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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF READING
The Psychology of Reading reviews what has been learned about skilled
reading and dyslexia using research on one of the most important
but often overlooked languages and writing systems – Chinese. It
provides an overview of the Chinese language and writing systems,
discusses what is known about the cognitive and neural processes that
support the skilled reading of Chinese, as well as its development
and impairment, and describes the computer models that have been
developed to understand these topics. It is written in an accessible
way to appeal to anyone with an interest in cognitive psychology,
language, or education.
Er ik D. R eichl e is a professor of Cognitive Psychology at

Macquarie University, Australia. His research interests include
computer models of reading, the cognitive and neural systems that
support skilled reading, and how those systems are affected by
different writing systems. He is the author of Computational Models
of Reading: A Handbook (2021).
L il i Y u is a lecturer at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research
uses eye tracking and other behavioral methods to understand the
cognitive processes that support the skilled reading of Chinese,
and how those processes might differ across languages and writing
systems.
T H E P S YC HOL O G Y
OF R E A DI NG
Insights from Chinese
ER IK D. R EICH L E
Macquarie University
LILI Y U
Macquarie University
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
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We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009272810
DOI: 10.1017/9781009272780
© Erik D. Reichle and Lili Yu 2024
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
First published 2024
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publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will
remain, accurate or appropriate.
This book is dedicated to our family and especially our parents,
for their endless love and support.
谨以此书献给我们的父母和家人们，
谢谢他们无尽的爱和支持。
Contents
List of Figures page ix

List of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xii
1 The Psychology of Reading 1

1.1 Communication, Language, and Reading 3
1.2 Methods to Study Reading 6
1.3 Models of Reading 11
1.4 Chapter Previews 19
2 The Chinese Language and Writing System 21

2.1 The Chinese Language 21
2.2 The History of the Chinese Writing System 28
2.3 The Modern Chinese Writing System 35
2.4 Conclusion 44
3 Character and Word Identification 46

3.1 Behavioral Experiments 47
3.2 Theories and Models 71
3.3 Conclusion 88
4 Skilled Reading 90
4.1 Eye-Tracking Experiments 92
4.2 Theories and Models 109
4.3 Conclusion 127
5 Reading Skill Development, Dyslexia,

and Cognitive Neuroscience 129
5.1 Reading Skill Development 129
5.2 Dyslexia 142
5.3 Cognitive Neuroscience 154
5.4 Conclusion 166
vii
viii Contents
6 Future Directions 168
6.1 English vs. Chinese: A Summary 168
6.2 Our Predictions 173
6.3 Conclusion 187
References 189
Index 221
Figures
1.1 Schematic diagram of McClelland and Rumelhart’s (1981)

interactive-activation model of word identification page 13
1.2 Schematic diagram of Reichle et al.’s (2012)
E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading 16
2.1 A map of China showing the main dialects and where
they are spoken 22
2.2 An example illustrating the four tones used to differentiate
the meanings of the spoken syllable /ma/ in Mandarin 24
2.3 A few examples of the earliest form of Chinese writing 29
2.4 A few examples showing how early pictographs changed
into their modern character equivalents during the evolution
of the Chinese writing system 31
2.5 A few examples illustrating the similarities and differences
between traditional and simplified Chinese characters 33
2.6 An example sentence written in modern Chinese using
simplified characters 35
2.7 An example illustrating the eight basic types of strokes and
the order in which character strokes are normally written 39
2.8 Example phonograms of phonetic radical variation 41
3.1 Taft et al.’s (1999) Chinese word-identification model 73
3.2 Perfetti et al.’s (2005) lexical-constituency model 76
3.3 The patterns of orthographic, phonological, and semantic
priming that have been simulated by Perfetti et al.’s (2005)
lexical-constituency model 78
3.4 X. Li et al.’s (2009) word segmentation and
identification model 81
3.5 J. F. Yang et al.’s (2009) “triangle” model of
Chinese character naming 85
4.1 Examples of the gaze-contingent paradigms that are used
in eye-tracking research 93
ix
x List of Figures
4.2 The default-targeting (M. Yan et al., 2010) (A) statistical
artifact (X. Li et al., 2011) (B) and dynamic-adjustment
(Y. P. Liu, Yu, Fu, et al., 2019) (C) accounts of saccadic
targeting in Chinese reading 112
4.3 X. Li and Pollatsek’s (2020) Chinese reading model (CRM) 115
4.4 Y. P. Liu et al.’s (2023) Chinese E-Z Reader (CEZR) model 121
4.5 A schematic diagram illustrating the character-segmentation
heuristic used by Y. P. Liu et al.’s (2023) Chinese E-Z Reader
(CEZR) model 122
4.6 Fan and Reilly’s (2022) variant of the Glenmore model adapted
to the reading of Chinese 125
5.1 Xing et al.’s (2002, 2004) connectionist model of Chinese
character pronunciation 140
5.2 The attractor network models used by J. F. Yang et al. (2013)
in their simulations of English word and Chinese character
naming and how performance in these tasks might be
impaired by phonological vs. surface dyslexia 150
5.3 Images showing the left (L) and right (R) cerebral
hemispheres of the human brain and the major cortical
regions and anatomical pathways that are involved in the
identification of printed words 155
5.4 The “split fovea” connectionist model of Chinese character
pronunciation proposed by Hsiao and Shillcock (2004, 2005) 164
Tables
3.1 Important findings related to the learning and

identification of alphabetic words page 48
3.2 Important findings related to the learning and
identification of Chinese characters and words 58
6.1 Key findings related to the orthographic processing of
English vs. Chinese words 169
6.2 Key findings related to the phonological processing of
6.3 Key findings related to the semantic processing of
6.4 Key findings related to the skilled reading of
English vs. Chinese 172
xi
Acknowledgments
Our initial motivation for writing this book was our belief that reading
scientists have neglected much of the research that has been done on the
reading of Chinese. We therefore hope that this book brings more recogni-
tion of this important topic and credit to the scientists who are undertak-
ing this research. We have been lucky to have collaborated with a number
of those scientists and are friends with several of them. Our ability to write
this book has benefited greatly from those collaborations and friendships
and so we want to thank those people for involving us in their research and
providing the opportunity to learn more about the reading of Chinese.
The first author would also like to thank his kung fu brothers and sisters
at Choy Lee Fut in Sydney. Our hours of training together each week have
provided me with a fun and healthy way to disengage from my academic
work and the task of writing this book, and for that I am very grateful.
Both authors would also like to thank two people at Cambridge
University Press who were instrumental in helping us write this book.
The first is Stephen Acerra, Commissioning Editor for Psychology and
Neuroscience. Your unwavering support and patience have made the pro-
cess of writing this book as painless as it could be, and for that reason
we owe you our sincere gratitude. The second is Rowan Groat, Senior
Editorial Assistant. Your support and guidance were also invaluable in
shaping the initial draft of our book into its final form.
And in relation to the editorial process, we are also extremely grateful to
Marcus Taft and Ronan Reilly for their constructive feedback on the first
draft of our book. Their suggestions and insightful comments significantly
improved the quality of our work.
Finally, two important disclaimers are necessary. The first is that the
order of authorship was decided by a coin flip because both authors con-
tributed equally to the writing of this book. The second is that any errors
in the content of this book are unintentional and entirely our responsibil-
ity; we offer our apologies in advance for any such mistakes.
xii
chapter 1
The Psychology of Reading
On first appearances, the task of reading sentences like this one is seem-
ingly so simple that it requires no explanation: The reader – in this
instance, you – simply looks at the words on the page, identifying them
in turn, and then (somehow) combining their meanings to understand
the contents of each new sentence. But this subjective experience is mis-
leading. The science of reading has shown that reading is one of – if not
the – most difficult activities in which we routinely engage but for which
we have no biological predisposition. Reading thus stands in contrast
to spoken language, which is another difficult activity that we routinely
engage in but for which we are genetically predisposed. It is an activity
that arguably requires a significant portion of the brain and the cog-
nitive systems that it supports to execute, including the systems that
support vision and attention (to identify the printed words), long-term
memory (the repository of our world knowledge), language (to construct
the meanings of sentences), and even motor control (to move the eyes
from one word to the next). The main goal of the psychology of reading,
therefore, is to develop an account of how we, as readers, can coordi-
nate these activities to convert the sequences of ink marks on a printed
page into the potentially infinite number of ideas that can be conveyed
through writing.
Although the “psychology of reading” might sound strange to the uniniti-
ated (given that many people view psychology as the study and treatment of
mental health problems), it refers to a subdiscipline of a particular branch of
psychology called cognitive psychology. As its name might suggest, cognitive
psychology is the study of the basic perceptual and mental processes (i.e.,
cognition) that make us who we are (for an introductory text, see Eysenck &
Keane, 2015). A short list of these processes include vision, attention, mem-
ory, language, reasoning, problem solving, consciousness, and any of the
many tasks that we humans engage in, including reading and many others
(e.g., driving automobiles, solving syllogisms, playing chess, etc.).
1
2 The Psychology of Reading
Because of the sheer complexity of what needs to be explained by the
psychology of reading, researchers in the field have developed a variety
of ingenious methods to study the behaviors of reading, the mental pro-
cesses and representations that are produced by or are the product of those
behaviors, and the neural systems that support those mental processes and
behaviors. These research methods are the building blocks of subsequent
chapters in this book, and as such, they will be discussed in some detail
below. However, an equally important tool for reading researchers are the
theories that guide the experimental research. Because the psychology of
reading is an advanced science, the field has benefited from the develop-
ment of several formal models, or theories that have been implemented
using mathematical equations and computer programs, that both describe
and simulate the various processes that are involved in reading (e.g., the
identification of printed words), often with remarkable accuracy (for an
introduction and review of these models, see Reichle, 2021). Because these
reading models play a central role in motivating new empirical research,
this chapter will also provide a brief introduction to two prominent exam-
ples and briefly discuss how models are compared and evaluated.
Before we review the methods and models of reading research, how-
ever, it is first necessary to have a clear understanding about what read-
ing is, and how it is related to both spoken language and other forms of
communication. The next section of this chapter does exactly that. But
before we launch into this discussion, we also want to say briefly what
this book is about, and where subsequent chapters will take us. As the
title of this book suggests, it is about the psychology of reading, and more
specifically, what has recently been learned about the psychology of read-
ing from experiments on and models of the reading of one language and
writing system – Chinese.
At this point, a perfectly natural question to ask might be: Why Chinese?
The short answer to this question is that most research that has been done
to understand the psychology of reading has focused on how people who
speak European languages go about reading alphabetic texts (e.g., English,
Spanish, Russian, etc.). Although this research has been highly informa-
tive and has taught us a considerable amount about reading (e.g., see the
monographs by Crowder & Wagner, 1992; Dehaene, 2009; Perfetti, 2005;
Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Rayner et al., 2012; Reichle, 2021; Seidenberg,
2017; Taft, 1991; Wolf, 2008; see also the edited volumes by Coltheart,
1987; Klein & McMullen, 2001; Pollatsek & Treiman, 2015; Snowling &
Hulme, 2005), this endeavor has until recently largely avoided the pos-
sible implications of languages and writing systems that differ markedly
from the ones that have been studied – languages and writing systems like
those required to read Chinese. This oversight is perhaps a bit like an orni-
thologist who concludes that all birds can fly because he or she has never
encountered a penguin, emu, or ostrich. This oversight has at least in some
instances resulted in theoretical assumptions about the psychology of read-
ing that are likely to be incomplete or even incorrect. Subsequent chapters
in this book will explore some of these (potentially) faulty assumptions,
but for now, we will continue with our exposition of reading, language,
and communication.
1.1 Communication, Language, and Reading

