The Research On Representation Of Chinese Words In The Cerebral Hemispheres

Abstract Along with the rise of cognitive neuroscience, the neural substrate of word representation and processing has become one of the most attractive research fields. There were many researches using alphabetic language stimuli, from which it was found that most right-handed persons showed an advantage of left hemisphere. However, the researches using Chinese stimuli obtained several kinds of results, which indicated the advantage of left hemisphere, right hemisphere or the balance of two hemispheres. In this research, stimuli were presented tachistoscopically either in the left or the right or with identical copies flashed simultaneously to both visual fields. 40 college students took part in the experiment 1 and experiment 2 respectively. The following is the results of this research: (1) There was a significant difference between words, non-words and pseudowords in error rate and correct reaction time (CRT). The bilateral advantage effect was significant for words and was absent for non-words and pseudowords. These results could be explained by the neurobiological theory of language representation ;(2) We did not find the left or right hemisphere advantage for words, non-words or pseudowords ; (3) There was no significant difference between the function and content words, which suggested that the word representation was not solely decided by the grammatical class; (4) Non-words did better than pseudowords. Pseudowords might have activated the functional webs of orthographic representation;(5) The word frequency had important effect in the category decision task. However, different modes exhibited in "yes" and "no" reaction; (6)For concrete content words with "no" reaction, the left hemisphere, which may involve the automatic semantic activation, did worst in the 3 visual field conditions.