Abstract
Although Mismatch Negativity (MMN) effects indicating early, automatic lexical processing have been reported in the auditory language modality, so far these have not been reliably obtained in MMN studies of visual word recognition. The present study explores this discrepancy by investigating whether visual MMN (vMMN) effects can be obtained in written Chinese single-character word recognition. While participants were engaged in a non-linguistic distraction task, we measured Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) time-locked to perifoveally-presented real and pseudo- characters matched in overall visual-orthographic attributes. VMMN was defined as significant difference between the ERPs to characters presented as deviants or as standards in a context of non-characters. For the native Chinese readers, af ter sub-lexical structural detection from 120–160 ms, only real characters elicited vMMN at the interval of 170–210 ms, suggesting that lexical information in Chinese words is processed early and automatically. In a later window of 340–380 ms, both real and pseudo- characters yielded vMMNs. In a control group of non-Chinese participants, no evidence of vMMN was found for either real or pseudo-characters. Taken together, these results suggest that long-term memory representations for real characters may enable their early processing even in unattended conditions.
Highlights
In our modern societies, we are constantly exposed to written language presented through different media such as posters and street signs, mobile phones and the internet, as well as magazines and books
Previous non-linguistic studies have shown that there is an analogue of the auditory MMN in the visual modality, i.e., visual MMN (vMMN). vMMN is typically elicited by infrequent visual features such as color[28,29], orientation[30], and motion[31]
It was reported by these authors that vMMN was elicited by a violation of the lexical tone pattern in the homophones, indicating that information about lexical tone was automatically extracted
Summary
We are constantly exposed to written language presented through different media such as posters and street signs, mobile phones and the internet, as well as magazines and books. It remains unclear to what extent information about lexicality is processed so early and whether this is affected by task demands Another important issue is that usually, in previous word-related N170 studies, linguistic stimuli have been presented in the center of the screen, which makes it very difficult not to attend them[18] and the tasks themselves, for example, lexical decision, or semantic categorisation, have involved directly accessing different levels of linguistic analysis. In these conditions, it is difficult to provide definitive answers to questions about the earliness and automaticity of lexical processing[19]. It was reported by these authors that vMMN was elicited by a violation of the lexical tone pattern in the homophones, indicating that information about lexical tone was automatically extracted
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