Although anyone reading this book will be intimately familiar with both
reading and language, it is important to distinguish between the two to
avoid unwarranted assumptions. To begin with, spoken language is a nat-
ural endowment of the human species – a capacity to communicate that
develops in all neurologically normal children, irrespective of their culture,
and with only minimal explicit instruction (Deacon, 1997; Pinker, 2015).
All spoken languages also share several necessary and sufficient features
that are not shared by other forms of animal communication.
The first of these features is that language is generative (Chomsky, 1959).
By this, we simply mean that, even if one only knows a finite number of
words, it is still possible to express an infinite number of ideas. This unlim-
ited power of expression is possible because grammar, or the rules that
permit individual words to be combined into the larger units of meaning
corresponding to phrases and sentences, allow for the expression of an
unlimited number of novel ideas – ideas that vary along the continuum
from being simple to tremendously complex, or that differ from other
ideas in often subtle ways. And if one ignores the many non-linguistic
restrictions on language comprehension (e.g., one’s attention span or the
degradation in understanding caused by background noise), then these
sentences can in principle be of unlimited length. (A good example of this
is Mike McCormack’s single-sentence, 232-page novel, Solar Bones, 2016,
which won the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.)
A second feature of human language that also contributes to its gen-
erativity is the fact that words are symbolic in nature, allowing an infinite
number of objects and concepts to be referenced by arbitrary combina-
tions of sounds (i.e., phonemes) and visual forms (i.e., graphemes) within
a given language. This point is immediately obvious if one compares the
words for a given concept, for example “cat,” across languages; in English,
the word is written “cat” and pronounced /kæt/, whereas in Italian it is
written as “gatto” and pronounced as /ˈgatːo/, while in Chinese it is writ-
ten as “猫” and pronounced as /mao1/.1 These three examples illustrate
how the mappings between the thing or concept being referred to, on
the one hand, and the symbols that are used to represent the thing or
concept, on the other, are completely arbitrary, having been established
through historical accident and convention within a group of language
speakers. Importantly, the symbolic nature of language adds to its genera-
tivity in that new words can and constantly are being coined. For example,
consider one word that, although it is in worldwide circulation now, was
largely unheard of until 2020: “Covid-19.”
The generative and symbolic nature of human language also affords its
third and final feature – that the speakers of language can refer to things or
situations outside of the immediate present. This allows one to speak, for
example, of something that happened in the past, or that might be antici-
pated to happen in the future, or in the context of fantasy and science fic-
tions stories, situations or things that are not possible in the real world. In
short, languages allow their speakers to traverse time, escaping the bounds
of whatever is happening in the immediate present.
These three features of human language – the fact that it is genera-
tive, symbolic, and allows one to reference the past and future – stand
in stark contrast to animal communication. For example, consider the
warning signals that are issued by vervet monkeys in response to different
predator threats (Seyfarth et al., 1980). Although these monkeys use dif-
ferent calls to warn their compatriots of eagles, snakes, and leopards, these
calls cannot be combined to convey more complex or novel warnings
(e.g., something equivalent to “Ignore the eagle in the distance because
a leopard is approaching!”). Nor can the monkeys issue warning about
novel threats (e.g., “Avoid the humans!”). And finally, the calls are only
issued in response to immediate danger, and cannot, for example, be
issued in advance (e.g., “Beware of the leopard that will return later.”).
Thus, although vervet monkeys use their warning calls to communicate
important information to other vervet monkeys, this communication
is extremely rigid, being fixed to a small number of messages that are
directly related to the immediate present. As far as we know, these same
1
The International Phonetic Alphabet (see Akmajian et al., 2010) will be used here and in subsequent
chapters to represent all examples of phonological forms or pronunciations of words. And as will
be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, the Chinese spoken languages are tonal, with each written
character having an associated tone or pitch that can be represented by a number. In the example
given, the 1 represents a flat tone (i.e., one that does not change).
limitations seem to apply to all other forms of animal communication,
making human language truly unique in the animal kingdom.
With this background on what language is and is not, it is now possible
to contrast spoken language, on one hand, with written language (and read-
ing), on the other.2 As mentioned previously, the capacity to use spoken
language is part of our genetic endowment. As such, the capacity to speak
has been subject to evolutionary pressure and likely emerged over millions
of years (Deacon, 1997). And during the past few millennia, spoken lan-
guages have continued to evolve among populations of speakers within dif-
ferent geographical regions, resulting in the roughly 6,500 languages that
are spoken in the world today. The evolution of these languages can often
be traced using comparative methods, allowing, for example, for a compre-
hensive understanding of how modern English and German diverged from
a single common language to become two distinct languages.
In contrast to spoken language, the capacity to read and write are rela-
tively recent cultural inventions in that the best available evidence suggests
have only been around for approximately 5,500 years (Robinson, 1995).
Like many other significant cultural inventions (e.g., legal and political sys-
tems), the insights that led to the capacity to read and write likely occurred
independently across different cultures separated by vast geographic dis-
tances. Robinson provides summary evidence, for example, that economic
transactions were likely being recorded on clay tablets by 3,500 bce, with
these simple notations changing to cuneiform within a few hundred years.
And independently of that, other very different forms of writing seem to
have developed at other locations around the world. Key milestones in
the development include the emergence of hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt
by 3,000 bce, the emergence of various scripts in and around the Indus
valley and Aegean sea (e.g., Linear A and B) by 2,500–1,500 bce, the use
of ideograms (the early precursors to characters) in China by 1,200 bce,
the development of the Phoenician alphabet by 1,000 bce, the subsequent
adoption and modification (e.g., addition of letters representing vowels)
of the Phoenician alphabet by the Greeks around 730 bce, and evidence
of Mesoamerican scripts and hieroglyphs by 600 bce.
Despite their tremendous variety, what all these early writing systems
share with modern writing systems is their capacity to represent the sounds
2
This discussion will ignore various forms of sign language that are used by the deaf. It is worth not-
ing, however, that these languages are true languages, and that as such, what was said about spoken
languages is equally applicable to sign languages. And in the same vein, although our discussion of
reading will ignore the reading of braille, it is also a true writing system.
and meanings of spoken language, fixing the information in media that
allows for a permanent record of not only financial transactions, but also
of history and culture, as well as religious texts, poetry, and literature. The
significance of this new technology cannot be overstated. As the astrono-
mer Carl Sagan (1980) rightly noted, this capacity is “perhaps the great-
est of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each
other,” allowing one to be “inside of the mind of another person, maybe
somebody dead for thousands of years.”
The challenge, therefore, is to develop methods for understanding this
most amazing of cognitive tasks. Fortunately, this has been possible; the
experimental methods and technologies of modern cognitive psychol-
ogy and neuroscience have allowed reading researchers to make informed
inferences about mental processes that support reading by measuring their
neural correlates (e.g., patterns of brain activity) and the overt behavior
required to perform various types of reading-related tasks (e.g., pronounc-
ing words aloud).3 Section 1.2 will provide a brief introduction to the main
methods and technologies that are available to do this and that have been
productively used to advance the science of reading. However, please note
that this introduction is not intended to be comprehensive in scope, but
instead only provides the minimal background that might be required
to understand the remaining chapters of this book. Readers with back-
grounds in either cognitive psychology or neuroscience may therefore opt
to skip ahead to those chapters.
1.2 Methods to Study Reading

The psychology of reading has a long history of scientifically rigorous
experimental investigation (e.g., Huey’s, seminal The Psychology and
Pedagogy of Reading, 1908, is perhaps the earliest comprehensive account).
It is therefore not surprising that many of the experimental methods that
have been used to study reading also have a long history. This section will
review those methods, as well as new technologies that have only recently
made it possible for researchers to study the internal behaviors of a reader’s
mind or brain – the patterns of cortical activity that can be measured using
the brain’s electrophysiology and metabolism.
3
We will avoid the thorny philosophical issue of specifying precisely how the mind differs – if it even
does – from the brain, but will instead simply acknowledge that it is useful to think about the mind
as being a more abstract description of how the brain operates. This approach is analogous to how
one might think about a computer program as being an abstract description of how a computer
operates (e.g., see Coltheart, 2012).
The earliest methods used to study reading involve simple behavioral
tasks that, despite their simplicity, were used with ingenuity to good effect.
For example, someone unfamiliar with how reading research is conducted
might suggest the simple task of having participants read extended passages
of text for some amount of time and then answering questions to gauge
their understanding of the text’s contents. This task can be used to deter-
mine the maximal reading speed or what a reader is likely to remember
about a given text, but unfortunately says very little about the moment-to-
moment inner workings of the mind, or how the processing of words and
sentences allows a reader to construct the mental representations that are
necessary to answer comprehension questions. Such insights require more
sophisticated methods, typically involving tasks coupled with experimental
designs that allow researchers to focus on one specific process of interest.
For example, because the key component of reading is the identifica-
tion of printed words, or lexical access, many of the earliest techniques for
studying reading were designed to shed light on this process. For example,
one technique called the perceptual-identification task involves displaying
a word under well-controlled viewing conditions using a device called a
tachistoscope. This device contains a camera shutter that allows a word (usu-
ally printed on a card) to be displayed for a precise amount of time under
specific lighting conditions. By asking participants to name or otherwise
identify words that are displayed using a tachistoscope, it is possible to
determine the minimum amount of time that is needed to identify a word,
as well as the types of information that might be extracted when participants
make errors. For example, one early and theoretically important finding
from such experiments that has also withstood the scrutiny of time is the
word-superiority effect. This effect is the seemingly paradoxical finding that
a letter displayed in the context of a word can be identified more rapidly
and accurately than a letter displayed in isolation (Reicher, 1969; Wheeler,
1970). For example, the letter “k” can be identified more efficiently if it is
displayed in the context of “work” than if “k” is displayed in isolation. This
suggests that the perception of letters is somehow facilitated or supported
by the processing of the word in which they occur, and explanations of the
effect typically refer to the “top-down” influence of word representations
in memory influencing the visual perception of letters, with letters that
are displayed in words benefiting from this additional support (e.g., see
McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982).
Over the last few decades, the behavioral tasks that are used to study
word identification have been refined into a small set of standardly used
tasks. Although each of these tasks is useful, it is fair to say that all of these
tasks also have their limitations. For example, the first of these tasks is
naming, wherein participants simply pronounce words that are displayed
on a computer monitor as rapidly and accurately as possible, with a micro-
phone being used to detect the onset time of the naming response (Balota
et al., 2007; Schilling et al., 1998). Although this task is (at least somewhat)
natural and can under some conditions guarantee that participants have
accessed a word’s pronunciation from memory (see, e.g., Rossmeissl &
Theios, 1982), it is also clear that words can be sounded out and thus per-
formance in this task can have little to do with lexical access. (The easiest
demonstration of this is the fact that you can pronounce non-words like
“fark” that, by virtue of being non-words, are not represented in the lexi-
con.) Another limitation of the naming task is that words beginning with
certain phonemes (e.g., voiced consonants, which are more likely to trigger
the voice key) are more likely to be named more rapidly and/or accurately
than words beginning with other phonemes (Rastle & Davis, 2002).
A second standardly used task is lexical decision, wherein participants
view a series of words and non-words displayed one at a time on a com-
puter monitor, with the task of indicating as rapidly and accurately as pos-
sible via button presses whether each letter string is a word or non-word
(Balota et al., 2007; Schilling et al., 1998). Because both “word” and “non-
word” responses are registered using button presses, this task avoids much
of the messiness of naming. But because the task requires binary decisions,
the task is subject to strategies that reflect a variety of variables, includ-
ing the relative proportion of words versus non-words being used in the
experiment (West & Stanovich, 1982), and the degree to which the non-
words resemble words (e.g., it is easier to decide that the consonant string
“rxwmq” is a non-word than it is to decide that the pseudo-homophone
“brane” is a non-word; Van Orden et al., 1990). For those reasons, the
lexical-decision task has been criticized on the grounds that it often mea-
sures more than just lexical access (e.g., Balota & Chumbley, 1984).
Given the limitations of the naming and lexical-decision tasks, one
might ask why researchers do not simply ask participants to somehow
indicate the meaning of a word, as a way of guaranteeing that lexical
access has occurred. One task that has been developed to do exactly that
is semantic verification, wherein participants indicate (usually via button
presses) whether or not each word in a series has some particular seman-
tic attribute (e.g., Lewellen et al., 1993). Participants might be asked, for
example, to indicate whether each of a series of words refers to some-
thing animate. For example, the sequence “cat,” “hammer,” and “sink”
would be expected to elicit “yes,” “no,” and “no” responses, respectively.
Although the semantic-verification task avoids most of the pitfalls of
naming and lexical decision, it also requires binary decisions that can bias
responses and thus has also been criticized for being unnatural (e.g., see
Van Orden, 1987).
One final task that avoids the criticism of being unnatural uses the mea-
surement of eye movements during natural reading – an approach that
is most often referred to as eye tracking (Rayner, 1979; for reviews, see
Rayner, 1998, 2009). This technique obviously requires an eye tracker, or
device that measures the position of a reader’s eyes as they read text that
is displayed on a computer monitor. The most widely used eye trackers
today, for example, typically measure the position of a reader’s dominant
eye once every millisecond as they read sentences or passages of text, allow-
ing the experimenter to reconstruct a variety of different measures that
reflect (on average, across a sample of participants) how long and often
each word is looked at during reading. Using these word-based measures,
it is then possible to make informed inferences about what is happening
in the mind of a reader because there is a tight coupling between the eye
and mind during reading (Reingold et al., 2012). Moreover, because the
task is natural (i.e., doesn’t require binary decisions or other secondary
task demands) and is both non-intrusive and highly sensitive (i.e., fixation
durations and locations can be measured very accurately), the only real
drawback of this approach is its inherent complexity. In other words, to
interpret a pattern of eye movements as they move through a sentence, one
must make informed inferences about how visual processing, attention,
word identification, and sentence comprehension drive the moment-to-
moment movement of the eyes – the inner workings of the mind that are
of interest to reading researchers.
Although each of the behavioral methods differ in important ways, and
although each has its merits and limitations, all have proven useful, and
many of the key findings have been documented using more than one of
the methods, with this convergence further validating the methods. These
key findings will be discussed in subsequent chapters of this book, but for
now, it is important to note that arguably most of what has been learned
about the psychology of reading has been learned using the behavioral
methods. However, it is also important to note that technology has
rapidly expanded the arsenal of methods that reading researchers now
have at their disposal. These new technologies allow researchers to make
informed inferences about the mental processes that support reading by
examining their neural correlates, the activity of the cortical systems that
support cognition.
The oldest of these more recent methods entails the recording of
the electrical currents generated by large ensembles of neurons that are
engaged in the coordinated activity that occurs during reading. For exam-
ple, as a participant names a sequence of words in the naming task, an
electoencephalogram (EEG), or recording of the electrical activity of the
participant’s brain, is first recorded and then averaged across the individual
responses to produce event-related potentials, or ERPs (for a review, see
Handy, 2005). The ERPs that are collected from two different conditions
(e.g., words read with vs. without normal parafoveal preview) can then
be compared to make inferences about what happens during word iden-
tification (Antúnex et al., 2021). Because these recordings are analog and
recorded continuously over time, ERPs have a fine temporal resolution,
allowing researchers to examine how the brain’s electrical activity changes
over small intervals of time (e.g., milliseconds). The main drawback of this
approach, however, is that the neural generators that give rise to the ERPs
are difficult to localize. In other words, although the electrical activity is
often recorded from a high number of electrodes (e.g., sixty-four) that are
widely distributed across a participant’s scalp, and although sophisticated
mathematical techniques can be used to make inferences about the foci
of the neural generators (Jatoi et al., 2014), the spatial resolution of these
localization techniques is poor, often only allowing coarse inferences about
the location of a neural generator (e.g., left vs. right cerebral hemisphere).
Fortunately, a few more recent brain-imaging methods have been devel-
oped to sidestep the problems of ERPs. The oldest of these methods, posi-
tron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), measure cortical activity indirectly, by measuring changes in blood
flow that occur with increases in neural activity. With PET, these blood-
flow changes are measured using radioactive tracers (for an introduction
to this method, see Raichle, 1983). With fMRI, participants are placed in
a strong magnetic field, so that the hydrogen atoms in the blood can be
aligned with the magnetic field. With each off pulse of the magnetic field,
the hydrogen atoms relax (i.e., spin randomly) and emit radio waves that
are then detected by antennae situated around the participant’s head (see
Logothetis, 2003). Although both methods allow much better spatial reso-
lution than ERPs, the resolution of fMRI is superior (typically a few cubic
millimeters) and fMRI is less invasive because it does not require the injec-
tion of radioactive tracers. Where the two methods fare less well, however,
is temporal resolution: PET measures brain activity within a given cortical
region across several tens of seconds, whereas fMRI measures brain activity
across several seconds.
The final method to be reviewed here, magnetoencephography (MEG),
is related to EEG in that it uses highly sensitive sensors to measure the
magnetic induction that is generated by the post-synaptic potentials of
neurons, with this measure of induction then being used to generate
a composite image of the brain’s electrical activity (see Baillet, 2017).
This method is much less invasive than PET, with a spatial resolution
comparable to fMRI but with a temporal resolution comparable to
EEG. With all these strengths, one might ask why MEG is not used
instead of the other brain-imaging methods? Apart from a few practical
limitations (e.g., operating costs), one of the main limitations of MEG
is that it is better suited to measuring the magnetic induction gener-
ated by neurons located near the surface of the brain rather than those
generated by deep brain structures. A second limitation is that relative
to both PET and fMRI, the nature of the signals being measured are
complex and thus more poorly understood. For those reasons, although
MEG is an extremely useful methodology, it is probably more useful
to view MEG as complementary to (rather than superior to) the other
brain-imaging methods.
With that brief introduction to the methods used in reading science, it
is important to emphasize that none of the methods that have been men-
tioned in this section – behavioral or neurophysiological – are without
limitations, and that all the methods have proven useful, especially when
two or more methods converge to provide mutual support for some find-
ing or conclusion. Our approach throughout the remainder of this book
will therefore be to sample from these methods in a manner that allows
us to cover key findings related to the psychology of reading, utilizing the
insights afforded by each method.
1.3 Models of Reading

