语音在汉字语义通达中作用的研究述评

语音在汉字语义通达中的作用是二十多年来心理语言学研究的热点之一。直通假设和形音交互假设是学者们主张的理论观点,它们在语音和语义的相互关系上存在分歧,并分别有各自的实验证据。从比较语音语义激活时间进程、同音字效应、神经心理学与脑成像、语音作用的发展转换这四个方面对过去的研究进行回顾,指出了实验范式和实验材料中存在的问题,并提出结合汉字特点进行研究的思路。     

Functional heterogeneity of inferior frontal gyrus is shaped by linguistic experience

A crosslinguistic, positron emission tomography (PET) study was conducted to determine the influence of linguistic experience on the perception of segmental (consonants and vowels) and suprasegmental (tones) information. Chinese and English subjects (10 per group) were presented binaurally with lists consisting of five Chinese monosyllabic morphemes (speech) or low-pass-filtered versions of the same stimuli (nonspeech). The first and last items were targeted for comparison; the time interval between target tones was filled with irrelevant distractor tones. A speeded-response, selective attention paradigm required subjects to make discrimination judgments of the target items while ignoring intervening distractor tones. PET scans were acquired for five tasks presented twice: one passive listening to pitch (nonspeech) and four active (speech = consonant, vowel, and tone; nonspeech = pitch). Significant regional changes in blood flow were identified from comparisons of group-averaged images of active tasks relative to passive listening. Chinese subjects show increased activity in left premotor cortex, pars opercularis, and pars triangularis across the four tasks. English subjects, on the other hand, show increased activity in left inferior frontal gyrus regions only in the vowel task and in right inferior frontal gyrus regions in the pitch task. Findings suggest that functional circuits engaged in speech perception depend on linguistic experience. All linguistic information signaled by prosodic cues engages left-hemisphere mechanisms. Storage and executive processes of working memory that are implicated in phonological processing are mediated in discrete regions of the left frontal lobe.     

Sometimes spelling is easier than phonemic segmentation

Poor spellers from the Netherlands segmented and spelled the same words on different occasions. If they base their spellings on the segmentations that they produce in the segmentation task, the correlation between segmentation and spelling scores should be high, and segmentation should not be more difficult than spelling. The predicted correlation was found, but spelling proved to be easier than segmentation, particularly for postvocalic consonant-clusters. Correct spellings despite incorrect segmentation were also more frequent than would be expected on the basis of unreliability of segmentation. Ways in which writing may facilitate and improve segmentation are therefore discussed. These findings raise doubts about the validity of segmentation test and about the efficiency of teaching children to segment without using letters.     

视觉经验缺失对盲人听觉词汇识别的影响

听觉词汇识别包含复杂的认知加工过程。视觉通道受阻的盲人在听觉词汇加工中具有一定听觉补偿优势; 但由于视觉经验的缺失, 盲人对一些视觉相关词(比如颜色词)的语义加工和理解比明眼人弱。未来的研究应对词汇的视觉相关性进行分类讨论; 对音、形、义等多层面及其神经生理机制进行深入探究, 发展符合盲人感知特点的听觉词汇加工模型; 并拓展不同年龄段的发展性研究。最终, 揭示视觉经验缺失对盲人听觉词汇识别影响机制的全貌。     

The Foundations of Literacy

Learning to read and write in English requires children to master the alphabetic principle, the idea that the letters in printed words represent the sounds in spoken words in a more or less regular manner. Children need at least two skills in order to grasp the alphabetic principle. The first is phonological awareness, or a sensitivity to the sound structure of spoken words. The second is knowledge about letters, including knowledge of letter names and knowledge of letter sounds. Recent research sheds light on these foundational skills, documenting the linguistic factors that affect children's performance and how children put their phonological skills and knowledge of letters to use in learning to read and spell.     

二语语音的识别方式与激活脑区

采用行为测量和功能性核磁共振成像技术, 以明确二语语音的激活脑区定位与识别方式。本文对比分析了23名高水平晚双语者在进行高频、强规则性和强词汇性二语真词的同韵判断时, 与假词和对照字符在行为学和影像学上所表现出来的差异。行为学和影像学结果显示：高水平晚双语者在识别真词和假词的语音时, 速度相近, 均明显慢于对照字符的识别; 所激活的脑区集中在左背侧外额叶系统功能区、左腹侧前额叶系统功能区、左背侧顶下系统功能区和双腹侧颞－枕系统功能区; 这些脑区与其母语语音处理的脑区相似, 并在整体上表现出较强的左侧化, 在枕叶和小脑等局部表现出较弱的右侧化。上述结果表明：高水平晚双语者在识别二语语音时, 激活的脑区仍然是母语语音处理的脑区, 采用的可能是合成方式而不是直呼方式。     

Functional Neuroimaging Insights Into the Development of Skilled Reading

ABSTRACT— Typically developing children require years of overt training and practice to learn to read with skill. The relatively recent advent of functional neuroimaging methods amenable to the study of children has provided insight into the neurobiological underpinnings of skilled reading development. In this brief review, we discuss how neuroimaging during reading-related tasks has revealed that, when adult and child skilled readers perform identical reading-related tasks with comparable levels of performance, these groups show similar but nonidentical patterns of regional brain activity. Children activate some neural regions that adults do not activate (or activate less), and vice versa. The activity patterns in these regions transition to mature levels with increased proficiency and maturity. The dynamic nature of the reading brain as the child matures is thought to be a demonstration of both the inherent flexibility and the increasing efficiency of brain processing over development.     

小学儿童汉字阅读特点初探

该研究运用命名任务、通过两个实验探查了小学儿童汉字阅读的发展特点。实验一发现,小学7岁、8岁、9岁儿童在汉字阅读中受不同汉字结构类型的影响。在笔画数没有显著差异的情况下,独体字的阅读比合体字快,而合体字中上下结构和左右结构类型之间没有差异,而且独体字语音提取的优势从7岁儿童开始就具有了,这种优势稳定地发展下去。实验二在实验一的基础上进一步考察了7岁、9岁、11岁儿童汉字形声字阅读中声旁对整字发音的影响,结果发现,声旁与整字发音一致的形声字阅读快于声旁与整字发音不一致的形声字的阅读,这种汉字阅读中的规则效应从7岁儿童就出现了,而且,稳定地发展下去。     

Regularity re-revisited: modality matters

The issue of regular-irregular past tense formation was examined in a cross-modal lexical decision task in Modern Greek, a language where the orthographic and phonological overlap between present and past tense stems is the same for both regular and irregular verbs. The experiment described here is a follow-up study of previous visual lexical decision experiments (Tsapkini, Kehayia, & Harema, 2002) that also addressed the regular-irregular distinction in Greek. In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of input modality in lexical processing and compared different types of regular and irregular verbs. In contrast to our previous intra-modal (visual-visual) priming experiments, in this cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming study, we found that regular verbs with an orthographically salient morphemic aspectual marker elicited the same facilitation as those without an orthographically salient marker. However, irregular verbs did not exhibit a different priming pattern with respect to modality. We interpret these results in the framework of a two-level lexical processing approach with modality-specific access representations at a surface level and modality-independent morphemic representations at a deeper level.