Two-character Chinese Words Research Articles

Processing of Emotional Words in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in understanding emotional language, but little research has discussed the developmental course of the processing of emotional words in the clinical population. Previous studies have revealed distinct processing for emotion-label (e.g., happiness) and emotion-laden (e.g., birthday) words in typically developing (TD) children and adolescents. Extending these findings, the study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the processing of these two types of emotional words in children and adolescents with ASD. The stimuli included two-character Chinese words with factors of word type (emotion-label versus emotion-laden) and valence (positive versus negative). The participants were 11 to 14-year-old children and adolescents with ASD (N = 23) and age-matched TD peers (N = 23). They categorized emotion valence for words while their brain responses were recorded. Both the TD and the ASD groups exhibited emotional processing for all emotional words across the N400 and late positivity component (LPC). The emotional processing was modulated by word type but varied with group and valence. A trend for group differences was observed in processing positive words at 500-600ms. In particular, the emotion effects of positive emotion-label words were positively correlated with social dysfunction across all participants. These findings suggested that children and adolescents with ASD have a selective impairment in understanding emotional concepts from language. The ERP measurements may reflect atypical emotional word processing for individuals with higher autistic severity in positive valence contexts.

Neighborhood in Chinese lexicon: A megastudy analysis of lexical decision and naming of two-character Chinese words.

The present study examines the impact of neighborhood size (number of other two-character words sharing the same character at the same position) on Chinese lexical processing, along with its joint effects with variables such as character frequency, word frequency, and semantic transparency. Previous factorial experiments have yielded conflicting results that are difficult to reconcile with existing models (Li et al., 2015, 2017). To provide high-powered tests for these theoretically important effects on visual word recognition, we leveraged the megastudy approach and used linear mixed-effect analyses to investigate lexical decision and naming responses to a large pool of two-character Chinese words (N > 17,000) sourced from Tse et al.'s (2017, 2023) database. In all analyses we controlled for extraneous orthographic (e.g., stroke count), phonological (e.g., consistency), and semantic (e.g., transparency) variables. In addition to evaluating Li et al.'s (2015, 2017) models, we also investigated whether the parallel dual-route mechanism, which entails lexical access via whole-word or character decomposition-then-composition, could account for neighborhood size effect and its interactions in lexical decision and naming. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings on the specificity of lexical effects with regard to character position and lexical processing task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Unraveling the mechanism of semantic object-based attention: The role of top-down search strategies.

There is an ongoing debate between the sensory enhancement account and the attentional prioritization account concerning the mechanism underlying object-based attention. This debate remains unresolved because of the predominant use of geometric objects in previous studies, which made it difficult to experimentally dissociate the two accounts due to the prominent boundaries of these objects. The current study investigated the mechanism underlying semantic object-based attention by utilizing Chinese two-character words with different word frequencies and the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to elucidate the ongoing debate. The behavioral results showed that the semantic object effect was observed only in the high-frequency condition. The ERP results revealed the following: (1) the N1 component was larger for the high-frequency condition compared with the low-frequency condition. However, there was no significant difference in amplitude between the N1 component elicited by invalid same object locations and invalid different object locations, irrespective of whether it occurred in high- or low-frequency conditions. (2) The P3 component elicited by invalid same object locations was larger than that elicited by invalid different object locations only in the high-frequency condition. (3) The N400 amplitude elicited by invalid same object locations was smaller than that elicited by invalid different object locations only in the high-frequency condition. These results suggest that in the absence of obvious object boundaries, the production of object-based attention is primarily driven by search strategies. Attentional prioritization, rather than sensory enhancement, is the dominant mechanism underlying object-based attention.

Similarities and differences between Chinese two-character words and their constituent characters in norm-feature correlations

Similarities and differences between Chinese two-character words and their constituent characters in norm-feature correlations

Decoding the essence of two-character Chinese words: Unveiling valence, arousal, concreteness, familiarity, and imageability through word norming.

Investigation of affective and semantic dimensions of words is essential for studying word processing. In this study, we expanded Tse et al.'s (Behav Res Methods 49:1503-1519, 2017; Behav Res Methods 55:4382-4402, 2023) Chinese Lexicon Project by norming five word dimensions (valence, arousal, familiarity, concreteness, and imageability) for over 25,000 two-character Chinese words presented in traditional script. Through regression models that controlled for other variables, we examined the relationships among these dimensions. We included ambiguity, quantified by the standard deviation of the ratings of a given lexical variable across different raters, as separate variables (e.g., valence ambiguity) to explore their connections with other variables. The intensity-ambiguity relationships (i.e., between normed variables and their ambiguities, like valence with valence ambiguity) were also examined. In these analyses with a large pool of words and controlling for other lexical variables, we replicated the asymmetric U-shaped valence-arousal relationship, which was moderated by valence and arousal ambiguities. We also observed a curvilinear relationship between valence and familiarity and between valence and concreteness. Replicating Brainerd et al.'s (J Exp Psychol Gen 150:1476-1499, 2021; J Mem Lang 121:104286, 2021) quadratic intensity-ambiguity relationships, we found that the ambiguity of valence, arousal, concreteness, and imageability decreases as the value of these variables is extremely low or extremely high, although this was not generalized to familiarity. While concreteness and imageability were strongly correlated, they displayed different relationships with arousal, valence, familiarity, and valence ambiguity, suggesting their distinct conceptual nature. These findings further our understanding of the affective and semantic dimensions of two-character Chinese words. The normed values of all these variables can be accessed via https://osf.io/hwkv7 .

