Spatiotemporal Analysis of ERP During Chinese Idiom Comprehension

The objective of the present study was to elucidate the neural underpinning of Chinese idiom comprehension with spatiotemporal patterns of ERP. Thirteen subjects were required to decide whether the last character of each viewed Chinese four-character idiom was correct or not. Fuzzy c-means algorithm based on shape similarity was applied to segmenting spatiotemporal patterns of ERP. Statistical parametric map of t-statistic (SPM(t)) was performed after realignment according to the referential frame provided by fuzzy clustering in order to overcome temporal mismatch. Within 540 ms post-stimulus onset, the spatiotemporal patterns of ERP under both conditions could be segmented into 7 stages optimally and both share the first four microstates with variant membership functions and durations. SPM(t) presented significant differences in multiple regions in 3 stages: (1) during 120-150 ms, the early right hemispheric negativities (ERHN) in both frontal and temporoparietal areas were likely to reflect both initial syntactic processing and visual word-form mismatch; (2) during 320-380 ms (the N400 stage), negative deflections in left frontal, left anterior temporal, centrofrontal regions might coordinate and integrate both syntactic and semantic analysis in extensive right hemisphere; (3) during 480-540 ms (the P600 stage), positive deflections in left temporoparietal and occipital regions seemed to reflect the reanalysis and the integration of word meanings to obtain the over all meaning of idioms. Our study has implicated the brain mechanism of language comprehension common to alphabetic language as well as that specialized in logographic language.