Reading does not depend on writing, even in Chinese

The interaction of orthography, phonology and semantics in the process of second language learners' Chinese character production

Theories of connectionism emphasize the mappings of orthography, phonology, and semantics in the process of word recognition and production. Chinese has a logographic writing system, which is markedly different from alphabetic languages. The current study investigated how orthography, phonology, and semantics contribute to Chinese character production among Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners. This study collected 33,856 Chinese characters in a sample of 2,116 CSL learners with 7 diverse L1s. ANOVA was conducted to examine the effect of Chinese character error type on 7 L1s and three Chinese proficiency levels. The results of ANOVA revealed that successful CSL learners' Chinese character production was derived from connections between orthography, semantics, and phonology. Semantics, especially the orthography-semantics connection, was the key point for production skills. Furthermore, connectionist models of languages rather than language distance affected production. These findings indicate that Chinese character production is associated with not only orthographic knowledge but also representation mechanisms of orthography, phonology, and semantics between different language writing systems. The results contribute to a better understanding of literacy skills in CSL learners. Future research could further address how CSL learners transform perceptive skills into production skills and the correlation between reading and writing skills by examining and controlling other important cognitive variables.

Meta-linguistic awareness skills in Chinese-speaking children with hyperlexia: A single-case study

Purpose

The aim of the study is to examine the meta-linguistic awareness skills contributing to reading aloud in a Chinese-speaking child with hyperlexia.

Methods

Case study approach was used with one case of hyperlexia (TYH) and two control groups: typically developing (TD) children matched for chronological age (CA) and TD children matched for mental ability (MA). A battery of phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness skill tests were administered.

Results

Results from the modified t-test found that the hyperlexic child did not demonstrate advanced meta-linguistic awareness skills in comparison with the two control groups. On the contrary, TYH's morphological awareness skills were even lower than the CA control group. Also, in the orthographic awareness test, TYH demonstrated weaker knowledge of character structure and components than the two control groups although his ability in the recognition of real words is intact. In addition, the predictability of orthographic awareness skill was comparable to the CA group with predicted score showed no difference to his obtained score, while TYH achieved a significantly higher reading score than what his morphological awareness skills should predict with reference to TD children of similar age; as well as what his phonological awareness skill predict with reference to the MA group.

Conclusion

The findings suggest that TYH can achieve advanced reading ability with comparable phonological and orthographic awareness skill, despite his weakness in morphological awareness. It is concluded that the hyperlexic reading in Chinese might be achieved through the direct mapping between the whole character and the sound.

How Characters Are Learned Leaves Its Mark on the Neural Substrates of Chinese Reading

Understanding how the brain functions differently as one learns to read may shed light on the controversial nature of the reading ability of human being. Logographic writing system such as Chinese has been found to rely on specialized neural substrates beyond the reading network of alphabetic languages. The ability to read in Chinese has also been proposed to rely on writing skills. However, it was unclear whether the learning-related alteration of neural responses was language specific or resulted from the more reliance on writing practice during acquisition. This study investigated whether the emergence of typical logographic-specific regions relied on learning by writing. We taught proficient alphabetic language readers Chinese characters and used pre-test and post-test to identify changes in two critical stages of reading, namely, orthographic processing and orthographic-to-phonological mapping. Two typical left hemispheric areas for logographic reading showed increased responses to characters in the brains of proficient alphabetic readers after learning, regardless of whether the learning strategy involved writing practice. Moreover, learning strategy modulated the response magnitude or multivoxel patterns in the left superior parietal lobule, left middle frontal gyrus, and right fusiform gyrus, some of which were task dependent. The findings corroborated a limited role of writing in the emergence of logographic-specific reading network and suggested the heterogeneous nature of different brain regions in this network.

The Effect of Visual Mnemonics and the Presentation of Character Pairs on Learning Visually Similar Characters for Chinese-As-Second-Language Learners