Semantic transparency modulates the semantic perception of morphemes: Evidence from RSA of BOLD signals

There is no converging evidence on how a word’s semantic transparency affects morphemes’ potential semantic activation. The inconsistent results may be due to the limitation of traditional univariate analyses, in which the semantic transparency was treated as discrete categories. In the current study, Chinese two-character words were used as stimuli and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques were combined with a priming paradigm. Unlike most previous studies, the multivariate representation similarity analysis (RSA) was used to treat semantic transparency as a continuous variable. The RSA results showed that widespread regions in the frontal-parietal-temporal network represent the semantic perception of characters in all words and transparent words, but no brain areas were identified in opaque words. Unlike RSA results, univariate analyses showed no significant difference between the opaque and transparent words. These results suggest that RSA is more suitable to examine the neural mechanism related to continuous variables such as semantic transparency.

Not perceptually equivalent in semantic emotion across visual and auditory modalities: cross-modal affective norms of two-character Chinese emotion-label words

Not perceptually equivalent in semantic emotion across visual and auditory modalities: cross-modal affective norms of two-character Chinese emotion-label words

Reading compound words in Finnish and Chinese: An eye-tracking study

Two eye-tracking experiments in alphabetic Finnish and two in logographic Chinese examined the recognition of two-constituent compound words in reading. In Finnish, two-constituent compound words vary greatly in length, whereas in Chinese they are identical in length. According to the visual acuity principle (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003), short Finnish compound words and all two-character Chinese compound words that fit in foveal vision are recognized holistically, whereas long Finnish compound words are recognized via components. Experiment 1 in Finnish provided evidence consistent with the account, whereas the results for long compound words presented in condensed font in Experiment 2 were inconsistent with it. In Chinese, the first-character frequency effect was non-significant even when the compound words were presented in large font. The Finnish results suggest that componential processing is necessary when the compound word entails more than 10 letters. The Chinese results are compatible with the Chinese Reading Model (Li & Pollatsek, 2020) that assumes whole-word representations to overrule the activation of components during compound word recognition.

Semantic Overlaps Between Chinese Two-Character Words and Constituent Characters: A Normative Study

In written Chinese, the graphic units are Chinese characters (CCs). Most of the commonly used characters often join with others to form two-character words (2C-words) or words of more than two characters. Indeed, over 70% of the commonly used words are 2C-words. Since almost all characters are meaningful in their own right, there are semantic overlaps between 2C-words and their constituent characters. The present study investigated how normative semantic overlap of 2C-words and their constituent characters (SWC) might be influenced by whether the constituent characters are word or word-not characters (Wording) and by whether they are left or right characters (Positioning) and might be predicted by ordinary features of the constituent characters. The results confirmed earlier work that word-not characters are more strongly associated than word characters with 2C-words, and that right characters are more strongly than left characters associated with the 2C-words in semantics. The present study is also the first to provide evidence concerning the prediction of SWC by the norm features of the constituent characters. Skilled readers’ perception of the semantic features, frequency features and number-of-word features of the constituent characters may be mediated by Wording and Positioning in 2C-word semantic processing. However, they are not likely to perceive the visual features of the constituent characters. Rather, they seem to take the constituent characters of m-CCs as individual units, which should be highly familiar to them. In a semantic task on 2C-words, skilled readers may process the constituent characters in number of meanings, concreteness, imageability and emotion arousal, but not in sensory experience arousal. There appears to be a close association in valence between the 2C-words and the word characters, but not between the 2C-words and the word-not characters. These findings strongly support the theoretical argument that both words and characters should be taken as language units in Chinese. However, Wording and Positioning should be considered carefully when considering a CC as a language unit. These findings may be of more general significance for semantic understanding of compound words.

Word Familiarity Modulates the Interference Effects of Mind Wandering on Semantic and Reafferent Information Processing.

