The Temporal Courses of Phonological and Orthographic Encoding in Handwritten Production in Chinese: An ERP Study

Abstract

A central issue in written production concerns how phonological codes influence the output of orthographic codes. We used a picture-word interference paradigm combined with the event-related potential technique to investigate the temporal courses of phonological and orthographic activation and their interplay in Chinese writing. Distractors were orthographically related, phonologically related, orthographically plus phonologically related, or unrelated to picture names. The behavioral results replicated the classic facilitation effect for all three types of relatedness. The ERP results indicated an orthographic effect in the time window of 370–500 ms (onset latency: 370 ms), a phonological effect in the time window of 460–500 ms (onset latency: 464 ms), and an additive pattern of both effects in both time windows, thus indicating that orthographic codes were accessed earlier than, and independent of, phonological codes in written production. The orthographic activation originates from the semantic system, whereas the phonological effect results from the activation spreading from the orthographic lexicon to the phonological lexicon. These findings substantially strengthen the existing evidence that shows that access to orthographic codes is not mediated by phonological information, and they provide important support for the orthographic autonomy hypothesis.

An electrophysiological analysis of the time course of phonological and orthographic encoding in written word production

“…Our finding of earlier access to phonology than to orthography in written production is in agreement with our earlier results from purely behavioral results (e.g., Qu, Damian, Zhang, & Zhu, 2011) summarized in the Introduction. However, this pattern contrasts with both behavioural and EEG results (Zhang & Wang, 2016) in which relatively late phonological effects were found. Here we consider possible reasons for this discrepancy.…”

The role of phonological awareness and phonetic radical awareness in acquiring Chinese literacy skills in learners of Chinese as a second language

“…Path analysis is confirmatory in nature, and it should be based on certain theoretical frameworks or research findings (Klein, 2010;McDonald & Ho, 2002). Drawing on the findings about the influence of L1 background on phonological awareness (Branum-Martin, Tao, & Garnaat, 2015;Zhang, 2017) and the correlation matrix (Table 8) between the measured variables in our study, only L1 background and gender, out of the four background variables, were included in the model.…”

“…According to the orthographic autonomy hypothesis, phonological information is not necessarily activated in order to access the orthographic code in the task of spelling (Rapp, Benzing, & Caramazza, 1997). The independent role of orthographic information in facilitating written production has been observed in Chinese characters (Han, Zhang, Shu, & Bi, 2007;Law, Yeung, Wong, & Chiu, 2005;Zhang & Wang, 2016). Phonetic radical awareness is just one part of orthographic awareness of characters, and by itself might not be able to activate the orthographic representation of the compound character for CSL learners with limited L2 proficiency.…”

Word frequency effect in written production: Evidence from ERPs and neural oscillations

“…Over the past decade, researchers have studied the cognitive neural mechanisms of written production using brain imaging techniques. As a result, the brain regions underlying the various cognitive processes involved in written production have been elucidated (e.g., Dufor & Rapp, 2013; Planton et al., 2013; Purcell, Napoliello, et al., 2011; Purcell & Rapp, 2013; Rapp & Dufor, 2011; Rapp & Lipka, 2011), and the time course of some of these processes has been investigated (e.g., Baus et al., 2013; Perret & Laganaro, 2012; Python et al., 2018; Qu et al., 2016; Zhang & Wang, 2016). However, to date, no studies have investigated neural oscillation in relation to written production, and this gap in the literature is the focus of the present study.…”

“…Existing electrophysiological studies have provided fine‐grained temporal information about the different components of language production (e.g., Aristei et al., 2011; Costa et al., 2009; Python et al., 2018; Qu et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2018; Zhang & Wang, 2016; for reviews, see Ganushchak et al., 2011; Indefrey, 2011). However, only a few of these studies have explored neural oscillations involved in speech production (Ewald et al., 2012; Hendrix et al., 2017; Piai, Roelofs, & Maris, 2014; Piai et al., 2012), and no study has reported neural oscillations related to written production.…”