Learning to read in traditional and simplified Chinese scripts shape adult readersÕ perception of Chinese characters and visual attention

Ruoxiao Yang

This study investigates whether and how the long-term experience with simplified and traditional Chinese characters (i.e., the traditional-simplified Chinese script effect) shapes the readersÕ perception of Chinese characters which requires engaging their orthographic knowledge and their visual attention which do not directly require orthographic knowledge to be involved. A series of four behavioral experiments were conducted with the adult skilled Hong Kong (HKC) traditional Chinese readers and Mainland China (MLC) simplified Chinese readers, with the first three experiments (a categorical perception experiment paradigm, a lexical decision task and a composite matching task) examining the traditional-simplified Chinese script effect at the orthographic knowledge level and the last one experiment (a lateralized attention network task) checking the effect at the visual ability level. Our investigations provide supportive empirical evidence showing the effect of long-term script experience with traditional and simplified Chinese characters on the adult HKC and MLC readersÕ character perception and visual perception patterns. In particular, the results suggest that the MLC simplified Chinese readers prefer a more analytic processing strategy to perceive Chinese characters, attending more easily and automatically to the local features of Chinese characters at the initial stage of character perception; by contrast, the HKC traditional Chinese readers tend to use a more holistic processing strategy to perceive Chinese characters at the initial stage of character perception, directing their visual attention more to the global configurations of Characters instead of local features. In addition, these different perception strategies shown in character perception by the two groups of Chinese readers seem to be kept in their other visual perception processes (e.g., visual attention) which do not require the direct involvement of orthographic knowledge of Chinese characters. The evidence that we find more holistic processing in perceiving characters and other pure visual objects by the HKC traditional character readers than the MLC simplified character readers corresponds with several recent studies which examined the effect of literacy on the cortical networks for language and vision at the neurobiological (Dehaene et al., 2010) and behavioral level (Ventura et al., 2013). Dehaene et al. (2010) conducted an fMRI study to compare illiterate with literate adults and reported that at the Òvisual word form areaÓ (VWFA, i.e., the left fusiform gyrus), learning to read competes with other visual categories at the cortical level, especially inducing a significant reduced activation for faces. This study also showed that increasing literacy leads to a stronger right-hemispheric lateralization for faces. Dehaene et al. (2010) interpreted these results through a Òneural recyclingÓ theoretical position (Dehaene, 2009; Dehaene & Cohen, 2007; Dehaene et al., 2015), namely, reading is a too recent cultural invention to influence the human genome and therefore reading processes must ÒrecycleÓ cortical areas devoted to evolutionary older functions. This Òneural recyclingÓ hypothesis is also in line with similar previous views from evolutionary linguistics (Wang, 1982) and general evolutionary theory (Anderson, 2010; Gould, 1991; Jacob, 1977). Ventura et al. (2013) adopted composite face and house tasks to further examine whether learning to read has consequences on the processing of non-linguistic visual stimuli. They found positive evidence that illiterates were consistently more holistic than participants with reading experience in perceiving faces and houses, which suggested that the brain reorganization induced by learning to read may reduce the influence of automatic holistic processing of faces and houses by developing a more analytic and flexible processing strategy. Connecting together with some recent studies tackling the strengths and weaknesses of literacy development in the two Chinese scripts (as reviewed in McBride, 2015), although we have not tested face or related visual objects with HKC and MLC adult literates yet, our results already suggest different levels of holistic processing in readers with different learning experience of two writing systems for Chinese, the traditional and simplified characters respectively. Particularly, our results also further imply that the learning experience with different writing systems may induce different levels or patterns of the brain reorganization and therefore may lead to recycling different cortical areas, which merits future studies to evaluate and further explore.

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