摘要：Models of oral reading in Chinese assume there are at least two pathways available. Based on aphasie patient studies, Weekes, Chen and Yin (1997) proposed that a lexical semantic pathway and a non-semantic (direct) pathway are normally used for reading in Chinese. Unlike conversion of graphemes-to-phonemes in alphabetic languages, they assumed Chinese characters are not decomposed by nonlexical mechanisms to assemble subword units for pronunciation. Instead, pronunciation depends on the operation of semantic and direct reading pathways only. Weekes and Chen (1999) also hypothesized that oral reading of high imageability (concrete) characters was independent of the semantic reading pathway as these characters can be read aloud by the direct pathway alone. One test of this hypothesis comes from the oral reading of children with hyperlexia. These children can read aloud correctly despite impaired comprehension of written words. According to Weekes and Chen (1999), children with hyperlexia in Chinese should be able to read high imageability characters that they cannot comprehend.
