Abstract: A connectionist model regards reading as statistical learning acquired from an input corpus. The regularity and consistency effects in mapping from orthography to phonology are regarded as the statistical properties of word reading. These effects originate from the impact of families at different levels of orthography-phonology mapping in English. On the other hand, in Chinese, only the consistency effect originates from the impact of phonetic families, while the regularity effect emanates from the impact of the phonetics. In this paper, we trained two connectionist models to understand the nature of the universal (consistency) and specific (regularity) effects of reading Chinese characters in a general framework.
In Simulation 1, a connectionist model adopted from English was trained to understand the mapping of 4,468 Chinese characters from orthography to phonology. The naming accuracy and sum squared error (SSE) were measured to test the model’s performance. Simulation 2 was trained to test the nature of the regularity effect by modifying the orthographic representation of phonetics, which appeared as an independent character.
The model in Simulation 1 successfully captured the regularity and consistency effects and their interaction with frequency. The results revealed a pattern similar to that found in previous empirical research. Following the occlusion of orthographic similarity in Simulation 2, the disappearance of the regularity effect revealed that the nature of Chinese regularity is the result of similar orthography-phonology mapping between phonograms and their phonetics.
The universal-language (consistency) and Chinese-specific (regularity) effects were simulated and understood in combination, through statistical learning acquired from orthography-phonology mapping in a general framework. It can be concluded that the mechanism of reading is universal across languages and a language-specific mechanism arises from the different statistical properties of the input corpus

Key words: Chinese characters reading, connectionist, regularity, consistency