This study investigates the effects of visual mnemonics and the methods of presenting learning materials on learning visually similar characters for Chinese-as-second-language (CSL) learners. In supporting CSL learners to build robust orthographic representations in Chinese, addressing the challenges of visual similarity of characters (e.g., and ) is an important issue. Based on prior research on perceptual learning, we tested three strategies that differ in the extent to which they promote interrelated attention to the form and meaning of characters: (1) Stroke Sequence, a form-emphasis strategy, (2) Key-images, a form + meaning strategy utilizing visual code, (3) Pithy Formulas with Key-images, a form + meaning strategy combining visual and verbal codes. A pretest-posttest equivalent-group design was adopted. The independent variables were the learning strategy, the method of presenting character pairs (visually similar vs. dissimilar), and testing time. The dependent variables were learners' proportions of accurate responses to reading and writing Chinese characters through a posttest (immediately performed after learning) and a delayed posttest (1 week after learning); a learner experience survey was also administered to investigate learners' opinions on each strategy. Sixty-six non-beginning learners of Chinese participated; they were randomly assigned to one of the two groups in which participants learned ten characters via the three strategies, respectively, differing between whether the characters were presented in similar pairs or dissimilar pairs. Data were analyzed via three-way ANCOVAs. The Pithy Formulas with Key-images and the Key-images generally yielded higher writing accuracy than Stroke Sequence immediately after learning. Notably, the advantage of the Pithy Formulas with Key-images (verbal and visual) over the Key-images (visual) on writing was specific to the participants that learned with visually similar pairs rather than those that learned with dissimilar pairs. All strategies were effective for reading, yet learners' experience ratings favored the two form + meaning strategies over the strategy that focused primarily on form. Suggestions for future research and pedagogical implications on learning visually similar characters were offered.

Exploring Relationships Between L2 Chinese Character Writing and Reading Acquisition From Embodied Cognitive Perspectives: Evidence From HSK Big Data

Chinese characters are central to understanding how learners learn to read a logographic script. However, researchers know little about the role of character writing in reading Chinese as a second language (CSL). Unlike an alphabetic script, a Chinese character symbol transmits semantic information and is a cultural icon bridging embodied experience and text meaning. As a unique embodied practice, writing by hand contributes to cognitive processing in Chinese reading. Therefore, it is essential to clarify how Chinese character writing (bodily activity), language distance (past language usage), and cultural background (bodily coupling with the environment) influence CSL reading proficiency. Based on extant research on L2 reading acquisition and strength of key theoretical perspectives of embodied cognition theory (ECT), this study tested a regression model for CSL reading involving individual-level factors (Chinese character writing proficiency [CCWP]) and group-level predictors (language distance and cultural background). This study collected big data in a sample of 74,362 CSL learners with 67 diverse L1s. Results of hierarchical linear modeling showed a significant effect of CCWP and significant language distance × CCWP interaction effect on reading proficiency; however, cultural background × CCWP interaction effect was not significant. These results conform to the ECT and indicate that bodily activity, past language usage, and cultural background aided reading. CCWP may benefit from withstanding the negative transfer from L1s. Furthermore, CCWP and cultural background are not synergistic predictors of reading. This study may open novel avenues for explorations of CSL reading development.

From Hand to Eye With the Devil In-Between: Which Cognitive Mechanisms Underpin the Benefit From Handwriting Training When Learning Visual Graphs?

Cognitive science has recently shown a renewed interest on the benefit from training in handwriting (HW) when learning visual graphs, given that this learning experience improves more subsequent visual graph recognition than other forms of training. However, the underlying cognitive mechanism of this HW benefit has been elusive. Building on the 50 years of research on this topic, the present work outlines a theoretical approach to study this mechanism, specifying testable hypotheses that will allow distinguishing between confronting perspectives, i.e., symbolic accounts that hold that perceptual learning and visual analysis underpin the benefit from HW training vs. embodied sensorimotor accounts that argue for motoric representations as inner part of orthographic representations acquired via HW training. From the evidence critically revisited, we concluded that symbolic accounts are parsimonious and could better explain the benefit from HW training when learning visual graphs. The future challenge will be to put at test the detailed predictions presented here, so that the devil has no longer room in this equation.

Functional brain networks underlying automatic and controlled handwriting in Chinese

This study aimed to identify the functional brain networks underlying the distinctions between automatic and controlled handwriting in Chinese. Network-based analysis was applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected while adult participants performed a copying task under automatic and speed-controlled conditions. We found significant differences between automatic and speed-controlled handwriting in functional connectivity within and between the frontoparietal network, default mode network, dorsal attention network, somatomotor network and visual network; these differences reflect the variations in general attentional control and task-relevant visuomotor operations. However, no differences in brain activation were detected between the two handwriting conditions, suggesting that the reorganization of functional networks, rather than the modulation of local brain activation, underlies the dissociations between automatic and controlled handwriting in Chinese. Our findings illustrate the brain basis of handwriting automaticity, shedding new light on how handwriting automaticity may be disrupted in individuals with neurological disorders.

