Poster D77, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Unfolding the temporal dynamics of phonological interference (PI) effects in meaning access with ERPs
Lin Zhou1,2,3, Charles Perfetti1,2,3;1Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, 2Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 3Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
Phonological interference (PI) effects during meaning access is one line of evidence that automatic phonological activation occurs during meaning access. Such effects have been reported in Chinese reading (e.g. Perfetti and Zhang, 1995): In judging whether two sequentially presented Chinese characters were related in meaning, participants required more time and were less accurate when the character pairs were homophonic (but not related in meaning). However, the locus of these PI effects has remained unclear: some research concludes that PI effects arise from phonological processing at the lexical level, whereas other research shows that they arise at sub-lexical level. In an attempt to decide between these alternatives, we carried out an ERP study to examine the temporal dynamics of PI effects by manipulating orthogonally the second characters’ key orthography-to-phonology mapping properties, which were defined over lexical (pronunciation consistency) and sub-lexical (pronunciation regularity) levels. The results showed that PI effects occurred in (1) the N170 that was modulated by both consistency and regularity of the characters, (2) the P200 and N400 that were modulated by consistency only, and (3) the P600 that was modulated by neither consistency nor regularity. These results suggest that PI effects arise from phonological processing at both lexical and sub-lexical levels. We interpret these results in a two-stage framework of meaning judgment. The first stage begins with lexical access of the second character, where its consistency and regularity play a role (indexed by their impacts on N170, P200 and N400). The second stage is a meaning comparison process that requires reactivation of the first character, where neither the second character’s consistency nor its regularity matters (indexed by their null impact on P600).
Themes: Reading, Phonology and Phonological Working Memory
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)