Abstract
There are still inconsistencies as to whether frequency and orthographic neighborhood size affect the reading and recognition of Chinese words. In addition, research on Chinese reading still adheres to the view that “all skilled readers read in the same way” and pays little attention to the influence of individual differences in linguistic skills on word recognition. In this research, we studied the recognition of Chinese two-character words in a lexical decision task (LDT) by manipulating neighborhood size and word frequency and controlling the frequency of the initial constituent character. Individual differences in linguistic skills were assessed through tests of spelling and reading comprehension. The results showed that: (1) A larger orthographic neighborhood size of the initial character had a facilitative effect on Chinese word recognition. The orthographic neighborhood size effect is modulated by word frequency, but this modulation effect was not stable. (2) Spelling and reading comprehension skills are good indicators to assess individual differences in Chinese linguistic skills, and they are significantly correlated. (3) Individual differences in linguistic skills influence the neighborhood size effect, which is moderated by word frequency.
Highlights
Recognizing words is the most basic and important process during reading
We studied the recognition of Chinese two-character words in a lexical decision task (LDT) by manipulating neighborhood size and word frequency and controlling the frequency of the initial constituent character
The results showed that: (1) A larger orthographic neighborhood size of the initial character had a facilitative effect on Chinese word recognition
Summary
A large number of studies have shown that lexical properties are an important factor affecting word recognition (Wu et al, 1994; Kliegl et al, 2004; Zhao et al, 2018), and orthographic neighborhood size is one of them. The concept of orthographic Neighborhood Size (NS) was first presented by Coltheart et al (1977) in research on word recognition in alphabetic systems. The facilitative NS effect indicates that it is the representation of the target word that is activated and its neighbor words during the process of word recognition
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