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Electrophysiological correlates of word planning in context-driven object and action naming
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Poster E9 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Irina Chupina1, Britta U. Westner1, Vitória Piai1,2; 1Radboud University, Donders Centre for Cognition, 2Radboud University Medical Center, Donders Centre for Medical Neuroscience
Investigations of the neural organisation of nouns (objects) and verbs (actions), originally inspired by observations from clinical populations (e.g. Miceli et al., 1984), have a long history. However, to what extent object and action word retrieval are neurally similar remains debated, with mixed findings that are not easily explained by either differences in investigation techniques or experimental tasks (Crepaldi et al., 2015). Furthermore, the neural similarity of the processes has frequently been inferred based on the spatial overlap, which in itself is not sufficient to provide conclusive evidence for or against the similarity of function. Thus, the aim of the current study is to investigate object and action word retrieval not only examining the spatial, but also the frequency and time dimension of the electrophysiological responses. To achieve this, we will use a well-established context-driven object naming paradigm (Piai et al., 2014) as well as a similarly-designed novel action naming task. Each task comprises constrained (The farmer milked the… or There is a priest kneeling in the church. He…) and unconstrained sentences (The child drew a… or There is a dark-haired man in the room. He… ) that end with the target picture (“cow” and “prays”). Contrasting the two conditions (constrained - unconstrained context) in the pre-picture interval yields an index of conceptual-lexical retrieval measured as oscillatory activity, namely alpha-beta power decreases in temporo-parietal and (to a lesser degree) frontal areas of the left hemisphere (Piai et al., 2020). First, we collected response time (RT) data for the novel action naming task (university students, n=21, 5 male) to ensure the presence of the context effect at the behavioural level. The mean RT was 713 ms (sd = 300 ms) in the constrained and 1037 ms (sd = 308 ms) in the unconstrained condition, with the effect size of Cohen’s d = 2.14. These results point to a similar, yet stronger behavioural context effect in the action naming task as compared to the object naming task (with the effect size of Cohen’s d = 1.6, see Roos & Piai, 2020). Currently, we are collecting EEG data from healthy young adults (intended n = 25). First, we will compute time-resolved power of the pre-picture interval. Based on the behavioural findings, we expect the neural correlates of object and action retrieval to both be indexed by alpha-beta power decreases. Next, to reveal the spatial distributions of the word retrieval effects, we will perform source reconstruction of the oscillatory activity. In terms of spatial similarity, the findings in the literature are mixed, either indicating frontal-temporal or no segregation when comparing object and action naming (for review, see Crepaldi et al., 2015). Taken together, this EEG study aims at further characterising the electrophysiological (dis-)similarities between object and action word retrieval, by looking at time-resolved alpha-beta band power decreases and their spatial extent.
Topic Areas: Language Production,