Hermit Character Effect: Chinese Character Recognition in Lexical Decision and Semantic Categorization

Neighborhood effects play a critical role in examining the organization of Chinese mental lexicon. In alphabetic writing systems, there was no consensus on whether the inhibitory effect of hermit word (a word without neighbors), supporting the nature of competition in mental lexicon, was actually a lexical effect or not (Bowers, Davis, & Hanley, 2005; Qiao, Forster, & Witzel, 2009). In the present study, we applied Chinese writing system, in which the orthography and the pronunciation could be disentangled, to re-examine the hermit word effect. The original experimental design of Bowers’ et al. (2005) was adopted with some further improvements. The experiment 1 was a 2 (target type: hermit character vs. non-hermit character) x 2 (pseudo-character type: learned vs. unlearned) within-participant design. Participants were required to learn Chinese pseudo-characters. Each Chinese pseudo-character was created as a new orthographic neighbor of a specific Chinese hermit character. To examine the effect of neighbors newly learned on hermit characters, the semantic categorization task was conducted. We obtained inhibitory orthographic neighborhood effects in both analyses of reaction times and accuracies of all three administrations, supporting the nature of competitions among lexical representations in the mental lexicon as claimed by Bowers et al. (2005). In order to compare to the results of Qiao et al. (2009), we also used masked form priming lexical decision task in the experiment 2. However, we didn’ t repeat the prime lexicality effect in the experiment 2. It might be because the experimental design and the procedural of Qiaos’ et al. (2009) resulted in strategic behaviors of participants.