N400 and P600 Effect of Chinese Words Recognition

Word recognition is an important part of the processing in reading comprehension. N400 component is generally considered as semantic index of word processing, and P600 component is used to interpret syntactic processing. But the discovery of “Semantic P600” effect prompts people to interpret the meaning of P600 again. This study takes normal developing teenagers (ages 12-14) as research subject by using the event-related potentials (ERP) to examine the N400 and P600 effect of Chinese words processing of the true words and pseudo words recognition. The results show that the reaction time of the pseudo words are longer than that of the true words and N400 can also be evoked by the independent Chinese words; the pseudo words evoked larger amplitude of N400 than that of the true words. Compared with the true words, the latency of P600 of pseudo words are significantly delayed. The amplitudes of P600 evoked by true words are larger than by the Pseudo words. The present results suggest that N400 and P600 have different functions and significance in words recognition, N400 reflects the semantic priming effect, P600 reflects the semantic integration in the late stages of semantic processing.

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