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Research Interests: Psychology, Education, Educational Psychology, Functional Anatomy, Psycholinguistics, and 15 moreEnglish, Performance, Reading, Dyslexia, Developmental dyslexia, Search, Speed, Skills, Consistency, Language Culture and Communication, Awareness, Reading Process, Pathway, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Visual-Motor Integration
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Research Interests: Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Literacy, Education, Phonological Awareness, and 10 moreCognition, Psycholinguistics, Phonological processing, Dyslexia, Developmental dyslexia, Language Culture and Communication, Cognitive Ability, Reading Process, Primary School Children, and Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
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Behavioral studies have shown that short letter strings are read faster than long letter-strings and words are read faster than nonwords. Here, we describe the dynamics of letter-string length and lexicality effects at the cortical level,... more
Behavioral studies have shown that short letter strings are read faster than long letter-strings and words are read faster than nonwords. Here, we describe the dynamics of letter-string length and lexicality effects at the cortical level, using magnetoencephalography, during a reading task in Finnish with long (eight-letter) and short (four-letter) word/nonword stimuli. Length effects were observed in two spatially and temporally distinct cortical activations: (1) in the occipital cortex at about 100 msec by the strength of activation, regardless of the lexical status of the stimuli, and (2) in the left superior temporal cortex between 200 and 600 msec by the duration of activation, with words showing a smaller effect than nonwords. A significant lexicality effect was also evident in this later activation, with stronger activation and longer duration for nonwords than words. There seem to be no distinct cortical areas for reading words and nonwords. The early length effect is likely...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Medical Sciences, Magnetoencephalography, Linguistics, and 15 moreCognitive Neuroscience, Medicine, Orthography, Cognitive, Humans, Female, Male, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Neurosciences, Occipital Lobe, photic stimulation, connectionist models, Neural correlates, and Language tests
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Multilingualism, English language, Cognition, and 15 moreJapan, Adolescent, Language Impairment, Medicine, Language disorders, Brain, Humans, Primary School, Female, Cortex, Great Britain, Parietal Lobe, Regional Cerebral Blood Flow, English Language, and Neurosciences
# The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Behavioral studies showed that AS, an English-Japanese bilingual, was a skilled reader in Japanese but was a phonological dyslexic in English.... more
# The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Behavioral studies showed that AS, an English-Japanese bilingual, was a skilled reader in Japanese but was a phonological dyslexic in English. This behavioral dissociation was accounted for by the Hypothesis of Transparency and Granularity postulated by Wydell and Butterworth. However, a neuroimaging study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) revealed that AS has the same functional deficit in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG). This paper therefore offers an answer to this intriguing discrepancy between the behavioral dissociation and the neural unity in AS by reviewing existing behav-ioral and neuroimaging studies in alphabetic languages such as English, Finnish, French, and Italian, and nonal-phabetic languages such as Japanese and Chinese.
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Three experiments investigated whether reading aloud is affected by a semantic variable, imageability. The first two experiments used English, and the third experiment used Japanese Kanji as away of testing the generality of the findings... more
Three experiments investigated whether reading aloud is affected by a semantic variable, imageability. The first two experiments used English, and the third experiment used Japanese Kanji as away of testing the generality of the findings across orthographies.The results replicated the earlier findings that readers were slower and more error prone in reading low-frequency exception words when they were low in imageability than when they were high in imageability (Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995). This result held for both English and Kanji even when age of acquisition was taken into account as a possible confounding variable, and the imageability effect was stronger in Kanji compared to English. Most current models of visual word recognition and naming assume the existence of at least two processing routes for the pronunciation of written words. That is, upon presentation of a printedword, phonology is retrieved through a lexical–semantic pathway (or network) as well as assembl...
