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Listeners are sensitive to the metric structure of words, i.e., an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, in auditory speech processing: Event-related potentials recorded as participants listen to a sequence of words with a consistent metrical pattern, e.g., a series of trochaic words, suggest that participants register words metrically incongruent with the preceding sequence. Here we examine whether the processing of individual words in silent reading is similarly impacted by rhythmic properties of the surrounding context. We recorded participants' EEG as they read lists of either three trochaic or iambic disyllabic words followed by a target word that was either congruent or incongruent with the preceding metric pattern. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to targets were modulated by an interaction between metrical structure (iambic vs. trochaic) and congruence: for iambs, more positive ERPs were observed in the incongruent than congruent condition 250-400 ms and 400-600 ms post-stimulus, whereas no reliable impact of congruence was found for trochees. We suggest that when iambs are in an incongruent context, i.e., preceded by trochees, the context contains the metrical structure that is more typical in participants' native language which facilitates processing relative to when they are presented in a congruent context, containing the less typical, i.e., iambic, metrical structure. The results provide evidence that comprehenders are sensitive to the prosodic properties of the context even in silent reading, such that this sensitivity impacts lexico-semantic processing of individual words.

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In auditory speech processing, phonological stress functions as an attention holding cue, which facilitates detection of mispronunciations and phonetic deviants in strong syllables as compared to weak ones. Whereas silent reading involves activation of phonological information including word stress, it is not clear whether it has any functional relevance for visual language processing. We investigated whether phonological stress impacts orthographic processing such as detection of misspellings in silent reading. In an ERP experiment, participants silently read intact and misspelled German words. We manipulated the strength of the misspelled syllable (strong vs. weak) as well as its position (word-initial vs. word-middle). No effect of stress was observed for misspellings occurring in a word-initial position suggesting that misspellings in word-initial position disrupt visual word processing regardless of the phonological strength of the first syllable. In contrast, phonological strength modulated the ERPs when misspellings occurred in the middle of the word: misspellings embedded in strong syllables enhanced the P600 and the N400-like component compared to misspellings in weak syllables. In this case, i.e., when misspellings occur in the middle of a letter string, lexical access may be hindered more when errors occur in strong syllables, as reflected in the enhanced N400 in strong compared to weak syllables. This in turn may facilitate active reanalysis as mirrored in the increased P600 in the strong condition. The findings are discussed in the context of the relatively late activation of phonological form in visual word recognition and its interaction with other perceptual visual information. Overall, the results demonstrate the functional significance of phonological stress in visual word processing.

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Visual object identification is modulated by perceptual experience. In a cross-cultural ERP study we investigated whether cultural expertise determines how buildings that vary in their ranking between high and low according to the Western architectural decorum are perceived. Two groups of German and Chinese participants performed an object classification task in which high- and low-ranking Western buildings had to be discriminated from everyday life objects. ERP results indicate that an early stage of visual object identification (i.e., object model selection) is facilitated for high-ranking buildings for the German participants, only. At a later stage of object identification, in which object knowledge is complemented by information from semantic and episodic long-term memory, no ERP evidence for cultural differences was obtained. These results suggest that the identification of architectural ranking is modulated by culturally specific expertise with Western-style architecture already at an early processing stage.

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Though associative recognition memory is thought to rely primarily on recollection, recent research indicates that familiarity might also make a substantial contribution when to-be-learned items are integrated into a coherent structure by means of an existing semantic relation. It remains unclear how different types of semantic relations, such as categorical (e.g., dancer-singer) and thematic (e.g., dancer-stage) relations might affect associative recognition, however. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we addressed this question by manipulating the type of semantic link between paired words in an associative recognition memory experiment. An early midfrontal old/new effect, typically linked to familiarity, was observed across the relation types. In contrast, a robust left parietal old/new effect was found in the categorical condition only, suggesting a clear contribution of recollection to associative recognition for this kind of pairs. One interpretation of this pattern is that familiarity was sufficiently diagnostic for associative recognition of thematic relations, which could result from the integrative nature of the thematic relatedness compared to the similarity-based nature of categorical pairs. The present study suggests that the extent to which recollection and familiarity are involved in associative recognition is at least in part determined by the properties of semantic relations between the paired associates.

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The FN400 refers to the early midfrontally-distributed difference between ERPs elicited by old and new items, which operates in a way consistent with a neural marker of familiarity-based recognition. Double dissociations between the FN400 and a later ERP index of recollection provide some of the most compelling evidence in support of dual-process models to date. It has recently been claimed, however, that there is no evidence that the FN400 is functionally distinct from the N400 index of implicit semantic priming (Voss, J., and Federmeier, K., FN400 potentials are functionally identical to N400 potentials and reflect semantic processing during recognition testing, Psychophysiology, 48, 532-546, 2011), challenging inferences made on the basis of this effect. We argue that the design employed to make this claim is flawed because it comprised a semantic priming manipulation embedded within a continuous recognition test which enabled recognition contrasts to be confounded by semantic processes in a number of ways. Here, ERPs were recorded from a design which avoided these confounds by employing a semantic priming paradigm which also served as the encoding phase for a surprise subsequent recognition test phase. An N400 effect elicited in the semantic priming task demonstrated the established centro-parietal maximum, whereas the difference between correctly responded to old and new ERPs in the recognition test was maximal over frontal sites in the same time window. When direct comparisons of the electrophysiological correlates of semantic priming and episodic recognition are recorded in a paradigm in which the two are not confounded, the FN400 reflects a qualitatively distinct effect from the N400.

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