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Title Effects of age of acquisition and semantic transparency onreading characters in Chinese dyslexia
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Yeung, Olivia |
| Copyright Year | 2010 |
| Abstract | This study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and semantic errors from other errors. A post hoc analysis of subsets of items orthogonally varied in the AOA and semantic transparency revealed an interaction between the two variables. These findings converge on reports of AOA and semantic effects on deep dyslexic individuals reading alphabetic scripts. The case of TWT, together with recent results of another Chinese dyslexic individual who reads via the nonsemantic route and exhibits the effects of AOA and phonological consistency, supports the arbitrary mapping hypothesis, which states that the AOA effect resides in the connection between two levels of representation. The age at which an individual acquires a word, the age of acquisition (AOA), influences lexical processing significantly. Previous studies of AOA have reported the effect in various processing tasks using normal subjects, including word naming, picture naming, lexical decision, object recognition, word-associate generation, and semantic categorization (for reviews, see Ghyselinck, Lewis, & Brysbaert, 2004; Johnston & Barry, 2006; Juhasz, 2005). Items that are learned early in life generally take less time to process in these tasks. One main account for AOA effects that has received much attention is the arbitrary mapping (AM) hypothesis (Ellis & Lambon Ralph, 2000; Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002, 2004). It proposes that the effect may depend on the degree of AM between different representations. Corroborating evidence for the hypothesis is found in larger AOA effects in picture-naming than reading-aloud tasks (e.g., Bonin, Barry, Meot, & Chalard, 2004; Brysbaert & Ghyselinck, 2006; Lambon Ralph & Ehsan, 2006), in reading and spelling words with inconsistent grapheme– phoneme correspondence than ones with consistent mappings (e.g., Bonin et al., © Cambridge University Press 2010 0142-7164/10 $15.00 Applied Psycholinguistics 31:4 712 Law & Yeung: AOA and semantic variable effects on reading Chinese 2004; Monoghan & Ellis, 2002b; Weekes, Castles, & Davies, 2006; Weekes, Davies, Parris, & Robinson, 2003; Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002), and smaller AOA effects in scripts that are more transparent than English such as Dutch (Brysbaert, Lange, & Van Wijnendaele, 2000; Ghyselinck et al., 2004) as pointed out by Juhasz (2005).1 Further support for the AM hypothesis can be drawn from writing systems that are more opaque than alphabetic scripts. Yamazaki, Ellis, Morrison, and Lambon Ralph (1997) and Yamada, Takashima, and Yamazaki (1998) found that both written and spoken AOA significantly contribute to reading latencies of Japanese Kanji.2 Of more interest, Havelka and Tomita (2006) reported stronger AOA effects on reading Kanji (102 ms) than the syllabic Kana with transparent grapheme to sound correspondence (27 ms). This comparison is analoguous to that between consistent and inconsistent English words and provides support for the claim that the size of AOA effects is modulated by the degree of AM. The aforementioned studies of reading aloud have focused exclusively on the orthographic form to sound correspondence. Clearly, the notion of AM also applies to the correspondence of form to meaning, as in picture naming. In word naming, investigating the effect of AOA in the context of predictability of orthographic form and meaning mapping is only possible if the writing system contains components providing semantic cues. The Chinese script is one such system. In this paper, we report a case study of a Cantonese-speaking brain-injured individual with acquired dyslexia. His reading deficits were the results of disruption to both the semantic and nonsemantic reading routes, that is, deep dyslexia. His word-naming accuracy was affected by both AOA and semantic transparency. There was also evidence for an interaction between the two variables. The findings have thus provided further support for the AM hypothesis of AOA effects. In the rest of this section, we describe the characteristics of the Chinese orthographic system, followed by a review of recent studies of the AOA effect in Chinese language processing. FEATURES OF THE CHINESE WRITING SYSTEM AND VARIABLES RELEVANT TO WORD NAMING The Chinese script is often characterized as morphosyllabic because the majority of characters are monosyllabic and represent morphemes. More than 80% of all Chinese characters are phonetic compounds consisting of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The semantic radical provides a clue to the meaning of a character, whereas the phonetic radical provides a cue to the pronunciation of the character. For instance, the character zi2 (toe) has a semantic radical on the left meaning “foot” and a phonetic radical zi2 on the right.3 Unlike alphabetic