EEG brain mapping of phonological and semantic tasks in Italian and Germanlanguages

Objectives: Event-related potential correlates of phonological encoding - a s compared with lexical access and semantic categorization were measured in two studies involving two groups of 14 German and 14 Italian subjects. Methods: A two stimulus reaction time paradigm was used. Stimulus pairs pre sented one-by-one with 2 s inter-stimulus intervals (ISI) had to be matched with respect to lexical identity (word-picture) in a word comprehension ta sk or with respect: to the phonological representative of objects in a rhym ing task. A semantic categorization task was added for the Italian sample. In both studies, the EEG was recorded from 26 scalp electrodes according to the 10-20 system. The slow negative potential during the ISI (CNV) was det ermined as the electrocortical correlate of preparation for and activation of the specific language-related task. Results: In both samples phonological encoding (rhyming) evoked a more pron ounced CNV over the left- compared with the right-frontal area, while less lateralized central dominance of the CNV was found in the word comprehensio n task. Semantic categorization was accompanied by the least asymmetry of a ctivity. Conclusions: Results indicate that the different degree of asymmetry induce d by phonological and semantic processing may be determined from the scalp distribution of slow cortical potentials with cross-lingual reliability. (C ) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.