The Graded Priming Effect of Semantic Radical on Chinese Character Recognition.

Xiuhong Tong,Mengdi Xu,Jing Zhao,Liyan Yu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.611066

Xiuhong Tong, Mengdi Xu + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.611066

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Abstract

This study used priming paradigm with lexical decision task to examine the effects of different levels of semantic relatedness on the identification of Chinese phonetic–semantic compound characters. Unlike previous studies that simply classify Chinese compound characters as semantically transparent or opaque, we categorize the semantic relatedness between semantic radicals (i.e., prime) and the target characters containing them into five levels: highly related (i.e., high condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 地), moderately related (i.e., moderate condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 场), minimally related (i.e., minimal condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 塔), unrelated but sharing the semantic radical (i.e., form-only condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 坏), and unrelated without sharing the semantic radical (i.e., control condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target 涌). Moreover, three stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA)s (i.e., 57, 140, and 243 ms) were used in this study to dissociate the radical- and character-level semantic priming effects. Results revealed a graded priming effect of the semantic radical on character recognition in Chinese readers for all SOAs. More specifically, the facilitative effect of the semantic radical on character processing was most evident for the high condition, followed by the minimal, form-only, and control conditions. This suggests a graded priming effect of the semantic radical on character identification.

Highlights

Visual word recognition involves the complex cognitive processing of orthographic, phonological, and semantic information (e.g., Seidenberg and McClelland, 1989; Tong and McBride, 2018), which varies across language systems
For the results of model fit, we reported the regression coefficients (b, effects relative to the intercept), standard errors (SE), and p values
The present study systematically examined the role of the semantic radical in Chinese character recognition by

Summary

Introduction

Visual word recognition involves the complex cognitive processing of orthographic, phonological, and semantic information (e.g., Seidenberg and McClelland, 1989; Tong and McBride, 2018), which varies across language systems. Phonological processing is the default route to visual word recognition in alphabetic languages, whereas semantic processing appears to be more important in Chinese character recognition given the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system (e.g., Wang et al, 2017; Tong and McBride, 2018). Usually occupying the left-hand position in a character, sometimes indicate the meaning of the character. These are called semantically transparent characters (i.e., those whose meanings are semantically related to the semantic radicals).

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