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Related Experiment Video

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Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Processes in Visual Word Recognition using Electrophysiology

Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Processes in Visual Word Recognition using Electrophysiology

Published on: June 29, 2021

Interference in character processing reflects common perceptual expertise across writing systems.

Alan C-N Wong¹, Zhiyi Qu, Rankin W McGugin

¹Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong. alancnwong@gmail.com

Journal of Vision

|January 20, 2011

Summary

Expert visual processing, like distinguishing Chinese characters and Roman letters, can share resources. This shared bottleneck causes interference for bilinguals, not just experts in one domain.

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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Visual Perception

Background:

Perceptual expertise can recruit common resources, potentially causing interference during concurrent processing.
The study investigates cross-domain interference in visual search based on expertise.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine if irrelevant Chinese characters interfere with visual search for Roman letters.
To examine the role of expertise in this cross-domain interference.

Main Methods:

Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task.
Participants: Chinese-English bilinguals and English readers.
Visual search for Roman letters with Chinese character and pseudoletter distractors.

Main Results:

Chinese distractors interfered with Roman letter search significantly more than pseudoletter distractors.
This interference was observed only in Chinese-English bilinguals, not in English readers.
Concurrent verbal rehearsal did not affect the magnitude of interference.

Conclusions:

Expertise in processing multiple visual domains (e.g., Chinese and Roman scripts) can lead to a common perceptual bottleneck.
This suggests overlapping cortical representations for different visual expertise domains share processing resources.