This dissertation explores the learning mechanism underlying reading process: how systematicities in the writing system are acquired and used in learning to read a language, and whether phonological learning and semantic learning are cooperative or not. Artificial orthographies were developed and used to manipulate systematicities of the correspondences between written forms and their pronunciations (orthography-to-phonology, O-P) as well as between written forms and their meanings (orthography-to-semantics, O-S). Participants were trained with an artificial orthography either with systematicities in both the O-P and O-S mappings, or with systematicities in only one mapping (0-P or O-S). The results showed that systematicities in one mapping facilitated the learning of that mapping and resulted in componential organization of the knowledge representation of that mapping. More interestingly, systematicities in one mapping also facilitated the learning of another mapping, indicating a cooperative learning mechanism between phonological learning and semantic learning. The cooperative learning mechanism was further revealed in learning order effects from Experiment 2. The correspondence in one mapping was learned better when it was learned later (could get more contributions from another mapping) than when it was learned earlier (could not get any contribution from another mapping). However, the cooperative learning effects in the current experiments were not as strong as expected and interacted with learning mappings and radical positions. The current findings not only provide empirical evidence for cooperative learning mechanism inspired by the triangle model, but also suggest challenges to the triangle model for the complex interaction effects in cooperative learning, and thus have theoretical contributions.
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