Interactions between lexical and sublexical processes in written production: Evidence from two ERP experiments

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Understanding the cognitive processes underlying written word production is crucial for explaining language acquisition and disorders.
• The Chinese writing system, with its logographic nature, presents unique challenges and opportunities for studying the interplay between lexical and sublexical processing.
• Previous research has explored lexical effects in Chinese, but the temporal dynamics and interaction with sublexical factors during active spelling remain less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the temporal dynamics of lexical and sublexical processing during Chinese spelling-to-dictation.
• To examine the influence of character frequency (CF) and regularity on both spelling and auditory lexical decision tasks.
• To elucidate the interaction between lexical access and sublexical orthographic production in the Chinese writing system.

Main Methods:

• Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments were conducted.
• Experiment 1 involved participants writing the initial character of dictated two-character disyllabic words.
• Experiment 2 used an auditory lexical decision task, with character frequency and regularity manipulated in both experiments.

Main Results:

• Consistent character frequency effects were observed in the N2 and late N400 ERP windows across both tasks, indicating shared lexical access and competition.
• Crucially, interactions between character frequency and regularity emerged specifically in the P2 and P3 intervals during the spelling-to-dictation task.
• These interactions suggest that sublexical orthographic information modulates lexical processing during active writing.

Conclusions:

• The findings support an interactive dual-route account of spelling, where lexical and sublexical processes interact dynamically.
• The Chinese writing system significantly shapes the time course of written word production, influencing the interplay between different processing levels.
• Early (P2) and later (P3) ERP components reflect distinct stages of orthographic encoding and response preparation influenced by both lexical and sublexical factors.