Abstract
The effect of the number of expected items on semantic priming was investigated using behavioral measures and event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Ten subjects were tested under the antonym condition and the category condition. In the antonym condition, antonym pairs were presented one as the prime, the other the target. In the category condition, the prime was a category name, while the target was a member of the category. Results showed that facilitation and inhibition effects on lexical decision time for the target were larger in the antonym condition. Large N400 was elicited by unrelated and nonword targets. Moreover in the category condition, the N400 amplitude was found to be larger in all types. These results suggested that N400 reflected the verification process in word recognition.
