Global mapping congruence influences phonological interference: ERP evidence for early and persistent ortho-phonological effects in reading Chinese for meaning.

Phonological interference during written-word meaning judgments occurs in both Chinese and English, suggesting that word-level phonological activation is universal rather than dependent on the sublexical structures that vary with writing systems. To accommodate this universality, we distinguish two sources of phonological congruence between a meaning-bearing orthographic unit (word or character) and other units in the orthographic lexicon: (a) Global congruence between a word (or character) and its orthographic neighbors having the same pronunciation and (b) Local congruence between a word (or character) and its graphic constituents (letters or radicals). Recent evidence by Zhou and Perfetti in 2021 shows a greater role for global than local congruence in covert naming of Chinese characters. We hypothesize this is true also for meaning processing and use behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures to test this hypothesis during character meaning judgments. As expected, we found word-level phonological interference in meaning decision times. Further, ERPs detected interference effects related to global congruence at early and mid-latency ERP components; local congruence effects emerged only in interaction with global congruence. A late ERP component (LPC) also showed phonological interference, but no effect on mapping congruence. These time-course results suggest two phases of phonological activation: (a) character identification, influenced mainly by global congruence, as indicated in early and mid-latency ERP components and (b) meaning comparison, influenced only by lexical phonology, as indicated by the LPC component. The early phase of lexical processing is much the same whether meaning or pronunciation is required because it engages ortho-phonological associations that are not easily suppressed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).