Thanks for using your very specific phrase in describing the research you recall. That helped me Google up a later study (I also had vague memories of the earlier study) that found that there is no particular difference in brain processing to the advantage of traditional Chinese script.
as a checklist of what to look for in experimental research.
Because everyone who is neurologically normal and with good hearing can speak, and understand speech, we can be reasonably confident that there are powerful brain short-cuts for dealing with phonological processing. Cross-cultural comparisons do show a variety of societally relevant efficiencies from writing systems being more rather than less user-friendly in representing speech sounds. The long argument on this point is given by John DeFrancis's book Visible Speech.
I narrowly escape embarrassment, because "phonetic activation" was a mistake. It's phonological activation, but I excuse myself if you were successful with that term :)
Now that I see this abstract, the "vaguely recalled" paper could have been on kana vs kanji processing. It's quite a no-brainer actually, because kanji stresses pattern recognition far more than kana, so it's only natural that phonological activation comes later, at which point semantic activation may have been activated.
Regarding the linked research, however, I can make a few observations. First, both as heavily-practiced scripts it isn't surprising that the same areas are recruited. We are looking at areas of phonological and semantic processing. Second, as these are heavily-practiced skills, pattern recognition is very efficient; you could probably get substantial differences if you compared bopomofo-trained readers vs. pinyin-trained readers, reading each others' scripts. In this case, you could predict, again, the same areas recruited for processing, but significant timing differences. Third, this is obviously not an RSVP paradigm. If it were, you'd be able to tweak how fast the subject needs to perceive the symbols, and it could be possible to get slightly different results between order of processing for the symbols. And under the RSVP paradigm, I would make the risky prediction that hanzi would win out in cognitive overload situations.
Just to clarify, I'm not commenting on the relative advantages in processing (nor do I think the bottleneck is in the script -- and hence it's silly to proclaim the superiority of semantic power of one script over another for the language trolls and apologists). It's more of a "language engineer's" look at scripts.
Thanks for using your very specific phrase in describing the research you recall. That helped me Google up a later study (I also had vague memories of the earlier study) that found that there is no particular difference in brain processing to the advantage of traditional Chinese script.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17885613
In the papers I have read on this issue, that seems to be the better replicated finding. As always, I recommend Peter Norvig's paper
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
as a checklist of what to look for in experimental research.
Because everyone who is neurologically normal and with good hearing can speak, and understand speech, we can be reasonably confident that there are powerful brain short-cuts for dealing with phonological processing. Cross-cultural comparisons do show a variety of societally relevant efficiencies from writing systems being more rather than less user-friendly in representing speech sounds. The long argument on this point is given by John DeFrancis's book Visible Speech.
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...