Morphological decomposition is an important part of complex word processing. In Chinese, this requires a comprehensive consideration of phonological, orthographic and morphemic information. The left inferior frontal gyrus (L-IFG) has been implicated in this process in alphabetic languages. However, it is unclear whether the neural mechanisms underlying morphological processing in alphabetic lan...

Event-related potential studies of rhyme judgments in alphabetic languages show that nonrhyming word pairs elicit a larger negative-going wave peaking at 450 ms after stimulus onset than rhyming word pairs. We use Chinese characters to explore the extent to which this N450 rhyming effect reflects phonological processing. Using Chinese characters provides an advantage over alphabetic scripts bec...

We consider two related problems in this paper. Given an undeciphered alphabetic writing system or mono-alphabetic cipher, determine: (1) which of its letters are vowels and which are consonants; and (2) whether the writing system is a vocalic alphabet or an abjad. We are able to show that a very simple spectral decomposition based on character co-occurrences provides nearly perfect performance...

This paper presents an initial study into the viability of text entry on a watch face using four alphabetic buttons and a central space key. The study includes a technical evaluation of likely error rates using a large text corpus and user studies on palmtop emulated mobile phone and watch. The results, though in favour of the phone pad, are encouraging and show such a method is feasible.

This paper presents a semi-automatic method to derive morphological analyzers from a limited number of example inflections suitable for languages with alphabetic writing systems. The system we present learns the inflectional behavior of morphological paradigms from examples and converts the learned paradigms into a finite-state transducer that is able to map inflected forms of previously unseen...

How language experience affects visual word recognition has been a topic of intense interest. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study compared the early electrophysiological responses (i.e., N1) to familiar and unfamiliar writings under different conditions. Thirteen native Chinese speakers (with English as their second language) were recruited to passively view four types of s...

Holistic processing (HP) is an expertise marker in visual perception; nevertheless, it can be modulated by writing experience (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2014). We have recently found that HP also indicates expertise in Cantonese speech perception (Liu & Hsiao, 2014). Nevertheless, Cantonese has a logographic writing system where one syllable corresponds to one character, whereas in alphabetic languages...