ERP Effects Of Fonts And Semantic Priming In Chinese Character Recognition

Based on the importance of Chinese character recognition in the field of cognition, more psychologists have focused on the research of Chinese characters. In 1980,in order to study the effect of sentences in reading content on vocabulary recognition, Kutas et al.found the Event related potential late component N400,a lot of research followed reveals that the N400 closely related to language cognition, but still not come out unified explanation on the processing mechanism of N400. Such as the post—lexical theory,which indexed the efforts at integrating the meaning of the stimulus in its context,the more difficult of the integrating the larger the N400 amplitude would be.on the contrary,the smaller.Based on the pre—lexical theory which is proposed by the word generator model argues that N400 reflects the spreading activation level automatically, start to stimulate automatically activated affect the activation level of the target stimulus. According to the theory of semantic extraction, N400 index of brain electrical component is the semantic processing.In the interactive activation model, processing of visual stimuli can be divided into three levels which is feature representation level, letter representation level and word representation level.The interactive activation model is no active threshold in different transfer characteristics of the levels, coupled with the transmission of information between adjacent levels of representation is bidirectional, high level of a node may have an impact on lower level node, that is, any level is activated, the activation will be feedback to its similar level, which is the feedback, so that makes the different processing stages looked almost simultaneously,which two factors effects at the same stage of processing.This study was able to take EEG experiments to explore the relationship between the font and semantic during the cognition of Chinese characters,that is to say,we adopted the interaction between stimulus quality(such as font)and semantic context to explore the processing mechanism of N400.The activation model can be better to explain these interaction.The activation model supposed that if the two factors have the interaction.the both factors affect the same processing stage.But the research in the past showed that the stimulus quality and semantic context present the additive effect (Borowsky and Besner,1991,1993; Brown and Besner,2002; Stolz and Neely,1995).The Interactive activation model is facing challenges.but the reserch in the past were based on phonetic as experimentalmaterials, their processing process is mainly from the shape to sound and then to meaning.ln this paper, we use Chinese words as the experiment materials which are ideographic character, visual information of Chinese words will directly affect the extraction of semantics.Because N400 is relevant with semantic processing and extraction, the interaction between stimulus and semantic priming is an indicators which reflect the process of series,the quality of stimulus is the font, to explore the effects of different fonts and characters and the interactions at the N400 between fonts and semantic priming, and used to verify the series processing mechanisms of interactive activation model.The first experiment is a high-frequency two-factor within-subject design experiment, the variable are font and context, semantic priming paradigm was used to explore the impact of Chinese character fonts and semantic priming to the ERP, according to the results of EEG, only got the N400 semantic priming effect, there is no significant interaction and the font effect. Interactive activation model considered that relative to Kai, Song could activate multiple nodes, and in EEG results, there is no font effects, that is in this activation level, Song and Kai is not significantly different, that is when the target stimuli at high frequencies, the target stimulus was supported by the active nodes with top-down, and this makes the top-down activation level between Song and Kai characterization on three levels become less noticeable.Two experiments using low-frequency characters as materials, continue to explore the Chinese character fonts and context in order to investigate the interaction of two factors, and explore the inherent mechanism of Chinese character recognition processing. The results of Experiment 1 show that at high frequencies, makes the difference between Song and Kai characterization on three levels of top-down activation level insignificant. Therefore, in the second experiment, we used a low frequency of fonts and characters to explore the effect of this factors on the N400, in order to verify the expected interactive activation model.Behavioral and EEG results of the two experiments results obtained that using Chinese character as experimental material, to found that when Chinese characters is high frequency conditions, appears only N400 priming effect, this is because at high frequency, high frequency subjects have a good familiarity, based on IA model expectations, high frequency words exist the top-down activation, this feedback activation weaken the difference of the activation at the three levels, so the font does not affect the recognition of high frequency words. However, at low frequencies, fonts and semantic priming have an interaction effect on the N400, indicate the existence of a series character recognition processing, while supporting IA model...