Orthographic Statistical Learning And Its Neural Mechanisms

Accumulating evidence has shown that orthographic regularity learning plays an important role in reading and writing acquisition,but much remains unclear about the mechanisms underlying the ability to develop sensitivity to orthographic regularities.Many researchers invoke statistical learning as a key mechanism underlying the orthographic regularity learning.However,understanding about the orthographic statistical learning mechanism to date is very limited.Therefore,this study aimed to investigate the statistical learning of orthographic regularities in adults as well as its neural mechanisms.The present study included four experiments.The first one employed artificial pseudocharacters and statistical learning paradigm to explore the statistical learning of radical's positional regularities in adults,and the second one studied the neural processes involved in this kind of learning using event-related potentials(ERPs)technique.The third explored the statistical learning of semantic radical's regularities in adults,and the fourth one studied the neural processes involved in this kind of learning using ERP technique.The results of the presents study were given as follow:1)Adult participants can acquire radical's positional regularities through statistical learning,and recognition accuracy was influenced by both pseudocharacter structure and consistency level.2)Adult participants can acquire semantic radical's regularities through statistical learning,and recognition accuracy was influenced by consistency level.3)The occipital-temporal region may be involved in the statistical learning of radical's positional regularities,and N170 might be a neural indicator of statistical learning of radical's positional regularities in Chinese.4)N170,posterior P2,N400 might be neural indicators of statistical learning of semantic radical's regularities in Chinese.