REVIEW article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Bilingualism
The Need for A Triangle Comparison Among Chinese Characters, Pinyin, and English: from Behavioral and Neurophysiological Perspectives
Provisionally accepted
- 1Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, Institute of Reproduction and Development, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
- 2Fudan University, Shanghai, China
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The current study reviewed previous research comparing Chinese and English from behavioral and, emphatically, neurophysiological perspectives. We found that previous studies have identified the time course and brain activation locations involved in processing Chinese and English. At the same time, most of them focus on comparing Chinese characters with English or Chinese characters with Hanyu Pinyin, leaving a gap in the comparison between Pinyin and English, which is essential in understanding the relationship between Chinese and English cognition. By summarizing the indices of previous fMRI and EEG studies, we conceived the idea of comparing Hanyu Pinyin and English using a future experimental paradigm. Meanwhile, Pinyin's role in character input and reading development in Chinese children was also an intriguing topic for future research.
Keywords: Chinese, english, Pinyin, comparison, Neurophysiological
Received: 04 Sep 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tian Zhang, 18110110063@fudan.edu.cn
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