Pilot considerations of brain activity detection based on difference of English words difficulty levels at recognition of English words

Abstract We performed pilot electroencephalography experiments to examine whether brain activity would reflect the difficulty levels of English words for Japanese English learner. During experiment, "easy" and "difficult" English words were visually presented and the participant responded whether he understood the meaning of the presented English word. We found that the most characteristic brain activity was a power decrease in the 10-20 Hz frequency band at 400-800 ms after stimulus presentation, which seemed to reflect the differences in the difficulty of the words. Future studies will focus on applying machine-learning techniques so as to classify brain activities for each word.