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Visual Analysis and Lexical Access of Chinese Characters by Chinese as Second Language Readers

To assess the learning of word form, pronunciation, and meaning in an unfamiliar writing system, we carried out Event Related Potential (ERP) experiments with learners of Chinese at the end of their first and second terms of Chinese class at an American university. The subjects were required to recognize a target Chinese character or English word with ERP recorded. They named filler targets indicated by a signal 1000ms after the onset of the stimuli. The orthographic processing of characters and words was extracted as a 200ms component by Principle Component Analysis (PCA). The semantic processing was extracted as a 400ms component (N400). The 200ms PCA component was negative at occipital (N200) and positive at frontal electrodes (P200). It was sensitive to visual analysis and lexical access respectively. ERP results showed that the visual analysis of Chinese was more difficult than English at the first term, but not the second term. The lexical access was more difficult and the semantic processing was slower for Chinese than English at both terms. Faster lexical access was obtained for familiar characters at the first term, but not the second term. The separation of visual analysis and lexical access at the second term indicates a threshold style processing of Chinese characters for the learners with moderate reading proficiency.