P200 and phonological processing in Chinese word recognition

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.