Abstract
Compound words make up a major part of modern Chinese vocabulary. Behavioral studies have demonstrated that access to lexical semantics of compound words is driven by the interaction between orthographic and phonological information. However, little is known about the neural underpinnings of compound word processing. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we asked participants to perform lexical decisions to pseudohomophones, which were constructed by replacing one or both constituents of two-character compound words with orthographically dissimilar homophonic characters. Mixed pseudohomophones, which shared the first constituent with the base words, were more difficult to reject than non-pseudohomophone non-words. This effect was accompanied by the increased activation of bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and left angular gyrus. The pure pseudohomophones, which shared no constituent with their base words, were rejected as quickly as non-word controls and did not elicit any significant neural activation. The effective connectivity of a phonological pathway from left IPL to left IFG was enhanced for the mixed pseudohomophones but not for pure pseudohomophones. These findings demonstrated that phonological activation alone, as in the case of the pure pseudohomophones, is not sufficient to drive access to lexical representations of compound words, and that orthographic information interacts with phonology, playing a gating role in the recognition of Chinese compound words.
Highlights
Access to lexical semantics is a fundamental process in reading
These results suggest that an interaction between orthography and phonology, rather than a predominant phonological mediation, is responsible for the semantic activation in reading Chinese compound words
Given that the pseudohomophone effect in lexical decision to Chinese compounds reflects the semantic activation of base words (Zhou and Marslen-Wilson, 2009) and given the absence of inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) activation for pure pseudohomophones, we argue that the activation of the left IFG in responding to mixed pseudohomophones reflects the process of retrieving semantic properties of base words
Summary
Access to lexical semantics is a fundamental process in reading. It has been widely accepted that word meaning can be accessed in two ways. The other way is through a phonologically mediated process, wherein the orthographic input first activates lexical phonological representations and activates semantic representations. It is widely accepted that phonological mediation plays a predominant role in accessing lexical semantics in reading alphabetic scripts (Frost, 1998), answers to these questions are more divergent for the Chinese logographic writing system. A character’s pronunciation (i.e., syllabic representation) cannot be used to uniquely identify the meaning of the corresponding morpheme, reducing the efficiency of computation from orthographic input to semantic representation via phonological mediation
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