Skip Nav Destination
Close Modal
Update search
NARROW
Format
Journal
TocHeadingTitle
Date
Availability
1-1 of 1
Joseph Fruchter
Close
Follow your search
Access your saved searches in your account
Would you like to receive an alert when new items match your search?
Sort by
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2015) 27 (10): 1912–1935.
Published: 01 October 2015
FIGURES
| View All (4)
Abstract
View articletitled, Lexical Preactivation in Basic Linguistic Phrases
View
PDF
for article titled, Lexical Preactivation in Basic Linguistic Phrases
Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such preactivation, however, has typically been studied indirectly through its subsequent effect on word recognition. Here, we use magnetoencephalography to study the dynamics of prediction within serially presented adjective–noun phrases, beginning at the point at which the predictive information is first available to the reader. Using corpus transitional probability to estimate the predictability of a noun, we found an increase in activity in the left middle temporal gyrus in response to the presentation of highly predictive adjectives (i.e., adjectives that license a strong noun prediction). Moreover, we found that adjective predictivity and expected noun frequency interacted, such that the response to the highly predictive adjectives (e.g., stainless ) was modulated by the frequency of the expected noun ( steel ). These results likely reflect preactivation of nouns in highly predictive contexts. The fact that the preactivation process was modulated by the frequency of the predicted item is argued to provide support for a frequency-sensitive lexicon.