Neighborhood Effect of Chinese Characters with Identical Semantic Radicals in Visual Recognition
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Yang, Fu-Ling
Abstract
Underlying information processing approach, words are considered decomposed processing for recognition in which sublexical information play roles. For Chinese characters, researchers suggest that meanings of semantic radicals enhanced whole-character recognition while characters and semantic radicals share the same semantic representation (Chen & Weekes, 2004; Chen, Weekes, Peng, & Lei, 2006; Feldman & Siok, 1999a, 1999b). However, relative evidence in previous studies was confounded with neighborhood effect, and needs to be reinvestigated. Characters with an identical semantic radical are form similar to be orthographic neighbors. As a result, neighborhood characteristics should be taken into account considering recognition. This study discusses the possible role of semantic radicals through investigating neighborhood effect of form similar (with same semantic radicals) characters in lexical decision task. The main findings are: (1) an inhibitory priming effect was found in prime-target pairs that primes and targets had identical semantic radicals in same positions. And the orthographic inhibition effect was modulated by character frequency. (2) An additive effect of orthographic inhibition and semantic facilitation in radical-related prime-target pairs. Radically and semantically related primes would facilitate target recognition on one hand and inhibit on the other hand. (3) An inhibitory neighborhood density effect was found while target characters were lack of semantic facilitation from orthographic neighbors. (4) A facilitation effect was found while target characters had a large amount semantic neighbors compared to targets had few semantic neighbors. Results of this study did not provide evidence to support sublexical processing of semantic radicals especially to semantic processing in character recognition. Instead, our findings demonstrated a neighborhood effect of characters with identical semantic radicals.
Subjects
character recognition
semantic radicals
orthographic neighbors
neighborhood density
orthographic inhibition
semantic priming
Type
thesis
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