Semantic Radical Research Articles

Foveal splitting causes differential processing of Chinese orthography in the male and female brain

Chinese characters contain separate phonetic and semantic radicals. A dominant character type exists in which the semantic radical is on the left and the phonetic radical on the right; an opposite, minority structure also exists, with the semantic radical on the right and the phonetic radical on the left. We show that, when asked to pronounce isolated tokens of these two character types, males responded significantly faster when the phonetic information was on the right, whereas females showed a non-significant tendency in the opposite direction. Recent research on foveal structure and reading suggests that the two halves of a centrally fixated character are initially processed in different hemispheres. The male brain typically relies more on the left hemisphere for phonological processing compared with the female brain, causing this gender difference to emerge. This interaction is predicted by an implemented computational model. This study supports the existence of a gender difference in phonological processing, and shows that the effects of foveal splitting in reading extend far enough into word recognition to interact with the gender of the reader in a naturalistic reading task.

The Implicit and Explicit Learning of Orthographic Structure and Function of a New Writing System

Two experiments were carried out to examine how adult readers of English learn to acquire the orthographic structure and function of Chinese characters selected from reading material in their first-semester college course in Chinese. The first experiment, an online lexical decision task, demonstrated that the learners quickly acquired knowledge about the orthographic structure of the characters. With only limited vocabulary and without explicit instruction, they were sensitive to the characters' curriculum frequency and internal compositional features. Overall, these results were consistent with our previous findings (Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2003). The second experiment further tested the learners' implicit and explicit learning of the orthographic component function of Chinese characters. In an offline unknown character identification task, these learners showed difficulty in making use of the functional cue of the known semantic radical without any probing. However, with probing they identified visually the majority of target semantic radicals. In addition, they demonstrated implicit knowledge of the meaning cue of the semantic radical by making more appropriate meaning inferences on high-frequency radicals than on low-frequency ones. After receiving explicit instruction, the students extracted significantly more meaning information from known semantic radicals, particularly low-frequency ones, compared to their performance prior to such instruction.

A “Radical” Approach to Reading Development in Chinese: The Role of Semantic Radicals and Phonetic Radicals

Two studies investigating the significance of radical knowledge in Chinese reading development are reported in this paper. Study 1 examined the semantic radical knowledge of 20 Grade 1, 20 Grade 3, and 20 Grade 5 Chinese children in Hong Kong. It was found that various types of semantic radical knowledge, including the position and semantic category of semantic radicals, correlated significantly with Chinese word reading and sentence comprehension. Study 2 examined phonetic radical knowledge with another three groups of 20 Chinese children in Grades 1, 3, and 5 respectively. It was found that various measures of phonetic radical knowledge, including the function and sound value of phonetic radicals, correlated significantly with Chinese word reading. These studies found that, developmentally, the children started acquiring the knowledge of character structure, position, semantic category, and sound value of radicals from about Grade 1. However, they did not understand that the function of semantic radicals is to provide meaning cues in reading until Grade 3. The authors concluded that the radical is an important orthographic processing unit in reading development in Chinese.

Exploring reading-spelling connection as locus of dyslexia in Chinese

This paper advances the argument that in learning to read/spell Chinese characters and words, it is important for learners to understand the role of the component parts. These constituents consist of phonetic and semantic radicals, or bujians, made up of clusters of strokes in their proper sequence. Beginning readers/spellers need to be sensitive to the positional hierarchy and internal structure of these constituent parts. Those Chinese children diagnosed with developmental dyslexia tend to have more difficulties in spelling Chinese characters and in writing to dictation than in reading. A lexical decision study with two groups of tertiary students differing in their Chinese language ability was carried out to test their efficiency in processing real and pseudo characters as a function of printed frequency of the characters, and the consistency of their component semantic radicals. There is some evidence that even for adult readers differing in their Chinese language ability, lexicality, frequency of characters and the consistency of the semantic radicals affect accurate and rapid character identification. Suggestions for research and teaching approaches are made to enhance the analysis and synthesis of the phonetic and semantic radicals to promote efficient reading and spelling in Chinese.

Automatic processing of positional and movement cues in Chinese character perception

Study of sign language and neuropsychology suggest visual and movement cues are linguistic for deaf signers and brain damaged patients. Research on selective attention shows skilled Chinese readers use semantic radicals automatically and pre-lexically in a semantic task. This leads to a hypothesis that skilled Chinese readers encode spatial and movement cues automatically during character perception. Two experiments were conducted in the current study. In Adding Part (AP) experiment, each character was divided into two parts, then presented one after the other. Subjects were to name the characters. We hypothesized that a positional cue between the two parts was not necessary. Results were as predicted. In the Path Memory (PM) experiment, characters were divided into two or three parts. Results showed subjects performed best when the stimuli were presented at a medium speed. The positional cue in AP and movement cue in PM was processed automatically. We therefore concluded that both position and movement are linguistic cues in character perception.

Semantic Radicals Contribute to the Visual Identification of Chinese Characters

In a character decision task, phonetic compound targets (composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic component) followed primes that shared (a) the target's radical and were semantically related (R+S+), (b) the target's radical and were not semantically related (R+S−), (c) no radical but were semantically related (R−S+), and (d) no radical and were not semantically related (R−S−). Target radicals also varied as to the number of compounds in which they appeared (i.e., combinability). When targets followed primes immediately (Experiment 1; SOA 243 ms), target latencies following R+S− primes were slowed relative to R−S− controls but those following R+S+ and R−S+ primes were facilitated equivalently. Increases in combinability significantly reduced decision latencies. When 10 items separated primes and targets (Experiment 2), facilitation was evident only after R+S+ primes. Results indicate that one type of component, the semantic radical, is processed in the course of Chinese character recognition and that orthographic similarity due to repetition of a radical is not an adequate account.

Children's understanding of the formal and functional characteristics of written Chinese

AbstractChinese script is often viewed as an exception to the processes of language learning in that it is presumed to be learned by rote. However, recent psycholinguistic investigations describing the formal and functional constraints of Chinese script have offered a new direction for a cognitive analysis of its acquisition. We investigated children's understanding of the formal and functional aspects of written Chinese in a task of judgment of orthographic acceptability and a creative spelling task. The formal constraint we examined was the fixed position of stroke patterns and their function as either a semantic radical (giving a clue to meaning) or a phonological component (giving a clue to pronunciation). The children (aged 4 to 9) attended either kindergarten or primary school in Hong Kong. Our results indicated that 6-year-olds could already use the positional rule to reject nonwords (which violate the formal constraint of position) as unacceptable, whereas pseudowords (which do not violate this constraint) were judged as acceptable. Significant effects of age and orthographic acceptability were observed. The task of creative writing replicated this trend and showed that, from age 6, the children were able to use semantic radicals to represent meaning. However, a more systematic use of phonological components as a clue to pronunciation was observed only among 9-year-olds. We conclude that learning to read and write in Chinese is not simply accomplished by the rote memorization of individual characters: rather, as children progress in learning, they develop an understanding of the underlying rules of written Chinese.