Do position-general radicals have a role to play in processing Chinese characters?

Abstract

Over 90% of Chinese characters are compounds, comprising two or more constituents called radicals. Two experiments employed a character matching task to examine the contribution of radical position in Chinese character processing. The task was to decide whether the target character had appeared in two briefly and sequentially presented preceding source characters. Experiment 1 discovered significantly more false matching when the target (e.g., ‘’) shared radicals with the source stimuli (‘’, ‘’) than when the target and the source shared no radical, indicating that radicals contribute to character processing. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and further demonstrated that sharing a single radical between target and source characters, regardless of its radical position, was sufficient to generate false matching. More importantly, participants took significantly longer time to correctly reject those target characters with two shared radicals (one at the same position and another at the changed position) relative to those with only a single shared radical at the same position. Furthermore, false matching rates were significantly affected by lexical variables such as character frequency. These results suggest that position-general radicals play a significant role in character recognition and processing.