forthcoming book on Chinese psycholinguistics

Cambridge University Press is due to release an interesting-sounding title in April 2006: The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics: Volume 1, Chinese. The editors are Ping Li of the University of Richmond, Virginia; Elizabeth Bates, of the University of California, San Diego; Li Hai Tan of the University of Hong Kong; and Ovid Tzeng, of National Yangming University, Taipei.

A second volume released at the same time will cover Japanese.

Here are the contents for the volume on Chinese:

  1. Language Acquisition:
    • “Actions and results in the acquisition of Cantonese verbs” — Sik Lee Cheung and Eve V. Clark;
    • “Chinese children’s knowledge of binding principles” — Yu-Chin Chien and Barbara Lust;
    • “Chinese classifiers: their use and acquisition” — Mary Erbaugh;
    • “Child language acquisition of temporality in Mandarin Chinese” — Chiung-chih Huang;
    • “Second language acquisition by native Chinese speakers” — Gisela Jia;
    • “Making explicit children’s implicit epilanguage in learning to read Chinese” — Che Kan Leong;
    • “Emergent literacy skills in Chinese” — Catherine McBride-Chang and Yiping Zhong;
    • “Basic syntactic categories in early language development” — Rushen Shi;
    • “Growth of orthography-phonology knowledge in the Chinese writing system” — Hua Shu and Ningning Wu;
    • “Interaction of biological and environmental factors in phonological learning” — Stephanie Stokes;
    • “The importance of verbs in Chinese” — Twila Tardif;
    • “Grammar acquisition via parameter setting” — Charles Yang;
    • “Early bilingual acquisition in the Chinese context” — Virginia Yip;
  2. Language Processing:
    • “Word form encoding in Chinese speech production” — Jenn-Yeu Chen and Gary S. Dell;
    • “Effects of semantic radical consistency and combinability on the Chinese character processing” — May Jane Chen, Brendan S Weekes, Danling Peng and Qin Lei;
    • “Eye movement in Chinese reading: basic processes and cross-linguistic differences” — Gary Feng;
    • “The Chinese character in psycholinguistic research: form, structure and the reader” — Douglas Honorof and Laurie Feldman;
    • “Perception and production of Chinese tones” — Allard Jongman, Yue Wang, Corinne B. Moore and Joan A. Sereno;
    • “Phonological mediation in visual word recognition in English and Chinese” — In-mao Liu, Jei-tun Wu, Iue-ruey Sue and Sau-chin Chen;
    • “Reading Chinese characters: orthography, phonology, meaning and the textual constituency model” — Charles A. Perfetti and Ying Liu;
    • “Processing of characters by native Chinese readers” — Marcus Taft;
    • “L2 acquisition and the processing of Mandarin tones” — Yue Wang, Joan A. Sereno and Allard Jongman;
    • “The comprehension of coreference in Chinese discourse” — Chin Lung Yang, Peter C. Gordon and Randall Hendrick;
    • “Lexical ambiguity resolution in Chinese sentence processing” — Yaxu Zhang, Ningning Wu and Michael Yip;
  3. Language and the Brain:
    • “The relationship between language and cognition” — Terry Kit-fong Au;
    • “Language processing in bilinguals as revealed by functional imaging: a contemporary synthesis” — Michael W. L. Chee;
    • “Specific language impairment in Chinese” — Paul Fletcher, Stephanie Stokes and Anita M.-Y. Wong;
    • “Brain mapping of Chinese speech prosody” — Jackson T. Gandour;
    • “Modelling language acquisition and representation in connectionist networks” — Ping Li;
    • “The manifestation of aphasia syndromes in Chinese” — Jerome L. Packard;
    • “Naming of Chinese phonograms: from cognitive science to cognitive neuroscience” — Dan-ling Peng and Hua Jiang;
    • “How the brain reads the Chinese language: recent neuroimaging findings” — Li Hai Tan and Wai Ting Siok;
  4. Epilogue: A tribute to Elizabeth Bates.

the brain & reading Chinese characters

An article in Science News on hyperlexia has a discussion of some recent research on reading, the brain, and Chinese characters.
The author of the article is to be commended for managing to summarize more or less accurately an important conclusion of the research: the notion that Chinese characters are ideographic and not tied to sound is, as observant Western analysts have been saying for nearly 200 years, a myth. (Asian analysts of language weren’t originally afflicted with the ideographic myth but acquired it from the West about 100 years ago. For more on this, see the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning.)