As indicated previously, a key marker of progress in understanding the
psychology of reading is the fact that there have been several formally
implemented theories or models of the core processes that occur in the
minds of readers. Reichle (2021) provides a comprehensive review of many
of these models, which for the purposes of facilitating their exposition, are
grouped according to what the models attempt to simulate and explain:
1. the identification of printed words;
2. the syntactic and semantic processing that is required to combine
words into representations of phrases and sentences;
3. the processing that is required to construct representations of more
extended discourses (i.e., the meaning of two or more sentences);
4. how each of the aforementioned processes are coordinated with
attention and the oculomotor system to determine when and where
the eyes move during reading (i.e., eye-movement control in reading).
Because models of Chinese reading are discussed at length in upcom-
ing chapters of this book, it is important to have a basic understanding
of what computer models are, and why they are useful. For those rea-
sons, two such models will be reviewed briefly here. Although these two
models describe processes that are involved in the reading of English,
the models are important for later discussions because the theoretical
assumptions of the models have been borrowed in developing models of
the reading of Chinese.
The first model to be reviewed here is the interactive-activation
model that was first proposed by McClelland and Rumelhart (1981;
Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982).4 This model, which is depicted in
Figure 1.1, provides an example of an artificial neural network, and as
such, consists of an interconnected network of nodes. These nodes are
arranged in a hierarchy to represent the features or line segments of indi-
vidual letters (in the bottom layer), letters (in the middle layer), and
words (in the top layer). As shown, these nodes are interlinked by config-
urations of excitatory (arrows) and inhibitory (filled circles) connections
that propagate activation among these nodes. Although this propagation
of activity can be loosely conceptualized as corresponding to the propa-
gation of neural activity among cortical areas that represent different
types of lexical information (features, letters, and words), the interactive-
activation model can also be viewed as an abstract description of the
representations and algorithms that are engaged during word identifica-
tion. Finally, it is the pattern of interconnections that is important for
how the model functions. This pattern of interconnections is also what
allows the model to explain the word-superiority effect (Reicher, 1969;
Wheeler, 1970) discussed earlier.
As Figure 1.1 shows, the presence of a word causes the nodes correspond-
ing to letter features (i.e., line segments corresponding to segments of the
highly stylized font that is, for convenience, used to represent each letter)
to become active. These letter features have specific locations, so that only
4
For a detailed description of the model including the equations that determine how excitatory and
inhibitory activation is propagated among the different types of representational nodes, see either
the original articles (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982) or Reichle
(2021: 101–7).
Figure 1.1 Schematic diagram of McClelland and Rumelhart’s (1981)
interactive-activation model of word identification
The nodes representing letter features, letters, and words are indicated, as are the
excitatory (arrows) and inhibitory (circles) connections among nodes. Panels A–C show
how the activation of nodes increase and decrease in their relative levels of activation
(with darker gray representing more activation) in response to the word “cat” at three
arbitrary points in time. The inset in the upper right of Panel A shows the full set of
twenty features used in the feature nodes, with the dark gray indicating those features
that would be active to represent the presence of a letter “R.”
Note: For the sake of clarity, this figure depicts only a small portion of the model.
one set of features, for example, can potentially become active in a word’s
first letter position, a second set in the word’s second letter position, and
so on. The letter feature activation then propagates to nodes representing
individual letters. For example, upon being presented with the word “cat,”
the features corresponding to the horizontal and vertical line segments
of the letter “c” in the first letter position will become active, which then
send their activation to a node representing the letter “c” in the first letter
position, but also to similar looking letters (e.g., “e”) in the same position.
Across time, a set of letter nodes will become active, which then propa-
gate their activation to words nodes containing those letters. As Figure 1.1
shows, the word “cat” will activate the nodes corresponding to its letters
in the first through third letter positions, and as the activity of those nodes
continues to ramp up, they will begin propagating their activation to word
nodes containing at least some of those letters. As shown, the node for
“cat” will become active, but so too (but to a lesser degree) will the nodes
for words like “can” and “rat” because these words share some number of
letters with “cat.”
Finally, notice that, as the word nodes increase in their activation, the
most active node will eventually come to suppress the others in a “winner
take all” manner via the set of mutually inhibitory connections among the
word nodes. This mutual inhibition is necessary to ensure that one and
only one node will be identified at any given point in time. And while this
is happening, notice that the words nodes also propagate their activation
back to the letter nodes to which they are connected, allowing a well-
activated word node to support the activation of its constituent letters in
a mutually reinforcing manner. This “top down” propagation of activa-
tion is what allows the interactive-activation model to explain the word-
superiority effect: Whereas a letter presented in isolation will only receive
significant activation from its letter-feature nodes, a letter that is displayed
in the context of a word will receive activation from both letter-feature
nodes and the word node with which it is connected.
The interactive-activation model can explain several empirical findings
besides the word-superiority effect. For example, because the word nodes
have a “resting” or baseline level of activation that reflects how often the
words that they represent have been encountered in printed text, common
words require less time to activate than rare words, thereby providing an
account of the word-frequency effect, or the finding that common words are
typically identified more rapidly than less common words (Reingold et al.,
2012; Schilling et al., 1998). It is also worth noting that these and other
successes, along with the model’s conceptual simplicity, have resulted in
it being highly influential in the development of other models of English
(and as we shall see later, Chinese) reading. For example, the interactive-
activation model is a core component of several other models of word
identification (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001; Davis, 2010; Grainger & Jacobs,
1996; Norris, 1994; Perry et al., 2007; Zorzi et al., 1998) and models of eye-
movement control in reading (e.g., Reilly & Radach, 2003, 2006; Snell
et al., 2018). Additionally, the more general notion of activation being
propagated among a set of highly interactive nodes has been incorporated
into models of sentence processing (e.g., Spivey & Tanenhaus, 1998) and
discourse representation (e.g., Kintsch, 1998). Acknowledging this influ-
ence, let us now turn to a second example of a reading model.
This second example is the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement con-
trol during reading (Reichle et al., 1998, 2012; for a review, see Reichle,
2011). In contrast to the interactive-activation model, which provides a
detailed or computationally explicit account of a single reading process,
that of identifying printed words, E-Z Reader provides a high-level, more
descriptive account of how several components of the mind work in a
coordinated manner to determine when and where a reader’s eye will
move during reading. Figure 1.2 is a schematic diagram of the model.5 As
shown, it consists of an early pre-attentive stage in which visual informa-
tion is propagated from across the entire visual field to the mind, but with
the fine-detailed features about words being used for lexical processing and
the coarser features (e.g., about the locations and lengths of words) being
used for saccadic programming. Each of these two processing “streams”
will be described in turn.
As Figure 1.2 shows, lexical processing is completed in two successive
stages. The first, familiarity check stage corresponds to a rapidly available
sense of familiarity (e.g., like the recognition response in dual-process
theories of memory; Yonelinas, 2002) that is used as a heuristic to “know”
that lexical access is imminent, thus signaling the oculomotor system to
start programming a saccade to move the eyes to the next word. The sec-
ond stage of lexical processing, which corresponds to lexical access, then
continues until the meaning and pronunciation of the word are avail-
able from memory. As shown, the completion of lexical access causes the
focus of attention to shift to the next word, and the initiation of what-
ever post-lexical processing is required to integrate the meaning of the
just-identified word into the representation of the sentence that is being
5
For a detailed description of the model, see Reichle (2011), Reichle et al. (2012), or Reichle (2021:
397–407).
Figure 1.2 Schematic diagram of Reichle et al.’s (2012) E-Z Reader model
of eye-movement control in reading
The boxes designate processes, the thick arrows indicate the propagation of
information, and the thin arrows indicate the flow of control. The dashed arrow
represents the actual movement of the eyes.
generated. As described so far, this part of the model instantiates the two
core assumptions of E-Z Reader – that there is a dissociation between
the events that trigger the movement of eyes (i.e., the familiarity check)
versus attention (i.e., lexical access), and that attention is allocated in a
strictly serial manner to support the processing and identification of only
one word at any given time. Finally, according to the model, post-lexical
processing occurs largely in the background on on-going lexical process-
ing, only occasionally intervening if integration for some reason fails (e.g.,
the syntactic structure of a sentence is mis-parsed) or if integration is too
slow (i.e., if word N+1 is identified before word N has been integrated).
Either of these two situations can result in a pause or the triggering of
an inter-word regression to move both the eyes and attention back to the
source of integration difficulty.
The second processing “stream” in E-Z Reader is related to saccadic pro-
gramming and execution. As Figure 1.2 shows, saccades are programmed
in two successive stages: an initial labile stage that can be canceled if
another saccade is initiated, followed by a non-labile stage in which the
saccade cannot be canceled. This distinction allows the model to explain
why words are sometimes skipped (i.e., not fixated) during reading, as fol-
lows. Imagine a situation in which both the eyes and attention are on word
N. In this situation, the completion of the familiarity check on word N
will cause the oculomotor system to start programming a saccade to move
the eyes to word N+1. Now imagine that, while this labile stage of pro-
gramming is being completed, lexical access of word N completes, causing
attention to shift to word N+1 and its lexical processing to begin. If the
familiarity check of word N+1 then completes rapidly enough, it will trig-
ger the initiation of a second labile program to move the eyes to word N+2,
which then cancels the original program, causing word N+1 to be skipped.
However, if the familiarity check of word N+1 completes more slowly,
then the labile program to move the eyes to word N+1 will likely complete,
initiating the non-labile stage of programming and thereby resulting in an
obligatory fixation on word N+1.
Finally, although the saccades are always directed towards the centers
of upcoming words (i.e., towards their optimal-viewing position; O’Regan,
1992) because this viewing location affords their efficient processing, there
are two sources of saccadic error. The first is random and causes fixations
to be normally distributed around their intended targets, but with the
amount of deviation also increasing with the length of the intended sac-
cade. The second type of error is systematic and causes saccades that are
shorter/longer than some “preferred” length to over/undershoot their
intended targets. Because both sources of error often result in fixations
being in suboptimal viewing locations, the model also assumes that effer-
ence copies of the intended saccade can be used to quickly determine the
size of the discrepancy, and to then rapidly initiate a corrective saccade to
move the eyes closer to the originally intended target (i.e., the center of
the word being processed). Together, these assumptions allow the model
to explain why fixation landing-site distributions tend to be normal and
centered near the middle of words (McConkie et al., 1988), and why fixa-
tions near either end of a word tend to be short in duration and more likely
to be followed by a refixation on the word (Vitu et al., 2001).
More generally, the E-Z Reader model as described above has been used
to simulate and understand many findings related to eye movements in
reading (Reichle et al., 1998) and other reading-like experiments (Reichle
et al., 2012; Veldre et al., 2023; for a review, see Reichle, 2011). And like the
interactive-activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) discussed
earlier, E-Z Reader has been influential, motivating a considerable amount
of new empirical research (e.g., Inhoff et al., 2005; Pollatsek et al., 2006)
and the development of several competitor models (e.g., Engbert et al.,
2005; McDonald et al., 2005; Reilly & Radach, 2003, 2006; Schad &
Engbert, 2012; Snell et al., 2018). More recently, the model has been
“fleshed out” by embedding more computationally explicit models of word
identification, sentence processing, and discourse representation within its
framework to produce a computationally explicit account of reading in its
entirety, Über-Reader (Reichle, 2021).
Finally, the two models that have been reviewed here, the interactive-
activation model and E-Z Reader, are important for present purposes
because they provide examples of the types of formal theories that have been
developed to advance our understanding of the psychology of reading.6
This advancement occurs in two ways. First and foremost, the models pro-
vide useful summary descriptions of the main processes that are involved
in reading, allowing researchers to think more concretely about what hap-
pens during reading, and to make predictions about what might happen in
experimental situations. Such predictions are immensely useful for advanc-
ing the science of reading because they allow researchers to formulate pre-
cise tests that can be used to disconfirm one or more assumptions of a
model, thereby allowing the model to be rejected in favor of other models,
or for the faulty assumptions to be modified. (For discussion of how and
why formal models are useful in psychology, see Hintzman, 1991.)
In the context of the remainder of this book, models like the two that
have been described have a second important use. Because most reading
models have been developed to explain the reading of languages that use
alphabetic scripts, like English and German, the theoretical assumptions
of those models may not be appropriate for understanding the reading
of languages that use non-alphabetic writing systems, like Chinese. As
we will argue later, these possible discrepancies are extremely interesting
because they suggest one of two basic conclusions. The first is that the
theoretical assumptions in question may simply be wrong, and that they
must be replaced by assumptions that are general enough to explain the
6
Although both models have been formally implemented as computer programs, it is important to
acknowledge that “formally implemented” is often a matter of degree, and that most models are
implemented using some combination of mathematical equations, computer programs, and dia-
grams. That being said, less formally implemented models or verbal theories can also be important
conceptual tools for both thinking and making predictions about the outcomes of experiments in
new research domains, and for precisely that reason, a few examples of such theories are described in
Chapters 3 and 4.
1.4 Chapter Previews 19
reading of, for example, English and Chinese. The second possible conclu-
sion is that different assumptions may be required to explain the reading
of English versus Chinese – that one set of assumptions may be necessary
to understand the reading of one of the two languages, but either those
assumptions are unnecessary or other assumptions are required to explain
the reading of the other language.
Finally, given this brief discussion of why models are useful, one might
ask about the process of adjudicating between two or more models. Or more
generally, how are two or more models compared and evaluated? Although
a complete answer to these questions can be extremely complicated (e.g.,
see Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2018), a short answer suffices for the purposes
of this book. This short answer is that, with all else being equal, models
that explain many empirical findings using a small number of theoreti-
cal assumptions are preferred to models that require many assumptions to
explain just a few findings. Additional considerations that might be used
in comparing and evaluating models might include: Do the models use
assumptions that are consistent with what is known about either cognition
or neuroscience more generally? And do the models generate predictions
that are in some way novel or unexpected? After all, models are useful to the
extent that they advance our understanding of some issue, and in relation to
the psychology of reading, a useful model is one that provides a new insight
into what might be happening in the mind of a reader as they convert the
marks on a printed page into the rich and varied representations that are
afforded by the capacity to read. Models of reading are useful because they
can provide a window into how this capacity is possible.
1.4 Chapter Previews

