The neural dynamics of semantic diversity in spoken word recognition: The role of alpha-beta power
Word recognition performance is significantly affected by semantic diversity (SemD), acorpus-based measure that indexes the degree to which the contexts associated with a word are similar in meaning. Due to the prominence of SemD as a determinant of behaviour, it is important to understand its neural correlates, but these remain underexplored. To address thisgap, this study examines whether and how SemD information is reflected in alpha-beta power dynamics during spoken word recognition. Given previous evidence linking stronger alpha-beta power decreases to semantically richer words, high-SemD words were predicted to elicit stronger alpha-beta power decreases relative to low-SemD words. Electroencephalographic data were recorded while 13 older adults performed a word-picture verification task. Average alpha-beta (10–20 Hz) power around 400–600 ms post-word onset served as the dependentvariable in linear mixed models whose fixed effects included SemD and other psycholinguistic variables. Results showed that SemD was not a significant predictor whenposterior sites were considered. However, when anterior sites and a later time window were examined, a significant effect of SemD was found, with higher scores predicting stronger alpha-beta power decreases. Additional analyses on event-related potential responses around 300–500 ms post-stimulus showed no effects of SemD. These findings provide the first insights into the electrophysiological signature of SemD and corroborate previous reports of stronger alpha-beta power decreases when more lexical-semantic information needs to beretrieved from memory. The null results are discussed in view of a few methodologicalaspects, which could be explored in future studies.