Detection of deviance in Japanese kanji compound words

Yuka Egashira; Yoshimi Kaga; Atsuko Gunji; Yosuke Kita; Motohiro Kimura; Naruhito Hironaga; Hiroshige Takeichi; Sayuri Hayashi; Yuu Kaneko; Hidetoshi Takahashi; Takashi Hanakawa; Takashi Okada; Masumi Inagaki

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2022.913945

Detection of deviance in Japanese kanji compound words

Front Hum Neurosci. 2022 Aug 15:16:913945. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.913945. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Yuka Egashira¹, Yoshimi Kaga^{1

2}, Atsuko Gunji^{1

3

4}, Yosuke Kita^{5

6}, Motohiro Kimura⁷, Naruhito Hironaga⁸, Hiroshige Takeichi^{1

9}, Sayuri Hayashi¹, Yuu Kaneko¹⁰, Hidetoshi Takahashi^{4

11}, Takashi Hanakawa^{4

12}, Takashi Okada¹, Masumi Inagaki^{1

13}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Developmental Disorders, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry (NCNP), Kodaira, Japan.
² Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Yamanashi, Chuo, Japan.
³ College of Education, Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan.
⁴ Integrative Brain Imaging Center, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry (NCNP), Kodaira, Japan.
⁵ Cognitive Brain Research Unit (CBRU), Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
⁶ Department of Psychology, Faculty of Letters, Keio University, Minato-ku, Japan.
⁷ Department of Information Technology and Human Factors, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.
⁸ Brain Center, Faculty of Medicine, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
⁹ Open Systems Information Science Team, Advanced Data Science Project, RIKEN Information R&D and Strategy Headquarters (R-IH), RIKEN, Yokohama, Japan.
¹⁰ Department of Neurosurgery, National Center Hospital, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry (NCNP), Kodaira, Japan.
¹¹ Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Kochi Medical School, Kochi University, Nankoku-shi, Japan.
¹² Integrated Neuroanatomy and Neuroimaging, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto, Japan.
¹³ Department of Pediatrics, Tottori Prefectural Rehabilitation Center, Tottori, Japan.

Abstract

Reading fluency is based on the automatic visual recognition of words. As a manifestation of the automatic processing of words, an automatic deviance detection of visual word stimuli can be observed in the early stages of visual recognition. To clarify whether this phenomenon occurs with Japanese kanji compounds-since their lexicality is related to semantic association-we investigated the brain response by utilizing three types of deviants: differences in font type, lexically correct or incorrect Japanese kanji compound words and pseudo-kanji characters modified from correct and incorrect compounds. We employed magnetoencephalography (MEG) to evaluate the spatiotemporal profiles of the related brain regions. The study included 22 adult native Japanese speakers (16 females). The abovementioned three kinds of stimuli containing 20% deviants were presented during the MEG measurement. Activity in the occipital pole region of the brain was observed upon the detection of font-type deviance within 250 ms of stimulus onset. Although no significant activity upon detecting lexically correct/incorrect kanji compounds or pseudo-kanji character deviations was observed, the activity in the posterior transverse region of the collateral sulcus (pCoS)-which is a fusiform neighboring area-was larger when detecting lexically correct kanji compounds than when detecting pseudo-kanji characters. Taken together, these results support the notion that the automatic detection of deviance in kanji compounds may be limited to a low-level feature, such as the stimulus stroke thickness.

Keywords: MEG; automatic processing; kanji compounds; lexical processing; parafoveal vision; reading ability; visual word processing.