This effect was not significant for the lexical stimuli. As found previously, there was a late positivity for high tone-inducing suffixes incorrectly preceded by a low stem tone. It had the same onset (400 ms) as in Roll et al. (2010), but its duration was shorter, probably due to noise introduced by the interfering hand movement, which occurred on average around 700 ms after suffix onset. The positivity was only found in selleck chemical the blocks involving the semantic task. This was also the only task yielding a corresponding interaction between stem
tone and suffix in the response times. This would suggest that the positivity does indeed show some kind of reprocessing of the uncued high tone-inducing suffix, i.e. a P600-like effect. Seventeen right-handed native speakers of Central Swedish, age 23.5 years, SD=3.8, 9 women, participated in the study. All were undergraduate students at Lund University. Thirty different words per condition, 360 in total, were presented in 6 blocks in pseudorandomized order with SOA jittered between 4 and 8 s. Stimulus nouns containing two syllables with voiceless stops
see more at the boundary between stem and suffix were chosen for ease of splicing. Two male Central Swedish speakers recorded the words in an anechoic chamber. The words were pronounced in isolation without any focal prominence. Test-words were cut between stem and suffix in order to create mismatching stem–suffix combinations, and the intensity was normalized
over stems and suffixes separately. The stem/suffix fragments were then spliced to obtain words with match and mismatch between stem tone and suffix. Stems were on average 631 ms long for high tones, SD=91, and 648 ms long for low tones, SD=85. High tone-inducing suffixes (plural) were 835 ms, SD=57, and low tone-inducing suffixes (singular definite) were 715 ms, SD=49. The high tone was 10.9 semitones (st), SD=0.7, and fell to 3.5 st, SD=2.4 during 388 ms, SD=117. The corresponding low tone was 3.2 st, SD=0.71 st, falling to 2.2 st, SD=1.1, with a duration of 406 ms from the lowest to the highest point, SD=154. Response times in the semantic task were measured from suffix onset, i.e. the unique disambiguation point where the Cobimetinib cell line test words could be identified as being either singular or plural. Reaction times in the boundary tasks were measured from word offset, i.e. the word boundary. A 129-channel HydroCel Geodesic Sensor Net from Electrical Geodesics Incorporated (EGI) recorded the EEG at a sampling rate of 250 Hz. Band-pass filter with cutoff frequencies 0.01–70 Hz was used online, and a 0.1–30 Hz filter was applied offline. Impedances were kept below 50 kΩ (manufacturer’s recommendation, high impedance amplifiers). CZ was used as online reference, and average re-referencing was computed offline.