Liu Jiang, Zhang Yang
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Linguistics Program, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA.
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences & Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
Brain Sci. 2023 Sep 14;13(9):1321. doi: 10.3390/brainsci13091321.
Prior event-related potential (ERP) research on how the brain processes non-alphabetic scripts like Chinese has identified an N200 component related to early visual processing of Chinese disyllabic words. An enhanced N200 response was observed when similar prime-target pairs were presented, but it was not elicited when native Chinese speakers read Korean Hangul, a script resembling Chinese characters. This led to the proposal that N200 was not a universal marker for orthographic processing but rather specific and unique to Chinese. However, there was uncertainty due to the absence of Korean participants in the previous research. The impact of language experience on N200 remains unclear. To address this, the present pilot ERP study included three adult groups (totaling 30 participants) with varying language proficiency levels. The participants judged if randomly presented words were Chinese or Korean, while the ERP responses were recorded. The behavioral data showed high accuracy across the groups. The reaction times differed between the groups with the native speakers responding faster. The N200 patterns varied across the groups. Both Chinese native speakers and Chinese-as-second-language learners showed stronger N200 responses for Chinese words compared to Korean words regardless of whether an adaptive or a fixed-time window was used for the N200 quantification, but this was not the case for Korean native speakers. Our cross-linguistic study suggests that N200 is not exclusive to Chinese orthography. Instead, it reflects general visual processing sensitive to both orthographic features and learning experience.
先前关于大脑如何处理像中文这样的非字母文字的事件相关电位（ERP）研究已经确定了一个与中文双音节词早期视觉处理相关的N200成分。当呈现相似的启动刺激-目标刺激对时，观察到N200反应增强，但当以中文为母语的人阅读韩语 Hangul（一种类似于汉字的文字）时，并未引发该反应。这导致有人提出，N200不是正字法处理的通用标记，而是中文特有的。然而，由于先前的研究中没有韩国参与者，存在不确定性。语言经验对N200的影响仍不清楚。为了解决这个问题，本项ERP试点研究纳入了三个语言熟练程度不同的成年组（共30名参与者）。参与者判断随机呈现的单词是中文还是韩文，同时记录ERP反应。行为数据显示各组的准确率都很高。各组的反应时间不同，母语者反应更快。N200模式在各组之间有所不同。无论使用自适应窗口还是固定时间窗口来量化N200，以中文为母语的人和以中文为第二语言的学习者对中文单词的N200反应都比对韩文单词更强，但以韩文为母语的人并非如此。我们的跨语言研究表明，N200并非中文正字法所独有。相反，它反映了对正字法特征和学习经验都敏感的一般视觉处理。
