Are pumpkins better than heaven? An ERP investigation of order effects in the concrete-word advantage

The present study investigated the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the processing of concrete and abstract words by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants performed an English lexical decision task. Concrete and abstract words were presented in three stimulus-order conditions: abstract before concrete, concrete before abstract, and mixed. Beginning between 125 and 175 ms, nonwords elicited significantly more negative responses than real words. Between 300 and 500 ms, concrete words elicited significantly more negative responses than abstract words in the abstract-first and mixed conditions, but not in the concrete-first condition. We discuss our findings in relation to a feature activation framework and conclude that order of presentation provides a context for words that dynamically interacts with activation of a word’s meaning features, thus allowing word order to modulate the concreteness effect.