Language Experience Impacts N170Sensitivity To Visual Words

Investigations of functional changes that occur during reading acquisition in cortical regions associated with the perception of visual words are important to understand the nature of reading processing. Previous ERP (event-related potentials) studies have demonstrated that words N170is the earliest sensitive component to language. But researches about N170sensitivity have not reached consistent conclusions, mainly as word experiences haven’t been controlled in many researches. This study further discusses the relation between word experiences and the N170sensitivity, and defines word experiences as script familiarity and word form familiarity. Studying the brain mechanisms of Chinese character recognition is of great significance. Chinese logographic scripts could manipulate separately orthography and phonology, and Chinese scripts contain many subordinate species (for example Jiagu) which have different physical shape but same word formation rules (orthography). So studying Chinese characters could solve some scientific problems which can’t be solved by alphabetic scripts and facilitate the development of the word recognition theory.In the current study, we designes three experiments to reveal deeply the relationship of word experiences and the N170sensitivity. Experiment1is to explore the influences of script familiarity on N170by use of Chinese, English, Korean and line drawings and the influences of word form familiarity on N170by use of Chinese, pseudowords, stroke combinations and line drawings. Experiment2uses Chinese characters, Jiagu and line drawings to research how words N170modulated by subordinate species familiarity with Chinese scripts. Experiment3clarifies how the subordinate species familiarity with scripts and word form familiarity modulate words N170by subjects studying word form of Jiagu.The main findings are as follows:(1) The N170amplitudes evoked by Chinese and English are significantly larger than by Korean, suggesting that only familiar language could elicit the sensitivity of N170.(2) Jiagu before training elicites different amplitude of N170as Chinese characters, which suggestes the sensitivity of N170elicited by modern Chinese couldn’t be evoked by unfamiliar subordinate species of Chinese characters.(3) The amplitudes of N170evoked by words and pseudowords in Chinese scripts have no difference, indicating that word form familiarity didn’t influence N170component. However, after10days of learning Jiagu, learned Jiagu and those unlearned Jiagu N170amplitudes are different significantly, which reveals word form familiarity could modulated the N170component in short terms learning.(4) After10days of training word form of Jiagu, the amplitudes of N170between learned Jiagu and modem Chinese doesn’t not differ significantly,which reveales that word form experience of short terms training can induce the N170sensitivity of Jiagu.