Rowed to recovery: The use of phonological and orthographic information in reading Chinese and English.

Abstract

To examine how readers of Chinese and English take advantage of orthographic and phonological features in reading, the authors investigated the effects of spelling errors on reading text in Chinese and English using the error disruption paradigm of M. Daneman and E. Reingold (1993). Skilled readers in China and the United States read passages in their native language that contained occasional spelling errors. Results showed that under some circumstances very early phonological activation can be identified in English, but no evidence for early phonology was found in Chinese. In both languages, homophone errors showed a benefit in measures of later processing, suggesting that phonology helps readers recover from the disruptive effects of errors. These results suggest that skilled readers take advantage of the special features of particular orthographies but that these orthographic effects may be most pronounced in the early stages of lexical access.

Readers of Chinese extract semantic information from parafoveal words

“…Like Feng et al (2001), who reported early phonological activation in English, but not in Chinese, we did not find statistically significant evidence for early phonological PB in the present study, but there was a numerical trend for phonological facilitation. Pollatsek et al (2000) reported significant facilitation in naming latency with the preview of homophonic characters, irrespective of orthographic form, in isolated character recognition tasks.…”

“…This could be due to a direct, early, and automatic phonological activation through orthography (see, e.g., Grainger & Holcomb, in press). For Chinese reading, there is evidence for a comparatively small contribution of phonological activation to character identification (for a review, see Feng et al, 2001), and it is generally accepted that the Chinese word center. Using the same set of contrasts, we found that the differences between the unrelated and related previews were 0.10, 0.08, and 0.06 for the orthographically, phonologically, and semantically related previews, respectively.…”

Parafoveal processing in reading

“…Indeed, the effects of phonology, which are quite strong in alphabetic languages, have been reported to be comparatively smaller in Chinese (Feng, Miller, Shu, & Zhang, 2001), although, as was noted above, phonological preview benefits have been observed in Chinese. Furthermore, as was mentioned before, because words in Chinese are physically smaller than those in alphabetic languages, the upcoming word in Chinese may actually fall in the fovea, leading to faster activation of semantics.…”

The effect of word predictability on the eye movements of Chinese readers

“…It is sometimes suggested that there are differences in the way Chinese and English readers read (due to major differences in the nature of the orthographies). For example, there is some controversy regarding the relative importance of orthographic versus phonological information in the initial access of Chinese versus English words (Feng, Miller, Shu, & Zhang, 2001;Rayner, Pollatsek, & Binder, 1998;Wong & Chen, 1999). Yet the more we learn about the eye movements of Chinese readers, the more apparent it becomes that there are more similarities than differences.…”