We describe a novel method for tracking the time course of visual identification processes, here applied to the specific case of letter perception. We combine a new behavioral measure of letter identification times with single-letter ERP recordings. Letter identification processes are considered to take place in those time windows in which the behavioral measure and ERPs are correlated. A first significant correlation was found at occipital electrode sites around 100 msec poststimulus onset that most likely reflects the contribution of low-level feature processing to letter identification. It was followed by a significant correlation at fronto-central sites around 170 msec, which we take to reflect letter-specific identification processes, including retrieval of a phonological code corresponding to the letter name. Finally, significant correlations were obtained around 220 msec at occipital electrode sites that may well be due to the kind of recurrent processing that has been revealed recently by TMS studies. Overall, these results suggest that visual identification processes are likely to be composed of a first (and probably preconscious) burst of visual information processing followed by a second reentrant processing on visual areas that could be critical for the conscious identification of the visual target.

The concept of “monitoring” refers to our ability to control our actions on-line. Monitoring involved in speech production is often described in psycholinguistic models as an inherent part of the language system. We probed the specificity of speech monitoring in two psycholinguistic experiments where electroencephalographic activities were recorded. Our focus was on a component previously reported in nonlinguistic manual tasks and interpreted as a marker of monitoring processes. The error negativity (Ne, or error-related negativity), thought to originate in medial frontal areas, peaks shortly after erroneous responses. A component of seemingly comparable properties has been reported, after errors, in tasks requiring access to linguistic knowledge (e.g., speech production), compatible with a generic error-detection process. However, in contrast to its original name, advanced processing methods later revealed that this component is also present after correct responses in visuomotor tasks. Here, we reported the observation of the same negativity after correct responses across output modalities (manual and vocal responses). This indicates that, in language production too, the Ne reflects on-line response monitoring rather than error detection specifically. Furthermore, the temporal properties of the Ne suggest that this monitoring mechanism is engaged before any auditory feedback. The convergence of our findings with those obtained with nonlinguistic tasks suggests that at least part of the monitoring involved in speech production is subtended by a general-purpose mechanism.

Literacy changes the way the brain processes spoken language. Most psycholinguists believe that orthographic effects on spoken language are either strategic or restricted to meta-phonological tasks. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the locus and the time course of orthographic effects on spoken word recognition in a semantic task. Participants were asked to decide whether a given word belonged to a semantic category (body parts). On no-go trials , words were presented that were either orthographically consistent or inconsistent. Orthographic inconsistency (i.e., multiple spellings of the same phonology) could occur either in the first or the second syllable. The ERP data showed a clear orthographic consistency effect that preceded lexical access and semantic effects. Moreover, the onset of the orthographic consistency effect was time-locked to the arrival of the inconsistency in a spoken word, which suggests that orthography influences spoken language in a time-dependent manner. The present data join recent evidence from brain imaging showing orthographic activation in spoken language tasks. Our results extend those findings by showing that orthographic activation occurs early and affects spoken word recognition in a semantic task that does not require the explicit processing of orthographic or phonological structure.