If Su

Taking a Radical Position: Evidence for Position-Specific Radical Representations in Chinese Character Recognition Using Masked Priming ERP

In the investigation of orthographic representation of Chinese characters, one question that has stimulated much research is whether radicals (character components) are specified for spatial position in a character (e.g., Ding et al., 2004; Tsang and Chen, 2009). Differing from previous work, component or radical position information in this study is conceived in terms of relative frequency across different positions of characters containing it. A lexical decision task in a masked priming paradigm focusing on radicals with preferred position of occurrence was conducted. A radical position that encompasses more characters than other positions was identified to be the preferred position of a particular radical. The prime that was exposed for 96u2009ms might share a radical with the target in the same or different positions. Moreover, the shared radical appeared either in its preferred or non-preferred position in the target. While response latencies only revealed the effect of graphical similarity, both effects of graphical similarity and radical position preference were found in the event-related potential (ERP) results. The former effect was reflected in greater positivity in occipital P1 and greater negativity in N400 for radicals in different positions in prime and target characters. The latter effect manifested as greater negativity in occipital N170 and greater positivity in frontal P200 in the same time window elicited by radicals in their non-preferred position. Equally interesting was the reversal of the effect of radical position preference in N400 with greater negativity associated with radicals in preferred position. These findings identify the early ERP components associated with activation of position-specific radical representations in the orthographic lexicon, and reveal the change in the nature of competition from processing at the radical level to the lexical level.

An ERP study of effects of regularity and consistency in delayed naming and lexicality judgment in a logographic writing system

Phonological access is an important component in theories and models of word reading. However, phonological regularity and consistency effects are not clearly separable in alphabetic writing systems. We investigated these effects in Chinese, where the two variables are operationally distinct. In this orthographic system, regularity is defined as the congruence between the pronunciation of a complex character (or phonogram), and that of its phonetic radical, while phonological consistency indexes the proportion of orthographic neighbors that share the same pronunciation as the phonogram. In the current investigation, regularity and consistency were contrasted in an event-related potential (ERP) study using a lexical decision (LD) task and a delayed naming (DN) task with native Chinese readers. ERP results showed that effects of regularity occurred early after stimulus onset and were long-lasting. Regular characters elicited larger N170, smaller P200, and larger N400 compared to irregular characters. In contrast, significant effects of consistency were only seen at the P200 and consistent characters showed a greater P200 than inconsistent characters. Thus, both the time course and the direction of the effects indicated that regularity and consistency operated under different mechanisms and were distinct constructs. Additionally, both of these phonological effects were only found in the DN task and absent in LD, suggesting that phonological access was non-obligatory for LD. The study demonstrated cross-language variability in how phonological information was accessed from print and how task demands could influence this process.

Lexical-Semantic Variables Affecting Picture and Word Naming in Chinese: A Mixed Logit Model Study in Aphasia

Lexical-semantic variables (such as word frequency, imageability and age of acquisition) have been studied extensively in neuropsychology to address the structure of the word production system. The evidence available on this issue is still rather controversial, mainly because of the very complex interrelations between lexical-semantic variables. Moreover, it is not clear whether the results obtained in Indo-European languages also hold in languages with a completely different structure and script, such as Chinese. The objective of the present study is to investigate this specific issue by studying the effect of word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, visual complexity of the stimuli to be named, grammatical class and morphological structure in word and picture naming in Chinese. The effect of these variables on naming and reading accuracy of healthy and brain-damaged individuals is evaluated using mixed-effect models, a statistical technique that allows to model both fixed and random effects; this feature substantially enhances the statistical power of the technique, so that several variables–and their complex interrelations–can be handled effectively in a unique analysis. We found that grammatical class interacts consistently across tasks with morphological structure: all participants, both healthy and brain-damaged, found simple nouns significantly easier to read and name than complex nouns, whereas simple and complex verbs were of comparable difficulty. We also found that imageability was a strong predictor in picture naming, but not in word naming, whereas the contrary held true for age of acquisition. These results are taken to indicate the existence of a morphological level of processing in the Chinese word production system, and that reading aloud may occur along a non-semantic route (either lexical or sub-lexical) in this language.

