Charles Perfetti is the director of, and Senior Scientist for, the Learning and Research Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
He conducts cognitive behavioral studies involving ERP, fMRI and MEG imaging techniques.
[1] Charles Perfetti focuses on recognizing specific components of reading which are generalized across cultures.
Perfetti's studies which are concerned with learning across writing systems, involve neuroimaging such as fMRI and ERP.
Event related potential readings shows that various types of information are available to be quickly accessed for comprehension.
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.
[2] For additional support on his research of comparing English and Chinese writing styles, Perfetti published an article called Writing Affects the Brain Network of Reading in Chinese: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.
The participants were 17 Carnegie Mellon undergraduates who had Functional Magnetic resonance imaging was administered on them while they completed a passive viewing and lexical decision.
In the lexical decision task, participants had to figure out whether the stimulus was a real Chinese character or not and lasted for over 5 minutes.
Results also revealed brain activation patterns for the passive viewing and lexical decision tasks.
Character writing influences components not used for native languages at the visual and mapping form.
[3] In exploring the Lexical Quality Hypothesis Charles Perfetti focuses on analyzing the brain’s fundamentals of being able to read.
In doing so, Perfetti provides findings that suggest word-knowledge impacts the processing of word meaning and comprehension.
[4] His findings also focus on the importance of lexical Representations and how it facilitates differences in individuals who perform comprehension task.
In his article Learning words in Zekish: Implications for understanding Lexical Representation, He describes their studies of phonology, orthography and comprehension.
When analyzing comprehension, he considers lexical knowledge that is placed into a system which can provide and maintain what is represented in a text being read.
To provide evidence of this, Perfetti analyzes three types of lower lexical quality words and what they contribute to the processing of text.
The students were given reading task to assess their levels of spelling, word sounding and comprehension skills.
Furthermore, educating participants on lower exposed members of homophones can reverse the confusion of comprehension to the point that they become higher frequency words.
In this study, adults with various levels of reading comprehension skills learned rare unknown English words.
He argues that learning how to write words may improve orthographic representations and support word-specific identification processes.
The rule relates to Chinese language where the writing system promotes character-specific identification depending on accuracy representation of how a word is spelled.
This experiment consisted of two studies that tested the hypothesis by analyzing learners of the Chinese language.
Due to the fact that participants were learners and not readers of Chinese, there was an expectation of lexical decision being the influence of learning.
The first thing he does is talk about the assimilation and accommodation hypothesis that involve the process of learning a second language.
Two test these hypothesis, Perfetti and colleagues examined a group of Chinese speakers who happened to be late learners with various levels of proficiency in English.
The study involved participants deciding whether two symbol patterns presented in sequence match or mismatched.