DOI:10.6129/CJP.202103_63(1).0002
中華心理學刊 民110，63 卷，1 期，23-40
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2021, Vol.63, No.1, 23-40

Christine Chifen Tseng（Department of Applied English, National Taichung University of Science and Technology）；Chun-Han Chiang（Department of Special Education, National Pingtung University）；Keng-Chen Liang（Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）；Ching-Chih（ KuoDepartment of Special Education, National Taiwan Normal University）

Abstract

Gifted children are precocious in verbal abilities. While the neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence has supporting evidence across cultures, electrophysiological responses associated with intelligence varied in children with different intellectual levels on various tasks. To test the hypothesis by components of the event-related field (ERF) on gifted children, we used a semantic-and-syntactic error detection task to study sentence processing in language comprehension. Three types of determiner-particle final sentences were presented visually to subjects in this
magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment: the congruent (a correct particle with a detection task), incongruent (an incorrect particle with a detection task), and filler (a correct particle followed by a word recall task) conditions.
To detect different waveforms within and between the gifted group (GT) (N = 19) and non-gifted group (NG) (N = 15), the permutation t tests (iteration: 1000; p = .05; two tailed) were adopted to compare the ERF of the two groups. For the within group comparison, the NG group showed stronger amplitudes only around 600 ms, while the GT group had early components closed to 400 ms and the late time-window around 600ms. For the incongruent-subtract-filler comparison, a significant ERF difference was found between the two groups at a late time window around 650 ms in the right occipital channel. The topography revealed stronger current in the occipito-temporal region for the GT group
during this time-window. In contrast, no statistically significant difference was found by comparing incongruent-subtractcongruent (IC) and congruent-subtract-filler (CF) conditions.
Interestingly, this study showed that responses of gifted children had stronger magnetic current at a late time point compared to children with average IQ in the semantic-syntactic judgment task. These results indicate the complex task might engage deeper processing in a brain network and that gifted individuals show greater brain activation than their average peers. Task complexity or difficulty needs to be taken into  consideration when the neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence is proposed.

Keywords: magnetoencephalography (MEG), giftedness, verbal ability, semantic-and-syntactic error, Neural Efficiency Hypothesis of Intelligence