Meng Xiangzhi, Jian Jie, Shu Hua, Tian Xiaomei, Zhou Xiaolin
Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Brain Res. 2008 Jul 11;1219:91-102. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2008.04.052. Epub 2008 Apr 27.
An event-related potential (ERP) experiment was conducted to investigate the development of orthographic and phonological processing during Chinese sentence reading between school children and adult readers. Participants were visually presented with sentences, word-by-word, and were asked to judge whether the sentences were semantically acceptable. The crucial manipulation was on the sentence-final two-character compound words, which were either correct or incorrect. For the incorrect compounds, the second characters of the base words were replaced by homophonic or orthographically similar characters. ERP results showed that, across participant groups, the peak of P200 appeared earlier for the homophonic condition than for the orthographic and the baseline conditions. Importantly, for both child and adult readers, relative to the baseline, both orthographic mismatch in the homophonic condition and phonological mismatch in the orthographic condition elicited N400 effects. While for adults these effects appeared to be equal in size, the peak of the N400 component appeared earlier for orthographic mismatch than for phonological mismatch. For children the N400 effect was larger for orthographic mismatch than for phonological mismatch. The N400 component was also more negative for children than for adults in the homophonic condition, and its peak appeared later for children than for adults in the homophonic and the baseline conditions. Moreover, the offset of the N400 effects appeared earlier for adults than for children and for orthographic mismatch than for phonological mismatch. These findings suggest that both Chinese adult readers and school children rely more on orthographic information than on phonological information to access lexical semantics in reading Chinese sentences. However, the differential effects between orthography and phonology may have different ERP manifestations in adults and children.
进行了一项事件相关电位（ERP）实验，以研究学龄儿童和成年读者在阅读中文句子时正字法和语音处理的发展情况。向参与者逐字视觉呈现句子，并要求他们判断句子在语义上是否可接受。关键的操作在于句末的双字复合词，这些词要么正确要么错误。对于错误的复合词，基础词的第二个字被同音或正字法相似的字替换。ERP结果表明，在所有参与者组中，同音条件下P200的峰值出现时间早于正字法条件和基线条件。重要的是，对于儿童和成年读者而言，相对于基线，同音条件下的正字法不匹配和正字法条件下的语音不匹配均引发了N400效应。虽然对于成年人来说，这些效应的大小似乎相等，但正字法不匹配时N400成分的峰值出现时间早于语音不匹配时。对于儿童来说，正字法不匹配时的N400效应大于语音不匹配时。在同音条件下，儿童的N400成分也比成年人更负，并且在同音条件和基线条件下，其峰值出现时间晚于成年人。此外，N400效应的结束时间，成年人早于儿童，正字法不匹配时早于语音不匹配时。这些发现表明，中国成年读者和学龄儿童在阅读中文句子时获取词汇语义时，都更多地依赖正字法信息而非语音信息。然而，正字法和语音之间的差异效应在成年人和儿童中可能有不同的ERP表现。
