The Neighborhood Size Effect in Chinese Character Recognition： Facilitative or Inhibitory?

In recent years, there has been an increase of research investigating neighborhood effect in Chinese character recognition. As for whether orthographic neighborhood size (NS) effect reveals facilitative or inhibitory in Chinese character recognition, opinions vary and the question is still under debate (Bi, Hu & Weng, 2006; Zhang & Jiang, 2008; Bi & Weng, 2008; Zhang & Wang, 2010; Li, Bi & Zhang, 2010; Li, Bi, Wei & Chen, 2011). To clarify this topic, the present study implemented two experiments, the materials of which respectively were irregular & inconsistent phonograms in Experiment 1, and regular & consistent phonograms in Experiment 2. Researchers manipulated the orthographic neighborhood size and the number of higher frequency neighbors (HFNs) of the target characters, with the character frequency controlled. Results indicated that, regardless of the regularity and consistency of the stimuli, an inhibitory NS effect was observed. And both in the conditions of targets without HFNs and with HFNs, the NS effect was stably inhibitory. Researchers raised the possible underlying mechanism of the orthographic neighborhood size effect in Chinese character recognition, and exploited a global theoretical framework involving the neighborhood effect of characters and words in Chinese.