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Visual Analysis and Lexical Access of Chinese Characters by Chinese as a Second Language Readers

Visual Analysis and Lexical Access of Chinese Characters by Chinese as a Second Language Readers. Liu, Perfetti , & Wang (2006) as summarized by Scott Hajek. How Do Writing Systems Affect Visual Word Recognition?. Early work was all on English and other alphabetic systems

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Visual Analysis and Lexical Access of Chinese Characters by Chinese as a Second Language Readers

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  1. Visual Analysis and Lexical Access of Chinese Characters by Chinese as a Second Language Readers Liu, Perfetti, & Wang (2006) as summarized by Scott Hajek

  2. How Do Writing Systems Affect Visual Word Recognition? Early work was all on English and other alphabetic systems Do different orthographic representations require different processes? If the processes are different, do we need different models?

  3. Comparing Languages English Chinese • Alphabetic Orthography • graphemes correspond to sounds • Processing: • Dual-Route Cascaded model • Morpho-phonemic Orthography • graphemes correspond to monosyllabic morphemes • Processing: • Threshold-style • Straight from grapheme to meaning? • Tongue-Twister Effect (Zhang & Perfetti 1993)

  4. Dual-Route Cascaded Model Three paths to get to read a word aloud

  5. Threshold-Style Recognition • Below Threshold • Facilitation for orthographic units that look similar • After Threshold Reached • Activation of phonology and semantics, enabling phonological and semantic priming • Competition for graphically similar items

  6. Chinese as a 2nd Language • Relevant components • Orthographic Analysis • Facilitation effects in previous priming studies show this is learned by L2 learners quickly • Phonological Access • Meaning Retrieval • No phonological or semantic priming in a single term • Marginal phonological priming after 2nd term

  7. Neuroimaging: ERP • N200 – orthographic & phonological processing • N400 – phonological & semantic processing • Key: • ERP = Event Related Potentials • N = negative, P = positive • 200/400  approx. time window after stimulus

  8. Experiment Design • Participants: students in elementary Chinese class • ERPs recorded during Delayed Naming Task • Only asked to name the word for fillers (20% of trials) – to make sure they try to process the words, but they didn’t want an overt response on targets to interfere with ERPs • Word Frequency – High/Low • Based on textbook frequency for Chinese • Based on Kucera & Francis (1967) for English • Exper. 1 after 1st term, Exper 2 after 2nd

  9. The Take-Away Lesson I learned…

  10. …is that ERPs analysis is complicated!

  11. Term 1: Explaining the Variance Comp 2 N200/P200 Comp 4 N400

  12. Term 2

  13. Term 2: Explaining Variance Comp 3 N200/P200 Comp 2 N400

  14. Term 2: Results

  15. Compare Term 1 & 2

  16. Questions: Marianna 1. I am not quite sure that I understand the discussion of the results of the two experiments, in particular the part concerning the N200/P200 component. On p. 651, the authors state that “... Chinese had larger amplitude at N200/P200 which indicated more visual processing (occipital) and lexical access (frontal and central) effort were needed for processing Chinese...”. This is in agreement with previous results (Liu & Perfetti, 2003) which showed that the amplitude of N200/P200 ellicited by a Chinese character was reduced when an orthographically similar character had been presented before, thus suggesting that primed written words are easier to process. Bearing this in mind, the result that the P200 of the high frequency characters was more positive than that of low frequency characters at central frontal electrodes seems unexpected. If larger amplitude suggests more effort in processing, wouldn't we expect less positivity for high than low frequency characters? Similarly, English high frequency words also elicit more positivity than low frequency words at the left central node. I may be missing something, but, based on the previous claim of the authors, these results seem to indicate that high frequency words and characters are harder to process than low frequency ones. However, at the bottom of p.651, the authors go on to say that “larger P200 at frontal electrodes reflects the earlier lexical access of high frequency characters in the first term”. I thought this claim contradicted what they previously said (see quote above). 2. In this study, the stimuli used in the two experiments were the same. The Chinese characters were chosen to reflect high and low frequency items based on their frequency of appearance in the textbook used in the first term of study. It is likely that the relative frequencies of those characters were different for the second experiment, since the students were exposed to different materials during the second term (some 15 more weeks of class).

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