ABSTRACT
This chapter will provide a comprehensive review of behavioural and neural evidence for the role of phonology in Chinese reading processes and how the best mapping principles and corresponding rules between orthography and phonology emerge in learning to read Chinese. The findings support the statistical learning mechanism for reading acquisition across writing systems and suggest that repeated exposure to similar orthographic forms, such as the phonetic radical in Chinese, is the key to developing awareness of the common unit within a set of orthographic neighbours and creating efficient mappings from sublexical orthographic units to sounds.
