Electrophysiological mapping of verbs modulation by lexicon-semantic features

• Grant number: 16/03960-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: July 01, 2016
• End date: March 11, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Cognitive Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Maria Teresa Carthery Goulart
• Grantee: Juliana Helena Bruno Machado
• Host Institution: Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 17/21380-7 - Functional connectivity of verbs' processing, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

To understand how we process and retrieve the meanings of what is heard or read is fundamental to language knowledge and understanding. However, to the present, the great majority of language research focus on noun processing. These projects have shown that there are levels of processing (i.e. prelexical, lexical and semantic) and that they occur in a cascaded manner, and they may overlap. Nevertheless, the verbs' dimensions that may influence their processing are still widely unknown. The present project aim to verify: (1) Which are the psycholinguistics variables that influence the visual recognition of verbs and (2) Whether the processing of these variables occur in cascade or parallel. We will evaluate 400 verbs, with different prelexical, lexical and semantic variables. We will, also, analyze how these variables modulate the neural processing of these verbs through concomitant EEG recording during two experiments. This study may contribute to further studies of lexical-semantic pathologies.