strongly with decreased emotion recognition.