Word frequency effect on mismatch negativity in human brain
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1
Saint Petersburg State University, Department of Higher Nervous Activity and Psychophysiology, Russia
In the present study, the effect of spoken word frequency on mismatch negativity (MMN) was investigated. Words’ frequency of occurrence is one of the relevant psycholinguistic parameters to characterize the process of lexical identification and it seems probable that there might be differences in latency and amplitude of MMN evoked by words with different frequency of occurrence.
The stimuli consisted of four pairs of synthesized consonant-vowel-consonant words with different frequency of occurrence in Russian language. Each pair was presented to ten healthy subjects (age range 19-29) in an oddball paradigm in direct (i.e. word 1 as the deviant stimulus and word 2 as the standard stimulus) and reversed condition (i.e. word 2 as the deviant stimulus and word 1 as the standard stimulus), which provided equal influence of physical differences between stimuli on the MMN. Also acoustical difference between stimuli was the smallest (variance between words in a pair was the only one vowel) thus providing minimum influence on the parameters of the MMN.
We found that words with high and moderate frequency of occurrence elicited significantly enhanced MMN with shorter peak latency as compared to words with low frequency of occurrence. For example, in the most demonstrative pair a strong evidence of the MMN was found in 40 ms windows around individual peaks when a frequent word (‘mir’) was presented as the deviant stimulus among the repetitive rare words (‘mor’) as the standard stimuli (F (1,7) = 40.42, p = 0.0004), while in reversed condition (low frequency word as the deviant) there were no such differences.
So, a frequent word may represent a more relevant change in repeating acoustic stimulation and elicit stronger MMN - a mechanism of involuntary attention, which plays an important role in the processes of speech comprehension. Also, words with high frequency of occurrence might be processed faster than low frequency words, which is reflected by shorter peak latency of MMN.
Conference:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Presentations
Citation:
Belyaeva
D and
Alexandrov
AA
(2009). Word frequency effect on mismatch negativity in human brain.
Conference Abstract:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.109
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Received:
26 Mar 2009;
Published Online:
26 Mar 2009.
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Correspondence:
Daria Belyaeva, Saint Petersburg State University, Department of Higher Nervous Activity and Psychophysiology, Saint Petersburg, Russia, daria.belyaeva@gmail.com