scripts, there are no elements within a character that correspond to phonemes or tone. Law (1997) surveyed the entries in two phonetic compound dictionaries (Li, 1989; Ni, 1982) and found that about 34% to 40% of phonetic compounds in Cantonese are “regular” characters containing a phonetic radical that is segmentally Applied Psycholinguistics 31:4 713 Law & Yeung: AOA and semantic variable effects on reading Chinese identical (regardless of tone) to the whole character (e.g., zi2 and zi2), 30% are “partially regular” phonetic compounds sharing at least the same rime as their phonetic radical (e.g., paak3 and baak6), and the rest of the entries are “irregular” with no phonological relationship with their phonetic radical (e.g., lou6 and gok3). Besides regularity, consistency refers to the extent to which a phonetic radical serves as a reliable cue to the pronunciations of the phonetic compounds in which it appears. A high consistency value means that phonetic compounds sharing the same phonetic radical as a group map onto a small number of phonological forms (e.g., the phonetic radical zaak appears in five phonetic compounds that as a group map onto two different syllables, zaai for and zik for , , , ), and a low consistency value refers to a set of phonetic compounds having a common phonetic radical that is associated with many phonological representations (e.g., jau appears in 10 phonetic compounds, together representing six different pronunciations, jau for , , and ; dek for ; dik for ; zau for , , and ; cau for ; and zuk for ). In other words, “regularity” focuses on the phonological relationship between a phonetic radical and the phonetic compound character in which it appears, whereas “consistency” emphasizes the relationship between a phonetic radical and the family of phonetic compounds containing it. The effects of frequency, regularity, and consistency have been strongly demonstrated in the literature on Chinese single word reading involving normal speakers (e.g., Ding, Peng, & Taft, 2004; Fang, Horng, & Tzeng, 1986; Hue, 1992; Hue & Erickson, 1988; Lee, Tsai, Su, Tzeng, & Hung, 2005; Lian, 1985; Seidenberg, 1985; Weekes, Chen, & Lin, 1998; Wu, Chou, & Liu, 1994; Zhou & MarslenWilson, 1999), as well as individuals with acquired dyslexia (Han, Bi, Shu, & Weekes, 2005; Law, Weekes, Wong, & Chiu, 2009; Law & Wong, 2005; Weekes & Chen, 1999). A distinguishing feature of the Chinese orthography is that many characters not only contain a phonetic cue provided by their phonetic radical, but they also carry a semantic cue signified by their semantic radical. Previous psycholinguistic studies have shown that semantic radicals are involved in lexical processing; more specifically, there is access from these radicals to meaning (Chen & Weekes, 2004; Feldman & Siok, 1999; Li & Chen, 1999; Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1999). Similar to the phonetic radical, the semantic radical also varies in consistency. For instance, the semantic radical in (oxygen) is consistently linked to the meaning of gaseous substance such as (nitrogen), (chlorine), and (helium); characters containing the semantic radical , meaning “door,” are often not related to the object, for example, (open), (close), (gate), (to read), (owner), (to flash), and (leisure). Besides semantic radical consistency, two other variables associated with the semantic radical have been found to affect lexical processing including semantic categorization and character decision (Chen & Weekes, 2004; Feldman & Siok, 1997): semantic transparency and semantic radical combinability. The former refers to the degree of relatedness between the meaning of a target character and the concept denoted by its semantic radical. For instance, the semantic radical means “wood.” The character (desk) is therefore semantically transparent, whereas (power) is semantically opaque. Semantic radical combinability is the number of phonetic compound characters in which a semantic radical appears. Applied Psycholinguistics 31:4 714 Law & Yeung: AOA and semantic variable effects on reading Chinese RECENT STUDIES OF AOA EFFECTS ON CHINESE LANGUAGE PROCESSING Interests in examining the effect of AOA on word production in Chinese have only begun in the last several years. Weekes, Shu, Hao, Liu, and Tan (2007) have found unique and independent contributions of AOA, name agreement, and object familiarity to picture-naming latencies in normal Mandarin Chinese participants. Significant effects of AOA on object-naming accuracy were also observed in Cantonese anomic individuals with relatively preserved reading aloud performance (Law, Weekes, Yeung, & Chiu, 2009). Given the presence of phonological and semantic cues in phonetic compound characters and the variation in consistency (or predictability) between these radicals and phonological and semantic information, respectively, the AM hypothesis would predict that character processing should be affec |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/135486/1/content.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
