Hemispheric processing of lexical information in Chinese character recognition and its relationship to reading performance

Abstract

Hemispheric predominance has been well documented in the visual perception of alphabetic words. However, the hemispheric processing of lexical information in Chinese character recognition and its relationship to reading performance are far from clear. In the divided visual field paradigm, participants were required to judge the orthography, phonology, or semantics of Chinese characters, which were presented randomly in the left or right visual field. The results showed a right visual field/left hemispheric superiority in the phonological judgment task, but no hemispheric advantage in the orthographic or semantic task was found. In addition, reaction times in the right visual field for phonological and semantic tasks were significantly correlated with the reading test score. These results suggest that both hemispheres involved in the orthographic and semantic processing of Chinese characters, and that the left lateralized phonological processing is important for Chinese fluent reading.