No one way ticket from orthography to semantics in recognition memory: N400 and P200 effects of associations.

Computational models of word recognition already successfully used associative spreading from orthographic to semantic levels to account for false memories. But can they also account for semantic effects on event-related potentials in a recognition memory task? To address this question, target words in the present study had either many or few semantic associates in the stimulus set. We found larger P200 amplitudes and smaller N400 amplitudes for old words in comparison to new words.