Two words that varied in their relationship were presented sequentially to Chinese readers who made meaning and pronunciation decisions. In the meaning task, they decided whether the words had the same meaning. In the pronunciation task, they decided whether the words had the same pronunciation. In both tasks, the word pairs represented 1 of 4 relationships: graphically similar, homophonic, semantically related, or unrelated. Event related potentials (ERP) recordings made from the onset of the 2nd word suggested a temporal unfolding of graphic, phonological, and semantic effects. Specifically, graphically related pairs produced a smaller P200 in the pronunciation task and a smaller N400 in the meaning task. Homophones produced reduced N400 component with bilateral sources in the meaning task. Reading a word involves a rapid temporal unfolding of information sources—the appearance of the word, its formal graphic constituents (e.g. letters or other graphic components), its pronunciation (phonological constituents), and its meaning. How these sources of information are used in any given reading event is a different question. In reading for meaning, semantic information must be used, and in reading aloud, phonological information must be used. More generally, skilled readers have knowledge about graphic, phonological, and meaning components that they use in any word-reading task. Theories of word reading are essentially about how these different sources of information become available and provide information for further processing. Theories with very different frameworks share the assumption that all three sources of information can be used when a word is read (e.g., Berent &

The development of reading depends on phonological awareness across all languages so far studied. Languages vary in the consistency with which phonology is represented in orthography. This results in developmental differences in the grain size of lexical representations and accompanying differences in developmental reading strategies and the manifestation of dyslexia across orthographies. Differences in lexical representations and reading across languages leave developmental “footprints ” in the adult lexicon. The lexical organization and processing strategies that are characteristic of skilled reading in different orthographies are affected by different developmental constraints in different writing systems. The authors develop a novel theoretical framework to explain these cross-language data, which they label a psycholinguistic grain size theory of reading and its development. Reading is the process of understanding speech written down. The goal is to gain access to meaning. To acquire reading, children must learn the code used by their culture for representing speech as a series of visual symbols. Learning to read is thus fundamentally a process of matching distinctive visual symbols to units of sound (phonology). In most languages, the relationship between symbol

this article was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9616519. We are grateful to Max Coltheart, Laurie Feldman, Rumjahn Hoosain, Yuriko Kayamoto, and Sandy Pollatsek for their thoughtful comments. We thank Li Long for her assistance in recruiting participants in Beijing. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Li Hal Tan or Charles A. Perfetti, Learning Research and Development Center, 3939 O'Hara Street, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260. Electronic mall may be sent to tanlh@hkucc.hku.hk. Recent research with Chinese single-character words, however, has suggested a stronger role for phonology in Chinese reading. In a primed perceptual-identification paradigm, Perfetti and Zhang (1991, Experiment 3) observed a synchrony of phonologic and semantic priming effects when a single-character prime was exposed for 50 ms, followed by a character target of 35 ms. Using a backward-masking procedure, Tan, Hoosain, and Peng (1995) exposed a target character for 60 ms, followed by a mask character that was presented for 40 ms. As in Perfetti and Zhang's experiment, they found no evidence for semantic effects in the absence of phonological effects. Equally interesting, when the target character had vague meaning, they found phonological effects in the absence of semantic effects. Such results suggest a very rapid activation of phonology and are not consistent with a meaning-first hypothesis (see Tan & Perfetti, 1998, for a detailed review of recent discoveries). The generality of these demonstrations of phonology is limited, however, because the research has used exclusively single-character words. Estimates of modem Chinese show that multiple-character words are actually more common than single-character words. According to...

The authors examine the implications of research on Chinese for theories of reading and propose the lexical constituency model as a general framework for word reading across writing systems. Word identities are defined by 3 interlinked constituents (orthographic, phonological, and semantic). The implemented model simulates the time course of graphic, phonological, and semantic priming effects, including immediate graphic facilitation followed by graphic inhibition with simultaneous phonological facilitation, a pattern unique to the Chinese writing system. Pseudocharacter primes produced only facilitation, supporting the model’s assumption that lexical thresholds determine phonological and semantic, but not graphic, effects. More generally, both universal reading processes and writing system constraints exist. Although phonology is universal, its activation process depends on how the writing system structures graphic units. The development of models of word reading has been informed primarily by studies of English word identification. This is true for both symbolic models that postulate an internal lexicon and multiple pathways to pronunciation (Besner & Smith, 1992; Coltheart,

