Consistency and regularity effects in character identification: A greater role for global than local mapping congruence

Abstract

Consistency and regularity, concepts that arise, respectively, from the connectionist and classical cognitive modeling work in alphabetic reading, are two ways to characterize the orthography-to-phonology mappings of written languages. These concepts have been applied to Chinese reading research despite important differences across writing systems, with mixed results concerning their relative importance. The present study of covert naming in Chinese is distinctive in testing the ERP effects of regularity and consistency in a fully orthogonal design. We found that consistency, but not regularity, affected the N170, P200 and N400 as well as pronunciation transcription accuracies, demonstrating a more prominent role of consistency than regularity in character naming, consistent with conclusions from English word naming. To capture a generalization across writing systems, we propose mapping congruence as a writing-system-independent way of referring to orthography-to-phonology mappings and illustrate these congruence effects in an interactive framework of character identification.