Electrophysiological evidence of sublexical phonological access in character processing by L2 Chinese learners of L1 alphabetic scripts

Abstract

While Chinese character reading relies more on addressed phonology relative to alphabetic scripts, skilled Chinese readers also access sublexical phonological units during recognition of phonograms. However, sublexical orthography-to-phonology mapping has not been found among beginning second language (L2) Chinese learners. This study investigated character reading in more advanced Chinese learners whose native writing system is alphabetic. Phonological regularity and consistency were examined in behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) in lexical decision and delayed naming tasks. Participants were 18 native English speakers who acquired written Chinese after age 5 and reached grade 4 Chinese reading level. Behaviorally, regular characters were named more accurately than irregular characters, but consistency had no effect. Similar to native Chinese readers, regularity effects emerged early with regular characters eliciting a greater N170 than irregular characters. Regular characters also elicited greater right-lateralized frontal P200 than irregular characters in phonograms of low consistency. In the N400 and LPC time windows, effects of regularity and consistency were found in that regular-consistent characters and irregular-inconsistent characters had more negative amplitudes than irregular-consistent characters. The overall pattern of brain activities revealed distinct regularity and consistency effects in both tasks. Although orthographic neighbours are activated in character processing of L2 Chinese readers, the timing of their impact seems delayed compared with native Chinese readers. The topographic distribution of the early components and the timecourses of regularity and consistency effects suggest both assimilation and accommodation of the reading network in learning to read a typologically distinct second orthographic system.