Identifying morphological markers of reading expertise in Chinese : correlating behavioural and event-related potential measures

Abstract

Morphological processing, which consists of lexical compounding and homophone awareness, is a crucial component for children to recognize and read Chinese. Most previous studies have focused on the lexical compounding awareness of this processing while homophone awareness at the neural level had seldom been investigated. The study was designed to investigate whether N400 components could characterize homophone awareness by manipulating the semantic congruency and orthographic similarity of homophone pairs using a homophone verification task with event-related potential (ERP) measures. Forty-two Grade 4 children were recruited to determine whether the spoken syllables matched the target visual homophone. A two-way ANOVA revealed that children responded to orthographic dissimilar homophones faster and more accurately. ERP results showed significant effects of semantic congruency at the N400 component and incongruent homophones showed a greater left-lateralized N400 than congruent homophones. Additionally, this homophone awareness was positively correlated with children’s ability to read Chinese characters. The results suggest that N400 could characterize morphological processing in children and children with better sensitivity to distinguish the correct visual form of homophones perform better in word reading.