BRAIN POTENTIALS IN A PHONOLOGICAL MATCHING TASK USING CHINESE CHARACTERS

In readers of English, involved in a rhyme judgement task, mismatch tr ials are associated with an enhanced N450 component of the Event Relat ed Potentials (ERPs). It has been suggested that N450 is related to or thographic or phonological priming. In this paper ERPs were recorded d uring a phonological matching task, using pairs of logographically dis similar Chinese characters. A pair was considered to match if they sou nded alike with identical phoneme sequences. The subjects (native Chin ese speakers) were instructed to ignore vowel-inflections, which in Ch inese have lexical status. Since sublexical assembly of phonology is n ot used in reading Chinese characters, and the members of each pair we re logographically dissimilar, match and mismatch trials did not suffe r in the amount of orthographic or sublexical phonological priming. An enhanced negative component (latency near 400 msec), was observed in ERPs elicited by the second character in non-matching pairs. The negat ivity could be similar to N450. If this were so, then N450 could not b e associated with orthographic priming, nor with sublexical phonology, but would probably be associated with postlexical processing. Also, i n both readers of Chinese and English, the negativity enhanced in non- match trials is larger over the right side of the scalp, suggesting a similar brain lateralization of the underlying processes.