Neural Correlates of Normal Reading Development and Reading Disorders in Chinese: Preliminary Findings from Event-related Potentials

Su, IF; Lau, Dky; Law, SP

doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.09.092

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In studies involving native Chinese readers, the results are mixed with respect to the laterality of N170. Lee et al ( 2007 ), Hsu et al ( 2009 ), as well as the present study, did not find hemispheric dominance of the component; nonetheless, left-lateralization of the N170 has been obtained in adults (Lin et al, 2011 ; Zhao et al, 2012 ) and children (Cao et al, 2011 ; Su et al, 2013 ). In sum, the N170 has consistently been associated with skilled reading in different writing systems, and left-lateralization of the component is not necessarily influenced by the nature of orthography-phonology mapping.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

An ERP study of effects of regularity and consistency in delayed naming and lexicality judgment in a logographic writing system

Yum¹,

Law²,

Su³

et al. 2014

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Phonological access is an important component in theories and models of word reading. However, phonological regularity and consistency effects are not clearly separable in alphabetic writing systems. We investigated these effects in Chinese, where the two variables are operationally distinct. In this orthographic system, regularity is defined as the congruence between the pronunciation of a complex character (or phonogram), and that of its phonetic radical, while phonological consistency indexes the proportion of orthographic neighbors that share the same pronunciation as the phonogram. In the current investigation, regularity and consistency were contrasted in an event-related potential (ERP) study using a lexical decision (LD) task and a delayed naming (DN) task with native Chinese readers. ERP results showed that effects of regularity occurred early after stimulus onset and were long-lasting. Regular characters elicited larger N170, smaller P200, and larger N400 compared to irregular characters. In contrast, significant effects of consistency were only seen at the P200 and consistent characters showed a greater P200 than inconsistent characters. Thus, both the time course and the direction of the effects indicated that regularity and consistency operated under different mechanisms and were distinct constructs. Additionally, both of these phonological effects were only found in the DN task and absent in LD, suggesting that phonological access was non-obligatory for LD. The study demonstrated cross-language variability in how phonological information was accessed from print and how task demands could influence this process.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

An ERP study of effects of regularity and consistency in delayed naming and lexicality judgment in a logographic writing system

Yum¹,

Law²,

Su³

et al. 2014

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In contrast, such an interaction between task and experimental conditions was not obtained in L2 Chinese learners until the LPC time window. It is worth noting that regularity effects in a lexical decision task have been observed in 9-year-old native Chinese readers, most of whom just finished Grade 4 (Su, Lau, & Law, 2013). The presence of phonological effects in LD performed by L1 Chinese developing readers and L2 Chinese learners can be interpreted as automatic extraction of phonological information during character recognition, whereas the absence of these effects in LD among L1 adult readers can be indicative of high reading skills and very efficient visual/orthographic analysis of characters, such that the lexicality status of a character can be judged solely on its orthographic form.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Yum

Law

et al. 2015

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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...

show abstract

“…For example, the character 評 ( ping4 ) <criticize> can be decomposed into the semantic radical 言 <speech-related>, which indicates clues to its meaning, and the phonetic radical 平 ( ping4 ) <flat>, which indicates clues to its phonology. Semantic and phonetic radicals were demonstrated in many studies to be involved in the decoding process of phonetic compounds (e.g., Feldman and Siok, 1999 ; Zhou and Marslen-Wilson, 2000 ; Law and Wong, 2005 ; Perfetti et al, 2005 ; Su et al, 2013 ; Lau et al, 2015 ). It has been widely reported that the recognition of regular phonetic compounds, those that share the identical syllables with their corresponding phonetic radicals, was associated with higher accuracy and faster reaction times (RTs) than responses to irregular phonetic compounds, those that do not share the identical syllables with their corresponding phonetic radicals (e.g., Su et al, 2013 ; Lau et al, 2015 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orthographic and Phonological Processing in Chinese Character Copying – A Preliminary Report

Lau

2020

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the current study, the effects of orthographic and phonological processing in Chinese character copying were investigated using a data set extracted from a database containing handwriting data of 856 stimuli; the responses of which were collected from 100 participants. To investigate the effect of character frequency, radical frequency, and phonetic regularity, 151 phonetic compounds were selected from the database because (1) their corresponding phonetic radicals were all free-standing characters, (2) their corresponding phonetic radicals were located at either the right or the bottom positions in the characters, and (3) no more than 10% of the participants made errors when copying these target characters. The results of the linear mixed effect models revealed that after controlling for inter-stroke distance (ISD) and stroke number, the inter-stroke intervals (ISIs) at the radical and logographeme boundaries were significantly longer, indicating significant orthographic processing in the immediate copying task that radicals and logographemes were used as writing units. In addition, shorter ISIs at the logographeme boundary associated with higher radical frequency, and shorter ISIs at the radical boundary associated with higher character frequency and regular characters, were observed. These observations indicated significant orthographic and phonological effects in the immediate copying task. Finally, the significant phonetic regularity effect observed also supported the notion that phonology contributes to Chinese character writing and that the effects of central processing, including character frequency and phonetic regularity, cascade over peripheral processing during Chinese character copying.

show abstract

Neural Correlates of Normal Reading Development and Reading Disorders in Chinese: Preliminary Findings from Event-related Potentials

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

An ERP study of effects of regularity and consistency in delayed naming and lexicality judgment in a logographic writing system

An ERP study of effects of regularity and consistency in delayed naming and lexicality judgment in a logographic writing system

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

Orthographic and Phonological Processing in Chinese Character Copying – A Preliminary Report

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About