An FMRI And EEG Study Of Words Processing In Chinese Language

Word Recognition is an important integral part of language understanding.Brain research to identify the type of vocabulary can position which areas participate the word recognition.This is important to the research of language processing and many aphasia patients due to surgery or due to mental stimulation.Magnetic Resonance Imaging(MRI)and electroencephalogram(EEG)as important means to explore the brain processing words mechanism are safe and stable.Since the brain activations of functional magnetic resonance imaging(f MRI)and recognition potential(RP)of event related potentials are the important feature of brain words processing.This article is based on f MRI and EEG to research brain mechanism of Chinese word processing.The main work of this paper includes:(1)The design of experimental materials:Selecting high frequency verbs and nouns from modern Chinese corpus,matching all kinds of factors that affect the Chinese word recognition,and designing words library includes abstract nouns,abstract verbs,concrete nouns and concrete verbs to explore the processing difference between semantics and categories.(2)The experiment design: Words and hash marks are appeared randomly and quickly based on E-prime.Choosing 12 boys and 12 girls who are healthy volunteers of native Chinese.(3)Processing and statistical analysis of experimental data: The pre-processing of f MRI data includes slice timing,realignment,coregistration,segment,normalise and smooth.The pre-processing of EEG data includes filtering,reduce artifacts,segment,multi-trial averaging and so on.Statistical analysis based on T-test,through comparing the f MRI activations between the four categories of words,we find that more brain regions involved in cognitive the concrete nouns and the concrete verbs.Based on F-test,through comparing recognition potential from EEG data,we find the brain recognizes difference between concrete words and abstract words.Based on the analysis of f MRI and EEG experimental data,we find that most of the brain regions associated with semantic processing,a small part of the brain regions involved in categories judgment.The results are similar with the brain research about English words.That is means,the activations and recognition potentials of the brain are mainly determinded by semantic,a small part of the brain activation is determined by the categorie.