Native English speakers with no knowledge of Chinese were trained on 60 Chinese characters according to one of three mapping conditions: orthography to pronunciation and meaning (P þ M), orthography to pronunciation (P), and orthography to meaning (M). Following the training, fMRI scans taken during passive viewing of Chinese characters showed activation in brain regions that partially overlap the regions found in studies of skilled Chinese readers, but typically not found in alphabetic readers. Areas include bilateral middle frontal (BA 9), right occipital (BA 18/19), and fusiform (BA 37) regions. The activation pattern of Chinese characters was similar across the three groups. However, peak location was different in the left middle frontal region between groups. Direct contrasts between the groups also revealed stronger activation of left middle frontal in the P þ M group. The results suggest that learners acquired skill in reading Chinese characters using a brain network similar to that used by Chinese native speakers. The results are consistent with the system accommodation hypothesis: The brain's reading network accommodates to features of an acquired writing system.

Four experiments with Chinese-English bilinguals were conducted in order to investigate the hypothesis of language nonselective access to an integrated lexicon for bilingual phonological representations. Results of a naming task (in Experiments 1 and 2) and a lexical decision task (in Experiments 3 and 4) showed homophone priming effects regardless of priming direction (English to Chinese, or Chinese to English) or English proficiency. Our findings are compatible with the BIA+ model of bilingual processing, provide further support for the hypothesis of language nonselective access to an integrated lexicon for bilingual phonological representations, and extend the hypothesis to language pairs with very different writing systems.

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To acquire representations of printed words, children must attend to the written form of a word and link this form with the word's pronunciation. When words are read in context, they may be read with less attention to these features, and this can lead to poorer word form retention. Two experiments with young children (ages 5-8 years) conWrmed this hypothesis. In our experiments, children attempted to read words they could not previously read, during a self-teaching period, either in context or in isolation. Later they were tested on how well they learned the words as a function of selfteaching condition (isolation or context). Consistent with previous research, children read more words accurately in context than in isolation during self-teaching; however, children had better retention for words learned in isolation. Furthermore, this beneWt from learning in isolation was larger for less skilled readers. This eVect of poorer word retention when words are learned in context is paradoxical because context has been shown to facilitate word identiWcation. We discuss factors that may inXuence this eVect of context, especially the role of children's skill level and the demands of learning new word representations at the beginning of reading instruction.