ERP Evidence for the Time Course of Graphic, Phonological, and Semantic Information in Chinese Meaning and Pronunciation Decisions.

Abstract

Two words that varied in their relationship were presented sequentially to Chinese readers who made meaning and pronunciation decisions. In the meaning task, they decided whether the words had the same meaning. In the pronunciation task, they decided whether the words had the same pronunciation. In both tasks, the word pairs represented 1 of 4 relationships: graphically similar, homophonic, semantically related, or unrelated. Event related potentials (ERP) recordings made from the onset of the 2nd word suggested a temporal unfolding of graphic, phonological, and semantic effects. Specifically, graphically-related pairs produced a smaller P200 in the pronunciation task and a smaller N400 in the meaning task. Homophones produced reduced N400 component with bilateral sources in the meaning task.

Learning context modulates the processing of expectancy violations

“…to pop-out stimuli in a visual search task, the P2 reflects visual feature detection (see also Liu, Perfetti & Hart, 2001). Consistent with this view, we found a P2 for all those deviants that differed perceptually from regular events, i.e., perceptual, perceptual-structural, and conceptual deviants but not for purely structural deviants.…”

“…The mean amplitudes in the N2b time window might be contaminated by component overlap with a preceding P2, especially when stimuli differ visually (Luck & Hillyard, 1994;Liu, Perfetti & Hart, 2001). This probably reduces N2b mean amplitude relative to regular stimuli.…”

“…Additionally, as it is known that the mean amplitudes in the N2b time window can be contaminated by component overlap with a preceding P2 when stimuli differ visually (Luck & Hillyard, 1994;Liu, Perfetti & Hart, 2001), an additional analysis sought to identify those deviant types that elicited a P2 by analyzing the mean amplitude differences between regulars and deviants in a 150 ms to 250 ms time window (see Supplement). Subsequently, a peak-to-peak analysis of the N2b was conducted only for those conditions in which a P2 was reliably elicited at the electrode site where N2b were largest and P2 did not differ between conditions (FCz).…”

Orthography to Phonology and Meaning: Comparisons Across and within Writing Systems

“…For example, the N400 is a negative going component peaked around 400 ms, which is sensitive to semantic and phonological processing (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980;Rugg, 1984). An earlier component, the P200 (a positive component with a peak at 200 ms) was found to be related with orthographic processing in Chinese (Liu, Perfetti, & Hart, 2003). Although a given ERP voltage shift can have an indefinite number of cortical sources because the number of neuronal cylinders involved in a cognitive task is much higher than ERP recording channels (currently 256 is the maximum), source identification can still be inferred reasonably well on the basis of various algorithms (Koles, 1998).…”

From N400 to N300: Variations in the timing of semantic processing with repetition

“…The N400 has been recorded in response to various stimuli, including visual and auditory words, drawings, photographs, faces or environmental sounds (Kutas et al, 2006). Its amplitude has been shown to be modulated by any type of semantic relations between the stimulus and preceding items, namely category (fruit-apple; e.g., Heinze et al, 1998), functional (broom-sweep; Bach et al, 2009), synonymy (street-road ; Liu et al, 2003), antonymy (black-white; Kutas and Iragui, 1998), schema (restaurant-wine; Chwilla and Kolk, 2005), or world knowledge ("The taxis in New York City are yellow"; Hagoort et al, 2004) and also by associative relations (mouse-cheese; Franklin et al, 2007). In contrast, the latency of this component, which typically peaks around 400 ms after stimulus onset, is considered to be relatively stable (Federmeier and Laszlo, 2009;Voss and Federmeier, 2011) and has rarely been used as a dependent measure.…”