Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…

Phonological interference during written-word meaning judgments occurs in both Chinese and English, suggesting that word-level phonological activation is universal rather than dependent on the sublexical structures that vary with writing systems. To accommodate this universality, we distinguish two sources of phonological congruence between a…

This article provides a review of previous studies that have examined the effects of orthography on establishing contrastive phonological representations in second language acquisition and presents results from an original study on Mandarin speakers' production of English stops investigating how the presence of orthography affects the production…

The present study investigated the influence of orthographic input on the recognition of second language (L2) spoken words with phonological variants, when first language (L1) and L2 have different orthographic structures. Lexical encoding for intermediate-to-advanced level Mandarin learners of Korean was assessed using masked cross-modal and…

In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of two-character target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The…

Research on what neural mechanisms facilitate word reading development in non-alphabetic scripts is relatively rare. The present study was among the first to adopt a multivariate pattern classification analysis to decode electroencephalographic signals recorded for primary school children (N = 236) while performing a Chinese character decision…

There is evidence that orthographic knowledge can influence on-line spoken-word recognition. Interestingly, when graphic and phonetic codes are not congruent due to the application of phonological alternation processes, people report hearing sounds that are matched to graphic (underlying), not phonetic codes (Hallé et al. in J Mem Lang 43:618-639,…

This study investigated the association of timed visual processing tasks varying in levels of phonological processing with word reading. We tested 293 Chinese children on Cross Out, Visual Matching, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and Chinese character recognition across three to five years. Children's character recognition at ages 6 and 7…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

To develop and evaluate a comprehensive intervention combining transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and behavioral training that specifically targets orthographic awareness and reading fluency for in Chinese children with dyslexia, this study selected two Chinese children with different subtypes of dyslexia, i.e., the orthographic…

This study investigated the influence of orthographic information on the production of allophones in a second language (L2). Two proficiency levels of native Mandarin speakers learned novel Korean words with potential variants of /h/ based on auditory stimuli, and then they were provided various types of spellings for the variants, including the…

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…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined the process of language specialization in the brain by comparing developmental changes in two contrastive orthographies: Chinese and English. In a visual word rhyming judgment task, we found a significant interaction between age and language in left inferior parietal lobule and left…

This study examined English as a foreign language (EFL) spelling development amongst 233 fifth-grade, eighth-grade and 10th-grade Hebrew first-language speakers to examine effects of English orthographic exposure on spelling. Good and poor speller differences were examined regarding the acquisition of novel phonemes (/ae/, /?/ and /?/) and…

Studies on proficient readers showed that speech processing is affected by knowledge of the orthographic code. Yet, the automaticity of the orthographic influence depends on task demand. Here, we addressed this automaticity issue in normal and dyslexic adult readers by comparing the orthographic effects obtained in two speech processing tasks that…