Charles Perfetti

Charles Perfetti is the director of, and Senior Scientist for, the Learning and Research Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. His research is centered on the cognitive science of language and reading processes, including but not limited to lower- and higher-level lexical and syntactic processes and the nature of reading proficiency. He conducts cognitive behavioral studies involving ERP, fMRI and MEG imaging techniques. His goal is to develop a richer understanding of how language is processed in the brain.

Charles Perfetti focuses on recognizing specific components of reading which are generalized across cultures. In doing so he compares the word recognition processes of Chinese and writing. Perfetti's studies which are concerned with learning across writing systems, involve neuroimaging such as fMRI and ERP. In his research titled Sentence integration processes: An ERP study of Chinese sentence comprehension with relative clauses, Perfetti analyzed comprehension of various types of Chinese relative clauses to find out generalization and linguistic specificity of how sentence comprehension is processed. The idea of the study is based on the fact that object-extracted clauses increase in memory load which is why subject-extracted clauses are easier to comprehend. The fact that Chinese speakers lack grammatical relationships between arguments raises questions whether if the process of remembering a words context overshadows the extraction of clausal relationships. The English language is the opposite because sentences which are processed are structure-dependent.

This experiment was performed on twenty-one graduates from the University of Pittsburgh who were native Chinese speakers. Participants had to perform a written sentence task where they would read a sentence that interrupted the approved continuation with a relative clause. The results of what was called the norming study revealed that approval of subject verb-object continuations were high both subject extracted and object extracted clauses. Participants read experimental sentences that contain one of the two types of relative clauses. One version of experimental sentences was read within a session and the other version was read between five and ten minutes later. An electroencephalogram recording was collected for each participant who read a sentence in Chinese.

The results reveal that structure and meaning processes of Chinese reading and the process of different kinds of information are parallel to other languages. The ERP results conclude that sense and thought processes are generalized across languages. Event related potential readings shows that various types of information are available to be quickly accessed for comprehension. Posterior regions of the brain support word to referent processing while anterior regions provide thinking and memory processes to build on references. The process of processing information depends on continuous support of memory devices to identify limited relations as it hold onto information being referenced. Perfetti’s finding conclude overall that Chinese sentence reading uses a neurological system that is susceptible to the hierarchical and sequential organization of linguistic judgment, reflecting the generalization of English.

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