Phonological regularity effects in homophone judgment in native and second language Chinese readers

Abstract

In Chinese character reading, phonological regularity is the congruence between pronunciations of the whole character and the phonetic radical as a standalone character. For first language (L1) readers, regularity effects begin to appear among good readers in first grade. The current study sought to establish whether second language (L2) Chinese readers with alphabetic L1 and grade two Chinese reading level similarly engage in sub-lexical phonological analysis in reading. Eighteen L2 Chinese readers judged whether a visually-presented Chinese character was homophonic with an auditory syllable prime. In the regular-incongruent condition, the prime had no relation with character pronunciation; while in the irregular-incongruent (interference) condition, the prime corresponded to the pronunciation of the phonetic radical. L2 readers were less accurate in judging irregular characters, similar to L1 developing readers. An interaction between prime congruence and regularity was observed in RT. More time was needed to reject irregular-incongruent characters relative to regular-incongruent characters. Interestingly, a significant reverse regularity effect was seen where regular-congruent characters produced longer RT than irregular-congruent characters. One interpretation is that the interference condition created a context-induced bias prolonging decisions for all characters with a primed phonetic radical. This bias might be amplified because L2 readers had less automaticity in accessing character pronunciations, so they relied on the information provided by the phonetic radical. The findings suggested that the auditory prime pre-activated the phonetic radical which competed with whole character pronunciation and thus demonstrated that L2 Chinese reading involved phonological access to sub-lexical orthographic units.