Rapid extraction of lexical tone phonology in chinese characters : a visual mismatch negativity study
In alphabetic languages, emerging evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies shows the rapid and automatic activation of phonological information in visual word recognition. In the mapping from orthography to phonology, unlike most alphabetic languages in which there is a natural correspond...
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Main Authors: | , , , |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2013
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/99789 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/9893 |
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Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
Language: | English |
Summary: | In alphabetic languages, emerging evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies shows the rapid and
automatic activation of phonological information in visual word recognition. In the mapping from orthography to
phonology, unlike most alphabetic languages in which there is a natural correspondence between the visual and
phonological forms, in logographic Chinese, the mapping between visual and phonological forms is rather arbitrary and
depends on learning and experience. The issue of whether the phonological information is rapidly and automatically
extracted in Chinese characters by the brain has not yet been thoroughly addressed.
Methodology/Principal Findings: We continuously presented Chinese characters differing in orthography and meaning to
adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers to construct a constant varying visual stream. In the stream, most stimuli were
homophones of Chinese characters: The phonological features embedded in these visual characters were the same,
including consonants, vowels and the lexical tone. Occasionally, the rule of phonology was randomly violated by characters
whose phonological features differed in the lexical tone.
Conclusions/Significance: We showed that the violation of the lexical tone phonology evoked an early, robust visual
response, as revealed by whole-head electrical recordings of the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), indicating the rapid
extraction of phonological information embedded in Chinese characters. Source analysis revealed that the vMMN was
involved in neural activations of the visual cortex, suggesting that the visual sensory memory is sensitive to phonological
information embedded in visual words at an early processing stage. |
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