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What's in a name? Electrophysiological differences between spoken nouns, proper nouns and one's own name

Mueller, Horst M. and Kutas, Marta (1996) What's in a name? Electrophysiological differences between spoken nouns, proper nouns and one's own name. [Journal (Paginated)]

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Abstract

To investigate the neural processing of different word categories, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 32 individuals listening to sentences, beginning either with a proper name (first name), the subject's own name, or a common noun. Names and nouns both elicited ERP waveforms with the same early componentry, but the N1 and P2 components were larger for proper names than common nouns. The ERPs to the subject's own name also had a large N1/P2 plus a prominent negativity at parieto-central site peaking around 400 ms and a late positivity between 500-800 ms over left lateral-frontal sites. These findings are consistent with differential processing of people's first names within the category of nouns.

Item Type:Journal (Paginated)
Keywords:auditory, event-related potential (ERP), lexicon, nouns, proper names, spoken language processing, word categories
Subjects:Linguistics > Semantics
Neuroscience > Neurolinguistics
Psychology > Psycholinguistics
ID Code:2100
Deposited By: Mueller, Horst M
Deposited On:21 Feb 2002
Last Modified:11 Mar 2011 08:54

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