The present study explored the time course of neighborhood frequency effect at the early processing stages, examining whether orthographic neighbors with higher frequency exerted an influence on target processing especially at the phonological stage by using the event-related potential (ERP). Thirteen undergraduate students were recruited in this study, and they were required to covertly name Chinese characters with or without higher-frequency neighbors (HFNs); meanwhile, their brain activity was recorded. Results showed that the effect of neighborhood frequency was significant in frontocentral P2 amplitude, with a reduction for naming characters with HFNs compared to those without HFNs; while there was no effect in posterior N1 amplitude. The only neighborhood frequency effect in P2 component suggested a special role for the HFNs in phonological access of??Chinese characters. The decrease in amplitude for naming with-HFN characters might be associated with the phonological interference of higher-frequency neighbors due to their different pronunciations from the target characters. 1. Introduction Once a single word is presented, its orthographically similar words are also partially activated. Coltheart first introduced the concept of orthographic neighborhood of a target word, defined as all words of the same length that can be generated by changing just one letter while preserving letter positions [1]. For example, cheap, chest, cleat, and wheat are all neighbors of cheat. Grainger and his colleagues pointed out that the printed frequency of a word’s orthographic neighbors played an important role in identification process of this target word, which is termed as neighborhood frequency effect [2]. The authors indicated that if the frequency of a target word was not the highest among its neighbors, those higher-frequency neighbors (HFNs) would compete with the target word and, consequently, slow down its processing. This inhibition was reported in several studies of lexical decision [2–8]. In naming tasks, no effect or a facilitatory trend of neighborhood frequency was observed [4, 9]. Grainger [4] gave an explanation to the absence of neighborhood interference based on the analogy theory of word naming [10, 11]. The pronunciations in alphabetic orthographic neighborhoods were of high consistency, a word usually sounded similar with its orthographic neighbors, and then the neighbors with higher frequency would provide support for the component phonology of the target word [4]. However, there is a close relationship between visual forms and pronunciations
References
[1]
M. Coltheart, E. Davelaar, J. T. Jonasson, and D. Besner, “Access to the internal lexicon,” in Attention and Performance, S. Dornic, Ed., pp. 535–555, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, USA, 1977.
[2]
J. Grainger, J. K. O'Regan, A. M. Jacobs, and J. Segui, “On the role of competing word units in visual word recognition: the neighborhood frequency effect,” Perception and Psychophysics, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 189–195, 1989.
[3]
M. Carreiras, M. Perea, and J. Grainger, “Effects of orthographic neighborhood in visual word recognition: cross-task comparisons,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 857–871, 1997.
[4]
J. Grainger, “Word frequency and neighborhood frequency effects in lexical decision and naming,” Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 228–244, 1990.
[5]
J. Grainger and A. M. Jacobs, “Orthographic processing in visual word recognition: a multiple-read out model,” Psychological Review, vol. 103, no. 3, pp. 518–565, 1996.
[6]
J. Grainger and J. Segui, “Neighborhood frequency effects in visual word recognition: a comparison of lexical decision and masked identification latencies,” Perception and Psychophysics, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 191–198, 1990.
[7]
A. M. Jacobs and J. Grainger, “Testing a semistochastic variant of the interactive activation model in different word recognition experiments,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 1174–1188, 1992.
[8]
W. J. B. van Heuven, T. Dijkstra, and J. Grainger, “Orthographic Neighborhood Effects in Bilingual Word Recognition,” Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 458–483, 1998.
[9]
C. R. Sears, Y. Hino, and S. J. Lupker, “Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency effects in word recognition,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 876–900, 1995.
[10]
L. Henderson, Orthographic and Word Recognition in Reading, Academic Press, London, UK, 1982.
[11]
R. Taraban and J. L. McClelland, “Conspiracy effects in word pronunciation,” Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 608–631, 1987.
[12]
L. H. Tan, A. R. Laird, K. Li, and P. T. Fox, “Neuroanatomical correlates of phonological processing of Chinese characters and alphabetic words: a meta-analysis,” Human Brain Mapping, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 83–91, 2005.
[13]
J. C. Ziegler, L. H. Tan, C. Perry, and M. Montant, “The phonological frequency effect in Chinese,” Psychological Science, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 234–238, 2000.
[14]
C. A. Perfetti and L. H. Tan, “The time course of graphic, phonological, and semantic activation in Chinese character identification,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 101–118, 1998.
[15]
X. Zhu, “Analysis of cuing function of phonetic components in modern Chinese,” in Proceedings of the Symposium on the Chinese Language and Characters, X. Yuan, Ed., pp. 85–99, GuangMing Daily Press, Beijing, China.
[16]
E. Bates, S. D'Amico, T. Jacobsen et al., “Timed picture naming in seven languages,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 344–380, 2003.