This chapter has provided the basic information that might be required of
someone without a strong background in cognitive psychology, linguistics,
education, or one of their aligned disciplines to understand the remainder
of this book. The next chapter will provide some additional background
that may be especially useful for readers who lack an understanding of the
Chinese languages and writing system, and the characteristics of the latter
that are unique and that provide points of contrast for the research that
has, to date, largely focused on the reading of alphabetic writing systems
and European languages.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 then comprise the core of the book, and as such, are
organized similarly. For example, Chapter 3 will focus on lexical processing
and word identification, beginning with a brief review of what has been
learned about these topics from the study of the reading of alphabetic writ-
ing systems (mostly English) using the experimental methods reviewed ear-
lier in this chapter. The bulk of Chapter 3 will then focus on what has been
learned about the processing and identification of characters and words in
Chinese reading from experiments using the same methods. Chapter 3 will
also review the models that have been developed to explain what is known
about the identification of characters and words during Chinese reading.
Chapters 4 and 5 then continue using this same organizational approach,
but with the former chapter focusing on skilled reading, and the latter
focusing on the development of reading skill, its impairment (i.e., dys-
lexia), and what has been learned from cognitive neuroscience about the
reading of Chinese. Because much of our own research has used eye track-
ing to study reading, much of the research on skilled reading that will be
discussed in Chapter 4 is based on experiments that have also used this
methodology. And although neuroscience methods of the type described
earlier in this chapter have been used to study both the identification of
isolated words and skilled reading, this research has been collectively rel-
egated to Chapter 5 for the purpose of maintaining coherence. As each of
these chapters will demonstrate, although there are consistencies in what
has been learned about these topics across languages and writing systems as
different as those used in the reading of English versus Chinese, there are
also important differences – differences that are usually not afforded the
recognition that they warrant, especially given the theoretical and practical
implications that they likely have for our general understanding of reading.
Finally, Chapter 6 closes with a more explicit comparison of what has
been learned about the reading of Chinese versus English (and other alpha-
betic writing systems), with particular emphasis on highlighting those
points of contrast that might have important ramifications for the psy-
chology of reading. This analysis will then be used to motivate a small set
of outstanding questions – questions that, if answered, we believe might
advance our basic understanding of what happens in the human mind
when it is engaged in reading. These questions will then motivate our pre-
dictions about future research, and a few of the more basic challenges that
remain to be addressed by future reading researchers. Our goal in doing all
of this, however, is modest – if we are successful, we hope to provide a few
“signposts” that might be useful to reading researchers who are interested
in advancing the science of reading by studying what really is one of the
most intriguing writing systems that was ever developed and that is still
widely used today – that of written Chinese.
chapter 2
The Chinese Language and Writing System
This chapter is intended to provide a high-level description of the Chinese

language and writing system. The description will not be comprehensive
but will instead only be sufficient to understand how the similarities and
differences between Chinese and other languages and writing systems that
have been used to study reading, most notably English, have and might
continue to be leveraged to provide theoretically interesting points of con-
trast. During the past few decades, these points of contrast have resulted
in a growing appreciation that the science of reading might be advanced
by studying the reading of languages that have markedly different writing
systems, like Chinese. Our present description of the Chinese language
and writing system will therefore focus mainly on the writing system and
aspects of it that make it make it so unique and worthy of study. For a
comprehensive treatment of the spoken Chinese language and its history,
please consult Norman’s (1988) definitive volume on the topic, which pro-
vides a wealth of information about the origins of the language, its relation
to other languages, and its key linguistic attributes. With this important
disclaimer, let us now begin our description of the Chinese language and
writing system.
2.1 The Chinese Language

As observed by W. Wang (1973: 60), “the Chinese language has the
largest number of speakers in the world and the greatest time depth of
its literature,” with the latter “spanning a period of 35 centuries” (51).
Currently, Chinese is spoken as a first language by approximately 1.3
billion people. It is a misnomer to call it a “language,” however, because
it is a family of languages consisting of seven to thirteen major mutu-
ally unintelligible linguistic groups or dialects that in turn consist of
hundreds of regional variants (Norman, 1988). For a variety of histori-
cal, political, and geographic reasons, the sizes of these language groups
21
22 The Chinese Language and Writing System
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Figure 2.1 A map of China showing the main dialects and where they are spoken
vary quite considerably, with larger, more homogeneous enclaves across

