Does font type influence the N200 enhancement effect in Chinese word recognition?

• The target in SF-Song condition elicited a clear N200 enhancement effect unaffected by fonts of prime.
• The N1 response was modulated by fonts with its amplitude following the degree of font degradation.
• The N270 response was influenced by the font manipulation.

By manipulating font type of the prime words in an immediate repetition paradigm, we investigated whether the centro-parietal N200 enhancement effect, an electrophysiological index specific to Chinese visual word recognition as reported by Zhang et al. (2012), is influenced by high spatial frequency information of Chinese characters during orthographic processing. Participants were asked to passively view lists of two-character compound words and only indicate Korean words via button presses. A compound word was presented in a prime trial in one of three font types (i.e., Song, LiShu, or ShuTi) that differed significantly in high but not low spatial frequency information, and was immediately followed by a target trial that presented the same word in Song font. A clear N200 enhancement effect was observed for target trials in all three conditions. Manipulation of font type did not modulate the N200 effect, but did modulate earlier ERP components N1 and N270. The finding that the N200 enhancement effect is not associated with high spatial frequency information was discussed in the framework of an invariant word recognition model with a hierarchy of local combination detectors (LCDs) proposed by Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, and Vinckier (2005).