Abstract
The acquisition of an alphabetic orthography transforms speech processing in the human brain. Behavioral evidence shows that phonological awareness as assessed by meta-phonological tasks like phoneme judgment, is enhanced by alphabetic literacy acquisition. The current study investigates the time-course of the neuro-cognitive operations underlying this enhancement as revealed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Chinese readers with and without proficiency in Jyutping, a Romanization system of Cantonese, were recruited for an auditory onset phoneme judgment task; their behavioral responses and the elicited ERPs were examined. Proficient readers of Jyutping achieved higher response accuracy and exhibited more negative-going ERPs in three early ERP time-windows corresponding to the P1, N1, and P2 components. The phonological mismatch negativity component exhibited sensitivity to both onset and rhyme mismatch in the speech stimuli, but it was not modulated by alphabetic literacy skills. The sustained negativity in the P1-N1-P2 time-windows is interpreted as reflecting enhanced phonetic/phonological processing or attentional/awareness modulation associated with alphabetic literacy and phonological awareness skills.
Highlights
The functional organization of the human brain can accommodate itself to new experiences
There were generally more accurate responses for trials with incongruent onsets than congruent onsets, but the effect of onset congruency was further modulated by list, as shown by a significant interaction between list and onset congruency (β = 2.07, z = 5.72, p < 0.001)
For auditory P1-N1-P2, which was analyzed based on the frontocentral electrode cluster, the ANOVAs revealed that the Jyutping group showed significantly more negative-going event-related potentials (ERPs) than the non-Jyutping group in P1 [F(1, 44) = 12.42, p < 0.01], N1 [F(1, 44) = 11.21, p < 0.01], and P2 time-windows [F(1, 44) = 8.42, p < 0.01]
Summary
The functional organization of the human brain can accommodate itself to new experiences. As a recent cultural invention in human history, the writing system of language influences how the brain represents and processes phonological information in a significant way (Castro-Caldas et al, 1998; Perre et al, 2009; Dehaene et al, 2010, 2015; Monzalvo and Dehaene-Lambertz, 2013; Morais, 2021) One example of such influence is that the grain size of phonological representations and processing has been suggested to be shaped by the units employed in the orthographic system (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). Prior to the introduction of the current study, we turn to a brief overview of previous neural and behavioral evidence on the influences of learning an alphabetic writing system on spoken language representations and processing
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