Neural Correlation of Relation Information——Evidence from ERP

Abstract Central-parietal N200 is an ERP component that associates with orthographic processing in Chinese word recognition. Studies have shown that it may be related to the early processing of morpheme structures. Compound words can be regarded as the smallest unit of morpheme combination, the recognition process can be analogous to the comprehension of the sentence, including combining constituent morphemes. This process includes grammatical combinations and semantic combinations. Studies have found that the semantic combination takes place during the N400 time-window. Generally speaking, the grammatical combination should occur before the semantic combination, so does the structure priming that occurred during the N200 time-window represent grammatical combination? We explored this issue by using Chinese coordinative compounds and ERP technology. We found that there is a significant grammatical structure priming effect in the processing of Chinese compound words. This effect occurs in the early stage of word processing, that is, the N200 period. Combined with the previous research, the semantic relation priming occurred in the N400 window, indicating that the grammatical combination did appear before the semantic combination, and outlined the time course of the effect of relation information.