Phonological activation in chinese reading: an event-related potential study using low-resolution electromagnetic tomography

Ren, Guiqin; Liu, Y.; Han, Yuhwa

doi:10.1016/j.neuroscience.2009.09.029

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Overall our results appear inconsistent with previous studies showing larger N2 peaks to homophones [13][14] and pseudohomophones [15] as compared to semantically congruent words. However, in our study sentence cloze probability was manipulated so as to make phonological priming effects particularly strong (see also ref.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…16) which we assume lead to automatic phonological activation overriding effects of orthographic expectation until after the window of semantic integration. We speculate that the previous conflicting findings regarding phonological integration indexed by the N2 may be accounted for by the absence of strong phonological expectations in the reader [12][13][14][15]. In this situation, phonological activation may be at a sub-threshold level vulnerable to interference from mismatch responses elicited by dissonant orthographic forms and would result in the observed increased N2 modulations [12,13,15], indexing early conflicts between orthographic and phonological processing [15,18].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Previous sentence reading studies have examined phonological activation by replacing semantically primed finals words with unexpected words sharing initial phonemes [12], homophones [13][14] or pseudohomophones (pseudowords homophonic to a real word) [15]. Some have found evidence for phonological effects in semantic integration indexed by the N400 [14][15], while others have not [12][13]. Furthermore, these studies have found only weak earlier phonological reductions in the N2 range and moreover concluded that N2 modulations in reading are primarily related to orthographic violation [15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Literate humans sound out words during silent reading

Savill

Lindell²,

Booth³

et al. 2011

NeuroReport

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Whether humans spontaneously sound out words in their mind during silent reading is a matter of debate. Some models of reading postulate that skilled readers access the meaning directly from print but others involve print-to-sound transcoding mechanisms. Here, we provide evidence that silent reading activates the sound form of words before accessing their meaning by comparing event-related potentials induced by highly expected words and their homophones. We found that expected words and words that sound the same but have a different orthography (homophones and pseudohomophones) reduce scalp activity to the same extent within 300 ms of presentation compared with unexpected words. This shows that phonological access during silent reading, which is critical for literacy acquisition, remains active in adulthood.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Literate humans sound out words during silent reading

Savill

Lindell²,

Booth³

et al. 2011

NeuroReport

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“…In event-related potential (ERP) studies of phonological processing in written words, the majority of research focused on N400 or even later stage components15161718. A few other ERP studies pointed to relatively early phonological effects on the early components such as P2 and N219202122.…”

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confidence: 99%

Spatio-temporal dynamics of automatic processing of phonological information in visual words

Wang

Liu

et al. 2013

Sci Rep

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Sensory-specific cortices appear to be sensitive to information from another modality. Here we investigate whether the human brain automatically extracts the phonological information in visual words in early visual processing. We continuously presented native Chinese speakers peripherally with Chinese homophone characters in an oddball paradigm, while they performed a visual detection task presented in the centre of the visual field. We found the lexical tone phonology embedded in the characters is processed automatically by the brain of native speakers, as revealed by whole-head electrical recordings of the mismatch negativity (MMN). Source solution further revealed the MMN involved the neural activations from the visual cortex to the auditory cortex (130-460 ms). The spatial-temporal dynamics indicate a visual-auditory interaction in the early, automatic processing of phonological information in visual words.I t is interesting and counterintuitive that sensory-specific cortices appear to be sensitive to information from another modality 1,2 . Audiovisual speech processing which involves multisensory integration sites including low level auditory and visual sensory regions 3,4 is ecologically important in daily communications. Empirical evidence from behavioural and neuroimaging studies demonstrated that in audiovisual speech processing, human auditory cortex responds to visual information and vice versa. A typical example of audiovisual speech processing is the integration of a written and a spoken language. Learning the correspondence between a spoken word and its written form is a prerequisite for the development of reading and writing skills 5 . Behavioural studies of written word recognition demonstrated the role of auditory phonology in visual word processing [6][7][8][9][10] . Some recent neuroimaging studies showed that phonological processing during visual word recognition is governed mainly by the left brain hemisphere including left lateralized supramarginal gyrus and left lateralized inferior frontal cortex, as well as bilateral superior temporal gyri [11][12][13][14] . In event-related potential (ERP) studies of phonological processing in written words, the majority of research focused on N400 or even later stage components [15][16][17][18] . A few other ERP studies pointed to relatively early phonological effects on the early components such as P2 and N2 [19][20][21][22] .The issue of whether or not phonological information embedded in written words can be automatically extracted by the brain and rapidly stored in visual sensory memory has remained virtually unexplored. To address this issue, an effective approach to isolate the brain response component contributed by the cognitive processing at an early, preattentive stage with a high temporal resolution is essential. To this end, the mismatch negativity (MMN) can be a potential tool. MMN has been suggested an index of early, automatic encoding of the changes of regularities in both of the auditory 23-25 and visual modality 26 . In audition, MMN ...

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“…Nevertheless, a number of studies have suggested that phonological information is activated automatically when reading Chinese (e.g. Leck, Weekes, & Chen, 1995; Perfetti & Tan, 1998, 1999; Ren, Liu, & Han, 2009; Xu, Pollatsek, & Potter, 1999). In particular, phonological activation has been consistently observed in monolingual Stroop tasks with native Mandarin speakers (Guo, Peng, & Liu, 2005; Li, Lin, Wang, & Jiang, 2013; Spinks, Liu, Perfetti, & Tan, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent language experience influences cross-language activation in bilinguals with different scripts

Wang

Lin

2016

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Purpose This study aimed to examine whether the phonological information in the non-target language is activated and its influence on bilingual processing. Approach Using the Stroop paradigm, Mandarin-English bilinguals named the ink color of Chinese characters in English in Experiment 1 and named the Chinese characters in addition to the color naming in English in Experiment 2. Twenty-four participants were recruited in each experiment. In both experiments, the visual stimuli included color characters (e.g. 红, hong2, red), homophones of the color characters (e.g. 洪, hong2, flood), characters that only shared the same syllable segment with the color characters (S+T−, e.g. 轰, hong1, boom), characters that shared the same tone but differed in segments with the color characters (S−T+, e.g. 瓶, ping2, bottle), and neutral characters (e.g. 牵, qian1, leading through). Data and analysis Planned t-tests were conducted in which participants’ naming accuracy rate and naming latency in each phonological condition were compared with the neutral condition. Findings Experiment 1 only showed the classic Stroop effect in the color character condition. In Experiment 2, in addition to the classic Stroop effect, the congruent homophone condition (e.g. 洪in red) showed a significant Stroop interference effect. These results suggested that for bilingual speakers with different scripts, phonological information in the non-target language may not be automatically activated even though the written words in the non-target language were visually presented. However, if the phonological information of the non-target language is activated in advance, it could lead to competition between the two languages, likely at both the phonological and lemma levels. Originality and significance This study is among the first to investigate whether the translation of a word is phonologically encoded in bilinguals using the Stroop paradigm. The findings improve our understanding of the underlying mechanism of bilingual processing.

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Phonological activation in chinese reading: an event-related potential study using low-resolution electromagnetic tomography

Cited by 15 publications

References 52 publications

Literate humans sound out words during silent reading

Literate humans sound out words during silent reading

Spatio-temporal dynamics of automatic processing of phonological information in visual words

Recent language experience influences cross-language activation in bilinguals with different scripts

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