The present study investigated brain activity elicited by character transposition processing of two-character Chinese words using event-related potentials (ERPs) with a two-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The behavioral results showed higher accuracy with canonical and transposed words than pseudowords in the short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, 249 ms) condition, but not in the long SOA (581 ms) condition. Additionally, relative to the pseudoword condition, the ERP results indicated that the canonical and transposed words elicited statistically less negative N250 and N400 amplitudes. Furthermore, both the canonical and transposed words revealed no significant differences in the early N100, P200, and N250 components, whereas a significant difference was observed in the N400 amplitude regardless of the SOAs between the two constituent characters, indicating less semantic activation. Taken together, our electrophysiological data indicate that early ERP components are not sensitive to Chinese character transposition. In contrast, such morpheme transposition affects the semantic processing of Chinese compound words.

本研究使用事件相关电位 (ERP) 和双目标快速串行视觉呈现 (RSVP) 任务调查了由两字汉字的字符转置处理引起的大脑活动。行为结果表明，在短刺激起始异步（SOA，249 毫秒）条件下，规范词和转置词的准确性高于伪词，但在长 SOA（581 毫秒）条件下则不然。此外，相对于伪词条件，ERP 结果表明规范词和转置词在统计学上引起的负 N250 和 N400 幅度较小。此外，规范词和转置词在早期 N100、P200 和 N250 组件中均未显示显着差异，而无论两个组成字符之间的 SOA 如何，在 N400 振幅中观察到显着差异，表明语义激活较少。综上所述，我们的电生理数据表明早期 ERP 成分对汉字换位不敏感。相比之下，这种语素转置会影响汉语复合词的语义处理。