An Event-Related Potential Study on the Typology of Writing

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24652078
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: University of Tsukuba
• Principal Investigator: IKEDA Jun 筑波大学, 人文社会系, 教授 (60288850)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): FUKUMORI Takahiro 大東文化大学, 外国語学部, 教授 (00407644)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 文字類型 / 子音文字 / ヘブライ文字 / ERP / N170 / P250

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In search of neural evidence for typology of writing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while native speakers of Hebrew silently read the eight stimuli in Hebrew script. Among them are the same words written with and without vowel points (P), lexically different but visually identical ones, and those consisting of one or two linguistic units (Us).
By comparing grand average ERPs, we found that the stimuli with P produced significantly larger amplitude at N170 than those without P, while the influence of the number of Us was limited at this time course. On the other hand, the stimuli with a single U produced significantly larger positive amplitude around 250 ms than those with two Us, while the influence of P was limited at this time course.
These results suggest that visual information and linguistic information of Hebrew are processed separately as early as 170 through 250 msec and that the visual processing precedes the linguistic processing within this time window.

Free Research Field

言語学