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Comparison of Electrophysiological Correlates of Writing and Speaking: A Topographic ERP Analysis

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Abstract

Behavioral and neuropsychological studies on written production suggested that some cognitive processes are common with spoken production. In this study, we attempted to specify the time course of common processes between the two modalities with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). High density EEG was recorded on twenty two healthy participants during a handwritten and an oral picture naming task on the same 120 stimuli. Waveform analyses and topographical pattern analyses were combined on stimulus- and response-aligned ERPs in order to cover the whole word encoding processing. Similar electrophysiological correlates between writing and speaking appeared until about 260 ms. According to previous estimations of the time course of spoken production, the time period of identical electrophysiological activity corresponds to visual (0–150 ms) semantic (150–190 ms) and lexical-semantic (190–275 ms) processes. Then, spoken and handwritten picture naming starts diverging and display different and modality specific topographical configurations from around 260 ms, i.e., at the beginning of the time-window associated to the encoding of the surface phonological form in spoken production. These results suggested shared conceptual and lexical-semantic processes between speaking and writing and different neurophysiological activity during word-form (phonological or orthographic) encoding.

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Notes

  1. Baseline correction was not applied for the following reasons. First, it is difficult to establish a good time window to be used as baseline for both stimulus- and response-aligned data. One can imagine using a pre-stimulus period. Nevertheless, we cannot exclude different recruitment of preparatory neural resources across conditions, specially because the sentence “lift the pen” appeared on the screen before the ready signal in the handwritten condition, which may induce differences in the pre-stimulus period across conditions. A discussion of possible consequences of pre-stimulus baseline correction on ERPs when different tasks are compared can be found in Michel et al. (2009, p. 43).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation grant no. PP001-118969/1. The Cartool software (http://brainmapping.unige.ch/Cartool.php) has been programmed by Denis Brunet, from the Functional Brain Mapping Laboratory, Geneva, Switzerland, and is supported by the Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM) of Geneva and Lausanne. The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

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  1. UFR Lettres, Sciences de l’Homme et des Sociétés, UTRPP–EA 4403 UP13, University Paris 13 Campus de Villetaneuse, 99 Avenue Jean-Baptiste Clément, 93430, Villetaneuse, France

    Cyril Perret

  2. FAPSE, Geneva University, Geneva, Switzerland

    Marina Laganaro

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  1. Cyril Perret
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  2. Marina Laganaro
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Correspondence to Cyril Perret.

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Perret, C., Laganaro, M. Comparison of Electrophysiological Correlates of Writing and Speaking: A Topographic ERP Analysis. Brain Topogr 25, 64–72 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-011-0200-3

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