Question

The traditional writing system of Chinese is ideographic (each concept or word is represented by a distinct character). More recently, the Chinese government has adopted a spelling system called pinyin, which is based on the Roman alphabet, and in which each symbol represents a sound. Following are several Chinese words in their character and pinyin forms. (The digit following the Roman letters in pinyin is a tone indicator and may be ignored.)

⽊ mu4 tree
花 hua1 flower
⽊ren2 man
家 jia1 home
狗 gou3 dog

Based on the information provided in this chapter, the location of neural activity would be the same when Chinese speakers read in these two systems.
a. True
b. False

Answer 1

The statement is false. Traditional Chinese characters and pinyin engage different cognitive and neurobiological processes given that characters are ideographic and pinyin is phonetic, affecting different areas of the brain during reading.

Step-by-step explanation:

The statement that neural activity would be the same when Chinese speakers read in both traditional Chinese characters and pinyin is false. Traditional Chinese characters are ideographic, meaning they represent ideas or objects rather than sounds.

Each character carries its own meaning and must be learned individually. Conversely, pinyin is a phonetic system that approximates the sounds of Mandarin using the Roman alphabet and tone indicators. This represents a fundamental difference in the cognitive processing required for literacy in these two systems. Learning traditional characters is a matter of memorizing thousands of unique symbols along with their meanings, which is a more visual and object-recognition intensive process.

In contrast, pinyin leverages the reader's knowledge of the phonetic values assigned to each letter of the Roman alphabet, a system that is more auditory and phonologically based. As such, reading traditional Chinese characters would predominantly activate areas of the brain related to visual processing and memory recall, while reading pinyin would engage areas related to phonological processing and auditory recognition.