Two-Character Chinese Compound Word Processing in Chinese Children With and Without Dyslexia: ERP Evidence

Abstract

Using event-related potential (ERP) measures, we examined the time course of Chinese compound word processing in 15 dyslexic and 10 normal children in a lexical decision task with three conditions including real words (e.g., (house)), reversed nonwords (e.g., can be transposed to a real word (ocean)) and random nonwords (e.g., is not a real word when transposing). Behavioral results showed that dyslexic children performed slower and less accurately than normal children did across conditions. ERP data revealed that normal children exhibited significant N400 effects across conditions. The dyslexics did not show any difference on N400, however, suggesting a possible weakness of morphological processing in dyslexic children.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Phil Duo Liu for helping us with the stimuli. We also thank all children and parents for their participation.

FUNDING

This research was supported by the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Research Grants Council (CUHK: 451811) and (HKIED: GRF-841311) to Catherine McBride and Kevin K. H. Chung respectively.