A study on morphological processing of kana characters with an event-related potential

Abstract

It was verified in this study whether or not an event-related potential (ERP) is involved in the lexicon with the same kana (Japanese syllabic) characters but with different meanings based on morphological analysis, such as “ikada: It is a squid / raft” and “koushi: calf / lattice.” A combination of lexicons with a different number of morphemes was presented to subjects on the condition of not being involved in case processing as visual stimulation, and based on comparison of potentials containing N170 and P250 components that are supposed to be performing pre-lexical processing from letter perception, whether or not morphological processing becomes a load and is reflected in the ERP was tested. As a result, N170 and P250 components increased in regards to O1, O2, T5 and T6. However, a significant difference in the potentials was not obtained between parts of brain as well as in regards to the difference in the number of morphemes. Because of these reasons, a particular load is not on morphological processing; therefore it is considered as not reflected in the ERP.