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2 - Semantic Awareness in Reading Chinese

from Part One - Writing System/Neuro-cognitive Processing of Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2022

By
Chia-Ying Lee
Edited by
Chu-Ren Huang ,
Yen-Hwei Lin ,
I-Hsuan Chen  and
Yu-Yin Hsu
Chu-Ren Huang
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Yen-Hwei Lin
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
I-Hsuan Chen
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Yu-Yin Hsu
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Summary

The primary function of language is to convey what we mean for communication. Semantics, a subfield of linguistics, aims to understand how meanings are encoded and operate in different levels of linguistic forms (such as morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, and discourses). The cumulative evidence thus far has mainly been based on native speaker intuitions about the meanings of linguistic forms in language usage. With recent breakthroughs in neuroimaging techniques, neurolinguistic research has been used to test and evaluate theories put forth by theoretical linguistics by measuring the brain activity underlying language processes. This chapter reviews a series of neurolinguistics studies that took N400, an event–related potentials (ERPs) component to index the semantic processing, to investigate how the brain processes meaning conveyed by Chinese radicals, characters, classifiers, and the leading context of sentences. These findings make essential contributions to the growing understanding of when and how meanings are extracted, represented, and processed in the brain for language comprehension.

Keywords

semantic awarenessChineseERPsN400reading
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics , pp. 23 - 44
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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