Representations of Semantic and Phonetic Components in Chinese Character recognition: Evidence from Repetition Blindness Paradigm

Most of Chinese characters belong to the type called “phonetic compound” that consists of a semantic component and a phonetic component. We examined whether the component-level analysis is necessary in Chinese character recognition and the representations of the semantic component and the phonetic component by adopting the repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. RB is the failure to detect or report the second appearance of the repeated stimuli in rapid serial visual presentation. RB results from the binding difficulty between the same type node with two different episodic tokens within a short interval. By observing the effect of RB for repeated components in two different characters, we examined the existence of component processing during character recognition and the internal representations of the component types. Results showed that omponent RB was found for both high- and low-frequency characters, and when characters were presented in word lists and in phrases. However, RB for semantic components was weaker and shorter-lived than that for phonetic components (Experiments 1 and 2). The size of RB for semantic components or for phonetic components was not affected by the consistency between the meaing or sound between the component and the whole-character, indicating that the dissociation of semantic and phonetic component type can occur before the character-level processing. These results suggest that the component analysis is necessary for Chinese character recognition, and representations of semantic and phonetic components can be dissociated during early stages of character recognition.