Pulvermüller's talk abstract

Dear all, Dr Pulvermuller will be giving a talk on Thursday the 1st of March at 4PM at YNic (tomorrow). Here goes his abstract Early time course of psycholinguistic information access in the brain as revealed by neurophysiological imaging (EEG and MEG) Friedemann Pulvermüller, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK, friedemann.pulvermuller(a)mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk The main stream view in neurophysiological psycholinguistics has been that relatively late components of the brain response with latencies of 300-500 ms reflect higher stages of language processing, such as lexical access, semantic processing and context integration. This view is in contrast with data from psycholinguistics indicating very early psycholinguistic information access. Why, then, would ERP studies reveal late neurophysiological effects, but not the early ones psycholinguistic behavioral work would suggest? As language stimuli are very variable physically and psycholinguistically, the early components of the linguistic brain response, which are both focal and short-lived, may fall victim to the neurophysiological reflection of such stimulus variance [1]. Studies keeping stimulus variance to a minimum [2-3] or using new paradigms and analysis techniques [4-5] reported early (<250 ms) near-simultaneous effects of lexical and semantic processing in word recognition. The talk will discuss these effects, using neurophysiological data to judge linguistic models of the time course of psycholinguistic information access. A neurobiological model will be used to account for both the near-simultaneity of psycholinguistic information access as well as the minimal time delays observed. Distributed cell assemblies with specific cortical topographies binding information about word form and meaning may be the basis of near-synchrony and precise spatio- temporal patterning [5-7]. [1] Pulvermüller, F. (1999). Words in the brain's language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 253-336. [2] Pulvermüller, F., Lutzenberger, W., et al. (1995). Electrocortical distinction of vocabulary types. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 94, 357-370. [3] Pulvermüller, F., Assadollahi, R., & Elbert, T. (2001). Neuromagnetic evidence for early semantic access in word recognition. European Journal of Neuroscience, 13(1), 201-205. [4] Hauk, O., Davis, M. H., Ford, M., Pulvermüller, F., & Marslen- Wilson, W. (2006). The time course of visual word-recognition as revealed by linear regression analysis of ERP data. Neuroimage, in press. [5] Pulvermüller, F. (2005). Brain mechanisms linking language and action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(7), 576-582. [6] Pulvermüller, F. (2006). Word processing in the brain as revealed by neurophysiological imaging using EEG and MEG. In G. Gaskell (Ed.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. in press). Oxford: Oxford University Press. [7] Pulvermüller, F., & Shtyrov, Y. (2006). Language outside the focus of attention: the mismatch negativity as a tool for studying higher cognitive processes. Progress in Neurobiology, 79, 49-71. Silvia Gennari Department of Psychology University of York Heslington, York YO10 5DD United Kingdom