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Chinese on the Brain

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Teaching English Reading in the Chinese-Speaking World

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Abstract

This chapter reviews the relevant literature on how Chinese script is processed at the character level. Basic word decoding processes (used in any written script) are reviewed, along with language-specific accommodations made to the basic model for the case of Chinese. Confirmatory evidence of these hypotheses on word identification are reviewed, including the literature on reading impairments such as dyslexia and language-specific neurological differences seen in Chinese readers. The basic means of character identification (through character-internal radical analysis) is discussed, and evidence from the literature on psycholinguistic studies including priming and fMRI studies is used to confirm this as the basis for character-level processing in Chinese, and indeed, reveals Chinese reading as quite unique compared with alphabetically transcribed languages. Other salient differences between Chinese processing and that of other languages are discussed, such as the difficulty in defining “words” and cerebral asymmetries vis-à-vis with reading in other languages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I’ve asked such to many of my students—both graduate and undergraduate—and this is a pretty close summary of the normal responses.

  2. 2.

    Although in the case of text reading, semantic information certainly does inform lexical search as the reader can often make reasonable predictions about upcoming content.

  3. 3.

    Which is, admittedly, still the lexical route, being an analysis of orthography, but it is informed by semantics prelexically.

  4. 4.

    And this is actually even more complicated by the prevailing tendency for people to say “want to” as “wanna”.

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  1. Akita International University, Akita, Japan

    Clay Williams

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Williams, C. (2016). Chinese on the Brain. In: Teaching English Reading in the Chinese-Speaking World. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0643-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0643-2_5

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