READING THE CHINESE CHARACTERS: AN INFORMATION PROCESSING VIEW

We discuss here two major questions in the study of reading Chinese characters from the viewpoint of experimental psychology. (1) Is there cerebral lateralization? Based on the recent results obtained in Japan and in our own laboratory, it is clear that the answer is affirmative, and that the lateralization is to the right hemisphere. (2) In progressing from the recognition of single characters to the comprehension of sentences, is phonetic recoding necessary? From our two experiments, we suggest the following. If we divide the entire reading process into several stages of information processing, then it appears that phonetic recoding is not necessary in going from the shape of the character to its meaning. But in going from character to character and in relating sentence to sentence, phonetic recoding typically does occur. The recoding is especially noticeable when recoding difficult materials. We believe this is due to the fact that our memory for the phonetic codes is more durable than our memory for the visual codes.