The Development Of N170Component For Visual Word Cognitong In An Artificial Language Training Study

As the basic composition unit of language, word is one of the most common visual objects in our daily life. At the same time, visual word cognition is also the basis of reading cognition, which is revealing that the special processing of visual word plays a key role in development of psycholinguistics. N170is an important cognitive component during the early phase of visual word processing. The investigation of the event-related potentials found that the N170component was located in bilateral fusiform gyrus, and it was the first negative component evoked during150-200ms after stimulus presentation in visual word cognition. Most researchers considered that this component was relevant to orthography processing. While, some researchers proposed that the N170component was also sensitive to the grapheme-phoneme correspondence. And some researches found that the N170component was modulated by other linguistic information (e.g., phonology and semantics). Investigation from the view of development is an important way to discuss this problem. But the problem is that students learn the form, phonology and semantics of the characters simultaneously, and it’s hard to distinguish the effect of these factors to the development of N170component. To overcome this problem, the research adopt the artificial character learning paradigm to further investigate the development of N170component.Jiagu is a proper kind of artificial characters. The research trained subjects to learning60selective Jiagu characters for30days. Every subject successively learned the form of Jiagu characters for10days, and learned the phonology in the following10days. Semantics training was in the next10days. There were4ERP tests in the whole process (i.e., pre-test, after character form training, after phonetics training and after semantics training). We used Chinese characters, houses and face images as control stimulus, and adopt one-back task to investigate the development of N170 component during Jiagu training.Here are the main results and conclusions of this research:(1) After the form training, there were significant difference between the amplitude of N170component evoked by Jiagu and house. This may suggest that subjects have got the N170sensitivity for Jiagu processing only after the training of character form.(2) The acquisition of phonology and semantics had no significant effect on the amplitude of N170component evoked by Jiagu, which may indicate that the phonology and semantics of characters could’t modulate the N170component of visual word cognition.(3) The latency of N170component evoked by Jiagu was significant later than the modern Chinese character’s, revealing that the familarity of the short-term word leaning had effect on the latency of visual word N170component.