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Brain Research Bulletin
Volume 69, Issue 2, 31 March 2006, Pages 182-186
 
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doi:10.1016/j.brainresbull.2005.11.021    How to Cite or Link Using DOI (Opens New Window)
Copyright © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

An ERP study of low and high relevance semantic features

Giuseppe Sartoria, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, Francesca Mamelia, David Polezzia and Luigi Lombardib

aDepartment of General Psychology, University of Padua, Via Venezia, 8, 35100 Padova, Italy bDepartment of Cognitive Sciences and Education, University of Trento, Via Matteo del Ben, 5, 38068 Rovereto (TN), Italy

Received 27 October 2005; 
revised 30 November 2005; 
accepted 30 November 2005. 
Available online 20 December 2005.

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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.

Keywords: Semantic memory; Semantic relevance; N400

Article Outline

1. Introduction
2. Experiment
2.1. Materials and method
2.1.1. Subjects
2.1.2. Stimuli and task
2.1.3. ERP recording
3. Results
3.1. ERPs data
3.2. Behavioural data
4. Discussion
Appendix A. Appendix
References



Brain Research Bulletin
Volume 69, Issue 2, 31 March 2006, Pages 182-186
 
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