Ohhhh that makes sense. Yeah, I've been trying to understand how speakers of different dialects all use the same characters and seem to write the same language. Do they learn written standard Mandarin and just associate different spoken words with the meaning of the characters? And which dialect do the phonetic components of characters correspond to?

When you explain it like that, grain size seems pretty simple. And much better than saying "grapheme to phoneme or morpheme correspondence ratio". I bet Ithkuil has the biggest grain size. Ithkuil always wins.

Ahh okay. I was wondering if the tonal information used to convey emotional content and such was treated by the brain in a similar way to lexical tone.

My source for the music thing is this link https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)/Using_Tones, so I'm not entirely sure how accurate I am.

That Korean vs Japanese study is interesting, and it makes sense. That seems to be purely an orthographic thing, but it still has an effect. Hm. It'd be interesting to see what happens in Anglophone brains when they try to learn Chinese.

My level of knowledge? Uh...I'm interested in learning Mandarin, so I know...some of the basic concepts, but I haven't really hit on much research. I mean, I was able to mostly comprehend this paper and I've read a lot of Language Log, and I've looked into dyslexia in Chinese versus English and reading rates. But I don't have a lot of the technical stuff down yet. I'm not sure I can pinpoint a single area. Character amnesia and how the use of Chinese is changing is interesting. A lot of the research I've done has been either to prove to people that characters aren't innately harder than alphabets (which I'm not sure about), that they aren't less effective, or on methods of learning characters. Not sure if that really helps refine it any.

Just goes to show that Chinese characters are the orthography of the future. None of this silly alphabet stuff that keeps us using only 10% of our brains.