Reading Pinyin activates sublexcial character orthography for skilled Chinese readers

ABSTRACT

How do skilled Chinese readers, accustomed to characters, process Pinyin, a phonemic transcription of Chinese? Does the orthography of Chinese characters become activated? In four experiments, native speakers first made a meaning judgment on a two-syllable word written in Pinyin. Immediately following, they responded to a character whose orthography sometimes was related to the character corresponding to the Pinyin. In Experiments 1 and 3, participant named the colour of the presented characters; there was an interference effect when the presented characters included phonetic radicals that were part of the character corresponding to the Pinyin. In Experiments 2 and 4, participants named the character; naming times were affected if either the semantic or phonetic radical was shared with the character corresponding to the Pinyin. The results indicate that access to lexical representations in Chinese is centred on the orthographic character, even when the input is Pinyin.

KEYWORDS:

• Pinyin reading
• character
• orthography
• phonology
• semantics

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Some characters in the O+P+ condition are irregular, i.e. the character has a pronunciation that differs from that of its phonetic radical (for example, 碟(dié) -枼(yè)) or contains a phonetic radical that cannot stand alone as character and thus has no pronunciation (for example, 脑(nǎo)-㐫(n/a)). Among these irregular characters, all have a relatively high consistency value, i.e. they have same pronunciation as their orthographic neighbors containing the same phonetic radial. This means that all phonetic radicals in the experiment, whether in regular or irregular characters, are related to the pronunciation of the character. Effect of tones is not considered in the current study. Pairs share same and different tones showed similar patterns.

2. Some semantic radicals appeared in more than one character in Experiment 3 and 4. Although this means there was some orthographic overlap across items, there was no evidence that radical repetition influenced the orthographic effect, which was not stronger in Experiments 3 and 4 than in Experiments 1 and 2, where no radicals were repeated.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by China National Social Science Foundation [grant number 15CYY020] to Lin Chen and National Science Foundation award [grant number OMA-0836012] to the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center and National Institutes of Health award [grant number 1R01HD058566-01A1] to the University of Pittsburgh (Charles Perfetti, PI).