Neurocognition in the reading of Chinese characters

Abstract

Chinese characters, which form an ideographic writing system, have shown distinctive features in the neurocognition of their reading. This paper gives a comprehensive review of five main issues of Chinese reading, which are (1) the relationship across written forms, sounds, and meanings during the neurocognitive processing of Chinese reading, (2) the involvement of structural and linguistic units, such as strokes (笔画), radicles (部件), components (偏旁), whole characters (整字), and words (词), in character reading, (3) the influence of attentional conditions on character reading, (4) the activation of Chinese characters from non-character input, and (5) the influences of readers’ linguistic experiences on character reading. We summarize that the reading of Chinese characters involves dynamic integration of multi-channel information and multiple levels of processing units, which, as compared with alphabetic writing systems, rely more on form-to-meaning semantic processing, while its form-to-phonology non-semantic processing is greatly influenced by para-linguistic context.