TY - JOUR
T1 - ERPs reveal sub-lexical processing in Chinese character recognition
AU - Wu, Yan
AU - Mo, Deyuan
AU - Tsang, Yiu Kei
AU - Chen, Hsuan Chih
N1 - This research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (10QNJJ020) and grants from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CUHK441008 and 441811).
Copyright:
© 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
PY - 2012/4/18
Y1 - 2012/4/18
N2 - The present study used ERPs and a lexical decision task to explore the roles of position-general and position-specific radicals and their relative time courses in processing Chinese characters. Two types of radical frequency were manipulated: the number of characters containing a specific radical irrespective of position (i.e., radical frequency or RF) and the number of characters containing a specific radical at a particular position (i.e., position-specific radical frequency or PRF). The PRF effect was found to be associated with P150, P200, and N400, whereas the RF effect was associated with P200. These results suggest that both position-general and position-specific radicals could influence character processing, but the effect of position-specific radicals appeared earlier and lasted longer than that of position-general radicals. These findings are interpreted in terms of the specific orthographic properties of the sub-lexical components of Chinese characters.
AB - The present study used ERPs and a lexical decision task to explore the roles of position-general and position-specific radicals and their relative time courses in processing Chinese characters. Two types of radical frequency were manipulated: the number of characters containing a specific radical irrespective of position (i.e., radical frequency or RF) and the number of characters containing a specific radical at a particular position (i.e., position-specific radical frequency or PRF). The PRF effect was found to be associated with P150, P200, and N400, whereas the RF effect was associated with P200. These results suggest that both position-general and position-specific radicals could influence character processing, but the effect of position-specific radicals appeared earlier and lasted longer than that of position-general radicals. These findings are interpreted in terms of the specific orthographic properties of the sub-lexical components of Chinese characters.
KW - Chinese character recognition
KW - Position-general radical
KW - Position-specific radical
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84862795868&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.neulet.2012.02.080
DO - 10.1016/j.neulet.2012.02.080
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 22401826
AN - SCOPUS:84862795868
SN - 0304-3940
VL - 514
SP - 164
EP - 168
JO - Neuroscience Letters
JF - Neuroscience Letters
IS - 2
ER -