Roles Of Phonological Information On Semantic Activation In Chinese Word Recognition:Evidence Form Event-Related Potentials

Chinese phonological information is composed of vowels,consonants and tones,Vowels,consonants,and tones worked together in activating Chinese semantic information.Previous studies have confirmed the role of phonological information on semantic activation.The role is not only played in the attentive stage of processing,but also in the pre-attentive stage of processing.In view of the characteristics of Chinese phonological,we aimed at the role of phonological information on the activation of lexical meanings in the stage of automatic early processing.By changing vowels,consonants and tones of Chinese,we can get different words and pseudo-words,to investigate the role of phonological information in isolation and context.We use the method of ERP and the passive Oddball paradigm to examine the vowels,consonants and tones how to active lexical semantic in the stage of automatic early processing.There are three passive Oddball sequences in total.We focus on the MMN component.Its amplitude and latency are the most important thing we should analysis under different experimental conditions.There is a type of standard stimuli and two types of deviant stimuli(words,pseudo-words)in each sequence.Deviant stimuli each occurring with a 10%probability against the background of standards,whose present probability is80%.The participants are asked to watch a silent films and ignored the auditory stimuli.The results showed that:(1)Vowels and consonants can automatically activate the semantic of Chinese in the automatic early processing;(2)In the stage of automatic early processing,the role of vowels and consonants on semantic activation is in much the same in isolation and context;(3)Whether in isolation or context,the right hemisphere has much more advantages in activating semantic information.The results support the acoustic hypothesis of speech perception.