[17]
C. W. Hue, “Recognition processes in character naming,” in Language Processing in Chinese, H. C. E. Chen and O. J. L. Tzeng, Eds., pp. 93–107, Advanced Psychology, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1992.
[18]
Q.-L. Li, H.-Y. Bi, T.-Q. Wei, and B.-G. Chen, “Orthographic neighborhood size effect in Chinese character naming: orthographic and phonological activations,” Acta Psychologica, vol. 136, no. 1, pp. 35–41, 2011.
[19]
Q.-L. Li, H.-Y. Bi, and J. X. Zhang, “Neural correlates of the orthographic neighborhood size effect in Chinese,” European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 866–872, 2010.
[20]
G. Grossi, N. Savill, E. Thomas, and G. Thierry, “Posterior N1 asymmetry to English and Welsh words in early and late English-Welsh bilinguals,” Biological Psychology, vol. 85, no. 1, pp. 124–133, 2010.
[21]
J. H.-W. Hsiao, R. Shillcock, and C.-Y. Lee, “Neural correlates of foveal splitting in reading: evidence from an ERP study of Chinese character recognition,” Neuropsychologia, vol. 45, no. 6, pp. 1280–1292, 2007.
[22]
C.-H. Hsu, J.-L. Tsai, C.-Y. Lee, and O. J.-L. Tzeng, “Orthographic combinability and phonological consistency effects in reading Chinese phonograms: an event-related potential study,” Brain and Language, vol. 108, no. 1, pp. 56–66, 2009.
[23]
S. E. Lin, H. C. Chen, J. Zhao, S. Li, S. He, and X. C. Weng, “Left-lateralized N170 response to unpronounceable pseudo but not false Chinese characters-the key role of orthography,” Neuroscience, vol. 190, pp. 200–206, 2011.
[24]
K. Miki, S. Watanabe, Y. Takeshima, M. Teruya, Y. Honda, and R. Kakigi, “Effect of configural distortion on a face-related ERP evoked by random dots blinking,” Experimental Brain Research, vol. 193, no. 2, pp. 255–265, 2009.
[25]
D. Nemrodov, Y. Harpaz, D. C. Javitt, and M. Lavidor, “ERP evidence of hemispheric independence in visual word recognition,” Brain and Language, vol. 118, no. 3, pp. 72–80, 2011.
[26]
L. Pylkk?nen and A. Marantz, “Tracking the time course of word recognition with MEG,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 187–189, 2003.
[27]
B. G. Chen, Y. Liu, L. X. Wang, D. L. Peng, and C. A. Perfetti, “The timing of graphic, phonological and semantic activation of high and low frequency Chinese character: an Event-Related Potential study,” Progress in Natural Science, vol. 17, no. 13, pp. 62–70, 2007.
[28]
L. Kong, J. X. Zhang, C. Kang, Y. Du, B. Zhang, and S. Wang, “P200 and phonological processing in Chinese word recognition,” Neuroscience Letters, vol. 473, no. 1, pp. 37–41, 2010.
[29]
Q. Zhang, J. X. Zhang, and L. Kong, “An ERP study on the time course of phonological and semantic activation in Chinese word recognition,” International Journal of Psychophysiology, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 235–245, 2009.
[30]
J. B. Debruille, “Knowledge inhibition and N400: a study with words that look like common words,” Brain and Language, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 202–220, 1998.
[31]
S. P. Fang, R. Y. Horng, and O. J. L. Tzeng, “Consistency effects in the Chinese character and pseudo-character naming tasks,” in Linguistics, Psychology, and the Chinese Language, H. S. R. Kao and R. Hoosain, Eds., pp. 11–21, Centre of Asian Studies, Hong Kong, 1986.
[32]
Y. Li and J. S. Kang, “The research on phonetic-radical of modern Chinese phonetic-semantic compound,” in Information Analysis of Modern Chinese Characters, Y. Chen, Ed., Shanghai Education Publishing House, Shanghai, China, 1993.
[33]
S. Greenhouse and S. Geisser, “On methods in the analysis of profile data,” Psychometrika, vol. 24, pp. 95–112, 1959.
[34]
A. M. Dale, A. K. Liu, B. R. Fischl et al., “Dynamic statistical parametric mapping: combining fMRI and MEG for high-resolution imaging of cortical activity,” Neuron, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 55–67, 2000.
[35]
L. H. Tan, J. A. Spinks, C.-M. Feng et al., “Neural systems of second language reading are shaped by native language,” Human Brain Mapping, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 158–166, 2003.
[36]
J. Luo and K. Niki, “The role of left inferior frontal gyrus in working memory: phonological competition and inhibition,” NeuroImage, vol. 11, no. 5, p. S400, 2000.