Abstract: 10 male university students aged 19-24 participated in the experiment.A negative-going ERP component N400 peaking around 410 ms appearedwhenever the mehtal template to a specific Chinese character mismatchedthe presented character. In conditions where graphemic and semantic fac-tors were constant the phonological match or mismatch affected the extentto which the N400 was asymmetrically distributed between the two hemis-pheres. The N400 was also found to be overlapped by P300 component asa result of the influences from such non-linguistic factors as the ratio ofdifferent types of characters and the tasks for judgement and response.

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