Jun Ren Lee, Wen-Jui Kuo, Rose Ru-Whui Lee and Ovid J. L. Tzeng

ABSTRACT: The universality and specificity of cross-linguistic reading have always been a topic of interest to researchers. The earliest controversies started with the issue of whether speech recoding is required for reading non-alphabetic scripts, for example, Chinese and Kanji, whether it is possible to directly access the semantic meaning of a word from orthography without speech recoding, and whether reading non-alphabetic scripts relies on the right rather than the left brain. The abatement of these controversies began with a series of experiments by Ovid Tzeng and William Wang which raised the possibility of universality across different languages. To study how humans read, two kinds of operation must be considered: the human cognitive system and the structure of language. In this paper, we will take the original controversy of non-alphabetic scripts being different from alphabetic scripts in the 1970s as the starting point, and use the current research results of cognitive neuroscience to explain what kind of consensus has been reached right now. In addition, we will use tone as an important feature in the study of Chinese reading, and describe the current research results on tone to highlight the special characteristics of Chinese. Finally, we will propose future research directions.