Speech recoding in reading Chinese characters.

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted with Chinese subj ects to investigate whether phonemic similarity affected the visual information processing of Chinese characters. The first experiment used a short-term retention paradigm and the second, a sentence judgment task. In both experiments the subject's performance was found to be impaired by the introduction of phonemic similarity into the test materials. The results were discussed with respect to the issues of orthographical differences and of speech receding in reading.Dyslexia is ostensibly uncommon in Japan (Makita, 1968), and it has been suggested that this is attributable to the Japanese use of ideographic scripts (Kanji). Research reported by Rozin, Poritsky, and Sotsky (1971) seems to support this thesis. They showed that a group of Philadelphia second-grade school children with serious reading problems that had persisted even after extensive tutoring by conventional methods were able to make rapid progress in learning and reading an ideographic writing system such as Chinese. Rozin et al. (1971) suggest, "The success of this program can be attributed to the novelty of the Chinese orthography and to the fact that Chinese characters map into speech at the level of words rather than of phonemes" (p. 1266).The idea of teaching the dyslexic to read Chinese is by no means a new one. According to Hinshelwood (1917), Bishop Harmon suggested that the ideal therapy for this disorder was to teach Chinese to dyslexics, because Chinese is a sign script where each word has its own symbol. The success of Rozin et al. (1971) eliminates the interpretation of dyslexia as a visual-auditory

Children’s memory for sentences and word strings in relation to reading ability

“…In contrast to manipulations of phonetic content, systematic manipulations of meaningfulness and variations in syntactic structure did not differentially affect the two reading groups. We conclude that the poor readers' inferior recall of phonetically nonconfusable sentences, word strings, and letter strings reflects failure to make full use of phonetic coding in working memory.Much evidence suggests that adult subjects employ a phonetic representation during comprehension of both spoken and written material (see, for example, Baddeley, 1978;Kleiman, 1975;Levy, 1977;Liberman, Mattingly and Turvey, 1972;Tzeng, Hung, and Wang, 1977). In several studies of beginning readers, we and other investigators (Byrne & Shea, 1979;Mark, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1977;Shankweiler, Liberman, Mark, Fowler, & Fischer, 1979) have found new support for the involvement of phonetic representation in the reading process: The ability to make effective use of phonetic representation appears to be correlated with success at learning to read.…”

Short-term memory for Chinese characters and radicals

“…However, later research (e.g., Hung & Tzeng, 1981;Tzeng et al, 1977) strongly suggested that processing of…”

“…A number of recent studies have examined short-term memory or memory span for Chinese characters (e.g., Tzeng, Hung, & Wang, 1977;Yu, Jing, & Sima, 1984;W. Zhang, Peng, & Sima, 1984).…”

Depth of phonological recoding in short-term memory

“…YIXU significanteffect on STM (Brady et al, 1987), although some studies foundthat the effect of consonantal similarity is much smaller than that of vowel similarity (Tzeng et al, 1977). The phonological nature of STM implies, as shown by some of the studies mentioned above, that if the material to be remembered is orthographic, it has to be first transformed into a speech-likeform.…”

“…Erickson, Mattingly, and Turvey (1977) found that Japanese kanji characters were harder for native speakers to recall correctly when the set of characters to be remembered had phonetically similar readings. Tzeng, Huang, and Wang (1977) showed that phonological similarity, whether in the visually presented items to be recalled or in the shadowing items that were auditorially presented and repeated by the subjects, interfered with STM for Chinese characters. Yik (1978) showed that the effect of phonological similarity on STM of Chinese characters is larger than the effect of visual similarity, although the latter was also found to be significant.…”