Inhibitory control ability may affect the orthographic neighborhood size (ONS) effect by inhibiting the semantic activation of neighbors. However, few studies have explored whether and how inhibitory control plays a role in the ONS effect on recognition of Chinese words. This study screened individuals with high and low inhibitory control…

Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. These cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character's meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the reader's processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman and Siok in…

This study investigated the strength of lexical and non-lexical processing among Arabic (L1) English (L3)-speaking children (fourth and fifth grades, N = 532) in two writing systems that vary in terms of transparency. Children were assessed using word reading, phonological and vocabulary measures. In Arabic, the study focused on standard form.…

This study investigated the development of component awareness, semantic radical identification ability, semantic radical knowledge application, Chinese character recognition, and the relationship among these abilities in nonnative speakers. A total of 139 Vietnamese undergraduates majoring in Chinese language who were sorted according to Chinese…

Prolonged inspection of a Chinese character induces a feeling of uncertainty of the character, a phenomenon named as "Orthographic Satiation." However, there has not been direct evidence showing that such satiation does occur at the orthographic level. To investigate whether Chinese satiation occurs at the orthographic level or at other…

The picture-word task presents participants with a number of pictured objects together with a written distractor word superimposed upon each picture, and their task is to name the depicted object while ignoring the distractor word. Depending on the specific picture and word combination, various effects, including the identity facilitation effect…

Research on Japanese reading has generally indicated that processing of the logographic script Kanji primarily involves whole-word lexical processing and follows a semantics-to-phonology route, while the two phonological scripts Hiragana and Katakana (collectively called Kana) are processed via a sub-lexical route, and more in a…

The diacritical markers that represent most of the vowels in the Arabic orthography are generally omitted from written texts. Previous research revealed that the absence of diacritics reduces reading comprehension performance even by skilled readers of Arabic. One possible explanation is that many Arabic words become ambiguous when diacritics are…

We sought to test a componential model of Chinese written spelling, including the role of orthographic working memory (OWM), among Hong Kong kindergartners. One hundred seventeen kindergartners were recruited. OWM was measured using a visual orthographic judgment and a delayed copying task. Orthographic knowledge, semantic knowledge, and…

A 3-year longitudinal study among 239 Chinese students in Grades 2-4 was conducted to investigate the relationships between orthographic skills (including positional and functional knowledge of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals, and orthographic memory of radicals) and Chinese literacy skills (word reading, word spelling, reading…

This study investigated Chinese children's development of sensitivity to positional (orthographic), phonological, and semantic cues of radicals in encoding novel Chinese characters. A newly designed picture-novel character mapping task, along with nonverbal reasoning ability, vocabulary, and Chinese character recognition were administered to 198…

The present longitudinal study investigated the role of spelling as a bridge between various reading-related predictors and English word reading in Chinese children learning English as a Second Language (ESL). One hundred and forty-one 5-year-old kindergarten children from Hong Kong, whose first language (L1) was Cantonese and second language (L2)…

Previous research has shown that the presence of English word spellings facilitates children's oral vocabulary learning. Whether a similar orthographic facilitation effect may exist in Chinese is interesting but not intuitively obvious due to the character writing system representing morphosyllabic but not phoneme-size information, and the more…

The contribution of linguistic and cognitive variables to reading processes might vary depending on the particularities of the languages studied. This view is thought to be particularly true for Arabic which is a diglossic language and has particular orthographic and morpho-syntactic systems. This cross-sectional study examined the contribution of…

Radicals are building blocks of Chinese complex characters and exhibit certain positional, phonological and semantic regularities. This study investigated whether adult non-native learners of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) were aware of the positional (orthographic), phonological and semantic information of radicals, and whether such…