Neighborhood effects in Chinese character recognition: Going beyond phonological perspectives to explain a possible underlying mechanism

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increase of research investigating the neighborhood effect in Chinese character recognition. As for whether orthographic neighborhood size (NS) effect reveals facilitative or inhibitory results in Chinese character recognition, opinions vary and the question is still under debate. To clarify this topic, the present study implemented two experiments, the materials of which respectively were irregular-inconsistent phonograms in Experiment 1 (1A and 1B), and regular-consistent phonograms in Experiment 2 (2A and 2B). The researchers manipulated the orthographic NS and the number of higher frequency neighbors (HFNs) of the target characters, with the character frequency controlled. Results indicated that, regardless of the regularity and consistency of the stimuli, an inhibitory NS effect was observed. Moreover, in conditions of targets both with and without HFN, inhibitory NS effects were also stably displayed. This study revealed a possible underlying mechanism of the orthographic NS effect in the lexical decision task and naming task with Chinese characters, and exploited a global theoretical framework involving the neighborhood effect of characters in Chinese.