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The Role of Phonological Processing in Semantic Access of Chinese Characters: A Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study

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Oxygen Transport to Tissue XXXVIII

Part of the book series: Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology ((AEMB,volume 923))

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Abstract

The Stroop task was used to investigate the role of phonological processing in semantic access for written Chinese language. Fourteen children were recruited to perform the Stroop task, using color characters, their homophones and neutral characters as stimuli. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was used to measure the brain activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) during the task. In view of better sensitivity, oxy-hemoglobin was chosen to indicate the task activation. In behavioral performance, there was a significant classical Stroop interference effect as indexed by longer response time and higher error rate for the color task than the neutral task, whereas there was no evident interference effect for the color homophones. The NIRS data agreed with the behavioral data, and showed a significant Stroop effect only for the color characters in the bilateral PFC. These results suggested that phonology may not play an important role in semantic activation of Chinese characters for children.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support from the PhD research startup foundation of Guangdong Medical University (2XB14006).

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Correspondence to Hui Gong .

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Sun, J., Rao, L., Gao, C., Zhang, L., Liang, L., Gong, H. (2016). The Role of Phonological Processing in Semantic Access of Chinese Characters: A Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study. In: Luo, Q., Li, L., Harrison, D., Shi, H., Bruley, D. (eds) Oxygen Transport to Tissue XXXVIII. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 923. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38810-6_31

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