the northern plains of China and smaller, more heterogeneous pock-
ets of speakers located in the mountainous regions of southern China
(see Figure 2.1). These linguistic groups form a dialectic “continuum,”
with the degree of intelligibility often declining in a graded manner with
increasing geographical distance, but with the rate of decline also punc-
tuated by, for example, mountain ranges or large rivers that have histori-
cally separated two or more regions.
The most commonly spoken of these languages is Mandarin, which is
based on the Beijing dialect and currently has roughly 800 million speak-
ers.1 Mandarin was adopted as the official language of the Republic of China
in the 1930s. It is also the official language of Taiwan, is one of a handful of
official languages of both Singapore and the United Nations, and is spoken
by the millions of Chinese diaspora who have emigrated around the globe.
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language (February 22, 2022).
A few other of the most widely used dialects include Yue or Cantonese,
which is spoken by about 68 million people, Wu or Shanghainese, which
is spoken by about 74 million people, and Min, which is spoken by about
75 million people. Again, it is important to emphasize that most of these
dialects are distinct languages, with a speaker of Mandarin, for example,
being as unintelligible to a speaker of Cantonese as a speaker of English
would be to a speaker of German (Norman, 1988: 2).
The Chinese languages are also more distantly related to the Tibeto-
Burman language group which, as its name suggests, includes both Tibetan
and Burmese. This larger group can be contrasted with the main language
groups that surround China, including the Altaic group (i.e., Turkic,
Mongolian, Tungusic, and possibly Korean and Japanese) to the north,
and to the south, the various Tai languages spoken in Vietnam, Laos,
Thailand, and Burma. The languages within each of these main groups
bear a “family resemblance” to each other, with the Chinese languages
sharing an overlapping constellation of features that, collectively, distin-
guish them from the languages of the other groups. One of these fea-
tures is that Chinese is monosyllabic, with each syllable corresponding to a
single morpheme or unit of meaning. Thus, in contrast to English, where
single-syllable words can contain multiple morphemes (e.g., cats = cat + s
to denote plurality; ran = run + inflection to denote past-tense form) and
multisyllabic words can correspond to a single morpheme (e.g., elephant,
hammer, continent), most syllables in Chinese correspond to only one unit
of meaning. (There are a few exceptions to this rule, but they are rare;
e.g., the Chinese disyllabic word meaning “spider.”) However, as is true
in English, most Chinese words consist of two or more morphemes and
are polysyllabic.
Each spoken syllable has a specific phonological structure that, at a
minimum, includes the vowel, but that can also have an optional onset
consisting of a consonant or a consonant and a medial glide, as well as an
optional coda consonant. In English, for example, the word “steel” has an
onset consisting of the consonant cluster “st” (/st/) and a body consist-
ing of the vowels “ee” (/iː/) and the coda consonant “l” (/l/). However,
in contrast to English, consonant clusters are not permitted in either the
onset or coda within the syllables that make up Chinese words. And one
final property of the Chinese syllable happens to be the one that is per-
haps most obvious to speakers of European languages – the fact that spo-
ken Chinese, in contrast to languages like English and German but also
many other Asian languages like Korean and Japanese, sounds “melodic”
to the ear because each syllable is spoken with an associated change in its
Figure 2.2 An example illustrating the four tones used to differentiate the
meanings of the spoken syllable /ma/ in Mandarin
The arrows show each tone’s change in the pitch contour as might be
measured using an oscilloscope.
pitch contour, or tone. In the case of Mandarin, for example, each syl-
lable has one of four different possible tones: (1) level; (2) rising; (3) falling
and then rising; or (4) falling. (Some descriptions of Mandarin include a
fifth, neutral tone that can be contrasted with the other four.) These tones
are used to differentiate between the meanings that might be associated
with a given syllable. For example, as Figure 2.2 illustrates, the syllable
pronounced /ma/ can have one of four distinct meanings that can be dif-
ferentiated by the tone that is used in its pronunciation; whereas the level
tone /ma1/ means “mother,” the falling-then-rising tone /ma3/ means
“horse.”2 The tones thus function as phonemes in that they provide the
minimal contrasts that are used to discriminate between two morphemes/
words, in the same manner that the contrast between the phonemes /k/
and /b/ are used to respectively discriminate between the words “cat”
and “bat” in English. And although Mandarin is spoken with four tones,
there are northern dialects that are spoken using as few as three, and some
southern dialects using six or more.
2
There are different conventions for representing the tones associated with Chinese syllables written
using the Roman alphabet (e.g., via diacritical markings above the vowels; W. Wang, 1973). The
convention that will be adopted in this book entails appending numbers to the ends of syllables to
indicate their tones, with 1 to 4 respectively indicating the level, rising, falling-then-rising, and fall-
ing tones. (The fifth, neutral tone is not marked with a number.) Relatedly, the pronunciations of
syllables and words will be indicated by the use of forward slashes.
Because the individual syllables correspond to morphemes, they often
correspond to single syllable words. However, most words are poly-
syllabic, with most being bi-syllabic but a non-negligible proportion
consisting of three or four syllables. As is true of English, Chinese mor-
phemes can be divided into those that convey independent meaning,
or contentives, and those that modify the contentives in some system-
atic manner, or functives. The former can be classified as nouns, verbs,
or adjectives and are used to construct words in those classes, whereas
the latter are used to convey the grammatical relationships among those
words. Because the syntactic structures of phrases and sentences are con-
veyed using prepositions, particles, and word order, with the default for
the latter being subject-verb-object, Chinese is generally considered to
be an analytic or isolating language (Norman, 1988). One implication of
this is that the use of both derivational and inflectional morphology are
comparatively rare.
Thus, in contrast to English, where an inflection requires internal
changes to the base word (e.g., ate = eat + inflection to denote completed
action), in Chinese, a small number of suffixes (e.g., /le/, /zhe/, etc.) can
be used immediately after the verb to indicate aspect (e.g., perfective, or
continuing). For example, /chi1/ is the basic verb meaning “eat,” but by
adding /le/ to the verb, the phrase /chi1 le/ now suggests that the act of
eating has been completed. (Note that the aspect differs from tense in that
the completed action could refer to a past or future event.) Similarly, /chi1
zhe/ indicates that the act of eating is currently in progress. As another
example, the plural suffix /men/ can be added to an animate pronoun
or noun to mark numerical change and thereby denote a collective (e.g.,
/wo3/ “I” + /men/ = /wo3 men/, meaning “we” or “us”; /xue2 sheng1/ “stu-
dent” + /men/ = /xue2 sheng1 men/, meaning “students”).
It is also worth noting that the obligatory use of inflected forms is limited
to indicating plural pronouns (e.g., /wo3 men/ “we” or “us”) and it is not
obligatory in other contexts. For instance, the plural measurement /zhe4
xie1/ “these” can be combined with singular nouns (e.g., added to /xue2
sheng1/ “student” to give /zhe4 xie1 xue2 sheng1/, meaning “these students”).
Similarly, durative actions can also be expressed using an adverb /zheng4
zai4/ meaning “in the process of” before the verb to indicate that the action
is in progress without using inflectional suffix /zhe/. Some linguists there-
fore consider the use of inflectional suffixes a grammatic or syntactic process
rather than a morphological one (e.g., Norman, 1988; cf. Packard, 2015).
One likely implication of this is that the concept of “word” in Chinese is not
clear to many of its readers – or even some linguists!
There are also some derivational affixes that can be attached to a base
word to form new words or phrases that have a different syntactic cat-
egory or meaning. At least as compared to inflected words, these derived
words appear to be more common in Chinese. To give a few examples, the
prefix /fu4/ denotes “again” and can be used to generate words like /fu4
he2/ (“reunite”), /fu4 cha2/ (“re-examine”), and /fu4 yuan2/ (“recover”).
Likewise, the prefix /wu2/ negates a base word, allowing for the genera-
tion of such words as /wu2 xu1/ (“no need”), /wu2 xian4/ (“unlimited”),
and /wu2 chang2/ (“without pay”). As one final example, the suffix /hua4/
corresponding to “-ify” or “-ize” can likewise be used to generate /jian3
hua4/ meaning “simplify,” /yang3 hua4/ meaning “oxidize,” and /gong1
ye4 hua4/ meaning “industrialize.”
Despite the use of inflectional and derivational affixes and suffixes
in Chinese, most Chinese disyllabic or multisyllabic words are formed
through compounding. Additionally, certain aspects of Chinese word for-
mation and their grammatical features are quite different from anything
that is found in English.
One example is that, in Chinese, the articles and numerals that mod-
ify nouns cannot directly precede those nouns. The articles and numerals
must instead be separated from their corresponding nouns by classifiers that
are used in reference to units of measure. Thus, while a speaker of English
might perfectly well say “the cat” or “three books,” the equivalent phrases in
Chinese (i.e., /na4 mao1/ and /san1 shu1/, respectively) would be agrammati-
cal. The Chinese speaker would instead by obliged to say /na4 zhi1 mao1/, or
“the piece cat,” and /san1 ben3 shu1/, or “three piece books,” where the word
“piece” is a loose English translation that has little semantic content but that
serves as a placeholder for the two classifiers, /zhi1/ and /ben3/.
A second example involves the use of syllable reduplication, wherein
a noun can be repeated to convey the added meaning of “every.” For
example, repeating the word /ren2/, which by itself means “person,” will
produce “every person” (i.e., /ren2 ren2/). Similarly, repeating the word
for “day,” /tian1/, gives “every day” (i.e., /tian1 tian1/). Applying this redu-
plication principle to verbs will change the word to its transitory mean-
ing. For example, repeating the word /kan4/, which by itself means “to
look,” will produce “to take a look” (i.e., /kan4 kan4/), while repeating the
word that means “to walk,” /zou3/, will produce “to take a walk” (i.e., /
zou3 zou3/). And to give one final example, an adjective can be converted
into an adverb via reduplication and the addition of the /de/ suffix; for
example, the adjective /kuai4/ meaning “quick” can be converted into the
adverb /kuai4 kaui4 de/ meaning “quickly.”
A third example is related to the formation of new words by conjoin-
ing two morphemes that have the opposite meaning. For example, the
antonyms /mai3/ (“buy”) and /mai4/ (“sell”) can be joined to form /mai3
mai4/, meaning “business.” Similarly, conjoining /chang2/ (“long”) and
/duan3/ (“short”) gives /chang2 duan3/, or “length.” However, the mean-
ing of the conjoined words is not always transparently related to their
parts; for example, /fan3/, which means “turned over,” can be combined
with /zheng4/, meaning “right side up,” to produce /fan3 zheng4/, which
means “in any case.”
As indicated previously, these features of the Chinese language dif-
ferentiate it from English as well as the other Asiatic language groups
that were mentioned earlier. For example, although the use of mono-
morphemic, tonal syllables is a feature shared by the Chinese languages
and many of the languages spoken to the south of China (e.g., Miao,
Thai, Vietnamese, or Yao), it differentiates Chinese from northern lan-
guages that use polymorphemic, atonal syllables (e.g., Japanese, Korean,
Manchu, Mongolian). And conversely, Chinese languages share features
with their northern linguistic neighbors (e.g., each syllable onset can
only contain one consonant, adjectives must precede the nouns that they
modify, etc.) that are at odds with their southern linguistic neighbors.
These similarities and differences provide clues about the evolution of
the Chinese language family and its linguistic neighbors. Although this
evolution has undoubtedly been bidirectional (e.g., as evidenced by that
fact that new words, especially those describing technology, have been
introduced into Chinese after first being appropriated into Japanese), it
is no exaggeration to say that the influence of Chinese culture has been
profound. In fact, the influence of the Chinese language on other regional
languages has been likened to that of ancient Greek and Latin on the
development of European languages (Norman, 1988).
Finally, as was indicated at the beginning of this chapter, our main
objective in providing this overview has been quite modest – to provide
the minimal background that is required for someone unfamiliar with
the Chinese language and writing system to gain a better understanding
and appreciation of the latter (in the remainder of this chapter). This
understanding is a prerequisite for understanding the topics that will
be discussed in the rest of this book – namely, what has been learned
about the psychology of reading from research on the reading of one
writing system, Chinese. For a more in-depth discussion of the Chinese
language, we again invite the reader to consult Norman (1988) because
it arguably provides the most complete and authoritative treatment of
the topic (at least, in English). With that caveat, we now turn to a brief
discussion of the origins of the Chinese writing system.
2.2 The History of the Chinese Writing System

The Chinese writing system has played a defining role in Chinese history
and is one of the most remarkable cultural inventions in all of human
history. The former claim is based on the fact that the Chinese writing
system has provided a foundation for the development of Chinese culture
and political unity. This is due to three factors that are perhaps unique to
China. First, as has already been discussed, the Chinese “language” com-
prises many mutually unintelligible languages. Second, the geographic
region making up China is occupied by a larger number of different eth-
nic groups. Third, the history of China is every bit as complex and rich as
that of Europe (see Keay, 2009). These three factors together have meant
that the Chinese writing system has been used as a linguae franca for the
peoples of China, allowing for ready commerce and the sharing of knowl-
edge, much as Latin allowed for such exchanges throughout much of
the history of Europe. As Norman states in his discussion of the Chinese
writing system:
The aptness of language as a symbol of cultural and even political unity was
facilitated by the use of a script that for all practical purposes was indepen-
dent of any particular phonetic manifestation of the language, allowing the
Chinese to look upon the Chinese language as being more uniform and
unchanging than it actually was. (Norman, 1988: 1)
This continuity of the written form, in combination with the fact that it
has existed for at least 3,500 years, thus makes Chinese unique among the
languages of the world. One implication of this fact is quite remarkable:
Modern readers of Chinese can often read texts that were written hun-
dreds or even thousands of years ago! This is true even though, because
the spoken language (like all spoken languages) has continued to evolve,
the spoken form of ancient Chinese is as different from its modern coun-
terpart as Latin is from modern Italian and French. Thus, although a
native speaker of Chinese might be able to read and understand por-
tions of the Analects as they were originally written by Confucius more
than two millennia ago (during the Warring States period, approximately
475–221 bce), the same Chinese speaker would not be able to have a spo-
ken conversation with Confucius. This is because the spoken form of the
Chinese language has continued to evolve and change over the ensuing
Figure 2.3 A few examples of the earliest form of Chinese writing

