Electrophysiological evidence of sublexical phonological access in character processing by L2 Chinese learners of L1 alphabetic scripts

Abstract

While Chinese character reading relies more on addressed phonology relative to alphabetic scripts, skilled Chinese readers also access sublexical phonological units during recognition of phonograms. However, sublexical orthography-to-phonology mapping has not been found among beginning second language (L2) Chinese learners. This study investigated character reading in more advanced Chinese learners whose native writing system is alphabetic. Phonological regularity and consistency were examined in behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) in lexical decision and delayed naming tasks. Participants were 18 native English speakers who acquired written Chinese after age 5 years and reached grade 4 Chinese reading level. Behaviorally, regular characters were named more accurately than irregular characters, but consistency had no effect. Similar to native Chinese readers, regularity effects emerged early with regular characters eliciting a greater N170 than irregular characters. Regular characters also elicited greater frontal P200 and smaller N400 than irregular characters in phonograms of low consistency. Additionally, regular-consistent characters and irregular-inconsistent characters had more negative amplitudes than irregular-consistent characters in the N400 and LPC time windows. The overall pattern of brain activities revealed distinct regularity and consistency effects in both tasks. Although orthographic neighbors are activated in character processing of L2 Chinese readers, the timing of their impact seems delayed compared with native Chinese readers. The time courses of regularity and consistency effects across ERP components suggest both assimilation and accommodation of the reading network in learning to read a typologically distinct second orthographic system. Keywords L2 Chinese reading . Phonological regularity . Phonological consistency . Event-related potential (ERP) . N170 . P200 . N400 . LPC Writing systems across the world vary fundamentally in the visual form of writing units and the mapping between orthographic and other linguistic units, including phonological units, grammatical morphemes, and semantic features. For instance, words in most alphabetic scripts are formed by linear arrangement of letters, while characters in Chinese, widely considered a morphosyllabic script (DeFrancis, 1989), are square-shaped consisting of components referred to as radicals. For mapping from orthography to phonology, the correspondence can be between graphemes and phonemes (e.g., English, French, and Korean hangul), between graphemes and consonants only (e.g., Hebrew), between a symbol and a mora in Japanese katakana and hiragana, or between a character and a syllable in Chinese. In today's globalized world, communicating in spoken and/or written form in two or more languages in different contexts on a daily basis is a way of life. The questions of how different scripts can be processed at relative ease by bilingual or multilingual speakers and how the characteristics of these systems may i...

N170 reflects visual familiarity and automatic sublexical phonological access in L2 written word processing

“…The timing as well as bilateral distribution of the regularity effect was compatible with previous reports in lexical decision and delayed naming tasks in L1 and L2 Chinese readers (Yum et al, 2014a; 2016), while a subsequent report did not find regularity effect at the N170 in a delayed naming task for native Chinese readers (Yum & Law, 2019). In the previous studies, greater N170 in regular characters relative to irregular characters was taken to reflect stronger activation of the phonological form of the character since there would be no interference.…”

“…Since phonological regularity of the phonetic radical is a unique construct in Chinese not found in alphabetic or syllabic languages, the two L2 groups showed a pattern of accommodation in viewing these characters. The robust effect of phonological regularity at the N170 across different groups underlined the integral nature of radical processing in Chinese character reading, as demonstrated in a number of previous ERP studies (Lee et al, 2007; Yum et al, 2014a; 2016).…”

“…Additionally, there were at least three important differences between the previous studies and the current one. First, although phonological consistency was shown to interact with phonological regularity in Yum et al (2016), it was not considered in this study. This was mainly because it was difficult to accurately assess phonological neighbourhood in L2 readers.…”

“…The participants exhibited bilateral P100 and N170 responses, but the radical position contrast showed a right-lateralized P100 effect followed by left-lateralized N170 effect, while L1 Chinese readers showed the effect at left-hemisphere electrodes in the P100 time window. In another study that examined phonological effects (Yum et al, 2016), non-native Chinese learners of a similar language background to those in Yum et al (2018) participated in delayed naming and lexical decision tasks. It was found that regular characters elicited stronger N170 than irregular characters, and the overall brain activities were right-side dominated and driven by delayed naming.…”

Electrophysiological evidence of lexical processing impacted by foreign language reading anxiety

“…For instance, Chinese reading is associated with a bilateralized or even right-lateralized N170 while English reading shows a more left-lateralized N170 [ [41] , [42] ]. The lateralized N170 could be attributed to the distinct orthographic information across languages [ 43 ]; [ 44 ]. As for the N400 component, English exhibits a weaker and/or longer N400 compared to Chinese [ 33 , 45 ].…”