Thanks for your interest in the research master programme Cognitive Neuroscience of the Radboud University. I signed you up for the CNS Open day. The specialization workshops and the lab tours promise to be interesting and fun. Attached you will find the programme. I will see you on November 27. With kind regards,

Abstract

Reduced words like yeshay for yesterday aften occur in natural conversational speech. Previous behavioral research reported a processing advantage for unreduced words over reduced words. The present study investigated whether this processing advantage is reflected in a modulation of alpha (8-12 Hz) and gamma (30+ Hz) band activity during unreduced and reduced word processing. In three electrophysiological (EEG) experiments, participants listened to unreduced and reduced infinitives in isolation (1 ), in sentence-final position (2), or in mid-sentence position (3). Alpha power was larger in response to reduced words than in response to unreduced words in only the first two experiments, whereas gamma power increases were only observed in response to unreduced words, in all experiments. Our findings suggest that alpha power increases reflect a higher auditory cognitive load during lexica! processing, while the observed gamma increases in response to unreduced words reflect the activation of semantic representations. This study lends further plausibility to differential processing mechanisms for unreduced and reduced words and gives insight into how neurophysiological resources are allocated to optimize reduced word processing.