Inscriptions that have been found on turtle shells, animal bones,
and bronze vessels that were often used for oracles.
These examples were extracted from www.zdic.net.
millennia. This is not to say that the writing system has not also changed
because of course it has. In fact, much more is known about the evolution
of the writing system due to the simple fact that physical evidence of this
change has been preserved in various media.
The earliest evidence of Chinese writing comes from inscriptions on the
turtle shells, animal bones, and bronze vessels that were used for divinatory
purposes (e.g., predicting weather).3 These inscriptions have been dated to
the Shang dynasty (sixteenth to eleventh centuries bce), but both their
prevalence and level of sophistication suggest that they were in widespread
use perhaps centuries earlier (R. Chang & Chang, 1978; Norman, 1988). A
few examples of these inscriptions are illustrated in Figure 2.3. As shown,
many consist of pictographs in that the referent of each inscription can
be readily inferred in the absence of any knowledge of written Chinese.
For example, the inscription meaning “sun” consists of a circle with a dot
in the center, while the inscription for “horse” is a simple line drawing
showing the animal complete with both its mane and tail. It is important
to note, however, that this is not true of all the inscriptions, and that the
total number of characters that have been cataloged is more than four
thousand (Robinson, 1995). These two facts indicate that the inscriptions
3
For discussion of the earliest forms of writing around the world and the archeological evidence dat-
ing their development, see Robinson (1995).
were in fact part of a complete writing system and not just, for example,
used for artistic purposes. They also suggest that the writing system may
have been developed hundreds of years earlier than the current archeologi-
cal evidence indicates, perhaps by as early as the Xia dynasty, which ended
the sixteenth century bce.
Although this early Chinese writing system may have been sufficient
for its purposes, careful consideration of the examples in Figure 2.3 sug-
gests at least a few limitations inherent in the approach. The first is that
the use of pictographs is by its very nature primarily applicable to con-
crete referents that can be drawn, such as plants, animals, geographic
features, and human artifacts. Although some abstract concepts can also
be represented (e.g., the concept “above” is represented by two hori-
zontal lines, with the shorter of the two being above the longer), these
abstract concepts are less transparent and necessitate that the group of
pictograph users adopt and understand the conventions that allow the
symbols to be used. This general approach to denoting referents also
becomes increasingly difficult as the concepts become more abstract
or complex, making it hard to represent complex thoughts about, for
example, human emotions, political concepts, or future events. A second
limitation of the inscriptions is that they do not provide direct links
to their spoken forms; for example, the symbols for “sun” and “horse”
shown in Figure 2.3 provide no indication of how the two words were
spoken. Finally, due to their complexity, the symbols can be cumber-
some to inscribe and perhaps even require some degree of artist talent to
render in a manner that is intelligible to others.
For those reasons, the increasing use of pictographs to represent other
types of records (e.g., financial transactions) meant that they were subject
to selective pressure to make them easier to use. One of these changes
was their simplification and a movement away from the use of true
pictographs to the use of more abstract characters. This abstraction of
course afforded the depiction of more complex and abstract concepts.
Figure 2.4 shows examples of how a few pictographs evolved into their
modern equivalents, Chinese characters, during the centuries following
the Shang dynasty (sixteenth to eleventh centuries bce). In tandem with
this simplification, another convention that was intended to make read-
ing easier was the adoption of the rebus principle to associate concepts
that were difficult to depict with characters that sounded like their spoken
counterparts. For example, at one point, the character meaning “wheat”
and pronounced /lai2/ was used in substitution for the concept “come,”
which was difficult to depict but was also pronounced /lai2/. Over time,
Figure 2.4 A few examples showing how early pictographs changed into their
modern character equivalents during the evolution of the Chinese writing system
These examples were extracted from www.zdic.net.
the character was used exclusively to refer to its new adopted meaning
as the spoken word for “wheat” fell out of use. And in a similar manner,
other characters were adopted to represent the meanings of concepts that
were pronounced like concepts that had originally been associated with
the characters. Two consequences of this trend are that it connected the
phonology of the spoken language to its written form more directly, and
expanded the number of possible referents.
As Figure 2.4 shows, the Chinese writing system continued to change
throughout recorded Chinese history. It is worth noting, however, that
this evolution did not proceed at a constant rate or with the desired end
product in mind; rather, the changes were sporadic and likely emerged
unsystematically in various locales, with some of the resulting changes
being adopted and spreading to other locales and many (perhaps even
most?) either going unnoticed or falling into disuse. The evolution of
the writing system was thus analogous to biological evolution in that the
retention and proliferation of its features were selected as a function of
their utility “fitness,” with the changes being made to facilitate the more
widespread reading and writing of Chinese.
However, as carefully documented by Norman (1988), there were also
at least three significant periods in the development of the Chinese writing
system, where the changes were rapid, systematic, and by design. The first
was the unification of China under the Qin dynasty (221–207 bce). This
political unification brought about the standardization of units of measure-
ment and legal statutes, and the replacement of various local scripts with
a single script that would further consolidate the government’s control of
its empire. This script was also of two types: a seal script that, as implied
by its name, was used for official seals and documents, and a clerical script
that was used by government officials and clerks for commerce, the main-
tenance of inventories, and so on. Both scripts were highly standardized
but with the former being more complex and stylized and the latter being
simpler and thus easier to use for everyday purposes.
The second watershed period in the development of the Chinese writ-
ing system occurred during the Han dynasty (206 bce – 24 ce), when the
seal script was abandoned in favor of the clerical script, which was further
simplified and standardized. For example, previous efforts to preserve the
pictographic links between characters and their referents were abandoned
in favor of utility. The line segments comprising the characters were also
shortened and straightened. The circular lines in the character represent-
ing “sun,” for example, were straightened to produce its current form, a
box bisected by a horizontal line. This simplified clerical script is therefore
the basis of the modern Chinese characters that are used today; although
native speakers of Chinese would have considerable difficulty reading most
characters written in the seal script, speakers with a good understanding
of written Chinese can decipher many characters written in clerical script.
Finally, an abbreviated, cursive form of the characters were also introduced
for informal purposes and for writing draft documents.
The third and final watershed period in the development of the Chinese
writing systems occurred in the mid-twentieth century. After their rise
to power in 1949, the government of the People’s Republic of China
began implementing a nationwide reform of the Chinese writing system.
Up until 1956, Chinese has been written in the traditional manner, using
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leaves, and in being tetrandrous. Of the plant from Abyssinia I have
seen only two expanded flowers, one of which is decidedly
pentandrous, the other apparently tetrandrous. Mr. Salt, however,
from an examination of recent specimens, states it to be
pentandrous. It is probably, therefore, not different from C. farinosa
of Forskal, whose specimens M. De Candolle has not seen. And as
the form of leaves is variable in the specimens from Senegal, and
not elliptical, but between oval and oblong, in those of Abyssinia, C.
dubia is probably identical with, or a variety merely of farinosa, as M.
De Candolle himself seems to suspect.
Crateva Adansonii (De Cand. prodr. 1. p. 243) is in the
collection from Bornou. This species is established by M. De
Candolle upon a specimen in M. de Jussieu’s herbarium, found in
Senegal by Adanson, and is supposed to differ from all the other
species in having its foliola equal at the base. I have examined the
specimen in M. de Jussieu’s herbarium, in which, however, the
leaves not being fully developed, I was unable to satisfy myself
respecting their form. But in a specimen, also from Senegal, which I
received from M. Desfontaines, the lateral foliola, though having
manifestly unequal sides, are but slightly unequal at the base, and
the inequality consists in a somewhat greater decurrence of the
lamina on the anterior or inner margin of the footstalk. As well as can
be determined, in very young leaves, this is also the case in the
specimen from Bornou; and it is manifestly so in my specimen of C.
læta, which appears to belong to the same species.
Crateva læta was founded by M. De Candolle on a plant from
Senegal, communicated by M. Gay, from whom I also received a
specimen in 1824, with the remark, that it was not different from C.
Adansonii. In that specimen the flowers are male with an imperfect
pistillum; in the plant from Bornou they are hermaphrodite, with
elongated filaments; and in the specimen received from M.
Desfontaines they are also hermaphrodite, but the stamina, though
apparently perfect, are fewer in number and shorter than the stipes
of the ovarium. I have observed, however, the flowers to be in like
manner polygamous in some other species of Crateva, belonging
both to India and America, a fact which materially lessens the
dependence to be placed on characters taken from the number and
length of the stamina in this genus.
Crateva Adansonii, it would appear, then, is the only known
species of the African continent, for C. fragrans does not belong to
the genus. And it will be difficult to distinguish this African Crateva
from a plant which seems to be the most general species of India;
except that in the latter, as in all the other species of the genus, the
inequality of the lateral foliola, which is also more marked, consists in
the greater decurrence of the lamina being on the outer or posterior
margin of the footstalk. This Indian species, which may be named C.
Roxburghii, is the Capparis trifoliata of Dr. Roxburgh’s manuscripts,
but not Niirvala of Hortus Malabaricus (vol. 3. p. 49. t. 42), as he
considers it. I have little doubt of its being also the plant described as
C. Tapia, by Vahl, (symb. 3. p. 61.) his specific character well
according with it, and not applying, as far as relates to the petals, to
any known species of America. But as this character is adopted by
Sir James Smith (in Rees’s Cyclop.), it may likewise be C. Tapia of
the Linnæan herbarium; a conjecture the more probable as Linnæus
has distinguished his Tapia by its ovate petals from gynandra, in
which they are said to be lanceolate (Sp. pl. ed. 2. p. 637). This
celebrated herbarium, however, is here of no authority, for Linnæus
was never in possession of sufficient materials to enable him to
understand either the structure and limits of the genus Crateva, or
the distinctions of its species; and the specific name in question,
under which he originally included all the species of the genus, ought
surely to be applied to an American plant, at least, and if possible to
that of Piso, with whom it originated. It is hardly to be supposed that
the plant intended by Piso can now with certainty be determined; the
only species from Brazil, however, with which I am acquainted, well
accords with his figure and short description. This Brazilian species
is readily distinguishable both from C. Adansonii and Roxburghii, by
the form of its petals, which, as in all the other American species, are
narrow-oblong or lanceolate; and from C. gynandra by the shortness
of its stipes genitalium, or torus.
Crateva Tapia so constituted, is, on the authority of a fragment
communicated by Professor Schrader, the Cleome arborea of that
author, (in Gœtt. Anzeig. 1821, p. 707. De Cand. Prodr. 1. p. 242.);
nor is there any thing in the character of C. acuminata of De
Candolle (Prodr. 1. p. 243) which does not well apply to our plant.
C. Tapia, as given by M. De Candolle (op. cit.), is characterized
chiefly on the authority of Plumier’s figure, in the accuracy of which,
either as to the number or length of stamina, it is difficult to believe,
especially when we find it also representing the petals inserted by
pairs on the two upper sinuses of the calyx.
The genus Crateva agrees, as I have already stated, in the
remarkable æstivation of its flower with Cleome Gymnogonia, by
which character, along with that of its fruit, it is readily distinguished
from every other genus of the order. Although this character of its
æstivation has never before been remarked, yet all the species,
referred to Crateva by M. De Candolle, really belong to it, except C.
fragrans, which, with some other plants from the same continent,
forms a very distinct genus, that I shall name Ritchiea, in memory
of the African traveller, whose botanical merits have been already
noticed.
Capparis sodada nob. Sodada decidua, Forsk. Arab. p. 81.
Delile, Flore d’Egypte, p. 74. tab. 26. De Cand. Prodr. 1. p. 245.
The specimen in the herbarium is marked by Dr. Oudney as
belonging to a tree common on the boundaries of Bornou. It is
probably the Suag, mentioned in his journal, observed first at
Aghedem, and said to be “a tetrandrous plant having a small drupa,
which is in great request in Bornou and Soudan, for removing sterility
in females: it is sweetish and hot to the taste, approaching to
Sisymbrium Nasturtium;” and that “in passing the plant a heavy
narcotic smell is always perceived.”
I have here united Sodada with Capparis, not being able to find
differences sufficient to authorise its separation even from the first
section of that genus, as given by De Candolle.
Forskal describes his plant as octandrous, and M. De Candolle
has adopted this number in his generic character. M. Delile (op. cit.),
however, admits that the stamina vary from eight to fifteen; and, in
the specimen which I received from M. Jomard, I have found from
fourteen to sixteen. But were the number of stamina even constantly
eight, this alone would not justify its separation from Capparis,
several octandrous species of which, belonging to the same section,
are already known.
Another species of Capparis, also from Bornou, exists in the
herbarium. It appears to be undescribed, and to belong to M. De
Candolle’s first section of the genus; but the specimen is too
imperfect to be satisfactorily determined.
Both these species have aculei stipulares, and it may here be
remarked that all the plants belonging either to Capparis, or to any of
the genera of the order whose fruit is a berry, in which these aculei
are found, are indigenous either to Asia, Africa, or Europe; while all
the aculeated Cleomes, with the exception of perhaps a single
African species, are natives of equinoxial America.
Mærua rigida. This plant, of which flowering specimens were
collected at Aghedem, certainly belongs to Forskal’s genus Mærua,
adopted by Vahl and De Candolle; and I believe it to be a species
distinct from the three already published. It is very nearly related,
however, to a fourth species (M. Senegalensis nob.), of which I
received a specimen from M. Desfontaines. M. De Candolle has
placed the genus Mærua at the end of Capparideæ, between which
and Passifloreæ he considers it intermediate. This view of its relation
to these two orders I cannot adopt. To me it appears truly a
Capparidea, having very little affinity with Passifloreæ, to which it
seems to approach in one point only, namely, the corona of the
calyx. But of a similar corona rudiments exist in several other African
Capparideæ, and from some of these the genus Mærua is with
difficulty distinguished[97].
Resedaceæ. The herbarium contains two species of Reseda.
The specimens of one of these are too imperfect to be determined.
The other is probably undescribed, though very nearly related to R.
suffruticulosa, and undata of Linnæus. This supposed new species
(Reseda propinqua) was found near Tripoli by Mr. Ritchie, and
between Tripoli and Mourzuk by Dr. Oudney. It is remarkable in
having the ungues of all the petals simple; that is, neither dilated,
thickened, nor having any process or appendage at the point of
union with the trifid lamina, into which they gradually pass. We have
here therefore a species of Reseda with petals not different in any
respect from those of many other families of plants; and, although
