Neighborhood frequency effect on Chinese character recognition: An investigation of lexical decision tasks

Abstract

Many studies have found that the orthographic neighborhood frequency (NF) effect plays a dominant role in word identification. Yet most research has been conducted on alphabetic languages rather than Chinese. We investigated the NF effect on Chinese character recognition in the context of lexical decision tasks. Experiment 1 tested the NF effect in simple characters, Experiment 2 tested the NF effect in compound characters. Results showed that targets with higher frequency neighbors had longer response latencies for both simple characters and compound characters, and that this inhibitory effect was more significant for low-frequency targets. The results overall imply there is an inhibitory NF effect existing in Chinese character recognition. The implications of the results are discussed with regard to character recognition.