Four experiments were designed to investigate the possible effect of orthographic neighborhood frequency (NF) on Chinese character recognition. Orthographic neighbors were operated under two conditions: stroke based and radical based. With the lexical decision and repeated-matching tasks adopted, the results showed an inhibitory NF effect on…

Background: Efficient word identification is directly tied to strong mental representations of words, which include spellings, meanings and pronunciations. Orthographic learning is the process by which spellings for individual words are acquired. Methods: In the present study, we combined the classic self-teaching paradigm with eye tracking to…

This study investigated preschoolers' knowledge of Chinese characters by testing character structures on four levels: radical (character components), whole characters, characters in words and characters in sentences. A total of 107 preschool children between the ages of three and six from four nursery schools in Taiwan participated in the study.…

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…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

Radical awareness (i.e. the ability to identify, analyze, and manipulate radicals within compound characters) plays an important role in character reading and learning for first language and second language (L2) learners of Chinese. Previous studies have shown that radical awareness contributes to character recognition, inference, and…

The process of word recognition can be analytic (or serial) or holistic (or parallel). They differ in the size of the processing units (lexical vs. sublexical) or in whether sublexical units are processed sequentially or simultaneously. First language (L1) reading development has been found to involve a transition from serial processing to…

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…

The goal of the paper was to investigate whether morphological units -- stems and suffixes -- influence orthographic processing by modulating visual attention demands to the task. Orthographic processing was measured with a visual one-back task requiring letters to be detected within pseudowords not including stems/suffixes, or containing real…

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…

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…

When reading in a second language, a reader's first language may be involved. For word reading, the question is how and at what level: lexical, pre-lexical, or both. In three experiments, we employed an implicit reading task (color judgment) and an explicit reading task (word naming) to test whether a Chinese meaning equivalent character and its…

Background: There is emerging evidence that individuals with developmental dyslexia show deficits in visual-spatial attention. This study focused on visual searches and examined whether visual search deficits would be found in Chinese children with dyslexia. More importantly, we examined the associations between dyslexia and distinct types of…

The majority of naturalistic reading occurs within passages. Therefore, it is important to understand how reading in context affects the division of labor between semantic and orthographic processing. However, it is difficult to compare the cognitive processes elicited by reading in context and lists because of the perceptual differences that…

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…