this is an exception to their usual structure in the genus, I shall
endeavour to show that all the deviations existing, however complex
in appearance, are reducible to this more simple state of the organ.
Resedaceæ, consisting of Reseda, divisible into sections or
subgenera, and Ochradenus, which may perhaps be regarded as
only one of these subdivisions, I consider very nearly related to
Capparideæ, and as forming part of the same natural class. It differs,
in the variable number of the parts of its floral envelopes, from the
other orders of the class, in which the quaternary or binary division is
without exception; and it is especially remarkable in having the
ovarium open even in its earliest state. From Cruciferæ and
Capparideæ, the two families of the class to which they most nearly
approach, Resedaceæ also differ in the apparent relation of the
stigmata to the placentæ. The stigmata in this order terminate the
lobes of the pistillum, and as these lobes are open sterile portions of
the modified leaves, from the union of which in the undivided part I
suppose the compound ovarium to originate, they necessarily
alternate with the placentæ. I have generally found, however, the
upper part of each placenta covered by a fleshy or fungous process,
which is connected with the margins of the lobes, and therefore with
the stigmata, and is probably essential to the fecundation of the
ovula. The singular apparent transposition of the placentæ in
Sesamoides of Tournefort, so well described by M. Tristan in his
ingenious Memoir on the Affinities of Reseda[98], appears to me
necessarily connected with the extreme shortness of the undivided
base of the ovarium; for in supposing this base to be elongated, the
placentæ would become parietal, and the ovula, which are actually
resupinate, would assume the direction usual in the order.
M. De Jussieu, in his Genera Plantarum, has included Reseda in
Capparideæ, and to this determination I believe he still adheres. M.
Tristan, in the memoir referred to, is inclined to separate it as a
family intermediate between Passifloreæ and Cistineæ, but more
nearly approaching to the latter. M. De Candolle, who first
distinguished Reseda as an order under the name here adopted, in
1819[99] placed it between Polygaleæ and Droseraceæ, and
consequently at no great distance from Capparideæ. He must, since,
however, have materially altered his opinion respecting it; for the
order Resedaceæ is not included in the first or second part of his
Prodromus, and I can find no observation respecting it in these two
volumes. It is probable, therefore, that he may either intend to place
it near Passifloreæ, as suggested by M. Tristan, or, which is more
likely, that he has adopted the hypothesis lately advanced, and
ingeniously supported, by Mr. Lindley, respecting its structure and
affinities[100].
According to this hypothesis, in Reseda the calyx of authors is an
involucrum, its petals neutral flowers, and the disk or nectary
becomes the calyx of a fertile floret in the centre: and, as a deduction
from this view of its structure, the genus has been placed near
Euphorbiaceæ.
The points in the structure of Reseda, which appear to have led
Mr. Lindley to this hypothesis, are the presence and appearance of
the hypogynous disk, the anomalous structure of the petals, and the
singular æstivation of the flower; but it is no slight confirmation of the
correctness of M. de Jussieu’s opinion, that all these anomalies
occur in a greater or less degree in Capparideæ, and have been
found united in no other family of plants. The remarkable æstivation
of Reseda equally exists in Crateva, and in more than one
subdivision of the genus Cleome; the hypogynous disk is developed
in as great a degree in several Capparideæ; and an approximation to
the same kind of irregularity in the petals occurs in two sections of
Cleome.
The analogical argument alone then might, perhaps, be regarded
as conclusive against the hypothesis. But the question, as far as
relates to the petals, and consequently to the supposed composition
of the flower, may be decided still more satisfactorily on other
grounds. Both M.M. Tristan and Lindley regard the upper divided
membranaceous part of the petal as an appendage to the lower,
which is generally fleshy. On the other hand, I consider the anomaly
to consist in the thickening, dilatation, and inner process of the lower
portion, and that all these deviations from ordinary structure are
changes which take place after the original formation of the petal. To
establish these points, and consequently to prove that the parts in
question are simple petals, and neither made up of two cohering
envelopes, as M. Tristan supposes, nor of a calyx and abortive
stamina, according to M. Lindley’s hypothesis, I shall describe their
gradual development, as I have observed it in the common
Mignonette; a plant in which all the anomalies that have led to this
hypothesis exist in a very great degree.
The flower-bud of Reseda odorata, when it first becomes visible,
has the divisions of its calyx slightly imbricate and entirely enclosing
the other parts. In this stage the unguis of each of the two upper
petals is extremely short, not broader than the base of the lamina,
and is perfectly simple; there being no rudiment of the inner process
so remarkable in the fully expanded flower. The lamina at the same
period may be termed palmato-pinnatifid, its divisions are all in the
same plane, the terminating or middle segment is whitish or opake,
and several times longer than the lateral segments, which are
semitransparent.
Of the remaining four petals, the two middle are dimidiato-
pinnatifid, their lateral segments existing only on the upper side; and
the two lower are undivided, being reduced to the middle segment or
simple lamina. All the petals are erect, and do not cover the stamina
in the slightest degree, either in this or in any other stage. The disk is
hardly visible. The Antheræ are longer than their filaments, of a pale-
green colour; those on the upper or posterior side of the flower being
manifestly larger, and slightly tinged with brown. The Pistillum is very
minute and open at the top. In the next stage, the calyx is no longer
imbricate, but open: the petals have their segments in nearly the
same relative proportions; the interior margin of the unguis is just
visible; but the transition from unguis to lamina is still imperceptible;
the apex of the former not being broader than the base of the latter.
It is unnecessary to follow the development through the more
advanced stages of the flower, the facts already stated being, in my
opinion, absolutely conclusive as to the real nature of the parts in
question: and I may remark, that similar observations on certain
genera of Caryophylleæ, especially Dianthus, Lychnis and Silene,
clearly establish the analogy between their petals and those of
Reseda.
I am aware that it has lately been proposed to include Datisca in
Resedaceæ, to which it is nearly similar in the structure of its
ovarium, as M. de Jussieu has long since remarked. But this is the
only point of resemblance between them; for the calyx of Datisca is
certainly adherent, and in most of its other characters it differs widely
both from Reseda, and from every other genus yet published.
Among the numerous discoveries made by Dr. Horsfield in Java,
there is a genus, (Tetrameles nob.) however, manifestly related to
Datisca, and remarkable in the regular quaternary division of every
part of its diœcious flowers. These two genera form an order very
different from every other yet established, and which may be named
Datisceæ.
Caryophylleæ. Five species only of this family were collected
near Tripoli, none of which are new.
Of Zygophylleæ, six species exist in Dr. Oudney’s herbarium,
namely, Tribulus terrestris, found in Bornou; Fagonia cretica, from
Tripoli to Benioleed; Fagonia arabica, at Aghedem; Fagonia Oudneyi
nob. with Zygophyllum simplex in Fezzan; and Zygophyllum album
every where in the desert.
This family, so distinct in habit from Diosmeæ or Rutaceæ, with
which it was formerly united, is not easily characterized by any very
obvious or constant peculiarities in its parts of fructification.
The distinguishing characters in its vegetation or habit are the
leaves being constantly opposite with lateral or intermediate stipulæ,
being generally compound, and always destitute of the pellucid
glands, which universally exist in true Diosmeæ, though not in all
Rutaceæ properly so called.
M. Adrien de Jussieu, in his late very excellent Memoir on the
great order or class Rutaceæ, in distinguishing Zygophylleæ from
the other subdivisions of that class in which he has included it,
depends chiefly on the endocarp, or inner lamina of the pericarp, not
separating from the outer lamina or united epicarp and sarcocarp,
and on the texture of the albumen. His first section of Zygophylleæ,
however, is characterised by the want of albumen; and in his second
section I find exceptions to the remaining character, especially in
Fagonia Mysorensis, in which the two laminæ of the ripe capsule
separate as completely as in Diosmeæ. Another plant, in my opinion
referrible to the same order, and which, in memory of a very
meritorious African traveller, I have named Seetzenia africana, has in
its ripe capsule the epicarp, or united epicarp and sarcocarp,
confined to the dorsal carina of each cell, the endocarp being the
only membrane existing on the sides, which are exposed long before
the bursting of the fruit. The plant in question has indeed many other
peculiarities, some of which may, perhaps, be considered sufficient
to authorise its separation from the order to which I have referred it;
for the æstivation of its calyx is valvular, it has no petals, its five
styles are distinct to the base, and the cells of its ovarium appear to
me to be monospermous. It completely retains, however, the
characters of vegetation on which I chiefly depend in distinguishing
Zygophylleæ; and I have no doubt of its being Zygophyllum lanatum
of Willdenow[101], by whom it is stated to be a native of Sierra Leone;
I suppose, however, on insufficient authority, for the specimens in the
Banksian Herbarium, from which I have made my observations, were
found in South Africa, near Olifant’s River, by Francis Masson.
In all the species of Fagonia, and in the two species of
Zygophyllum in Dr. Oudney’s collection, a character in the
fructification still remains, which is not found in Diosmeæ or
Rutaceæ, and which, were it general in Zygophylleæ, would
satisfactorily distinguish this order from all the families it has usually
been compared with. This character consists in the direction of the
embryo with relation to the insertion of the funiculus, its radicle being
seated at the opposite extremity of the seed, or to express, in the
unimpregnated ovarium, the infallible indication of this position, the
direction of the inner membrane and nucleus of the ovulum
corresponds with that of its testa.
But this character, in general very uniform in natural families, and
which, equally existing in Cistineæ, so well defines the limits of that
order, as I have long since remarked[102], would seem to be of less
importance in Zygophylleæ.
M. Adrien de Jussieu, who, in his memoir already cited, admits its
existence in Fagonia, and in both our species of Zygophyllum,
considers it as an exception to the general structure of the latter
genus, in the definition of which he retains the character of “radicula
hilo proxima.” I believe, however, that in all the species of
Zygophyllum, except Fabago, which possesses, also, other
distinguishing characters, this opposition of the radicle to the
external hilum will be found; for in addition to the two species
contained in the herbarium, in both of which it is very manifest, I
have observed it in Z. coccineum, and in all the species of South
Africa that I have had an opportunity of examining. In some of these
species, indeed, it is much less obvious, partly from the greater
breadth of the funiculus, and also from its being closely applied, or
even slightly adhering, to the testa of the seed. But hence it is
possible to reconcile the structure of these species with that of
Fabago itself, in which the raphe seems to me to be external: and if
this be really the case, Fabago differs from those Zygophylla of
South Africa alluded to, merely in the more intimate union of the
funiculus with the surface of the testa. Whether this observation
might be extended to the other genera of the order, I have not yet
attempted to ascertain.
Balanites Ægyptiaca, though not belonging to Zygophylleæ,
may be here mentioned. The specimen is from Bornou, but like all
the other plants of that country, has no particular place of growth
indicated, nor is there any observation respecting it. For a very full
and interesting history of this plant, I may refer to M. Delile’s Flore
d’Egypte (p. 77. tab. 28).
Of Cistineæ, three species were observed between Tripoli and
Mourzuk.
The Geraniaceæ of the collection consist of four species of
Erodium, all of which were found on the same journey.
Of Malvaceæ, considered as a class, there are twelve species in
the herbarium. Only two of these are particularly deserving of notice.
The first, Adansonia digitata, found in Soudan, where the tree is
called Kouka, is described by Captain Clapperton; the second,
Melhania Denhamii, a new and remarkable species of the genus,
differing from all the others in having its bracteæ regularly
verticillated, and, at the same time, longer and much broader than
the divisions of the calyx.
A single species of Vitis is in the collection, from Bornou.
Neurada prostrata, generally referred to Rosaceæ, was found
in Wady Ghrurbi.
Tamariscineæ. A species of Tamarix, apparently not different
from T. gallica, is the Attil, common in Fezzan, where, according to
Dr. Oudney, it is the only shady tree.
Lorantheæ. A species of Loranthus, parasitical on the Acacia
nilotica, was observed very commonly from Fezzan to Bornou.
Leguminosæ. Of this class the herbarium contains thirty-three
species, among which there are hardly more than two undescribed,
and these belonging to a well-established genus.
Of the order or tribe Mimoseæ only three species occur, namely,
Acacia nilotica, Mimosa Habbas, and Inga biglobosa, or a species
very nearly related to it. Of this last named plant, I judge merely from
ripe fruits adhering to the singular club-shaped receptacle, or axis of
the spike. The specimens were collected in Soudan, and belong to a
tree of considerable importance to the inhabitants of that country, by
whom it is called Doura. According to Captain Clapperton, “The
seeds are roasted as we roast coffee, then bruised, and allowed to
ferment in water; when they begin to become putrid, they are well
washed and pounded; the powder made into cakes, somewhat in the
fashion of our chocolate; they form an excellent sauce for all kinds of
food. The farinaceous matter surrounding the seeds is made into a
pleasant drink, and they also make it into a sweetmeat.” The Doura
of Captain Clapperton is probably not specifically different from the
Nitta mentioned by Park, in his First Journey; nor from Inga
biglobosa of the Flore d’Oware of M. de Beauvois, according to
whom it is the Nety of Senegal; and he also well remarks, that Inga
biglobosa, described by Jacquin as a native of Martinico, has
probably been introduced into that island by the Negroes, as he
himself found it to have been in St. Domingo.
Inga Senegalensis of M. De Candolle (Prodr. 2. p. 442) may also
belong to the same species.
It is possible, however, that some of the plants here mentioned,
though very nearly related to each other, and having all the same
remarkable club-shaped spike, may be specifically distinct; for it
appears from specimens collected at Sierra Leone by Professor
Afzelius, that two plants having this form of spike are known in that
colony; and two species, with similar inflorescence, probably distinct
from those of Africa, are described in the manuscript Flora Indica of
Dr. Roxburgh. All these plants possess characters fully sufficient to
distinguish them from Inga, to which they have hitherto been
referred. The new genus which they form, one of the most striking
and beautiful in equinoxial Africa, I have named Parkia[103], as a
tribute of respect to the memory of the celebrated traveller, by whom
the fruit of this genus was observed in his first journey, and who,
among other services rendered to botany, ascertained that the plant
producing Gum Kino is a species of Pterocarpus[104]. I have formerly
endeavoured to distinguish Mimoseæ from Cæsalpineæ, by the
valvular æstivation of both its floral envelopes, and by the
hypogynous insertion of its stamina. Instances of perigynous
insertion of stamina have since been noticed by MM. Kunth and
Auguste de St. Hilaire; but no exception has been yet pointed out to
the valvular æstivation of their calyx and corolla. Parkia, however,
differs from other Mimoseæ not only in its æstivation, which is
imbricate, but in the very manifest irregularity of its calyx, and in the
inequality of its petals, which, though less obvious, is still observable.
Erythrophleum, another genus indigenous to equinoxial Africa,
which I have elsewhere[105] had occasion to notice, and then
referred to Cæsalpineæ, more properly belongs to Mimoseæ,
although its stamina are perigynous. In this genus, both calyx and
corolla are perfectly regular, and their æstivation, if not strictly
valvular, is at least not manifestly imbricate, though the flower-buds
are neither acute nor angular. In Erythrophleum and Parkia,
