Effects of Phonological Consistency and Semantic Radical Combinability on N170 and P200 in the Reading of Chinese Phonograms

Studies have suggested that visually presented words are obligatorily decomposed into constituents that could be mapped to language representations. The present study aims to elucidate how orthographic processing of one constituent affects the other and vice versa during a word recognition task. Chinese orthographic system has characters representing syllables and meanings instead of suffixation roles, and the majority of Chinese characters are phonograms that can be further decomposed into phonetic radical and semantic radical. We propose that semantic radical combinability indexed by semantic radicals and the effect of phonological consistency indexed by phonetic radicals would interact with each other during the reading of Chinese phonograms. Twenty-six right-handed native Chinese speakers were recruited to the study. Participants were presented with phonograms divided into four conditions following their semantic radical combinability (large vs. small) and phonological consistency (high vs. low). EEG signals were recorded throughout the covert naming task. Our results show that there is an interaction effect between phonological consistency and semantic radical combinability on the right hemisphere N170 activity while reading phonograms. Semantic radical combinability influenced the right hemisphere N170 during the process of low-consistency character reading but not high-consistency character reading. On the other hand, the left hemisphere N170 revealed a more significant activity during reading high-consistency characters and was not affected by radical combinability. In addition, while low-consistency characters revealed a larger P200 than high-consistency characters, the semantic radical combinability effect on P200 was only significant when participants were reading high-consistency characters but not low-consistency characters. These results provide new information about how ERPs are involved in word recognition within the context of interaction among orthographic and phonological dimensions.

The Texts of Literacy Instruction

Texts are a central part of reading. Yet our understandings of appropriate text features and distributions of text diets at different points in students’ reading development are limited. The thesis of the essay is that, if the trajectory of struggling readers is to change, attention is needed to the features of texts and students’ text diets, especially those of students who attend schools in heavily impacted communities. Three issues are identified that require the attention of researchers to ensure appropriate texts and text diets for struggling readers: (a) texts from the earliest levels need to be meaningful, (b) at least part of struggling readers’ text diets need to be with texts in which words with morphological and phonological consistency are repeated, and (c) amount of text read by struggling readers needs to be substantial for reading capacity to increase. For each issue, the manner in which current practices can contribute to potential obstacles for struggling readers is described. Next, research on alternative practices is presented that shows how shifts in texts and text diets can support higher reading proficiency. The essay ends with a description of a research agenda that uses digital resources to increase students’ facility with vocabulary in complex texts.

Effects of age of acquisition and semantic transparency on reading characters in Chinese dyslexia

ABSTRACTThis study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and semantic errors from other errors. A post hoc analysis of subsets of items orthogonally varied in the AOA and semantic transparency revealed an interaction between the two variables. These findings converge on reports of AOA and semantic effects on deep dyslexic individuals reading alphabetic scripts. The case of TWT, together with recent results of another Chinese dyslexic individual who reads via the nonsemantic route and exhibits the effects of AOA and phonological consistency, supports the arbitrary mapping hypothesis, which states that the AOA effect resides in the connection between two levels of representation.