Poster E88, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Integrating word meaning with text meaning: ERP evidence from Chinese shows differences and similarities to English
Lin Chen1, Charles Perfetti1, Xiaoping Fang1;1Learning Research & Development Center, University of Pittsburgh
The influence of writing systems and orthographies during reading is largely localized at the word level, where the written form maps onto phonology and semantics, as demonstrated in comparisons of Chinese and English reading (Perfetti et al., 2005). But what about text processing? One expects that, once words are identified, the downstream processes of Chinese and English should be the largely the same. We tested this assumption in studies of on-line comprehension processes using ERPs. In two studies, native Chinese speakers read short texts for comprehension in the across-sentence word-to-text integration paradigm (Yang et al, 2007) to compare with studies of English that have used this paradigm. We found evidence for local binding of the currently read word with an antecedent (a “paraphrase” word) in the previous sentence, as indexed by N400 reduction. This result is consistent with results in English. However, we also observed a difference from English in an orthographic facilitation effect based strictly on the orthographic form independent of its meaning. This effect across sentence boundaries emerged in remote binding sites as well as local binding sites near the word being read at early stage (around 150ms) of word reading. The results indicate that although meaning based word-to-text integration is general across writing systems at the meaning level, Chinese reading shows an additional strong influence of orthographic form, as specific consequence of the structure of the Chinese writing.
Themes: Reading, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)