Representational Levels of Bilateral N170 for Japanese Hiragana Strings during Focal Spatial Attention to Letters

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  • OKUMURA Yasuko
    Hokkaido University, Graduate School of Education Department of Developmental Disorders National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry
  • KASAI Tetsuko
    Hokkaido University, Faculty of Education
  • MUROHASHI Harumitsu
    Hokkaido University, Faculty of Education

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<p>Fluent reading requires the rapid integration of letters into a unified letter-string percept. Previous studies have shown that this process is related to specific enhancement of the left-lateralized event-related potential (ERP) called N170. However, our previous studies found bilateral N170, rather than left-lateralized N170, enhancement for rapidly-presented Japanese Hiragana strings that were either unattended or had wide interletter spacing (Okumura et al., 2014, 2015). To explore the possibility that bilateral N170 reflects the processing of separate letters, the present study examined lateralized ERP attention effects for widely-spaced Hiragana words, nonwords, and alphanumeric symbol strings. Twelve participants were required to attend to the left or right end of strings, and to respond to a target letter/symbol at the attended location. We found bilateral N170 enhancement for Hiragana strings (130–210 ms poststimulus), while a spatial attention effect was seen in the 160—210 ms interval regardless of Hiragana or symbol strings. These results suggest that N170 specialization involves processing of letter strings at the level of separate constituent-letters when they are widely spaced or when attention does not cover letter strings.</p>

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