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Universal and specific reading mechanisms across different writing systems

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 1, pages 133–144 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Reading of alphabetic writing systems, such as English, has been extensively studied and most theories and models of reading are based on findings from these studies. This practice raises a practical question regarding whether findings from alphabetic writing systems can be extended to other writing systems, such as Korean or Chinese, and a more fundamental question about the universality of reading mechanisms. In this Review, we discuss how findings from different writing systems contribute to an understanding of the universal mechanisms of reading. We first describe the unique properties of different writing systems. Then we review evidence that points to universal mechanisms common to all writing systems, followed by evidence suggesting that readers of different writing systems develop specific perceptual and cognitive mechanisms for efficient reading. These findings suggest that computational models developed for alphabetic reading cannot always account for reading in other scripts. We conclude that studies in non-alphabetic writing systems are valuable in understanding the universal and script-specific mechanisms of reading.

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Fig. 1: Unique properties of writing systems.
Fig. 2: Main processes of reading.
Fig. 3: Routes from visual forms to semantics for different scripts.
Fig. 4: Script physical properties influence attention and eye movements.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31970992). This work was also jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Project Crossmodal Learning (NSFC 62061136001/DFG TRR-169). J.H. was supported by an Academy of Finland grant (no. 315963). The authors thank Q. Zhang and Q. Qu for comments on a previous version of the manuscript and Y. Bao for discussions regarding Mongolian and for providing examples of Mongolian.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xingshan Li, Linjieqiong Huang & Panpan Yao

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xingshan Li & Linjieqiong Huang

  3. School of Psychology, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

    Panpan Yao

  4. Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Jukka Hyönä

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Contributions

X.L. was the lead author and conceptualized the manuscript. All authors contributed substantially to discussion of the content. All authors wrote the article: X.L. was lead author for the sections Introduction, Unique properties of writing systems, Universal reading mechanisms, Lessons from non-alphabetic scripts and Summary and future directions; L.H. was lead author for the sections Routes from visual form to semantics and Reading without inter-word spaces; P.Y. was lead author for the section Perceptual span and covert attention; and J.H. was lead author for the section Reading compound words. All authors reviewed and/or edited the manuscript before submission.

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Correspondence to Xingshan Li.

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Nature Reviews Psychology thanks Ralf Engbert, who co-reviewed with Stefan Seelig; Lili Yu; and the other, anonymous, reviewer for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Glossary

Graphemes

The smallest written units that represent sound (such as letters or letter strings that represent phonemes in alphabetic writing systems and characters in syllabic and logographic writing systems).

Phoneme

The smallest sound unit in a language that makes a word differ from other words.

Morphemes

The smallest meaning-bearing linguistic units (for example, ‘baseball’ contains the morphemes ‘base’ and ‘ball’ and ‘cats’ contains the morphemes ‘cat’ and ‘s’).

Connectionist model

Neural-inspired computational network that propagates activation among simple units, also known as parallel distributed processing models.

Visual complexity

The level of detail or intricacy contained within an image, reflecting the amount of psychological effort required to process the image.

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Li, X., Huang, L., Yao, P. et al. Universal and specific reading mechanisms across different writing systems. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 133–144 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00022-6

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