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…

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…

Most printed Chinese words are compounds built from the combination of meaningful characters. Yet, there is a poor understanding of how individual characters contribute to the recognition of compounds. Using a megastudy of Chinese word recognition (Tse et al., 2017), we examined how the lexical decision of existing and novel Chinese compounds was…

Statistical learning (SL) plays a key role in literacy acquisition. Studies have increasingly revealed the influence of distributional statistical properties of words on visual word processing, including the effects of word frequency (lexical level) and mappings between orthography, phonology, and semantics (sub-lexical level). However, there has…

This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…

Background: In opaque orthographies, such as English, children with low reading skills tend to rely more on semantic information due to their inadequate acquisition of sub-lexical knowledge. This tendency has also been reported for kanji, a non-alphabetic and opaque Japanese orthography. However, previous studies on this phenomenon have had…

Word reading is critical for reading development. However, it has long been debated on the processes involved in real word and pseudoword decoding in developmental dyslexia (DD). We conducted a meta-analysis of 28 neuroimaging studies (519 participants with DD, 562 typical readers, age range 5-63 years, female 37.65%, 382 foci, 64 experimental…

Background: When reading a word, skilled adult readers automatically decompose the word into its separate morphemes by processing the word's morpho-orthography. In children, however, it still remains unclear when and how they start to automatically decompose words into morphemes. Methods: To better understand how primary school children learn and…

Prominent theories of reading development have separately emphasized the relevance of children's skill in learning (Share, 2008) and lexical representations (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Integrating these ideas, we examined whether skill in learning lexical representations is a mechanism that might explain children's reading development. To do so…

When reading Chinese, skilled native readers regularly gain a preview benefit (PB) when the parafoveal word is orthographically or semantically related to the target word. Evidence shows that non-native, beginning Chinese readers can obtain an orthographic PB during Chinese reading, which indicates the parafoveal processing of low-level visual…

Chinese coordinative compound words are common and unique in inter-character semantic and orthographic relationships. This study explored the inter-character orthographic similarity effects on the recognition of transparent two-morpheme coordinative compound words. Seventy-two native Chinese readers participated in a lexical decision task. The…

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…

How people learn to read is an interesting question which has been investigated by many studies with various approaches. Some recent studies have related learning to read with domain-general abilities and have found a positive relationship between statistical learning and learning to read, as well as between procedural learning and learning to…

This study intends to examine the reading process in Chinese of two young heritage language learners through the use of retrospective miscue analysis (RMA). Retrospective miscue analysis involves both the author and the reader in reflectively discussing the reader's oral reading miscues--responses that differ from the actual text. This study…