Early effects of radical position legality in Chinese: An ERP study

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the timecourse and neural underpinnings of the coding of radical positions in Chinese character reading. To isolate effects of radical positions, four types of pseudo-characters were created in which the constituent radicals appeared in positions varying in probability of occurrence, i.e., Unique, Dominant, Subordinate, or Illegal positions. Twenty native Chinese readers performed a character detection task where real characters were identified among pseudo-characters. The ERP data demonstrated that Illegal items were reliably distinguished from other pseudo-character items within 100ms, with larger P100 amplitudes at left posterior electrodes. At the N170, Illegal items elicited a smaller negativity than Unique items. In these time windows, pseudo-character conditions in legal radical positions did not differ among themselves. The early timecourse effects suggested that radical position legality was detected at the initial stage of visual processing, which challenged theoretical models that assume primacy of position-general radical representations.