scholarly journals Effect of Handwriting on Visual Word Recognition in Chinese Bilingual Children and Adults

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Qun Guan ◽  
Elaine R. Smolen ◽  
Wanjin Meng ◽  
James R. Booth

In a digital era that neglects handwriting, the current study is significant because it examines the mechanisms underlying this process. We recruited 9- to 10-year-old Chinese children (n = 24), who were at an important period of handwriting development, and adult college students (n = 24), for both behavioral and electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments. We designed four learning conditions: handwriting Chinese (HC), viewing Chinese (VC), drawing shapes followed by Chinese recognition (DC), and drawing shapes followed by English recognition (DE). Both behavioral and EEG results showed that HC facilitated visual word recognition compared to VC, and behavioral results showed that HC facilitated visual word recognition compared to drawing shapes. HC and VC resulted in a lateralization of the N170 in adults, but not in children. Taken together, the results of the study suggest benefits of handwriting on the neural processing and behavioral performance in response to Chinese characters. The study results argue for maintaining handwriting practices to promote the perception of visual word forms in the digital age.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaodong Liu ◽  
Luc Vermeylen ◽  
David Wisniewski ◽  
Marc Brysbaert

Lateralization is a critical characteristic of language production and also plays a role in visual word recognition. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the interactions between visual input and spoken word representations are still unclear. We investigated the contribution of sub-lexical phonological information in visual word processing by exploiting the fact that Chinese characters can contain phonetic radicals in either the left or right half of the character. FMRI data were collected while 39 Chinese participants read words in search for target color words. On the basis of whole-brain analysis and three laterality analyses of regions of interest, we argue that visual information from centrally presented Chinese characters is split in the fovea and projected to the contralateral visual cortex, from which phonological information can be extracted rapidly if the character contains a phonetic radical. Extra activation, suggestive of more effortful processing, is observed when the phonetic radical is situated in the left half of the character and therefore initially sent to the visual cortex in the right hemisphere that is less specialized for language processing. Our results are in line with the proposal that phonological information helps written word processing by means of top-down feedback.


Author(s):  
Manuel Perea ◽  
Victoria Panadero

The vast majority of neural and computational models of visual-word recognition assume that lexical access is achieved via the activation of abstract letter identities. Thus, a word’s overall shape should play no role in this process. In the present lexical decision experiment, we compared word-like pseudowords like viotín (same shape as its base word: violín) vs. viocín (different shape) in mature (college-aged skilled readers), immature (normally reading children), and immature/impaired (young readers with developmental dyslexia) word-recognition systems. Results revealed similar response times (and error rates) to consistent-shape and inconsistent-shape pseudowords for both adult skilled readers and normally reading children – this is consistent with current models of visual-word recognition. In contrast, young readers with developmental dyslexia made significantly more errors to viotín-like pseudowords than to viocín-like pseudowords. Thus, unlike normally reading children, young readers with developmental dyslexia are sensitive to a word’s visual cues, presumably because of poor letter representations.


Author(s):  
Diane Pecher ◽  
Inge Boot ◽  
Saskia van Dantzig ◽  
Carol J. Madden ◽  
David E. Huber ◽  
...  

Previous studies (e.g., Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005) found that semantic classification performance is better for target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the same semantic class (e.g., living) compared to target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the opposite semantic class (e.g., nonliving). In the present study we investigated the contribution of phonology to orthographic neighborhood effects by comparing effects of phonologically congruent orthographic neighbors (book-hook) to phonologically incongruent orthographic neighbors (sand-wand). The prior presentation of a semantically congruent word produced larger effects on subsequent animacy decisions when the previously presented word was a phonologically congruent neighbor than when it was a phonologically incongruent neighbor. In a second experiment, performance differences between target words with versus without semantically congruent orthographic neighbors were larger if the orthographic neighbors were also phonologically congruent. These results support models of visual word recognition that assume an important role for phonology in cascaded access to meaning.


2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Molinaro ◽  
Mikel Lizarazu ◽  
Jon Andoni Dunabeitia ◽  
Manuel Carreiras

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvin J. Yap ◽  
David A. Balota ◽  
Daragh Sibley ◽  
Roger Ratcliff

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document