Neural correlates of phonology-to-orthography mapping consistency effects on Chinese spoken word recognition.

Previous studies have shown that reading experience reshapes speech processing. The orthography can be implemented in the brain by restructuring the phonological representations or being co-activated during spoken word recognition. This study utilized event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging and functional connectivity analysis to examine the neural mechanism underlying two types of orthographic effects in the Chinese auditory semantic category task, namely phonology-to-orthography consistency (POC) and homophone density (HD). We found that the POC effects originated from the speech network, suggesting that sublexical orthographic information could change the organization of preexisting phonological representations when learning to read. Meanwhile, the HD effects were localized to the left fusiform and lingual gyrus, suggesting that lexical orthographic knowledge may be activated online during spoken word recognition. These results demonstrated the different natures and neural mechanisms for the POC and HD effects on Chinese spoken word recognition.

A phonetic radical account of the phonology-to-Orthography consistency effect on writing Chinese characters: Evidence from a Chinese Dysgraphic patient.

This study investigated the sublexical route in writing Chinese characters. Using a writing-to-dictation task, we compared neurotypical participants' performance on writing a set of 40 characters with homophones sharing different phonetic radicals and another set of 40 characters with homophones sharing the same phonetic radicals. The first set of stimuli was regarded as both syllable-to-character and syllable-to-radical inconsistent, while the second set of stimuli was considered syllable-to-radical consistent but syllable-to-character inconsistent. The results of the error analysis showed that the control participants demonstrated a greater tendency to make errors with preserved phonetic radicals in the second set of stimuli. Furthermore, we conducted the same task with a Chinese brain-injured patient, WCY, who had mild dyslexia and severe dysgraphia associated with mild impairment to the lexical semantic route as shown by the patient's character writing. The results showed that WCY demonstrated similar error patterns as those of the control participants and a shorter writing time in the second set of stimuli. Altogether, the observations were taken as evidence that supported our claim that a syllable-to-phonetic radical route governs the sublexical route in Chinese character writing.

Written object naming, spelling to dictation, and immediate copying: Different tasks, different pathways?

We report an investigation of cross-task comparisons of handwritten latencies in written object naming, spelling to dictation, and immediate copying. In three separate sessions, adults had to write down a list of concrete nouns from their corresponding pictures (written naming), from their spoken (spelling to dictation) and from their visual presentation (immediate copying). Linear mixed models without random slopes were performed on the latencies in order to study and compare within-task fixed effects. By-participants random slopes were then included to investigate individual differences within and across tasks. Overall, the findings suggest that written naming, spelling to dictation, and copying all involve a lexical pathway, but that written naming relies on this pathway more than the other two tasks do. Only spelling to dictation strongly involves a nonlexical pathway. Finally, the analyses performed at the level of participants indicate that, depending on the type of task, the slower participants are more or less influenced by certain psycholinguistic variables.