Abstract
ABSTRACTIn alphabetic languages, print consistently elicits enhanced, left-lateralized N170 responses in the event-related potential compared to control stimuli. In the current study, we adopted a cross-linguistic design to investigate N170 tuning to logographic Chinese and to pinyin, an auxiliary phonetic system in Chinese. The results demonstrated that logographic characters elicit a left-lateralized print-tuning effect in Chinese readers only. Crucially, the observed tuning effect is clearly driven by script familiarity, rather than by differences in visual features between print and control stimuli. This can be concluded because Dutch participants who viewed the same set of stimuli showed a bilateral topography instead. For pinyin, the left-hemispheric modulation was absent in both language groups, presumably because long strings of pinyin are unfamiliar to both groups. Because grapheme-to-phoneme conversion does not exist in logographic Chinese, our results tend to suggest a visual familiarity rather than a grapheme-to-phoneme mapping account of the print N170.
Highlights
Skilled reading depends on fast, automatized recognition of print
This aligns with consistently reported findings of left-lateralized print N170 in alphabetic languages, suggesting that the left-hemispheric modulation is a characterizing feature of the print N170 across languages and that similar visual specialization processes underpin reading in both alphabetic and logographic scripts
Fluent adult readers of Chinese showed enhanced, left-lateralized N170 responses to logographic characters compared to visual baseline
Summary
Skilled reading depends on fast, automatized recognition of print (words or pseudowords). Converging evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests that the visual decoding of print is accomplished in the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex (Dehaene & Cohen, 2011; Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005). This particular patch of the visual cortex has been labelled the visual word form system (VWFS; Cohen et al, 2000), as it is consistently activated for visually presented words (for a review, see Wandell, 2011). Familiarity with human faces leads to an enlarged N170 for face stimuli over visual baseline
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