Interactions of lexical and conceptual representations: Evidence from EEG.

• We examined the relationship between conceptual and lexical representations. • Participants viewed a sequence of 2 pictures and decided if they were related. • Some of the object names were ambiguous in orthography, phonology, or both. • N400 revealed that the lexical status of the self generated object names affected semantic decisions. • N230 revealed that conceptual access occurred 200 ms before lexical effects. We examined whether meanings automatically activate linguistic forms, and whether these forms affect semantic decisions. Participants were presented sequentially with pairs of pictures and decided whether the objects in the pictures were related. At no point did they name the pictures. The object names of the experimental stimuli were ambiguous either in orthography (homographs), phonology (homophones), or both (homonyms), or unambiguous. We show that the lexical characteristics of the name of the objects affect a semantic decision about real world relations, in an online measure (N400), in addition to offline behavioral measures. We show a dissociation between conceptual and lexical recognition, where an earlier component (N230), was affected by relatedness, but was not sensitive to the lexical characteristics. We interpret this as supporting the hypothesis that semantic recognition occurs before the automatic lexical activation of the object name, but that once linguistic representations are activated, they affect semantic integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]