Recent investigations of Chinese readers suggest that people everywhere invoke core neural responses in order to read, but other types of brain activity are necessary to attain mastery of alphabetic or non-alphabetic writing systems, psycholinguist Charles A. Perfetti of the University of Pittsburgh explained last February in Washington, D.C., at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Many investigators have assumed that, unlike alphabetic systems, written Chinese employs drawings that symbolize whole words.

Even if that were the case with ancient Chinese pictographic symbols, those characters have transformed into much more abstract shapes that induce sounds of spoken syllables in modern readers’ minds, Perfetti says. Chinese characters thus represent bigger chunks of spoken words than alphabetic letters do.

“All writing systems represent spoken language, but they have different design principles,” Perfetti asserts.

Consider Mandarin Chinese. It currently includes 420 syllables. These syllables correspond to nearly 4,600 written characters, so an average of about 11 characters share a single pronunciation, which can be modified by using any of four tones.

In spoken Chinese, the meaning of the many different words that sound alike becomes apparent only in the context of conversation. People listening to English sometimes discern word meanings in this way—consider the words guise and guys—but need to do so much less often than Chinese listeners do.

Many Mandarin Chinese words consist of only one syllable, Perfetti adds. That has encouraged the false impression, at least among Westerners, that the language’s written characters represent only words, he says.

Actually, only about 2 percent of Mandarin words are monosyllabic. But those that are tend to be used frequently. (But this is also the case in English. For some tangential remarks, see Taipei street names and the monosyllabic myth.) The monosyllabic myth is fed in part by confusion about morphemes and Chinese characters. (For remarks on this, see Chinese Writing.)

Experiments show that Mandarin Chinese characters correspond to spoken Chinese rather than to the idea that the word represents, Perfetti says. For instance, if shown the written character for the word red printed in blue ink, volunteers name the ink color more slowly than if the same character is printed in red ink. Analogous results have been noted among English readers, whose writing system inarguably represents spoken sounds.

Response times for Chinese readers turn almost as sluggish if a different character with the same pronunciation and tone as red, such as the character for flood, appears in blue ink. This effect indicates that written characters correspond to sounds in spoken Chinese, not to specific words. The pronunciation of flood calls to mind red and slows naming of the clashing ink color, Perfetti says. If the characters represented specific words, instead of sounds, this delay would not occur.

A smaller but still notable slowdown occurs when a character with the same pronunciation as red but a different vocal tone, such as the character for boom, appears in blue ink. Again, the common pronunciation calls to mind red, causing readers to take a little longer to identify the different ink color.

A little later is the statement that “Right brain regions involved in vision also contribute to reading Chinese but not to reading English.” This is the sort of thing that causes lots of people to forget everything that came before (such as how Chinese characters are tied to sound) and go back down the path of erroneous preconceptions about Chinese characters being ideographs.

another language & the brain study

Hmm. I’m curious to see the study itself.

发现之旅:中国人大脑前端有独特的语言功能区
http://cul.sina.com.cn 2005/03/31 11:19
人民网-人民日报
教育部设在解放军306医院的认知科学与学习重点实验脑功能成像中心与香港大学合作的最新科研成果揭示,使用表意象形文字的中国人与使用拼音文字的西方 人的大脑中,语言障碍区不在同一个地方,中国人有独特的语言区。该项发现对临床外科医生将有很大帮助,因为很多尖端的颅脑手术技术都是从西方引进的,手术 中如果医生了解了不同语言人群大脑语言区的确切位置,就可以减少大脑功能区受损。目前,该研究成果已在世界科技类最具权威的刊物美国《自然》杂志上发表公 布。

该中心金真主任介绍说,在人的大脑中,语言功能区有两个,分别是位于前脑的布鲁卡区和位于后脑的威尔尼克区。在此研究公布之前,所有的科研报告都众口一词:后脑的威尔尼克区主导语言功能,而前脑的布鲁卡区一般来说很少用。但是,现在的研究推翻了这一观点。

研究发现,中文的语言区更接近于大脑运动功能区,使用拼音文字的人,常用的是后脑的 威尔尼克语言区,但使用中文的人,此区几乎用不到,常用的是前脑的布鲁卡区。由于中文语言功能区与运动区紧密相连,要想学好中文要多看、多写、多说,靠 “运动”来记忆,而学习英文则应注重营造一个语音环境,注重多做听说的练习,因为英文的那一个语言功能区更靠近听力区。

现在很多人学了多年英文却是“哑巴英语”,因为用学习中文的方法来学习英文是行不通的。(徐))