Identifying phonological markers of reading expertise in Chinese : correlating behavioral and event-related potential measures

Abstract

The role of phonological regularity and consistency in learning to read Chinese has been well-established in behavioral studies with children. This study aims to identify the neural markers for phonological regularity and consistency processing in typically developing young Chinese readers, and establish whether such processing awareness correlates with reading ability. A standardized reading task was administered to native Chinese grade 4 children, followed by an event-related potential (ERP) delayed naming task with characters that varied in regularity and consistency. Regular characters had a significantly higher naming accuracy than irregular characters, and the ERP results revealed a smaller P200 and larger N400 evoked by regular characters compared to irregular ones. On the contrary, consistent characters elicited larger P200 and smaller N400 than inconsistent characters. Importantly, the correlation analysis revealed that greater sensitivity to the consistency and regularity effects at the P200 and N400 respectively was associated with higher reading scores. The results provide neural insights of how consistency and regularity impacts on sublexical phonological processing and lexical-semantic retrieval during reading aloud in young Chinese readers.