Effects of Chinese phonetic-to-sound mapping: A Connectionist model

Effects of Chinese phonetic-to-sound mapping: A Connectionist model Sau-chin Chen Department of Human Development, Tzu Chi University, Taiwan Xiaowei Zhao Department of Psychology, University of Richmond Ping Li Department of Psychology and Center for Language Science, Pennsylvania State University Abstract: The Chinese phonetic-to-sound mapping has a variety of types according to the dimensions of consistency and homophony based on the lexical knowledge and sub-lexical information of the phonetic radical. Many previous studies focused on the sub-lexical information based the comparison across the dimension of consistency. The current simulation attempted to address these effects in consideration of both the dimensions of phonetic-sound mapping. A feedforward neural was used to simulate the frequency effect and regularity effect. These findings reveal the importance of investigating the homophony of phonetic-sound mapping to build a theoretical framework capable of accounting for the lexical knowledge and sub-lexical information of the phonetic radicals in Chinese reading processing.