N400 Event-related Potential and Gamma Band Activities during Visual Perception of Korean/English Words

한글 및 영어 단어의 시각적 인지 시 N400 사건관련 뇌전위 및 감마대역 활성화

The observations of difference and similarity in brain activities involved in processing different languages have fundamental importance in cognitive neuroscience. The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference and similarity in temporal brain activation patterns due to the language difference during visual perception of Korean and English words under priming. Especially, we tried to find the difference in evoked spectral power in gamma-band, which is known to reflect feature binding. The stimulation was visually presented as word pairs belonging to same or different categories so that N400 event-related potential(ERP) was evoked. Average ERP analysis and spectral analysis of gamma-band activity(GBA) were performed on 12 normal Korean subjects. Several ERP components such as P1, N1, N400, and P600 could be identified consistently, and the differences in N1, N400, and P600 were observed. From the spectral analysis, we found that the evoked GBA(eGBA) was significantly larger for English at ${\sim}100$ ms poststimulus. The latency of the eGBA was also considerably delayed for English. Overall, the results on the ERP components and eGBA analyses seem to be commensurate with subjects' familiarity of each language, and the difficulty of perceiving words of each language. The methods of this study can also be applied for clinical purposes considering that the language-related processing can be greatly altered for the patients with neurological or psychiatric diseases.