The Contributions of Segmental and Suprasegmental Information in Reading Chinese Characters Aloud

RESEARCH ARTICLE The Contributions of Segmental and Suprasegmental Information in Reading Chinese Characters Aloud Min Wang1*, Chuchu Li1, Candise Y. Lin2 1 Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America, 2 Department of Psychology and Program in Hearing and Communication Neuroscience, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States of America * Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: Wang M, Li C, Lin CY (2015) The Contributions of Segmental and Suprasegmental Information in Reading Chinese Characters Aloud. PLoS ONE 10(11): e0142060. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0142060 Editor: Niels O. Schiller, Leiden University, NETHERLANDS Received: October 7, 2014 Accepted: October 17, 2015 Published: November 9, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The Chinese writing system provides an excellent case for testing the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental information in reading words aloud within the same language. In logographic Chinese characters, neither segmental nor tonal information is explicitly represented, whereas in Pinyin, an alphabetic transcription of the character, both are explicitly represented. Two primed naming experiments were conducted in which the targets were always written characters. When logographic characters served as the primes (Experiment 1), syllable segmental and tonal information appeared to be represented and encoded as an integral unit which in turn facilitated target character naming. When Pinyin served as the primes (Experiment 2), the explicit phonetic representation facilitated encoding of both segmental and suprasegmental information, but with later access to suprasegmental information. In addition, Chinese speakers were faster to name characters than Pinyin in a simple naming task (Experiment 3), suggesting that Pinyin may be read via a phonological assembly route, whereas characters may be read via a lexical route. Taken together, our findings point to the need to consider the contributions of both segmental and suprasegmental information and the time course in the well-established models for reading aloud, as well as the cognitive mechanisms underlying the reading aloud of logographic characters versus alphabetic Pinyin script. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This study was supported by an International Travel Award from the University of Maryland to MW and a University of Maryland Graduate Fellowship to CCL. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Funding for Open Access was provided by the UMD Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction The importance of phonological information in reading has been studied extensively in the literature. Reading, broadly defined, encompasses both visual word recognition (silent reading) and reading aloud. The current study focused on phonological encoding and processing in reading aloud. Studies have shown that phonological information is activated in both visual word recognition and reading aloud in alphabetic writing systems [1,2]. However, the Chinese writing system is logographic. There is no explicit representation of phonological information PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0142060 November 9, 2015 1 / 20 Segmental and Suprasegmental Information in the orthography; for example, the character 马, meaning horse, is pronounced as ma3 (the number 3 here denotes the tone). Note that none of the components of this character refers to the phonological constituents /m/, /ɑ/ or tone 3 (T3). Although some characters contain phonetic radicals, which encode or specify the sound of the character (e.g., 蚂 /ma3/ ant deriving its sound from its phonetic radical 马), linguistic analyses have shown that a phonetic radical could only accurately predict the pronunciation of a character 23–26% of the time when tone is taken into account [3,4]. Given the lack of grapheme-phoneme mapping in Chinese characters, the mechanism and time course underlying the activation of segmental and tonal information in visual character recognition and reading characters aloud has been an interesting and important question for discussion over the past two decades (e.g., ref [5–7]). Phonology encompasses segmental and suprasegmental information. Segments consist of vowels and consonants while suprasegmental features are speech attributes that accompany consonants and vowels but which are not limited to single sounds and often extend over syllables, words, or phrases [8]. Both segmental and suprasegmental information provide useful information in spoken word recognition. For example, the pronunciations of the English words pie and buy differ only in their initial phoneme segment (/p/ vs. /b/), yet their meanings and syntactic categories are completely different. In the spoken word record, when stress is placed on the first syllable RECord, it is a noun meaning an account of facts. When stress is placed on the second syllable reCORD, it becomes a verb and means to set down in writing. With regard to visual word recognition and reading aloud, previous research has focused mainly on the importance of segmental phonology. How different types of phonological constituents function in reading in general (e.g., segments vs. suprasegments) has received relatively less attention. Ashby and Clifton showed that stress information is indeed represented and activated in silent reading of English words [9]. This eye-tracking study showed that the number of stressed syllables in a word had an impact on word recognition in silent reading. Readers spent more time on words that contained two stressed syllables than those with one stressed syllable, controlling for factors such as word length and frequency. Similar to lexical stress in English, lexical tone is part of the suprasegmental phonology in Mandarin Chinese. One of the most influential models in reading literature is the dual-route model of reading aloud proposed by Colheart and colleagues [10–12]. This model claims that there are two distinct pathways to reading aloud of written words. The first route provides a direct linkage from visual input to a word’s phonology. It can go either directly from orthography to phonology, or go through semantic system to phonology. This route is referred to as the addressed, or lexical route. The second route converts graphemes into phonemes, either one by one or in strings, which are used to access the word’s phonology. The second route is referred to as the as (...truncated)