When two vowels go walking: An ERP study of the vowel team rule

Abstract

In an event-related potential (ERP) study of the vowel team rule in American English ("when two vowels go walking, the first does the talking"), we used a visual lexical decision task to determine whether words that do (e.g., braid) and do not (e.g., cloud) follow the rule elicit different processing, and to determine if this extends to nonwords (e.g., braip, cloup). In 32 young adults, N1 amplitude distinguished between rule-following and rule-breaking items: N1 amplitude was more negative to rulebreaking words and nonwords. In contrast, there were no significant effects of vowel team rule adherence on N400 amplitude. Behaviorally, participants responded more quickly and accurately to rule-following words, a pattern not observed for nonwords.These findings demonstrate that adherence to the vowel team rule can be indexed by both neural and behavioral measures in fluently reading young adults.