An ERP Study Of Satiation Of Chinese

“Gestaltzerfall” is characterized as increasing uncertainty of recognizing a character after being viewed steadily and continuously for a long period. Such a phenomenon is also named as “semantic satiation”.A variety of methods have been introduced for studying semantic satiation, producing series levels of explanation on the mechanism of semantic satiation. The occurrence of this phenomenon can be ranged from the perceptual representation level, the semantic processing level, or the association level.While semantic satiation on English as a representation of the phonetic text has been well acknowledged, the existence of such a phenomenon for Chinese characters remained unclear. Unlike English which only contains semantic satiation, processing of Chinese characters can be observed in a different way for orthographic decomposition. Therefore, this satiation for Chinese characters may contain more information than English and requires more systematical study.We herewith conducted three ERP experiments and one behavioral study, trying to establish some biomarkers such as N170 or N400 in detecting orthographic decomposition and semantic satiation. In Exp.1 we employed true characters, strokes and false characters without orthographic. We found significant differences in N170 between three conditions. Results of Exp 1 showed the amplitude of N170 was attenuated in left hemisphere, meaning the representation of characters is inhibited. Therefore we found the proof of existence of the orthographic decomposition in processing of Chinese characters.In Exp.2 we replicated a previous study, which found the threshold of decomposition was much lower in left-right combined characters than single ones. We ran an ERP experiment to find what will happen to component N170 between two conditions.In Exp.3 we modified Exp.2, explored the changing of N170 in Event Related Potential.Lastly, we compared two conditions between low satiation and high satiation, to analyze the differences of component N400. Results indicated amplitude of N400 was significantly lower under the condition of high satiation, that provided evidence of semantic satiation in processing of Chinese characters.Above all, our results show the first time about the existence of both orthographic decomposition and semantic satiation when processing of Chinese characters.