The effect of inter-letter spacing on the N170 during visual word recognition: An event-related potentials experiment.

Previous behavioral studies have shown that inter-letter spacing affects visual word recognition and reading. While condensed spacing may hinder the early stages of letter encoding because of increased crowding effects, the impact of expanded inter-letter spacing is still unclear. To examine the electrophysiological signature of inter-letter spacing on visual word recognition, we presented words in three different inter-letter spacing conditions (default, condensed [-1.

The time course of the lowercase advantage in visual word recognition: An ERP investigation.

Previous word identification and sentence reading experiments have consistently shown faster reading for lowercase than for uppercase words (e.g., table faster than TABLE).

The Sense of Sounds: Brain Responses to Phonotactic Frequency, Phonological Grammar and Lexical Meaning.

Two outstanding questions in spoken-language comprehension concern (1) the interplay of phonological grammar (legal vs. illegal sound sequences), phonotactic frequency (high- vs. low-frequency sound sequences) and lexicality (words vs.

Objects, events and "to be" verbs in Spanish--an ERP study of the syntax-semantics interface.

In Spanish, objects and events at subject position constrain the selection of different forms of the auxiliary verb "to be": locative predicates about objects require "estar en", while those relating to events require "ser en", both translatable as "to be in". Subjective ratings showed that while the "object+ser+en" is considered as incorrect, the "event+estar+en" combination is also perceived as unacceptable but to a lesser degree. In an ERP study, we evaluated the impact of a purely semantic distinction (object versus events) on the subsequent processing of these auxiliary verbs followed by locatives in Spanish.

Hands on the future: facilitation of cortico-spinal hand-representation when reading the future tense of hand-related action verbs.

Reading action-related verbs brings about sensorimotor neural activity, suggesting that the linguistic representation of actions impinges upon neural structures largely overlapping with those involved in actual action execution. While studies of direct action observation indicate that motor mirroring is inherently anticipatory, no information is currently available on whether deriving action-related knowledge from language also takes into account the temporal deployment of actions. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, here we sought to determine whether reading action verbs conjugated in the future induced higher cortico-spinal activity with respect to when the same verbs were conjugated in the past tense.