An ERP Study On Processing Difference Between Auditory Chinese Real Words, Pseudowords And Nonwords

Auditory words processing is the basis of human beings to communicate and transfer information. From the baby period or even the birth, people have begun to have innative sensitivity towards human voice. How do people acquire the ability to process auditory words without any effort? With the development of technology, more and more scientists hold the view that the mechanism and theoretic basis of human beings dealing with the language relies explicitly on biological explanations. Therefore, studying the secrets of human language processing through discovering the biological basis of human processing language has become the focus of the present linguists. In the recent years, with the development of ERP (event-related potential) and fMRI (functional magnetically resonance imaging), language researchers have showed great interest in the mechanism of word processing and have also obtained some positive results.Most of the past studies have taken the visual stimuli of words as the researching materials, and in the few experiments with the auditory stimuli as the researching materials, the stimuli were English, French, and German etc. So far, nearly no experiments have been done with the auditory Chinese two-character words as the researching objects.The main goal of the present study is to discover the specific mechanism of auditory words processing of Chinese two-character words. We make use of the lexical judgment as the experiment task, the Chinese two-character words as the experimental material since two-character words have taken 74% in all Chinese words. The stimuli have been classified into three types: the first type refers to the real word, with both syllables being phonologically congruent, and semantic congruent in the whole; the second type refers to the pseudoword, with both syllables being phonologically congruent, but semantic incongruent in the whole; the third type refers to the nonword, with the second syllable being phonologically incongruent, and semantic incongruent in the whole. What has to be pointed out is the phonology of the second syllable of nonword has been combined with the accidental gap of pinyin system in Chinese Putonghua.After the observation and comparing of the ERP components elicited by the three different kinds of auditory stimuli, we analyze the findings in terms of the most frequently referred components of N400 and P300. P300, as the index showing salient stimulus, decides whether the human brain continues to further process deeply, which has appeared in pseudowords and nonwords. N400, as the index showing the deep semantic processing, appears in all the three types of stimuli. Based on the analysis, we come to the conclusion the relationship between P300 and N400 suggest that the P300 has the function to mark the semantic processing, which is in accordance with the research result of Bentain etc. N200-like component elicited by real words is assumed to be the first part of N400 in our experiment.