The brain basis of handwriting deficits in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia

Abundant behavioral studies have demonstrated high comorbidity of reading and handwriting difficulties in developmental dyslexia (DD), a neurological condition characterized by unexpectedly low reading ability despite adequate nonverbal intelligence and typical schooling. The neural correlates of handwriting deficits remain largely unknown; however, as well as the extent that handwriting deficits share common neural bases with reading deficits in DD. The present work used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activity during handwriting and reading tasks in Chinese dyslexic children (n = 18) and age-matched controls (n = 23). Compared to controls, dyslexic children exhibited reduced activation during handwriting tasks in brain regions supporting sensory-motor processing (including supplementary motor area and postcentral gyrus) and visual-orthography processing (including bilateral precuneus and right cuneus). Among these regions, the left supplementary motor area and the right precuneus also showed a trend of reduced activation during reading tasks in dyslexics. Moreover, increased activation was found in the left inferior frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex in dyslexics, which may reflect more efforts of executive control to compensate for the impairments of motor and visual-orthographic processing. Finally, dyslexic children exhibited aberrant functional connectivity among brain areas for cognitive control and sensory-motor processes during handwriting tasks. Together, these findings suggest that handwriting deficits in DD are associated with functional abnormalities of multiple brain regions implicated in motor execution, visual-orthographic processing, and cognitive control, providing important implications for the diagnosis and treatment of dyslexia.

The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Literacy Learning

Previous research indicates that writing practice may be more beneficial than nonmotor practice for letter learning. Here, we report a training study comparing typing, visual, and writing learning conditions in adults (N = 42). We investigated the behavioral consequences of learning modality on literacy learning and evaluated the nature of the learned letter representations. Specifically, the study addressed three questions. First, are the benefits of handwriting practice due to motor learning per se or to other incidental factors? Second, do the benefits generalize to untrained tasks? And third, does handwriting practice lead to learning and strengthening only of motor representations or of other types of representations as well? Our results clearly show that handwriting compared with nonmotor practice produces faster learning and greater generalization to untrained tasks than previously reported. Furthermore, only handwriting practice leads to learning of both motor and amodal symbolic letter representations.

Pinyin Spelling Promotes Reading Abilities of Adolescents Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language: Evidence From Mediation Models

Pinyin is a phonological encoding system used to spell modern Chinese Mandarin due to the phonological opacity of Chinese characters. The present study examined the role of Pinyin spelling in the reading abilities of adolescents learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). A total of 158 Indonesian senior primary students were tested on Pinyin spelling, character production, listening comprehension, depth of vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. Pinyin spelling skills were assessed by two measures, Pinyin Dictation (sentence dictation in Pinyin) and Pinyin Tagging (Pinyin writing for characters). Path analysis revealed that even after controlling for the effect of character production, Pinyin dictation performance influenced reading comprehension through the mediating effect of listening comprehension and the depth of vocabulary knowledge, and Pinyin tagging performance also influenced reading comprehension through the mediating effect of the depth of vocabulary knowledge. The results highlight the importance of Pinyin skills for Chinese reading abilities of CFL learners. As a reliable and explicit indicator of specifying Chinese phonological representations and processing, Pinyin spelling has a long-term and multifaceted influence on higher-level CFL abilities.

Chinese characters are read using not only visual but also writing motor information

It has been suggested that mature reading systems consist of both a visual analysis decoding system and a motor gesture decoding system that facilitates reading by processing writing motor information. However, there is still uncertainty about the mechanisms and effectiveness of the latter system when reading Chinese characters. This study therefore aimed to provide empirical neural evidence for this phenomenon using a writing video as prompt in a delayed sequential same/different judgment task. We investigated whether and how the orthographic processing of target characters was modulated by the writing direction of the prompt (forward vs. backward) and the character repetition (repeat vs. nonrepeat) between the prompt and target characters. The results indicated that (a) the N170 component was more negative under the forward condition than under the backward condition; and (b) both writing direction and character repetition modulated the centro-parietal N200 component. These writing-direction effects were specific to Chinese characters--they did not apply to Korean characters, which are visually similar to Chinese characters but unfamiliar to the participants. These results suggest that the experience of learning Chinese might establish a motor gesture decoding system for reading, which begins to perform general orthographic representation at an early stage and works together with the visual analysis decoding system to achieve deep orthographic processing.

Whole-Brain Functional Networks for Phonological and Orthographic Processing in Chinese Good and Poor Readers

The neural basis of dyslexia in different languages remains unresolved, and it is unclear whether the phonological deficit as the core deficit of dyslexia is language-specific or universal. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using whole-brain data-driven network analyses investigated the neural mechanisms for phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese children with good and poor reading ability. Sixteen good readers and 16 poor readers were requested to make homophone judgments (phonological processing) and component judgments (visual-orthographic processing) of presented Chinese characters. Poor readers displayed worse performance than the good readers in phonological processing, but not in orthographic processing. Whole-brain activation analyses showed compensatory activations in the poor readers during phonological processing and automatic phonological production activation in the good readers during orthographic processing. Significant group differences in the topological properties of their brain networks were found only in orthographic processing. Analyses of nodal degree centrality and betweenness centrality revealed significant group differences in both phonological and orthographic processing. The present study supports the phonological core deficit hypothesis of reading difficulty in Chinese. It also suggests that Chinese good and poor readers might recruit different strategies and neural mechanisms for orthographic processing.