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Sentence context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours are important factors to speech perception and comprehension. In Chinese-Mandarin, lexical tones can be distinguished by the F0 contours. Previous studies found healthy people could... more
Sentence context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours are important factors to speech perception and comprehension. In Chinese-Mandarin, lexical tones can be distinguished by the F0 contours. Previous studies found healthy people could use the cue of context to recover the phonological representations of lexical tones from the altered tonal patterns to comprehend the sentences in quiet condition, but can not in noise environment. Lots of research showed that patients with schizophrenia have deficits of speech perception and comprehension. However, it is unclear how context and F0 contours influence speech perception and comprehension in patients with schizophrenia. This study detected the contribution of context and lexical tone to sentence comprehension in four types of sentences by manipulating the context and F0 contours in 32 patients with schizophrenia and 33 healthy controls. The results showed that (1) in patients with schizophrenia, the interaction between context and F0 ...
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Emotions are a vital component of social communication, carried across a range of modalities and via different perceptual signals such as specific muscle contractions in the face and in the upper respiratory system. Previous studies have... more
Emotions are a vital component of social communication, carried across a range of modalities and via different perceptual signals such as specific muscle contractions in the face and in the upper respiratory system. Previous studies have found that emotion recognition impairments after brain damage depend on the modality of presentation: recognition from faces may be impaired whereas recognition from voices remains preserved, and vice versa. On the other hand, there is also evidence for shared neural activation during emotion processing in both modalities. In a behavioral study, we investigated whether there are shared representations in the recognition of emotions from faces and voices. We used a within-subjects design in which participants rated the intensity of facial expressions and nonverbal vocalizations for each of the 6 basic emotion labels. For each participant and each modality, we then computed a representation matrix with the intensity ratings of each emotion. These matr...
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It has been reported in alphabetic languages that individuals with schizophrenia showed language-related cognitive impairments including phonological deficits, which were in turn associated with clinical symptoms such as auditory... more
It has been reported in alphabetic languages that individuals with schizophrenia showed language-related cognitive impairments including phonological deficits, which were in turn associated with clinical symptoms such as auditory hallucinations and thought disorders. To date, however, the phonological deficits involved in schizophrenia in Chinese and its neural basis have not been well established. In order to establish such a relationship we conducted a behavioral study using lexical tone judgment and digit span tasks as well as an event-related potential (ERP) study with an auditory oddball paradigm, in particular, for P300 effects, the event-related brain potential (ERP) index of discrimination. Chinese patients with schizophrenia and Chinese healthy controls in China participated in the current study. Compared to the healthy controls, the patients with schizophrenia showed significant impairments in phonological processing skills, which in turn significantly correlated with smal...
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Electroencephalography, China, Language, Adolescent, and 15 moreDyslexia, Brain Mapping, Brain, Evoked Potentials, Humans, Hallucinations, Female, Male, Clinical Sciences, Middle Aged, Adult, Asian Continental Ancestry Group, Neurosciences, Articulation Disorders, and Medical and Health Sciences
Patients with schizophrenia often experience severe reading deficits such as oral reading and reading comprehension deficits. However, it is not known whether different types of lexical or sub-lexical components in reading are also... more
Patients with schizophrenia often experience severe reading deficits such as oral reading and reading comprehension deficits. However, it is not known whether different types of lexical or sub-lexical components in reading are also impaired. In order to address this issue, the present study had 22 young Chinese patients with schizophrenia and 22 young Chinese normal controls undergo a battery of reading tests, which specifically measures lexical and sub-lexical components of reading in Chinese. The schizophrenic group further underwent Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) in order to ascertain the severity of patients' clinical symptoms. The results showed that compared to the controls, (1) the schizophrenic patients performed significantly poorly in orthographic processing, orthography-phonology mapping, and orthography-semantic mapping tests and further that (2) their performances in orthographic processing, and orthography-semantic mapping skill tests negatively correlated w...
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Running page heading: A bilingual SLI: Behavioural/rCBF study
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The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3... more
The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to accoun...
