creators_name: Sartori, Giuseppe
creators_name: Mameli, Francesca
creators_name: Polezzi, David
creators_name: Lombardi, Luigi
type: journalp
datestamp: 2006-09-08
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:56:35
metadata_visibility: show
title: An ERP study of low and high relevance semantic features
ispublished: pub
subjects: behav-neuro-sci
full_text_status: public
abstract: It is believed that the N400 elicited by concepts belonging to Living is larger than N400 to Non-living. This is considered as evidence that concepts are organized, in the brain, on the basis of categories. We conducted a feature-verification experiment where Living and Non-living concepts were matched for relevance of semantic features. Relevance is a measure of the contribution of semantic features to the “core” meaning of a concept. We found that when relevance is low the N400 is large. In addition, we found that when the two categories of Living and Non-living are equated for relevance the seemingly category effect at behavioral and neural level disappeared. In sum, N400 is sensitive, rather than to categories, to semantic features, thus showing that previously reported effects of semantic categories may arise as a consequence of the differing relevance of concepts belonging to Living and Non-living categories.
date: 2006
date_type: published
publication: Brain Research Bullettin
refereed: TRUE
citation:   Sartori, Prof. Giuseppe and Mameli, Dr. Francesca and Polezzi, Dr. David and Lombardi, Dr. Luigi  (2006) An ERP study of low and high relevance semantic features.  [Journal (Paginated)]     
document_url: http://cogprints.org/5120/1/Sartori_et_al_Brain_Res_Bull_2006.pdf