Exploring the effects of knowledge of writing on reading Chinese characters in skilled readers

Knowledge about how characters are written has been argued to play a particularly important role in how children learn to read Chinese. In the current study, we investigate the role that knowledge about writing characters plays in visual word processing in skilled adult readers. While there is clear neuropsychological evidence against the strong version of the hypothesis that reading depends on writing in Chinese even once literacy is acquired, it is still possible that writing could have a modulatory influence on how visually presented Chinese characters are processed in literate readers. The present study addressed this hypothesis using a visual same/different judgment task on pairs of characters that vary in how similar the 2 characters are visually and how similar they are in terms of motor plan, using 24 expert readers and writers of Chinese and 24 naïve participants with no prior experience with written Chinese as subjects. The results of linear mixed-effects modeling indicate that the speed of same/different judgments is influenced by visual similarity, but not by how similar they are written, even in the group of skilled readers. These results suggest that knowledge of how Chinese characters are written does not influence visual character processing in skilled readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Text Comprehension Mediates Morphological Awareness, Syntactic Processing, and Working Memory in Predicting Chinese Written Composition Performance

The goal of the present study was to test opposing views about four issues concerning predictors of individual differences in Chinese written composition: (a) Whether morphological awareness, syntactic processing, and working memory represent distinct and measureable constructs in Chinese or are just manifestations of general language ability; (b) whether they are important predictors of Chinese written composition, and if so, the relative magnitudes and independence of their predictive relations; (c) whether observed predictive relations are mediated by text comprehension; and (d) whether these relations vary or are developmentally invariant across three years of writing development. Based on analyses of the performance of students in grades 4 (n = 246), 5 (n = 242) and 6 (n = 261), the results supported morphological awareness, syntactic processing, and working memory as distinct yet correlated abilities that made independent contributions to predicting Chinese written composition, with working memory as the strongest predictor. However, predictive relations were mediated by text comprehension. The final model accounted for approximately 75 percent of the variance in Chinese written composition. The results were largely developmentally invariant across the three grades from which participants were drawn.

Lexical orthography acquisition: Is handwriting better than spelling aloud?

Lexical orthography acquisition is currently described as the building of links between the visual forms and the auditory forms of whole words. However, a growing body of data suggests that a motor component could further be involved in orthographic acquisition. A few studies support the idea that reading plus handwriting is a better lexical orthographic learning situation than reading alone. However, these studies did not explore which of the cognitive processes involved in handwriting enhanced lexical orthographic acquisition. Some findings suggest that the specific movements memorized when learning to write may participate in the establishment of orthographic representations in memory. The aim of the present study was to assess this hypothesis using handwriting and spelling aloud as two learning conditions. In two experiments, fifth graders were asked to read complex pseudo-words embedded in short sentences. Immediately after reading, participants had to recall the pseudo-words' spellings either by spelling them aloud or by handwriting them down. One week later, orthographic acquisition was tested using two post-tests: a pseudo-word production task (spelling by hand in Experiment 1 or spelling aloud in Experiment 2) and a pseudo-word recognition task. Results showed no significant difference in pseudo-word recognition between the two learning conditions. In the pseudo-word production task, orthography learning improved when the learning and post-test conditions were similar, thus showing a massive encoding-retrieval match effect in the two experiments. However, a mixed model analysis of the pseudo-word production results revealed a significant learning condition effect which remained after control of the encoding-retrieval match effect. This later finding suggests that orthography learning is more efficient when mediated by handwriting than by spelling aloud, whatever the post-test production task.

Phonology and access to Chinese character meaning

One of the central concerns in theories of reading skills is the role of phonology in access to word meaning. The present study focused on this issue in Chinese to examine the extent to which phonology affects Chinese character recognition. Two naming experiments were conducted with a phonologically mediated semantic priming paradigm, and the relative frequencies of semantic associates of the targets and their homophones were manipulated systematically. Analyses showed that a semantic associate produced robust priming on target naming at 57- and 250-msec. stimulus onset asynchronies, but only the low frequency homophones of high frequency semantic associates facilitated target naming at a 250-msec. stimulus onset asynchrony. These results indicate the role of phonology is neither obligatory nor efficient in access to Chinese character meaning, contradicting the key assumptions of the lexical constituency model. A revised parallel access model that emphasizes visual access to semantics is suggested as a more plausible account.