Chinese Lexical Priming Effect:Spatiotemporal Analysis Of ERP

ObjectiveThe aim of this research is to investigate the priming effect of Chinese words with spatiotemporal pattern of event-related potentials (ERP).MethodsFourteen college students joined a lexical decision task. All subjects were right-handed and had normal corrected vision, having no color blindness, color weakness, nervous or mental illness. They all had not participated in similar experiments previously, and received a little reward for their participation in consent.They were asked to judge whether a target word belong to the same class as the previous word (prime) or not by button-pressing. Three conditions had been set as the word repetition (e.g. soybean-soybean), the semantic priming (e.g. sorghum-soybean) and the semantic mismatch (e.g. ships-soybean).The EEG was recorded using an ERP system of19channels developed in our laboratory. One-way (three level:word repetition, semantic priming, semantic mismatch) ANOVA of repeated-measure was carried out for both ERP and behavioral performance. Statistical parametric mapping of F-values [SPM(F)] was gained from interpolation calculated by each channel’s F-value. The significant level was0.05. ResultsSignificant priming effects were for both reaction time:F(2,26)=77.28, P=0.00and the accuracy:F(2,26)=42.91, P=0.00. The performance of the repetition group (601.44±69.39ms,98.7±1.3%) were significantly better than either the semantic priming one (774.98±87.34ms,88.2±5.9%) and the semantic mismatch one (788.75±88.10ms,87.8±4.8%). No significant difference was found between the latter two groups in behavioral performance.Statistical parametric mapping of ERP showed the P200effects (200-250ms) within frontoparietal and temporal distribution related attention modulation and both perceptual priming and semantic priming, the N400effect (300-450ms) in centroparietal distribution revealing the detection of semantic mismatch and the P600effect (500-1000ms) in temporal and occipital distribution reflecting the semantic context reconstruction.ConclusionThe lexical decision task involves language processing in multiple levels and it is applicable for the evaluation of the language function with spatiotemporal pattern of ERP.