Concurrent effects of lexical status and letter-rotation during early stage visual word recognition: Evidence from ERPs

Recent studies report that the occipito-temporal N170 component of the ERP is enhanced by letter strings, relative to non-linguistic strings of similar visual complexity, with a left-lateralized distribution. This finding is consistent with underlying mechanisms that serve visual word recognition. Conclusions about the level of analysis reflected within the N170 effects, and therefore the timecourse of word recognition, have been mixed. Here, we investigated the timing and nature of brain responses to putatively low- and high-level processing difficulty. Low-level processing difficulty was modulated by manipulating letter-rotation parametrically at 0°, 22.5°, 45°, 67.5°, and 90°. Higher-level processing difficulty was modulated by manipulating lexical status (words vs. word-like pseudowords). Increasing letter-rotation enhanced the N170 led to monotonic increases in P1 and N170 amplitude up to 67.5° but then decreased amplitude at 90°. Pseudowords enhanced the N170 over left occipital-temporal sites, relative to words. These combined findings are compatible with a cascaded, interactive architecture in which lower-level analysis (e.g., word-form feature extraction) leads higher-level analysis (e.g., lexical access) in time, but that by approximately 170 ms, the brain's response to a visual word includes parallel, interactive processing at both low-level feature extraction and higher-order lexical access levels of analysis.

► Participants read words and pseudowords whose letters were rotated parametrically.
► We recorded brain responses during the early stages of word recognition.
► Both rotated letters and pseudowords enhanced N170 amplitude.
► We interpret these findings in terms of a hierarchical processing architecture.