Journal
COGNITION
Volume 116, Issue 2, Pages 289-296Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.05.004
Keywords
Word learning; Language acquisition; Event-related potentials; N400
Categories
Funding
- NIA NIH HHS [R01 AG008313, R01 AG008313-11A1, R01 AG08313-01A1] Funding Source: Medline
- NICHD NIH HHS [R01 HD053136-06A1, R01 HD022614, R01 HD22614, R01 HD022614-15A1, R01 HD053136] Funding Source: Medline
- NIDCD NIH HHS [T32 DC000041, T32 DC000041-19, DC00041] Funding Source: Medline
- NIMH NIH HHS [R01 MH60517, R01 MH060517, R01 MH060517-01A2] Funding Source: Medline
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Humans have the remarkable capacity to learn words from a single instance. The goal of this study was to examine the impact of initial learning context on the understanding of novel word usage using event-related brain potentials. Participants saw known and unknown words in strongly or weakly constraining sentence contexts. After each sentence context, word usage knowledge was assessed via plausibility ratings of these words as the objects of transitive verbs. Plausibility effects were observed in the N400 component to the verb only when the upcoming novel word object had initially appeared in a strongly constraining context. These results demonstrate that rapid word learning is modulated by contextual constraint and reveal a rapid mental process that is sensitive to novel word usage. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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