Are Different Brain Areas Responsible For Processing Aspects Of Widely Different Languages?

By Author: peter
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Applications of formal linguistic approaches like models of the transformational generative grammar have shown interesting results in Chinese. Yang observes (Chapter 12) that the principles and parameters approach to the study of child language in Chinese offers better possibilities of modelling. Yip (Chapter 13) observes that the study of the development of tones in Chinese in bilingual children is an important area of investigation. The second section of the handbook contains articles in the broad area of language processing that can be called adult psycholinguistics. Chen and Dell (Chapter 14) suggest, based on their extensive priming ED Hardy Hoodies experiments, that Chinese speakers actually store syllables for later retrieval and production, unlike English and Dutch speakers who have been shown to manufacture these syllables during speaking.

The authors argue that because phonological syllables are stored in this language, the need for morphological coding is minimal. The visual and linguistic complexity of processing Chinese characters ...
... is a very important area of research among psychologists and psycholinguists. Chen and colleagues (Chapter 15) emphasize the fact that the identification of a Chinese character is often driven by its being transparent or opaque. Methods like eye movement recording are new in psycholinguistic research but are already throwing new light on the temporal aspects of different processes. Feng's article on eye movement in Chinese reading (Chapter 16) shows the cross-linguistic difference between word recognition and reading and uses several important eye movement variables like fixation duration, saccade length, and perceptual span.

The evidence from perceptual span difference suggests that Chinese readers employ a different style of reading than English readers. Even after some very good research on Chinese word recognition, the various psycholinguistic features of the Chinese character remain ambiguous for the general reader. Honorof and Feldman in their excellent article on this topic (Chapter 17) present multiple facts that clear the confusion and help one think what could be a 'word' in Chinese. Discussion of Chinese phonology requires a discussion of Chinese tones and their psychological relevance in speech perception. Jongman and colleagues (Chapter 18) suggest that fundamental frequency, amplitude as well as temporal properties like overall duration are effective phonetic correlates of tone. Perfetti and Liu show that even in Chinese, with its very different orthography and phonology, readers activate phonology for word identification as they do indeed in the case of alphabetic scripts; hence this could be a universal way to read. Marcus Taft's decade-long research on Chinese character processing produces extensive generalizations and is an informative read. Papers in the ED Hardy Boots domain of sentence and discourse processing by Zhang et al. (Chapter 24) and Yang et al. (Chapter 23), respectively, demonstrate language-specific factors that affect processing strategies.

Any contemporary handbook of psycholinguistics cannot be complete without a representation of articles that link language processing to the brain. Part 3 of the handbook has eight contributions in this area. They range from fMRI studies on bilingual language processing, issues of specific language impairment in Chinese to brain dynamics in word recognition. Language and its structure can affect perception as well as quantification of the physical world in a strong manner. The article by Kit-fong Au (Chapter 25) briefly surveys works on the Chinese language that show such an influence. It has been a debate in the area of neuro-imaging studies whether different brain areas are responsible for processing aspects of widely different languages.