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Abstract
The present study examined the relationship between P200 and phonological processing
in Chinese word recognition. Participants did a semantic judgment task on pairs of
words. The critical pairs were all semantically unrelated in one of three conditions:
homophonic, rhyme, or phonologically unrelated. Noting the possibility that P200 may
be affected by phonological similarity and orthographic similarity and that literature
studies may not have assessed such effects separately, the present study used visually
dissimilar word pairs sharing no phonetic radicals. Relative to the control pairs,
both the homophonic and rhyme pairs elicited a significantly larger P200 with a scalp
distribution centering at the centro-parietal areas. The results present strong evidence
that P200 can be modulated by lexical phonology alone, independent of sub-lexical
phonology, or lexical or sub-lexical orthography. P200 effects were comparable in
amplitude and topography between the homophonic and the rhyme conditions, suggesting
that P200 is sensitive to phonology at both the syllabic and the sub-syllabic levels.
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