Morphological Processing in Chinese-Speaking Children: An Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

Morphological awareness has been suggested to play a significant role in reading development, and support various skills such as vocabulary and text comprehension. However, evidence on how morphological information is processed in Chinese is limited and has been constrained to behavioural tasks in children with reading difficulties (e.g. Chen et al., 2009; Tong et al., 2009). Using event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study examined whether typically developing children are sensitive to the processing of morphemes during lexical-semantic processing. Children were administered a standardized reading test (Hong Kong Graded Character Naming Test, Leung, Lai & Kwan, 2008), and asked to decide whether a target character corresponds to a syllable in the preceding spoken word in a homophone verification task. The auditorially-presented word and target character pairs varied in congruency (match vs. mismatch) and orthographic similarity (orthographically similar vs. dissimilar to the target character) factorially. Significant orthographic effects were found behaviorally, whereby children responded faster and more accurately to characters paired with visually dissimilar targets, suggesting that they needed more time and were more error prone to reject the target character amongst visually similar competitors. Electrophysiological results at the N400 component showed a left lateralization effect, and that characters paired with mismatched morphemes elicited a more negative N400 than matched morphemes. Character reading ability was also positively correlated with the amplitude of the N400 morpheme congruency effect in the central region. Importantly, the N400 component is sensitive to morphological processing in children, as more effortful N400 activation was required to inhibit the unrelated target morphemes during lexical-semantic retrieval. Moreover, the findings suggest the potential of applying the homophone verification paradigm, given its additional sensitivity to reading ability, to study morphological processing in less skilled and poor readers