Indices of Language Outcome 11 Years After Intrathecal Chemotherapy for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: A Sibling Case-Control Study

Studies are emerging that suggest that major language indices do not differentiate children treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) with risk-adapted intrathecal chemotherapy (ITC) from control children matched on age, gender, and educational level. No study to date has controlled for cognitive environment, an important variable influencing language achievement and outcome. This case-control study applies the deconfounding principle by using a sibling as a control to investigate language outcomes in a male child 11 years after administration of ITC for ALL at the age of 2 years 3 months. A comprehensive behavioral language test battery failed to differentiate the siblings on current language performance when descriptively compared, but neurophysiological assessment revealed that the ITC-treated child required more time and elicited a smaller N400 component compared to his sibling during picture-word matching. The findings suggest that in the absence of pretreatment performance indices, comparison with sibling achievement may supplement what is known on posttreatment language skill development drawn from comparative studies using children matched on age, sex, and educational level drawn from the community. The studys findings offer pilot data of language outcomes following ITC beyond the early stage of survivorship. The benefits and limitations of using siblings in research where the cognitive environment is known to make an important contribution to skill development are discussed.

Early Effects of Radical Position Legality in Chinese: An ERP Study

This study aimed to investigate the timecourse and neural underpinnings of the coding of radical positions in Chinese character reading. To isolate effects of radical positions, four types of pseudocharacters were created in which the constituent radicals appeared in positions varying in probability of occurrence, that is, Unique, Dominant, Subordinate, or Illegal positions. Twenty native Chinese readers performed a character detection task where real characters were identified among pseudocharacters. The event-related potential data demonstrated that Illegal items were reliably distinguished from other pseudocharacter items within 100 ms, with larger P100 amplitudes at left posterior electrodes. At the N170, Illegal items elicited a smaller negativity than Unique items. In these time windows, pseudocharacter conditions in legal radical positions did not differ among themselves. The early timecourse effects suggested that radical position legality was detected at the initial stage of visual processing, which challenged theoretical models that assume primacy of position-general radical representations.

Locus of orthographic facilitation effect in spoken word production: Evidence from cantonese Chinese

Previous research of picture naming in a picture-word interference paradigm has demonstrated independent facilitative effects of orthographic and phonological similarity in Chinese, as homophonous characters can be visually dissimilar. This study investigated the locus of orthographic priming in Chinese and assessed the hypothesis that the effect can be in part semantically based, through manipulating the extent of orthographic and semantic relatedness between target-distractor characters. Our findings replicated previous results of independent orthographic facilitation and semantic interference, as well as different time courses of these effects. More importantly, we observed longer naming latencies when the distractor was both semantically and orthographically related to the target compared with orthographically similar distractors, and an interaction between semantic and orthographic similarity. These findings suggest that orthographic facilitation on picture naming in Chinese is located at the semantic or the lemma level.

The interaction of semantic and orthographic processing during Chinese sinograms recognition An ERP Study

The present study investigated the interaction of semantic and orthographic processing during compound sinogram recognition, using event related potentials (ERPs) and a picture-word matching task. The behavioral results showed that participants generally needed more time to make a response and were more prone to make mistakes, when the paired mismatch sinogram was orthographically similar or semantically related to the picture’s matching name. The N400 results indicated the main effect of semantics and the significant interaction of semantics by orthography. Moreover, only under the semantically related condition (S+), the mean amplitude of N400 was more negative going in orthographically similar condition (O+) than in orthographically dissimilar one (O-), while there was no significant difference under the semantically unrelated condition (S-). Consequently, the sub-lexical orthographic information plays an important role in discriminating the sinograms sharing related semantics.

