Abstract
The contemporary models of visual word recognition reached a consensus on a cooperative division of labor between phonological and semantic processing. We examine how reading is influenced by the interaction of two processing in Chinese character reading since the ideographic property of the Chinese writing system is perfectly suitable to address this issue. The current study investigated whether Chinese character reading requires the interaction between orthography-to-phonology consistency and semantic processing of the whole character (imageability, Experiment 1) or the semantic radical (transparency, Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed a significant effect of the consistency and a marginal effect of the imageability, but no interaction between the two. Experiment 2 found a significant effect of the semantic transparency and its interaction with phonological consistency, where the transparent effect was significant for inconsistent characters but not for consistent ones. The current finding provided direct evidence of the interplay between phonological and semantic processing and shed light on the language-general reading model.
Highlights
A general agreement of the contemporary reading models (Hillis and Caramazza, 1995; Seidenberg, 2011) is that there exists an interaction between phonological and semantic processing involved in the computation from print to sound
The results offered potential neural correlates of the interaction between phonological and semantic processing in Chinese character reading
The current study aims to directly investigate whether Chinese character reading required the interaction between phonological processing and semantic processing at character (Experiment 1) or radical level (Experiment 2)
Summary
A general agreement of the contemporary reading models (Hillis and Caramazza, 1995; Seidenberg, 2011) is that there exists an interaction between phonological and semantic processing involved in the computation from print to sound. No study reported the direct evidence of phonological and semantic interaction in reading Chinese characters. Its robust evidence from human adults was the observation showing a semantic imageability effect only for irregular words, not for regular words (Strain et al, 1995, 2002; Strain and Herdman, 1999). This behavioral phenomenon has been simulated and explained by the cooperative division of labor between phonological and semantic pathways in a computational model (Harm and Seidenberg, 2004).
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