ERP evidence for the time course of mental rotation in the mirror reading of Chinese words

The present study investigated the neuro-mechanism of mirror reading using two-character Chinese words and event related potentials (ERPs). Seventeen Chinese participants performed a lexico-semantic decision task on normal or reversed words (presented normally or in mirror images). Behavioral results showed a clear processing advantage for the normal words, compared with the reversed ones. ERP components including N200, N400, and LPC showed differences between the two word types, indicating the presence of mental rotation and its overlap in time with the two major stages of word recognition, namely word form identification and lexico-semantic processing. The results support parallel processing models proposing that mental rotation takes place parallelly with word recognition in mirror reading.