Kuo, W. 1, 2 , Lee, C. 1, 3 , Lee, J. 1, 4 & Tzeng, O. J. 1, 3
1 Laboratories for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
2 Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
3 Brain and Language Laboratory, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica
4 Department of Educational Psychology, National Taiwan Normal University
In recent years, the role of phonology to orthography feedback consistency in visual word recognition has been a major challenge to the current models for reading. To tackle this issue is sometime problematic for the alphabetic writing system due to its nature of the high degree of coupling between grapheme and phoneme. Chinese, as an ideographic writing system, has approximately 1300 syllables which correspond to around 5000 characters. The pervasive homophony of Chinese implies the importance of a graphic form for selecting meaning and escaping homophony in reading Chinese. Most importantly, many Chinese homophone mates can be completely different in their orthographic patterns which provide a ground for a better understating of the feedback processing in visual word recognition. The present fMRI study manipulates the homophone density and character frequency in a lexical decision task. The reaction time data reveal the homophone density effect in reading low-frequency characters, and this psychological effect was mirrored in the left inferior temporal-occipital junction which a brain area emphasized for word from processing. The implication of how an orthographic form could benefit from the feedback connection from its homophonic mates will be discussed.