The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Reading and Writing in Chinese

Cognitive neuropsychological studies of patients with acquired reading and writing disorders in alphabetic languages have influenced our understanding of how mappings between orthography and phonology are learned, represented, and processed by the brain. This methodology has been extended to understanding reading and writing in Chinese during the past decade, leading to new insights about language processing and dyslexia and dysgraphia in Chinese. We review the key findings in this field and highlight some of the predictions that follow from a triangle framework of reading and writing in Chinese. Our conclusion is that the cognitive architecture for reading and writing is common across different scripts. However the unique features of Chinese script determine how the brain processes characters in normal and impaired reading and writing.