Neural correlates of age of acquisition on visual word recognition in Persian

Abstract The effect of Age of Acquisition (AoA) on visual word recognition is remarkable. However, there is debate about the loci of AoA effects. The Arbitrary Mapping hypothesis assumes AoA reflects mappings between input (e.g. orthography) and output (e.g. phonology) formed during the acquisition of literacy. An alternative view is that AoA reflects the acquisition of concepts. The AM hypothesis predicts reduced AoA effects on the recognition of written words with transparent mappings between orthography and phonological e.g. chair compared to written words with more opaque mappings between orthography and phonology e.g. choir . In the Persian language, mappings between letters and phonological output are predictable and transparent. However, in skilled reading, many written words become opaque due to the omission of vowels (diacritics) in adult text. Using event-related potential methods (ERP) we tested the prediction that AoA effects on ERP components would be reduced for words with transparent spellings compared to words with opaque spellings for skilled readers. We found an effect of AoA on visual word recognition in the window between 300 and 450xa0ms with higher N400 negativity for late acquired words and an interaction between transparency and AoA at an unexpected late component (450–700xa0ms) with significantly higher positivity for late acquired opaque words only. We conclude that AoA effects on Persian visual word recognition reflect arbitrary mappings between print and sound and offer a neurolinguistic account of AoA effects.

Electrophysiological evidence of sublexical phonological access in character processing by L2 Chinese learners of L1 alphabetic scripts

While Chinese character reading relies more on addressed phonology relative to alphabetic scripts, skilled Chinese readers also access sublexical phonological units during recognition of phonograms. However, sublexical orthography-to-phonology mapping has not been found among beginning second language (L2) Chinese learners. This study investigated character reading in more advanced Chinese learners whose native writing system is alphabetic. Phonological regularity and consistency were examined in behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) in lexical decision and delayed naming tasks. Participants were 18 native English speakers who acquired written Chinese after age 5xa0years and reached grade 4 Chinese reading level. Behaviorally, regular characters were named more accurately than irregular characters, but consistency had no effect. Similar to native Chinese readers, regularity effects emerged early with regular characters eliciting a greater N170 than irregular characters. Regular characters also elicited greater frontal P200 and smaller N400 than irregular characters in phonograms of low consistency. Additionally, regular-consistent characters and irregular-inconsistent characters had more negative amplitudes than irregular-consistent characters in the N400 and LPC time windows. The overall pattern of brain activities revealed distinct regularity and consistency effects in both tasks. Although orthographic neighbors are activated in character processing of L2 Chinese readers, the timing of their impact seems delayed compared with native Chinese readers. The time courses of regularity and consistency effects across ERP components suggest both assimilation and accommodation of the reading network in learning to read a typologically distinct second orthographic system.

Awareness of form-sound correspondence in Chinese children with dyslexia: Preliminary results from event-related potentials and time frequency analyses

Developmental dyslexia has usually been characterized as having difficulties learning grapheme-phoneme correspondence and applying the mappings. This study investigates form-sound awareness in Chinese reading-impaired children in terms of regularity, consistency and lexicality effects using event-related potentials (ERP) and time-frequency analysis (TFA). Preliminary data from two Cantonese-speaking male children, one with reading impairment (PR) and one with normal reading performance (CA), performing a character recognition task were collected. ERP results indicated that CA showed a lexicality effect at N400 that was not evident in PR. TFA showed that CA exhibited greater event-related synchronization (ERS) and phase coherence at theta and gamma bands suggesting greater cognitive demand in processing pseudo and irregular characters. An opposite pattern was observed for PR, where greater effort was needed to retrieve information related to real and regular characters whilst failing to respond to pseudo and irregular characters. Greater ERS and phase coherence was also observed for real, pseudo and regular characters at 350–450ms at theta suggesting adequate access to phonological and semantic information for CA compared to PR. Whereas PR showed greater ERS and phase coherence at earlier and later time intervals. These initial findings suggest that PR may have weaker semantic representations and may be less sensitive to the internal structure of characters and its relationship with sounds.