Congratulations to two lab members who presented their research this week.
First off, Emma Saraff presented her very successful Honors Thesis at the Psychology Department Honors Symposium. She looked at how properties of word onsets may or may not effect the latency of EEG components related to lexical processing, such as the N400. Word recognition models like COHORT and TRACE suggest that word-initial segments that facilitate word identification by being shorter and/or more informative lead to speedier activation. Using an existing set of EEG data from a single-word listening protocol, Emma partitioned the data based on informativeness (=Surprisal) or duration of the first phoneme (along with control partitions for whole-word frequency and duration) to test for predicted latency effects on the N400. Interestingly, she finds that while initial phoneme duration does modulate N400 amplitudes, there was no evidence for a latency shift. Congrats Emma!
Secondly, Samia Elahi presented a preliminary report of our new study on lexical repetition priming within and between speakers (joint work with Rob Wilder and Dave Embick, UPenn.) While the main data analysis stages remain ahead of us, Samia’s initial look reveals a sensible pattern: within-speaker priming appears at the earliest EEG components, like the N1, while between-speaker repetition priming only shows up at the later N400 component. Congrats Samia!
There is a lot going on beneath the surface in this data, though, so stay tuned for a more comprehensive report after Rob goes to work on these data during his visit to the lab this summer.
