Visual field differences in visual word recognition can emerge purely from perceptual learning: Evidence from modeling Chinese character pronunciation

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is skewed to the right, whereas in PS characters it is skewed to the left. Through training a computational model for SP and PS character recognition that takes into account of the locations in which the characters appear in the visual field during learning, but does not assume any fundamental hemispheric processing difference, we show that visual field differences can emerge as a consequence of the fundamental structural differences in information between SP and PS characters, as opposed to the fundamental processing differences between the two hemispheres. This modeling result is also consistent with behavioral naming performance. This work provides strong evidence that perceptual learning, i.e., the information structure of word stimuli to which the readers have long been exposed, is one of the factors that accounts for hemispheric asymmetry effects in visual word recognition.

► I model the recognition of two Chinese character types with opposite phonetic radical positions.
► The model does not assume any fundamental processing differences between the hemispheres.
► The two types have different visual field asymmetry effects due to the structural differences.
► The human character naming data correspond well with the modeling data.
► This result suggests that visual field differences can emerge purely due to perceptual learning.