Lee, J. 1, 3 , Chang, T. T. 2, 3 & Shen, W. Y. 1, 3
1 Department of Educational Psychology, National Taiwan Normal University
2 Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang Ming University
3 Laboratories for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
The role of phonology in reading has long been emphasized in the study of alphabetical languages. In contrast, the role of phonology in reading Chinese, a logographic writing system, has been debated. The issues of whether phonology is necessary for Chinese reading and whether the contribution of phonology to Chinese is as great as that to alphabetical languages remain open. Although previous studies have revealed the role of phonology in Chinese reading, the emphasis was placed on the high demand of visual-spatial processing in orthographic analysis and on the addressed phonology of syllabic (whole-character) units. In this talk, I will present evidence of early sublexical priming of phonological processing from an ERP experiment. I will also present the brain activation revealed in an fMRI experiment that is associated with orthographical analysis in reading Chinese when both semantic and phonological contribution is minimized. An attempt will be made to integrate the roles of early phonological and late orthographic information in reading Chinese by proposing the feed-forward and feed-backward processes. I will argue that, in comparison with reading alphabetic languages, reading Chinese does not involve different processing. However, reading Chinese places different weights on various stages from reading alphabetic languages due to the characteristics of the Chinese writing system.