中島, 祥夫

下山, 一郎

Nakajima, Yoshio

Shimoyama, Ichiro

word recognition

native and non-native languages

cerebral localization

To clarify the cerebral areas activated by word recognition process, twenty-one channel visual event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent reading of kanji or English words, or the Arabic numerals in either the native or non-native language in six Japanese, four Chinese and four Uighur subjects. Grand averaged ERPs revealed the negative potentials with latency ranges between 200 and 300 ms after the onset of word or numeral presentation. The amplitude topographies revealed that the recognition task for kanji activated the central, and bilateral-parietal and -temporal areas, that that for English over the left middle- and posterior-temporal, and parietal areas, and that for numeral over the bilateral temporal and occipital areas. It was also found that the left hemisphere was more powerfully activated by word recognition in the non-native language (English and numeral) than by that in the native one (kanji and numeral). It is suggested that word recognition of native and non-native languages activate separate cortical neural networks in the brain. The cortical functional difference observed in the present study is also suggested to depend on the differences of language system such as phonographic or ideographic one.