According to the Universal Writing System Constraint, all writing systems encode language, and thus reflect basic properties of the linguistic system they encode. According to a second universal, the Universal Phonological Principle, the activation of word pronunciations occurs for skilled readers across all writing systems. We review recent research that illustrates the implications of these two universal principles both across and within writing systems. Within the family of alphabetic systems, differences between Korean and English arise in the languages, rather than the orthographies, while the reverse appears to be true for German and English differences. Across writing systems, new Event Related Potentials (ERP) experiments show the robustness of phonology across Chinese and English systems and chart the time course of word reading in Chinese and English for Chinese bilinguals and for English speakers learning Chinese. The ERP results show differences between Chinese and English for both groups and suggest that the time course of word processes and the brain areas identified as sources for the ERP components differ both as a result of writing system and the skill of the reader. We propose the System Accommodation Hypothesis, that reading processes and the neural structures that support them accommodate to specific visual and structural features of a new writing system.

Using a priming procedure, 4 experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of a short preexposure of a prime that was a radical or contained radicals identical to the target. Significant facilitation was found when the target contained the prime as a radical, although only for low-frequency targets which did not arise merely as a result of graphical similarity. Facilitation also occurred when the prime and target shared a radical in the same position but not when in different positions. When the prime and target had exactly the same radicals but in different positions, however, the priming effect was inhibitory. This set of results suggests that simple characters (radicals) and complex characters are represented at a different level. The orthographic system of Chinese can be described at a number of different levels, that is, strokes, radicals, characters, and words. Words contain one or more characters, which, in turn, are composed of one or more radicals (e.g., the and of the complex character), 1 which, in turn, are composed of one or more strokes. A radical can appear in different positions within a complex character; for example, is found at the top of, the

The present study used the backward masking paradigm to investigate the nature and time course of phonological assembly. Two experiments were performed that tried to specify the extent to which phonological assembly is a serial process, or a process that gives special weight to consonants over vowels. Experiment 1 showed that recognition rates in a backward masking task varied as a function of the serial position of the phonemes that were shared between backward masks and target words. When the backward masks and target words shared final phonemes, recognition rates were higher than when they shared initial phonemes. In addition, the data exhibited a weak difference between consonant and vowel preserving masks. In Experiment 2, nonwords were added to the target words of Experiment 1 to discourage guessing from the backward masks. Although serial effects of phonological assembly were again found, the consonant/vowel differences from the previous experiment disappeared. Overall, the results of both experiments showed strong serial effects of assembled phonology compared

this article should be addressed to Li Hal Tan or Charles A. Perfetti, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O'Hara Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260. Electronic mail may be sent to tanl @ vms.cis.pitt.edu

Does phonology play a role in silent reading? This issue was addressed in Chinese. Phonology effects are less expected in Chinese than in alphabetical languages like English because the basic units of written Chinese (the characters) map directly into units of meaning (morphemes). This linguistic property gave rise to the view that phonology could be bypassed altogether in Chinese. The present study, however, shows that this is not the case. We report two experiments that demonstrate pure phonological frequency effects in processing written Chinese. Characters with a high phonological frequency were processed faster than characters with a low phonological frequency, despite the fact that the characters were matched on orthographic (printed) frequency. The present research points to a universal phonological principle according to which phonological information is routinely activated as a part of word identification. The research further suggests that part of the classic word-frequency effect may be phonological.

The neural substrate for reading includes highly general subsystems, collectively the “reading network”. To the extent these subsystems are indeed universal, they must somehow support reading of a wide variety of languages written in many different ways. In what follows, we examine a small piece of this variety to consider how the neural bases of reading accommodate this variety. In fact, the word “accommodate ” is central to our analysis. We conclude that the reading network must truly accommodate variation in writing systems. That is, the network changes in response to properties of the writing system. In elaborating this conclusion, we first review the structure of writing systems, which is critical for understanding why they might matter, and then review some of the behavioral evidence for the effects of writing systems on reading. We follow with a review of the comparative (across writing system) neuroscience research and finally a report of our recent research that asks how the brain accommodates to learning to read in a second writing system. Word Reading from a Writing System Perspective