An ERP Study Of Chinese Transposed Effect Under Different Prime Time

Previous studies have shown that the transposition pseudo-word can active its base word, and also can active the association relation word or synonyms word of its original word. The present study use associative priming paradigm combines ERP experimental techniques to explore the transposed effect of four-character Chinese pseudo-word, and want to explore the transposed effect in a cross-cultural perspective. On the semantic level, this article makes a contribution on enriching and validating the current letter position encoding mechanism.This study adopt the view of activate-verification account, when the prime stimulus exposure duration was short, the pseudo-word can activate the base word’s meaning, but when the exposure duration was longer, this associative or semantic effect was not exist, but because of transposed effect, the transposition-character pseudo-word can still activate the semantics of the original word when the exposure time was longer.In experimental 1, the prime duration was set to 80 ms,prime stimulus was divided into three categories: true word, transposition-character pseudo-word( TC pseudo-word), replacement-character pseudo-word(RC pseudo-word). This experiment used associative priming paradigm combines lexical decision task, and EEG recording ERP components. The study found in the 250-550 ms time window, the main effect of hemisphere was significant, the interaction between prime and hemisphere was significant, further test showed that in the right hemisphere, true word compare with RC pseudo-word was significant, and TC pseudo-word compare with RC pseudo-word was significant too.In experiment 2, the prime presentation time was extended to 200ms; other procedures were not different with Experiment 1. Results showed that in the 150-250 ms time window, the prime type main effect was significant; the main effect of electrode position was significant too. Post-hoc tests showed that true word compare with RC pseudo-word was significant, and this condition was also happened between TC pseudo-word and RC pseudo-word. In the 250-550 ms time window, the main effect of prime and hemisphere were both significant. The interaction effect between prime type and hemisphere was significant, the interaction effect between prime type and hemisphere was significant, and this effect was also found among prime type, hemisphere and electrode region. Further pair-wise comparisons shows that, true word compare with RC pseudo-word was significant, and TC pseudo-word compare with RC pseudo-word was significant too. On the posterior electrodes of left hemisphere, true word compare with RC pseudo-word and TC pseudo-word compare with RC pseudo-word were both significant,and these situation also found on the central and posterior electrodes on the right hemisphere.The following conclusions have been confirmed in the present study:(1) Regardless the prime presentation time is shorter or longer, four-character Chinese pseudo-word can play the same role with its original word and this kind of effect can be maintained for a long time.(2) The present Results are consistent with previous studies, and suggests that time of encoding character identity information is earlier than encoding location information in the process of visual word recognition.