Research in visual word recognition has shown that phonological neighborhood density facilitates visual word recognition. The current research was designed to determine the electrophysiological effect of phonological neighborhood density (PND). In two experiments, participants made lexical decisions to words varying on phonological neighborhood while Event-related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Behaviorally, the results replicate previous research by showing that words with many phonological neighbors were responded to more rapidly than were words with few phonological neighbors. However, the main contribution of the current research is that it shows an effect of PND on the N400 and Late Positive Component Event-Related Potentials. In contrast to previous reports in the literature, the nature of the effect was such that the N400 was larger to words with few phonological neighbors than to words with many. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and provided estimates of the independent components' time course and source localization. The increased N400 for small neighborhood words is thought to reflect additional semantic processing required for these words due their weaker phonological representations.

中文翻译：

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使用 N400 测量语音邻域对视觉词识别的影响：语义支架的证据

视觉词识别研究表明，语音邻域密度有助于视觉词识别。目前的研究旨在确定语音邻域密度 (PND) 的电生理效应。在两个实验中，参与者在记录事件相关电位 (ERP) 的同时，对在语音邻域上变化的单词做出词汇决定。在行为上，这些结果重复了之前的研究，表明具有许多音位邻居的单词比具有很少音位邻居的单词的响应速度更快。然而，当前研究的主要贡献是它显示了 PND 对 N400 和晚期阳性成分事件相关电位的影响。与之前的文献报道相比，效果的本质是，N400 对语音邻居很少的单词比对多语音邻居的单词大。实验 2 复制了这些发现，并提供了对独立组件的时间过程和源定位的估计。小邻域词的 N400 增加被认为反映了这些词由于语音表示较弱而需要的额外语义处理。