Lee, C. 1, 2
1 Brain and Language Laboratory, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica
2 Laboratories for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
Researches on word recognition have clearly shown that a word’s identification is affected by its neighborhood properties and suggest the visual word recognition relies on the co-activation among orthographic, phonological and semantic units. Languages vary in orthographic depth which may determine cross language differences in the grain size of lexical representations, the reading strategies developed, and the rate at which children acquire reading skills. Chinese is often classified as a logographic writing system. The reading unit, character, represents morphosyllablic rather than phonemic information. It is an intriguing question of how Chinese readers establish the efficient mapping between orthography and phonology in learning to read Chinese. In this talk, a series of neuroimaging and behavioral studies will demonstrate how Chinese readers capture the statistical mapping consistency between character and sound and the neural correlates responsible for the Chinese orthography-to-phonology transformation. Meanwhile, the ERP data reveals the consistency effect in three different time windows, N170, P200 and N400, especially for reading phonograms with large orthographic neighborhood (phonetic combinability) and suggests the interplay between orthographic density and the mapping from orthography to phonology in the different stages of lexical processing. This is further supported by the developmental data which shows the vocabulary size determines when and how the knowledge of phonetic consistency is acquired in learning to read. Based on these cross-linguistic evidences, it appears that the statistical learning approach holds that Chinese readers pick up subtle statistical regularities about orthographic as well as phonological patterns reflected in the early language inputs. Although the functional units underlying the reading mechanism may vary due to the orthographic depth, similar functional operation is assumed.