Give me a verb! Give me a noun!: an ERP investigation of perceptual words with ambiguous word classes

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that retrieving a verb from memory elicits different neural activity than retrieving a noun, however, what about words that can be both? It has been found that the context surrounding a target word hold primary importance in the classification of a word as being either a verb or a noun in the case of an ambiguous target word. Using Event-Related Potentials as a physiological instrument to measure cognitive processes through the means of a lexical decision task; the current study will examine brain activity when context is manipulated for words that are considered both verbs and nouns. The target words consisted of 5 English words: view, watch, witness, notice, sense. During the task, there were 2 sets of conditions presented to the participants twice. The first condition consisted of the words ‘to’ and ‘the’ preceding the target word in a random order. The second condition consisted of the word ‘this’ preceding or succeeding the target word in a random order. After the completion of all conditions, participants were prompted to complete a counterbalanced 9-point likert scale for each target word. They were asked to rate their opinion of how strongly each word was classified as a verb or a noun. Resulting ERP data was examined for contextual differences across word context category and between regions of interest montages.