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ERPs show that exemplar effects are driven by listeners' use of episodic memory

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Nijveld,  Annika
Center for Language Studies , External Organizations;
International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Ernestus,  Mirjam
Center for Language Studies , External Organizations;
Research Associates, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Nijveld, A., Mulder, K., Ten Bosch, L., & Ernestus, M. (2017). ERPs show that exemplar effects are driven by listeners' use of episodic memory. Poster presented at the Workshop Conversational Speech and Lexical Representations, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0002-57A6-1
Abstract
Listeners in priming experiments generally recognize repeated words more quickly and/or more accurately if repetitions
share surface details (e.g., speaker voice) than if they do not. These exemplar effects, although not always replicated, suggest
that word forms are stored as clouds of exemplars. These effects arose mostly when participants relied on their episodic
memories (e.g., in old-new judgment tasks), suggesting that exemplar effects are driven by episodic memory (rather than the
mental lexicon). However, some old-new judgment experiments did not obtain exemplar effects. Possibly, their method
(behavioral responses) was not sensitive enough.
We tested two hypotheses in two experiments: whether exemplar effects are driven by episodic memory, and
whether they are better captured by EEG (electroencephalography). We repeated words in the same or a different voice
(match and mismatch), and participants engaged in old-new (Experiment 1) or animacy judgment (Experiment 2; only the
former task relying on episodic memory). We collected participants' behavioral responses and EEG. We predict larger
exemplar effects Experiment 1 and in the ERP data (event-related potentials: stimulus-locked brain potentials derived from
the EEG).
In the ERPs, an N400 brain response peaked remarkably higher for the match than the mismatch condition in
Experiment 1 only (an exemplar effect). Behaviorally, 'match' words received slightly more accurate responses in both
experiments (no interaction arose). In response times, match and mismatch did not differ in either experiment (a null result).
We thus only detected clear exemplar effects in our ERP data, indicating that exemplar effects which do not surface in
behavior may still be present in cognitive processing (and can be measured with a more sensitive method like EEG). The
effects only arose when participants had to use their episodic memories. This suggests that exemplar effects are driven by
episodic memory rather than the mental lexicon.