9616519 PERFETTI This project will seek to increase understanding of the mechanisms of reading by means of comparisons of writing systems. Focusing on Chinese and English, it will build on the progress made in recent years in research on reading English and other alphabetic writing systems. Chinese, as a writing system based on characters, rather than letters, offers a maximal contrast to alphabetic systems. In Chinese, each character typically symbolizes a word, in contrast to English, where the basic unit (a letter) corresponds to a meaningless speech sound (phoneme). Thus, Chinese is a system in which the basic units can connect more directly to meaning than is the case in an alphabetic system. Nonetheless, although reading Chinese logically allows meaning to be accessed directly without contact with the sound system of the language (phonology), actual reading may involve phonology in both writing systems. Recent research suggests that both Chinese and English may be read by implicitly converting the written form into a spoken language form. These studies will use a variety of experimental tasks in both languages. On the English side, experiments will secure the interpretation of brief-exposure procedures that have produced evidence for automatic implicit phonology in word reading. On the Chinese side, the experiments will examine the time course of meaning and phonological events and provide for the development of computational models of the reading process. The outcome will be conclusions regarding both differences and similarities in reading English and Chinese. This will be an important step in unraveling which aspects of reading are dependent on the particular writing system of the language being read and which are universal and not dependent on the language's writing system. ***