It has been found that mind wandering interferes with the sensory and cognitive processing of widespread stimuli. However, it remains unclear what factors can modulate the magnitude of the interference effects of mind wandering. Here, we investigate whether and how word familiarity modulates the interference effects of mind wandering on semantic and reafferent information processing. High- and low-frequency words were used as stimuli to induce high- and low-familiarity contexts in a sustained attention to response task, in which participants were required to respond to Chinese nonanimal words (nontarget) and withhold responses to Chinese animal words (target) as well as to intermittently report whether their state was "on task" or "off task." Behavioral results revealed lower reaction stability for both high- and low-frequency nontarget words preceding "off-task" reports than those preceding "on-task" reports. However, ERP results revealed that low-frequency rather than high-frequency words elicited more negative N400, attenuated late positive complex, and attenuated reafferent potential for "off-task" reports than for "on-task" reports. The results suggest that mind wandering makes semantic extraction and integration more difficult for unfamiliar but not familiar two-character Chinese words and attenuates the reafferent feedback of the motor response. These findings are consistent with the decoupling hypothesis of mind wandering and provide the first neural evidence for how familiarity with external stimuli modulates the interference effects of mind wandering.

Masked orthographic neighbor priming effects in Chinese two-character words

AbstractIn masked priming lexical decision tasks in alphabetic or syllabic script languages, latencies are longer when a word target is primed by a higher frequency neighbor (e.g., blue–BLUR) than when primed by an unrelated word of equivalent frequency (e.g., care–BLUR) – an “inhibitory neighbor priming effect.” In contrast, Zhou et al. (1999) demonstrated facilitatory orthographic neighbor priming for two-character Chinese words (e.g., 华丽–华贵). However, Zhou et al. did not control for relative prime-target frequency, which has been shown to be important in experiments when examining languages with other scripts. In the present Experiment 1 word neighbor primes (e.g., 容易-容貌) produced an inhibitory neighbor priming effect when the prime was higher frequency than the target, paralleling effects in other script languages. In further experiments, paralleling those in other script languages, two-character targets primed by nonword neighbors (容待-容貌) or single constituent characters matching the target in either position (容-容貌) showed significant facilitation. These results suggest that lexical activation/competition processes for two-character Chinese words are reasonably similar to those for words in alphabetic/syllabic script languages.

Visual event-related potentials reveal the early whole-word lexical processing of Chinese two-character words

Morphologically complex words are common across different languages, especially in Chinese, because more than 90% of common modern Chinese words are complex words. Many behavioral studies have suggested the whole-word processing of Chinese complex words, but the neural correlates of whole-word processing remain unclear. Previous electrophysiological studies revealed automatic and early (∼250 ms) access to the orthographic forms of monomorphic words in the ventral occipitotemporal area. In this study, we investigated whether there is also automatic and early orthographic recognition of Chinese complex words (as whole units) by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). A total of 150 two-character words and 150 two-character pseudowords composed of the same 300 characters (morphemes) were pseudorandomly presented to proficient Chinese readers. Participants were required to determine the color of each stimulus in the color decision task and to determine whether each stimulus was a word in the lexical decision task. The two constituent characters of each stimulus were horizontally arranged in Experiment 1 and vertically arranged in Experiment 2. The results revealed a significant early ERP difference between words and pseudowords approximately 250–300 ms after stimulus onset in the parieto-occipital scalp region. The early ERP difference was more prominent in the color decision task than in the lexical decision task, more prominent in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, and more prominent in the left parieto-occipital scalp region than in the right. Source analysis results showed that the early ERP difference originated from the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These results reflected early and automatic access to whole-word orthographic representations of Chinese complex words in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex.

Neural correlates of understanding emotional words in late childhood.

Prior studies involving adults have shown that words can elicit emotional processing, with emotion-label (e.g., happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., gift) having distinct processes. However, limited studies have explored the developmental changes in these processes in relation to emotional valence. To address this question, this exploratory study measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in 11-14-year-old children/adolescents (N=25) and adults (N=23) while performing an emotional categorization task. The stimuli used were two-character Chinese words, with factors for word type (emotion-label versus emotion-laden) and valence (positive versus negative). To confirm word emotionality, neutral words were also included and compared with all emotional words. The results showed that adults exhibited reduced N400 amplitudes to emotion-label words compared to emotion-laden ones in both positive and negative valence contexts. The differentiation was only sustained for negative valence in the late positive component (LPC). Similar scalp distributions of the effects of word type were found in children/adolescents; however, they exhibited a more prolonged processing of all emotional words than adults. These results suggest that the processing of emotion-label and emotion-laden words are distinct in late childhood, and this discrepancy varies with emotional valence and increasing age.

Time course of the integration of the morpho-semantics and the meaning of two-character Chinese compound words

Time course of the integration of the morpho-semantics and the meaning of two-character Chinese compound words

The Chinese Lexicon Project II: A megastudy of speeded naming performance for 25,000+ traditional Chinese two-character words.

