Abstract
Two experiments investigated the modulation of event-related potentials (ERPs) by the repetition of orthographically legal and illegal nonwords. In Experiment 1, subjects silently counted occasional words against a background of nonwords, a proportion of which were repetitions of an immediately preceding legal or illegal item. ERPs to repeated legal items showed a sustained, topographically diffuse, positive-going shift. In contrast, repeated illegal nonwords gave rise to ERPs showing a smaller and temporally more restricted positive-going modulation. In an attempt to equalize depth of processing across legal and illegal nonwords, subjects in Experiment 2 were required to count items containing a nonalphabetic character against the same background of nonword items. ERPs to repeated legal items showed a modulation similar to, although smaller than, that found in Experiment I, but no effects of repetition were observed in the ERPs to the illegal nonwords. It was concluded that the effects of repeating nonwords, at least as manifested in concurrently recorded ERPs, differ as a consequence of whether items can access lexical memory, and that this is inconsistent with the attribution of such effects solely to the operation of episodic memory processes.
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This research was supported by the Mental Health Foundation and the Medical Research Council of the United Kingdom.
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Rugg, M.D., Nagy, M.E. Lexical contribution to nonword-repetition effects: Evidence from event-related potentials. Memory & Cognition 15, 473–481 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198381
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198381