Electrophysiological evidence for dual-route processing in visual recognition of Chinese jumbled words

Words with transposed letters-often referred to as jumbled words or transposed-letter nonwords-can still be read fluently. A comparable phenomenon occurs in Chinese, a logographic language in which words are composed of characters-square-shaped symbols that often correspond to morphemes. Consequently, most Chinese words are compound in nature. The present study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the recognition of Chinese jumbled words-two-character compounds with transposed character positions-using visual event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants performed an implicit reading task (color detection) while viewing Chinese words (or jumbled words) and pseudowords presented under two conditions that manipulated character order within each item: a left-to-right Canonical condition and a right-to-left Jumbled condition. Robust ND250 and left anterior negativity (LAN) effects were observed in both conditions. The ND250, associated with orthographic whole-word processing, was significantly attenuated in the Jumbled condition relative to the Canonical condition, suggesting that jumbled words only partially activated the orthographic representations of their base forms. The LAN, interpreted as an index of morphological decomposition, was also elicited in both conditions and did not significantly differ between Canonical and Jumbled conditions, indicating that decomposition processes operate automatically and are insensitive to character order. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that both whole-word and decomposition processing routes are engaged in the recognition of Chinese jumbled words, offering novel electrophysiological evidence for the flexibility of visual recognition of Chinese compound words.