In Japanese, the same word can be written in either morphographic Kanji or syllabographic Hiragana and this provides a unique opportunity to disentangle a word's lexical frequency from the frequency of its visual form--an important distinction for understanding the neural information processing in regions engaged by reading. Behaviorally,…

Romanized transliteration is widely used in internet communication and global commerce, yet we know little about its behavioural and neural processing. Here, we show that Romanized text imposes a significant neurocognitive load. Readers faced greater difficulty in identifying concrete words written in Romanized transliteration (Romanagari)…

Cognitive models of reading all assume some division of labor among processing pathways in mapping among print, sound and meaning. Many studies of the neural basis of reading have used task manipulations such as rhyme or synonym judgment to tap these processes independently. Here we take advantage of specific properties of the Chinese writing…

The role of phonological coding for character identification was examined with the benefit of processing parafoveal characters in eye fixations while reading Chinese sentences. In Experiment 1, the orthogonal manipulation of phonological and orthographic similarity can separate two types of phonological benefits for homophonic previews, according…

Brain activation during reading of phonographic (Hangul) and ideographic (Hanja) words is compared using functional MRI by taking advantage of the bi-scriptal system of the Korean language. To examine the psycholinguistic difference, i.e., phonographic vs. ideographic, separately from other differences due to Hanja being a secondary script, we…