Reliance on orthography and phonology in reading of Chinese: A developmental study

Abstract

Background: Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods: With eye-movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers rely on orthographic or phonological cues, substitutions that contain such cues should cause less disruption reading than do unrelated substitutions. Results: On pretarget words, there was a reliable reduction in gaze duration due to homophonic substitution only for children. On target words, we observed reliable recovery effects due to orthographic similarity for adults. On post-target words, adults had better orthographic-based and phonological-based recovery abilities than children.Conclusions: The combination of eye movement recording and the error detection paradigm offers a novel implicit paradigm for studying reading development: during sentence reading, beginning readers of Chinese may rely on phonological mediation, while skilled readers have more direct access to semantics from orthography. What is already known about this topic• There is little evidence for early phonological activation during the reading of Chinese sentences among skilled Chinese readers • There is a rich body of evidence supporting the view that phonological information is activated very early in alphabetic scripts, as indexed by shorter fixation durations

Simple View of Reading in Chinese: A One-Stage Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling

“…Given its features, Chinese is considered as an opaque orthography since character recognition not only requires visual-sound connection but also inevitably involves the activation of the character semantics (Chen & Shu, 2001; Ho et al, 2017; Joshi et al, 2012; Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1999; 2000), especially with the accumulation of reading experiences (Yan et al, 2015; Zhou et al, 2018). Additionally, a large number of homophones and the semantic cues carried by the radicals for the majority of characters (DeFrancis, 1984) may contribute to the longer time needed for the mastery of character recognition.…”

The Effect of Salience on Chinese Pun Comprehension: A Visual World Paradigm Study

“…One possible reason for the less robust phonological effect is that the Chinese script bears a weak form-sound relationship insofar that more time is needed for Chinese readers to activate corresponding phonological representations in the mental lexicon. Previous studies have shown that the semantic information of printed Chinese words can be more efficiently retrieved by Chinese readers (Leck et al, 1995), while phonology may play a trivial role among skilled Chinese readers because of the opaque lexical level orthography-phonology mapping (Luo et al, 2018;Zhou et al, 2018). Moreover, in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, Brennan et al (2013) claimed that learning to read could reorganize the phonological awareness network only for alphabetic but not for logographic writing systems, which was attributed to the different principles for mapping between orthographic and phonological representations.…”

The Changing Role of Phonology in Reading Development

“…This would suggest that, in German, for children, phonology plays a more important role in word identification than orthography, whilst, for adults, the opposite pattern seems to occur: orthography seems to play a more dominant role in facilitating lexical access than phonology. In Chinese, a morphosyllabic language [48], phonological information has been shown to be activated pre-lexically by children, whilst adults seem to use more direct access from orthography to semantics [49]. Within Chinese, the researchers argued, early, pre-lexical activation of phonology diminishes as readers become more skilled.…”