DIFFERENT ERP PATTERNS FOR TONAL AND PHONEMIC MISMATCH DURING CHINESECHARACTERS MATCHING

A previous Event Related Potential (ERP) study (Valdes-Sosa, Gonzalez, Xiang; Xiao-Lei, Yi, & Bobes, 1993) found that. in Chinese readers, t he N450 component was enhanced for phonemical mismatching pairs of log ographs. During the task, Ss had to indicate if the phoneme sequences for the logographs matched, while ignoring tonal inflections. This res ult is also found in readers of English during rhyme judgment. In both cases, the N450 enhancement is larger over the right side of the head . Tonal inflections have lexical status in Chinese. In this study ERPs obtained during phonemic matching are compared with those obtained du ring the matching of tones. The ERPs related to phonemic matching repl icate the previous experiment. Tone mismatch also elicited an enhanced negativity, which, however, is symmetric over both sides of the scalp . These results confirm the previous hypotheses that N450 would probab ly be associated with postlexical processes, but also suggest that sev eral subcomponents comprise this potential with a more complex structu re for the phonemic task.