Orthographic combinability and phonological consistency effects in reading Chinese phonograms: An event-related potential study

Hsu, Chih Yang; Tsai, Jie-Li; Lee, Chia Ying; Tzeng, Ovid J.L.

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.09.002

Cited by 100 publications

(106 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…This is consistent with the data from behavioral (Lee et al, 2005), eventrelated potential (Hsu, Tsai, Lee, & Tzeng, 2009), functional magnetic resonance imaging (Lee et al, 2004), and computational modeling (Yang et al, 2009) studies. In particular, using dummy coding, the regression results showed that the naming RTs for characters with regular phonetic radicals and unpronounceable radicals were significantly faster than those for irregular phonetic radicals.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

et al. 2015

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In this study, we aimed to provide a large-scale set of psycholinguistic norms for 3,314 traditional Chinese characters, along with their naming reaction times (RTs), collected from 140 Chinese speakers. The lexical and semantic variables in the database include frequency, regularity, familiarity, consistency, number of strokes, homophone density, semantic ambiguity rating, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, and the number of disyllabic compound words formed by a character. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the predictive powers of these variables for the naming RTs. The results demonstrated that these variables could account for a significant portion of variance (55.8 %) in the naming RTs. An additional multiple regression analysis was conducted to demonstrate the effects of consistency and character frequency. Overall, the regression results were consistent with the findings of previous studies on Chinese character naming. This database should be useful for research into Chinese language processing, Chinese education, or crosslinguistic comparisons. The database can be accessed via an online inquiry system (http://ball.ling.sinica.edu.tw/ namingdatabase/index.html).Keywords Naming . Chinese character naming . Psycholinguistic norm . Chinese visual word recognition Understanding how readers process words, which are fundamental units for reading, has been a core issue in psycholinguistic studies. Behavioral studies have utilized tasks such as naming, lexical decision, speech perception, and synonym judgment, with the aim of understanding how orthographic, phonological, and semantic information is processed during visual word recognition. These experiments have typically employed a factorial design by manipulating one or two lexical variables (e.g., word frequency and spelling-to-sound consistency) in a limited set of stimuli, while trying to control for other lexical variables (e.g., orthographic neighborhood size and acoustic properties of onsets) in order to prevent any potential confounds. Although this approach has provided fruitful evidence to advance our understanding of how various lexical properties affect visual word recognition, it has some limitations in terms of how to select a set of items that vary in only one dimension and how to generalize the findings to a larger set of stimuli.To overcome these limitations, a number of large-scale psycholinguistic databases have been made available for languages with alphabetic orthographies, including English (Balota et al

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

et al. 2015

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“…They were however unattended by the researchers, possibly because of its small magnitude, possibly because that researchers were mainly concerned with later semantic processing (e.g., concreteness, noun vs. verb) and the associated N400, as opposed to early lexical processing [26,28]. On the other hand, studies using single-character words typically did not show this N200 response [27,29]. Future studies with enhanced power are needed to find out whether single-character words do not elicit N200 at all, or they elicit a much weaker response compared with 2-character words.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Centro-parietal N200: An event-related potential component specific to Chinese visual word recognition

Zhang

Fang

et al. 2012

Chin. Sci. Bull.

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Almost all written languages currently used in the world are alphabetic or phonologically-based scripts (e.g., English) whose word recognition involves discrimination of one-dimensional linear combinations of several dozens of letters or phonological units, except written Chinese whose vocabulary consists of a large number of block characters, the analysis of which relies on the extraction of 2-dimensional form information at multiple levels including radical, character, and multiple-character word. Whether the dramatic contrast between the 2 types of orthography leads to distinctive mental processes is a fundamental question in psycholinguistic research unanswered in the past three decades. Using event-related potentials and visual lexical decision tasks, we asked native Chinese speakers to discriminate between real Chinese words and pseudo-or non-words and observed a widespread negative deflection with centro-parietal focus elicited 200 ms post-stimulus onset. This N200 response showed a clear and large amplitude enhancement upon word repetition and seems to be specific to Chinese as no similar effects had been reported in word recognition studies involving alphabetic scripts under similar experimental conditions. Further evidence showed that this N200 could not be attributed to non-linguistic sensori-perceptual processes, nor phonological or semantic processes, but likely reflects very early identification of the orthography of individual words involving extensive and higher-level visual analysis. Recently the first author proposed a meaning-spelling theory of written Chinese vocabulary proposing that the Chinese and alphabetic scripts are the only 2 possible logical types of mature human writing systems, and that the former is more thoroughly a visual language compared with the latter and thus shall emphasize more of visual processing. Reinforcing each other, the meaning-spelling theory and the discovery of the centro-parietal N200 reveal the uniqueness of Chinese both theoretically and empirically, and provide strong arguments for the intrinsic distinction between written Chinese and alphabetic scripts.

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“…Furthermore, it is also not clear to what specific properties of words the mid-fusiform gyrus (and N170) responds, because experimental materials used in previous studies had multiple features. One set of studies showed that its sensitivity to visual words is independent of changes in case, font, size, and location (Dehaene et al, 2001(Dehaene et al, , 2004Polk & Farah, 2002) but is dependent on orthographic regularity and GPC rules (Bentin et al, 1999;Fiebach, Friederici, Muller, & von Cramon, 2002;Hsu et al, 2009). Based on such evidence, several researchers suggested that N170's specialization was orthography (Binder, Medler, Westbury, Liebenthal, & Buchanan, 2006;Vinckier et al, 2007).…”

Section: Visual Word Recognition: Also Expertise For Character Likeness?mentioning

confidence: 99%

It's a word: Early electrophysiological response to the character likeness of pictographs

et al. 2010

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Using unfamiliar and meaningless pictographs that varied in their degree of similarity to Chinese characters, the current study tested whether the early electrophysiological response was modulated by character likeness. We measured P100 and N170 while 20 native Chinese speakers were viewing Chinese characters, drawings of objects, and pictographs. Comparisons across the three categories of stimuli showed that pictographs elicited a smaller N170 amplitude than did Chinese characters and a stronger N170 amplitude than did objects, but did not differ in the P100 amplitude from the other two categories. Within the category of pictographs, stimuli with a higher degree of character likeness elicited larger N170 amplitudes and shorter N170 peak latencies, and this effect was again not observed in P100. These results suggest that N170 is sensitive to visual stimuli's character likeness even though they are unfamiliar pictographs with no meanings or sounds.

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Orthographic combinability and phonological consistency effects in reading Chinese phonograms: An event-related potential study

Cited by 100 publications

References 40 publications

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

Centro-parietal N200: An event-related potential component specific to Chinese visual word recognition

It's a word: Early electrophysiological response to the character likeness of pictographs

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