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Previous research into the cognitive processes involved in reading Chinese and developmental dyslexia in Chinese, revealed that the single most important factor appears to be orthographic processing skills rather than phonological skills.... more
Previous research into the cognitive processes involved in reading Chinese and developmental dyslexia in Chinese, revealed that the single most important factor appears to be orthographic processing skills rather than phonological skills. Also some studies have indicated that even in alphabetic languages some dyslexic individuals reveal deficits in orthographic processing skills, which are linked to a deficit in the visual magnocellular pathway. The current study therefore employed a visual psychophysical experiment together with visual and auditory event-related potential (ERP) experiments eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN) to investigate the link between visual magnocellular functional abnormalities and developmental dyslexia in Chinese. The performance levels of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD) from the behavioural and electrophysiological experiments were compared to those of the chronological age-matched (CA) children and those of the reading level matched (RL) younger children. Both the behavioural and electrophysiological results suggest that the orthographic processing skills were compromised in the Chinese developmental dyslexics, which in turn is linked to a deficit in the visual magnocellular system.
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Electrophysiology, Cognition, Electroencephalography, Language, and 15 moreDyslexia, Developmental dyslexia, Brain Mapping, Humans, Child, Chinese, Female, Male, Comparative Analysis, Cognitive Process, Cognitive processes, Asian Continental Ancestry Group, Diagnostic Tests, Contingent Negative Variation, and chronological age
Research Interests: Semantics, Speech perception, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Functional MRI, Reading, and 15 moreRight Hemisphere Functions, Humans, Form perception, Neuroimage, Male, Hemispheric Asymmetry, Adult, Hemispheric Specialization, Fusiform Gyrus, Left Hemisphere, Occipital Lobe, Functional Laterality, photic stimulation, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
... that is appropriate to other characters containing the same phonetic component (Butterworth and Yin, 1991). ... second character means grass and is typically pronounced /sou/ in compounds; its kun reading is ... a significant main... more
... that is appropriate to other characters containing the same phonetic component (Butterworth and Yin, 1991). ... second character means grass and is typically pronounced /sou/ in compounds; its kun reading is ... a significant main effect of consistency, F(3, 9) = 25.24, P<O.OOI and a ...
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Two patients who met Hodges' clinical criteria for transient global amnesia (TGA) were given anterograde and retrograde memory tests during and after the attack. A SPECT scan was performed during TGA in one case,... more
Two patients who met Hodges' clinical criteria for transient global amnesia (TGA) were given anterograde and retrograde memory tests during and after the attack. A SPECT scan was performed during TGA in one case, showing a reduced blood flow confined to the bilateral medial temporal lobes, which resolved on the next day. In both cases, the initial period of retrograde
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Abstract 1. It is generally assumed that access to phonology for words written in logographic Japanese Kanji must be mediated by access to their meaning. This proposal was examined in a semantic categorization task with homophones. If the... more
Abstract 1. It is generally assumed that access to phonology for words written in logographic Japanese Kanji must be mediated by access to their meaning. This proposal was examined in a semantic categorization task with homophones. If the assumption about Kanji ...
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ABSTRACT
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We report the case of AS, a 16 year-old English/Japanese bilingual boy, whose reading/writing difficulties are confined to English only. AS was born in Japan to a highly literate Australian father and English mother, and goes to a... more
We report the case of AS, a 16 year-old English/Japanese bilingual boy, whose reading/writing difficulties are confined to English only. AS was born in Japan to a highly literate Australian father and English mother, and goes to a Japanese selective senior high school in Japan. His spoken language at home is English. AS's reading in logographic Japanese Kanji and syllabic Kana is equivalent to that of Japanese undergraduates or graduates. In contrast, his performance in various reading and writing tests in English as well as tasks involving phonological processing was very poor, even when compared to his Japanese contemporaries. Yet he has no problem with letter names or letter sounds, and his phoneme categorisation is well within the normal range of English native speakers. In order to account for our data that show a clear dissociation between AS's ability to read English and Japanese, we put forward the 'hypothesis of granularity and transparency'. It is postulated that any language where orthography-to-phonology mapping is transparent, or even opaque, or any language whose orthographic unit representing sound is coarse (i.e. at a whole character or word level) should not produce a high incidence of developmental phonological dyslexia.