Cognitive Processing Of Chinese And Related Asian Languages

The aim of this volume is to integrate the most recent research in the cognitive processing of Chinese and related Asian languages (i.e. Japanese and Korean) into a single academic reference. Because so much more was learned about the topic over the past several years, the proposed volume is intended to provide something like a state-of-art review and to capture what is currently going on in a new and rapidly expanding field.

The area of cognitive processing of Chinese and Japanese is currently attracting a great deal of attention by leading cognitive psychologists. They aim to find out the similarities and differences in processing the morphosyllabic Chinese and Japanese syllabary as compared with alphabetic language systems. Topics under the processing of Chinese include: the use of phonological codes in visual identification of Chinese words, the constraint on such phonological activation, recognition of Chinese homophones, Chinese sentence comprehension and children's errors in writing Chinese characters. Topics under the processing of Japanese include: the automatic recognition of kanji within an interactive-activation framework, On-reading and Kun-reading of kanji characters, processing differences between hiragana and kanji, the effect of polysemy on katakana script, and the writing behavior of Japanese and non-Japanese speakers. The interactive-activation model provides the phonologic-orthographic links in processing both language systems. The present volume should add greatly to our understanding of this topic. Many of the contributors are internationally known for their experimental psychological work.

This volume presents an exciting sample of the most recent research on the processing of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Researchers in the fields of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and neuro-science have long been interested in the impact of the development of a universal theory of how humans process language. Many believe that the creation of such a theory could possibly assist in the understanding of how the human brain works. For this reason, much research has been performed on sentence processing in English and other Indo-European languages. Yet, East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have received little attention. This volume is the first of its kind to discuss how native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean process sentences in their native tongues. Although these three languages share similar characteristics, the volume acknowledges and discusses specific issues that are unique to each language. Contributors explore the effects of homophones on lexical ambiguity in Chinese, and investigate the impact of word order on structural ambiguity in Japanese and working memory in Korean. The findings presented have important implications for sentence processing and cognitive processing models, and by extension contribute toward the construction of a universal theory of human language processing.

The area of cognitive processing of Chinese and Japanese is currently attracting a great deal of attention by leading cognitive psychologists. They aim to find out the similarities and differences in processing the morphosyllabic Chinese and Japanese syllabary as compared with alphabetic language systems. Topics under the processing of Chinese include: the use of phonological codes in visual identification of Chinese words, the constraint on such phonological activation, recognition of Chinese homophones, Chinese sentence comprehension and children's errors in writing Chinese characters. Topics under the processing of Japanese include: the automatic recognition of kanji within an interactive-activation framework, On-reading and Kun-reading of kanji characters, processing differences between hiragana and kanji, the effect of polysemy on katakana script, and the writing behavior of Japanese and non-Japanese speakers. The interactive-activation model provides the phonologic-orthographic links in processing both language systems. The present volume should add greatly to our understanding of this topic. Many of the contributors are internationally known for their experimental psychological work.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the processing of major East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. These languages, due to their salient differences in structure from European languages, provide challenging opportunities to explore both language-specific processes involved in comprehension and communication and the universality of theories developed from the study of European languages. This volume presents an exciting sample of the most recent research on the processing of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Topics range from written and spoken word processing to sentence and discourse comprehension. The authors include specialists working in major areas of language and cognitive processes from different parts of the world.

What are the linguistic constituents and structural components of Chinese characters and words? Does the spoken language provide a basis for reading different writing systems, including Chinese? How do the results of current neuroimaging and electrophysio

This volume uses unique properties of Chinese script to focus on morphological analyses during the character and word recognition process, though some of the reported work also pertains to the use of phonological information. In addition, this volume contains work on syntactic and pragmatic processes during sentence reading and three chapters that examine on-line processes. A comprehensive appraisal of cognitive processes during the reading of Chinese script that includes studies conducted by leading researchers from within and outside the mainland, this volume will be of interest to all those studying reading and visual symbol processing.