The Interaction Of Speech And Semantic Cues In Chinese Reading

Visual word reading is a process from orthographic input to phonetic output,it involves mapping from orthography to phonology and mapping from orthography to phonology via semantic.There are two cognitive theories of reading.DRC(Dual Route Model)think phonetic and semantic clue in the process of reading are separate.PDP(parallel distributed processing),an orientation of connectionism,which propose the reading triangle model thinks that reading is the interaction among the three systems of visual orthography system,phonetic system and semantic system.Reading aloud also includes two routes,that is,the orthography to the phonology,the orthography through the semantic and then to the phonology.The two routes which have different functions interact and cooperate to complete all words reading.Two cognitive theories believed that reading is the result of the interaction between the orthography to phonology and the semantic routes.Evidence from cognitive neuroscience,computer simulation,and neuroimaging research has shown that reading involves the interaction of the phonetic and semantic processing,and the interaction is cross-language universality.However,the majority of the research evidence comes from the alphabetic writing systems,the research are relatively limited in the interpretation of the semantic mechanism.Chinese characters are phonogram.Semantics plays an important role in the processing of Chinese characters.However,phonetic and semantic clues in the process of Chinese character recognition are how to interact with each other,there is no corresponding experimental evidence.In this study,two behavioral experiments and an ERP experiment were conducted to explore this problem.We directly manipulated phonological(consistency vs.inconsistency)and semantic(transparent vs.opaque)factors,to investigate the interaction between phonetic and semantic clues in Chinese characters reading.In Experiment 1,participants were asked to perform the lexical decision task.Participants’ task was to determine the experiment materials was true words or false words,all of the key materials were true words("yes" response),and filler material were false words.Results showed a significant consistent effect,in which the response on consistent character was faster and more accurate than on inconsistent character.A significant semantic transparency effect was also found.However,there was no significant interaction between consistency and transparency.Experiment 2 using the same design and critical materials as Experiment 1,conducted a deeper task,asking participants to name the characters.Results found a significant consistency effect,in which the response to the phonological consistent characters was faster and more accurate than the phonological inconsistent.No semantic transparency effect was found.The most interesting finding was the interaction between consistency and transparency since the transparency effect was observed in inconsistent characters.Under the condition of phonological inconsistent,naming semantic transparent Chinese characters was faster than that of semantic opaque.The results found the interaction of the phonetic and semantic cues in Chinese character reading for the first time.In order to further reveal the neural mechanisms of phonetic and semantic interaction,Experiment 3 using a delay naming task with ERP technology,using the same materials as Experiment 2.The results showed trends between consistency and transparency.We preliminary obtained the neural mechanisms of phonetic and semantic clues in Chinese character reading.In summary,our research investigated the interaction of phonetic and semantic clues in Chinese characters reading in behavioral and neural level.In line with the existing research results,we find character reading is influenced by both phonetic and semantic clues.These results provide direct evidence for PDP,and reveal the cognitive mechanism of reading from the perspective of cross-language.