therefore, exceptions to all the assumed characters of Mimoseæ are
found, and there is some approach in both genera to the habit of
Cæsalpineæ. It is still possible, however, to distinguish, and it will
certainly be expedient to preserve, these two tribes or orders.
Abandoning divisions strictly natural, and so extensive as the tribes
in question, merely because we may not be able to define them with
precision, while it would imply, what is far from being the case, that
our analysis of their structure is complete, would, at the same time,
be fatal to many natural families of plants at present admitted, and
among others to the universally received class to which these tribes
belong. No clear character, at least, is pointed out in the late
elaborate work of M. De Candolle[106], by which Leguminosæ may
be distinguished from Terebintaceæ and Rosaceæ, the orders
supposed to be the most nearly related to it. It is possible, however,
that such characters, though hitherto overlooked, may really exist;
and I shall endeavour to show that Leguminosæ, independent of the
important but minute differences in the original structure and
developement of its ovulum, may still be distinguished at least from
Rosaceæ.
In the character of Polygaleæ, which I published in 1814[107], I
marked the relation of the parts of the floral envelopes to the axis of
the spike, or to the subtending bractea. I introduced this
circumstance chiefly to contrast Polygaleæ with Leguminosæ, and to
prove, as I conceived, that Securidaca, which had generally been
referred to the latter family, really belonged to the former.
M. de Jussieu, who soon after published a character of
Polygaleæ, entirely omitted this consideration, and continued to refer
Securidaca to Leguminosæ. M. De Candolle, however, in the first
volume of his Prodromus, has adopted both the character and limits
of Polygaleæ, which I had proposed, though apparently not
altogether satisfied with the description he himself has given of the
divisions of the calyx and corolla.
The disposition of the parts of the floral envelopes, with reference
to the axis of the spike, in Polygaleæ, namely, the fifth segment of
the calyx being posterior or superior and the fifth petal anterior or
inferior, is the usual relation in families the division of whose flower is
quinary. This relation is in some cases inverted; one example of
which I have formerly pointed out in Lobeliaceæ[108], as I proposed
to limit it, and a similar inversion exists in Leguminosæ. But this
class also deviates from the more general arrangement of the parts
of the flower with regard to each other. That arrangement consists,
as I have long since remarked[109], in the regular alternation of the
divisions of the proximate organs of the complete flower. To this
arrangement, indeed, many exceptions are well known; and M. De
Candolle has given a table of all the possible deviations, but without
stating how many of these have actually been observed[110].
In Leguminosæ the deviation from the assumed regular
arrangement consists in the single pistillum being placed opposite to
the lower or anterior segment of the calyx.
In these two characters, namely, the relation of the calyx and
corolla both to the simple pistillum and to the axis of the spike or to
the bractea, Leguminosæ differ from Rosaceæ, in which the more
usual arrangements are found.
But in those Rosaceæ, in which the pistillum is solitary and placed
within the anterior petal, its relation to the axis of the spike is the
same as that of Leguminosæ, in which it is within the anterior
division of the calyx. And in all families, whether dicotyledonous or
monocotyledonous, this, I believe, is uniformly the position of the
simple solitary pistillum with regard to the spike or bractea.
The frequent reduction of Pistilla, in plants having the other parts
of the flower complete in number, must have been generally
remarked. But the order in which these abstractions of pistilla take
place, or the relations of the reduced series to the other parts of the
flower, have, as far as I know, never yet been particularly attended
to. It will probably appear singular, that the observation of these
relations in the reduced series of pistilla should have suggested the
opinion, that in a complete flower, whose parts are definite, the
number of stamina and also of pistilla is equal to that of the divisions
of the calyx and corolla united in Dicotyledones, and of both series of
the perianthium in Monocotyledones.
This assumed complete number of stamina is actually the
prevailing number in Monocotyledones; and though in Dicotyledones
less frequent than what may be termed the symmetrical number, or
that in which all the series are equal, is still found in decandrous and
octandrous genera, and in the greater part of Leguminosæ. The
tendency to the production of the complete number, where the
symmetrical really exists, is manifested in genera belonging or
related to those pentandrous families in which the stamina are
opposite to the divisions of the corolla, as by Samolus related to
Primulaceæ, and by Bæobotrys, having an analogous relation to
Myrsineæ; for in both these genera, five additional imperfect stamina
are found alternating with the fertile, and consequently occupying the
place of the only stamina existing in most pentandrous families.
Indications of this number may also be said to exist in the divisions
of the hypogynous disk of many pentandrous orders.
With respect to the Pistilla, the complete number is equally rare in
both the primary divisions of phænogamous plants. In
Monocotyledones, the symmetrical number is very general, while it is
much less frequent in Dicotyledones, in which there is commonly a
still farther reduction.
Where the number of Pistilla in Dicotyledones is reduced to two,
in a flower in which both calyx and corolla are present and their
division quinary, one of these pistilla is placed within a division of the
calyx, the other opposite to a petal or segment of the corolla. In other
words, the addition to the solitary pistillum, (which is constantly
anterior or exterior), is posterior or interior. This is the general
position of the component parts of a bilocular ovarium, or an ovarium
having two parietal placentæ; and in flowers whose division is
quinary, I can recollect no other exceptions to it, than in some genera
of Dilleniaceæ.
It is particularly deserving of notice, that the common position of
the cells of the bilocular pericarpium with relation to the axis of the
spike was well known to Cæsalpinus, who expressly distinguished
Cruciferæ from all other bilocular families by their peculiarity in this
respect, the loculi in that family being placed right and left, instead of
being anterior and posterior[111].
On the subject of the position of the Pistilla in the other degrees of
reduction from the symmetrical number, I shall not at present enter.
But in reference to Leguminosæ, I may remark, that it would be of
importance to ascertain the position of the Pistilla in the pentagynous
Mimosea, stated to have been found in Brazil by M. Auguste de St.
Hilaire[112]. Are these Pistilla placed opposite to the divisions of the
calyx, as might probably be inferred from the position of the solitary
Legumen in this class? Or are we to expect to find them opposite to
the petals, which is the more usual relation, and their actual place in
Cnestis, though the single ovarium of Connarus, a genus belonging
to the same family, is seated within the anterior division of the calyx?
In the very few Leguminosæ in which the division of the flower is
quaternary, namely, in certain species of Mimosa, the ovarium is still
placed within one of the divisions of the calyx.
As to Moringa, which was originally referred to this class from a
mistaken notion of its absolutely belonging to Guilandina, it is surely
sufficiently different from all Leguminosæ, not only in its compound
unilocular ovarium with three parietal placentæ, but also in its simple
unilocular antheræ; and it appears to me to be an insulated genus,
or family (Moringeæ), whose place in the natural series has not yet
been determined.
Cæsalpineæ. Of this tribe, four species only occur in the
collection. One of these is Bauhinia rufescens of Lamarck (Illustr.
329, f. 2.); another is Cassia (Senna) obovata, which, according to
Dr. Oudney, grows wild in small quantities in Wady Ghrurbi.
Papilionaceæ. Twenty-six species of this tribe are contained in
the herbarium, none of which form new genera, and the only two
species that appear to be unpublished belong to Indigofera.
Alhagi Maurorum, or Agoul, is abundant in Fezzan, where it forms
excellent food for camels.
Compositæ. Of this class, thirty-six species exist in the collection.
The far greater part of these were found in the vicinity of Tripoli and
in the Desert. All of them appear to belong to established genera,
and very few species are undescribed.
Rubiaceæ. The herbarium contains only six species of this family,
five of which, belonging to Spermacoce and Hedyotis, were found in
Bornou and Soudan; the sixth, a species of Galium, near Tripoli.
Of Asclepiadeæ only three plants occur. One of these is a new
species of Oxystelma, exactly resembling in its flowers O.
esculentum of India, from which it differs in the form of its leaves,
and in that of its fruit[113]. A species of Dœmia was found in the
Desert; but the specimens are too imperfect to be ascertained.
Of Apocineæ, strictly so called, there is no plant whatever in the
collection; and of Gentianeæ, a single species only of Erythræa.
Sesameæ. An imperfect specimen of Sesamum pterospermum, of
the catalogue of Mr. Salt’s Abyssinian plants[114], is in the collection
from Bornou.
Sapoteæ. The only plant of this family in the herbarium is the
Micadania, or Butter Tree of Soudan, particularly noticed by Captain
Clapperton. The specimen, however, is very imperfect, consisting of
detached leaves, an incomplete fruit, and a single ripe seed. On
comparing these leaves with the specimen of Park’s Shea Tree[115],
in the Banksian Herbarium, I have little doubt that they both belong
to one and the same species. Whether this plant is really a Bassia, is
not equally certain; and the seed at least agrees better with Vitellaria
paradoxa of the younger Gærtner, (Carpol. tab. 205.) than with that
of Bassia, figured by his father, (de Fruct. et Sem. Pl. tab. 104.)
That the woody shell in the nuts of all Sapoteæ is really formed of
the testa or outer membrane of the seed, as I have elsewhere
stated[116], and not of a portion of the substance of the pericarpium,
according to the late M. Richard and the younger Gærtner, is proved
not only by the aperture or micropyle being still visible on its surface,
as M. Turpin has already shown in one case, (Ann. du Mus. d’Hist.
Nat. 7, tab. 11, f. 3.); but also by the course and termination of the
raphe, as exhibited in the younger Gærtner’s figures of Calvaria and
Sideroxylum, (Carpol. tabb. 200, 201, et 202.) and by the origin and
ramification of the internal vessels.
Scrophularinæ. Only six species of this family occur, none of
which are unpublished.
Orobanche compacta of Viviani was observed between Fezzan
and Bornou.
Of Convolvulaceæ there are five species, four of which belong
to Bornou; the fifth is an aquatic Ipomœa, found creeping on the
borders of a small lake near Tintuma. Possibly this plant may be
Ipomœa aquatica of Forskal, and consequently Convolvulus repens
of Vahl, (symb. 1, p. 17.) It is not, however, the plant so called by
Linnæus, which proves, as I have elsewhere stated, (Prodr. Fl. Nov.
Holl. 1, p. 483.) to be Calystegia sepium; nor does it belong to either
of his synonymes. Our plant differs also from Vahl’s description of his
Convolvulus repens, in having constantly single-flowered peduncles,
and leaves whose posterior lobes are rather acute than obtuse, and
are quite entire. It is probably, therefore, distinct; and I have named it
Ipomœa Clappertoni[117].
Among the few Labiatæ, there is a species of Lavandula, possibly
distinct from but very nearly related to L. multifida. It was found on
the mountains of Tarhona.
Of Boragineæ, the herbarium includes eleven species, the
greater part of which were collected near Tripoli, and all of them
belong to well established genera.
Primulaceæ. Of this family two species of Anagallis occur in the
collection, and of these A. cærulea was observed both near Tripoli
and in Bornou.
Samolus Valerandi was also found near Tripoli, in Wady
Sardalis in Fezzan, and in Bornou.
Of Dicotyledonous, or even of all phænogamous plants, S.
valerandi is perhaps the most widely diffused. It is a very general
plant in Europe, has been found in several parts of North Africa, in
Dr. Oudney’s herbarium it is from Bornou, I have myself observed it
at the Cape of Good Hope and in New South Wales, and it is also
indigenous to North America.
The geographical distribution of the genus Samolus is equally
remarkable. At present eight species are known, of which S.
Valerandi is the only one indigenous to Europe, or which, indeed,
has been found in the northern hemisphere, except the nearly
related S. ebracteatus of Cuba. All the other species belong to the
southern hemisphere, where S. Valerandi has also a very extensive
range.
Of Plumbagineæ, there are three species of Statice Taxanthema;
for the latter name may be preserved as belonging to a section,
though hardly as that of a genus, so far at least as depends on
inflorescence, which in both subdivisions of Statice is essentially
similar; that of Statice Armeria being only more condensed. Of the
three species in the herbarium, one appears to be unpublished.
Among the plants of the Apetalous orders in the collection, there
are very few remarkable, and hardly any new species.
Gymnocarpus decandrum was observed by Dr. Oudney very
commonly in gravelly deserts, on the route from Tripoli to Fezzan;
and Cornulaca monacantha of M. Delile is said to be widely
extended from Tripoli to Bornou, and to be excellent food for camels.
Monocotyledones. The number of species belonging to this
primary division contained in the herbarium is altogether seventy. But
Gramineæ and Cyperaceæ being excluded, thirteen only remain,
namely, three species of Juncus, a single Commelina, three
Melanthaceæ, three Asphodeleæ, one species of Iris, and two
Aroideæ, of which Pistia Stratiotes is one.
Of these thirteen plants, two appear to be unpublished, both of
them belonging to Melanthaceae. The first, a congener of
Melanthium punctatum, which is also in the collection, was found in
Fezzan.
The second is a species of Colchicum, very different from any
hitherto described; and which yet, by Mr. Ritchie, who first observed
it, is said to be common in the desert near Tripoli, where it was also
found by Dr. Oudney.
This species, which I have named Colchicum Ritchii, is easily
distinguished from all its congeners by having two cristæ or
membranous processes which are generally fimbriated, at the base
of each segment of the perianthium, parallel to each other, and to the
intermediate filament. But this character, though excellent as a
specific difference, is neither of generic importance, nor sufficient to
authorise the formation of a separate section[118].
Bulbocodium and Merendera, however, which, following Mr.
Ker[119], I consider as belonging to Colchicum, appear to me
decidedly to form subgenera or sections; and in this opinion I am
confirmed by having found a fourth section of the same genus. This
fourth subgenus is established on Hypoxis fascicularis, a plant
which has been seen by very few botanists, and which Linnæus
introduced into his Species Plantarum, and referred to Hypoxis,
solely on the authority of the figure published in Dr. Russell’s History
of Aleppo. In the Banksian Herbarium I have examined part of the
original specimen of this species, found by Dr. Alexander Russell,
and figured by Ehret in the work referred to, as well as more perfect
specimens collected by Dr. Patrick Russell; and am satisfied that its
ovarium is not in any degree adherent to the tube of the perianthium.
I find, also, that Hypoxis fascicularis differs from Colchicum merely in
having a simple unilocular ovarium with a single parietal placenta
and an undivided style, instead of the compound trilocular ovarium
with distinct or partially united styles, common to all the other
sections of that genus.
A reduction, as in this case, to the solitary simple pistillum[120],
though existing in all Gramineæ and in certain genera of several
other families of Monocotyledones, is yet comparatively rare in that
primary division of phænogamous plants, and in the great class

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The Psychology of Reading: Insights

from Chinese Reichle

Er ik D. R eichl e is a professor of Cognitive Psychology at

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

List of Figures page ix

1 The Psychology of Reading 1

2 The Chinese Language and Writing System 21

3 Character and Word Identification 46

5 Reading Skill Development, Dyslexia,

1.1 Schematic diagram of McClelland and Rumelhart’s (1981)

3.1 Important findings related to the learning and

The Psychology of Reading

1.1 Communication, Language, and Reading

1.2 Methods to Study Reading

1.3 Models of Reading

1.4 Chapter Previews

The Chinese Language and Writing System

This chapter is intended to provide a high-level description of the Chinese

2.1 The Chinese Language

vary quite considerably, with larger, more homogeneous enclaves across

2.2 The History of the Chinese Writing System

Figure 2.3 A few examples of the earliest form of Chinese writing

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