The Role of Word Relation as a Context in Chinese Character Priming Tasks
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Chen, Chih-Wei
Abstract
Manipulating different contexts in priming tasks in Chinese characters is an important research method to explore the Chinese character recognition process. Forming semantic relation, associative relation, or a two-character word between a prime and a target character are three important ways to explore the effect of the contexts in priming tasks. To solve the issue of whether word relation is involved in automatic character recognition process or is only strategically used as a clue to predict target characters, the present research used lexical decision task and naming task with a single-character priming paradigm in three experiments. Word relation, word frequency, neighborhood size of the prime character, and neighborhood size of the prime character as the first constituent in a word were manipulated at different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) to observe the patterns of priming effects when semantic and associative relations were excluded. If priming effect can be observed at a short SOA, the effect is more likely to be from the automatic recognition process. At a long SOA, the two neighborhood size factors could be used as detectors to check whether word relation is involved in strategic processes. The results showed that the word relation yielded priming effects in both tasks at an SOA of 50 milliseconds. It evidenced that word relation is consistently involved in the automatic Chinese character recognition process. The results also showed that different neighborhood sizes rendered different patterns of priming effects at an SOA of 150 milliseconds. This demonstrated that word relation indeed could be used as a clue to predict target characters when participants have enough time to process prime characters.
Subjects
Chinese character
word recognition
context priming
semantic priming
associative priming
Type
thesis
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