Effect Of Orthographic On Phonological Processing

Investigations of the language processing characteristic in illiteracy are an important way to understanding the word cognition. As the illiteracy do not have the knowledge of orthography consciousness but they have the ability of phonological processing and semantic processing, thus exploring the phonology and semantic processing of illiteracy can further reveal the relationship of the grapheme, phoneme and semantics in word cognition. Recently, it has carried out some researches of illiterate phonological processing abroad, and the results suggest that the acquisition of orthography in childhood can affect the behaviors and brain mechanisms of speech processing in adulthood. But these studies have some inconsistent conclusions, and need further discussions. As alphabetic words belong to logo phonetic words, its processing is largely influenced by pronunciation, and physical characteristics, orthographic level and relationships of the graphic, phonological and semantic of Chinese characters as ideograms are different from alphabetic words, therefore, the investigation of language processing characteristic of Chinese illiteracy provides not only a way to solve the dispute of the above findings, more importantly, but an opportunity to explore the universality of the relationship between the grapheme, phoneme and semantics, and the uniqueness of Chinese characters processing in order to promoting the development of the theory of lexical processing. So we make the experiment about Chinese illiteracies' phonological processing to fill the blank of this field.This study includes two experiments. The first experiment use the repeating task of words,pseudo-words and non-words to explore the characteristics of the Chinese words processing of the illiteracy. The second experiment is designed by Chinese phonetic consciousness (Initials, finals, tones) equal judgment task to reveal differences between the phonological awareness of illiteracy and literacy.The main findings and conclusions of the present investigation are as follows:(1)The condition of dialect word repetitions:The rate of accuracy of the literate participants repeating non-words is significantly higher than that of the illiterate participants, while the difference of accuracy of the illiterate participants versus the literate participants in repeating pseudo-words are close to significant. The illiterate participants repeating pseudo-words react more quickly than who repeating non-words, whereas, the reaction time of literate participants repeating pseudo-words and repeating non-words are same.(2) The condition of Mandarin Chinese:The literate participants' accuracy rate of repetition of words, pseudo-words and non-words are all higher than the illiterate participants'. On the reaction time, repeating words and repeating non-words of illiterate participants have significant difference, while the difference of repeating words and repeating pseudo-words are close to significant. But the literate participants are all the same.(3) Reaction time is same with the illiterate participants versus the literate participants at Chinese phonetic consciousness (Initials, finals, tones) equal judgment task.(4)The rate of accuracy of the literate participants is significantly higher than that of the illiterate participants in initials judgment task. While there have no significant difference at the finals judgment task and tones judgment task.