Using a megastudy approach, (Tse et al.,2017Behavior Research Methods, 49,1503-1519)established a large-scale repository of lexical variables and lexical decision responses for more than 25,000 traditional Chinese two-character words. In the current study, we expand their database by collecting norms for speeded naming reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates, and compiling more lexical variables (e.g., phonological consistency and semantic neighborhood size). Following Tse et al.'s procedure, about 33 college-aged native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong read aloud each word. We conducted item-level regression analyses to test the relative predictive power of orthographic variables (e.g., stroke count), phonological variables (e.g., phonological consistency), and semantic variables (e.g., semantic transparency) in naming performance. We also compared the effects of lexical variables on naming performance and Tse et al.'s lexical decision performance to examine the extent to which effects are task-specific or task-general. Freely accessible to the research community, this resource provides a valuable addition to other influential mega-databases, such as the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2004Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283-316), and furthers our understanding of Chinese word recognition processes.

An ERP investigation of morpheme transposition in rapid serial visual presentation

The present study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of morpheme transposition in two-character Chinese compound words (canonical words and transposed words) and pseudowords at a very short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 83 ms, employing a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Event-related potential (ERP) results showed that, relative to pseudowords, canonical words elicited increased positivity or decreased negativity in ERP amplitudes beginning with the 200–300 ms (P200) and continuing through the 300–450 ms (N400) into the late time window of 450–600 ms (late positive component, LPC). Critically, the morpheme transposition effects were found on the N400 component and LPC, with larger N400 and smaller LPC amplitudes in the transposed words than in the canonical words. Taken together, these results demonstrated that morpheme transposition hindered the semantic extraction and combinatorial processing of the whole word entities in very rapid succession, as reflected by the modulations of N400 and LPC.

Imageability ratings for 10,426 Chinese two-character words and their contribution to lexical processing

Imageability ratings for 10,426 Chinese two-character words and their contribution to lexical processing

A reexamination of the impact of morphology on transposed character priming effects.

Using two-character Chinese word targets in a masked priming lexical-decision task, Gu and colleagues (2015) demonstrated a significant transposed character (TC) priming effect. More importantly, the priming effect was the same size for single-morpheme words and multiple-morpheme words, suggesting that TC priming effects are not influenced by morphemic structure. In Chinese, there are, however, two types of single-morpheme words, single-morpheme simple words (e.g., [similar to practice in English]) and single-morpheme complex words (e.g., [similar to carpet in English in that both components are words themselves and, hence, when presented in transposed order, may activate morphological information reflecting the individual components rather than the word itself]), a contrast that Gu et al. did not examine. In Experiment 1, we replicated Gu et al.'s finding of equal TC priming effects for their single- and multiple-morpheme words, although our priming effects were noticeably smaller than theirs. In Experiment 2, we split the single-morpheme condition in order to examine the TC priming effects for single-morpheme simple words, single-morpheme complex words and multiple-morpheme words. The results showed that the single-morpheme complex words produced the smallest priming effect, indicating that transposed morphemes can influence masked priming in Chinese; however, apparently only in an inhibitory fashion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

An ERP megastudy of Chinese word recognition.

This article reports the first ERP (event-related potential) megastudy in traditional Chinese word recognition. Fifty-one native Chinese undergraduates in Hong Kong, who were native Cantonese speakers, provided ERP data to 1020 two-character words and 204 two-character pseudowords in a go/no-go lexical decision task (go trials: pseudowords). The item list and the ERP data were compiled into a database called "E-MELD" (ERP MEgastudy of Lexical Decision). To illustrate how E-MELD can be utilized in research of traditional Chinese word recognition, a series of linear mixed-effects (LME) models were conducted to examine how properties at word (contextual diversity, number of strokes, and concreteness) and character (contextual diversity, number of homophones, and semantic transparency ratings) levels influenced the ERP amplitudes in different time windows. The results showed that in all time windows, both word and character variables influenced the amplitudes of ERP signals, which argued against the proposal that Chinese two-character words are recognized holistically. At the same time, there was no evidence that character effects preceded word effects (i.e., no evidence of character-mediated word recognition). Overall, the pattern suggests that characters and words are accessed simultaneously in Chinese word recognition. E-MELD is made available online, such that interested researchers can download it and use the data innovatively for their research purpose.

Impairment of semantic composition in schizophrenia: An ERP study with lexical stimuli

The ability of taking advantage of contextual constraints to facilitate semantic composition is impaired in schizophrenia, especially when control demands are high. This study examined the deficit using a primed lexical decision task with low control demands. Furthermore, two types of two-character Chinese words, binding nouns and compound nouns representing different levels of compositional difficulty, were employed to explore processing differences between schizophrenic (N = 35) and healthy (N = 18) participants. With the initial character of each word serving as the prime (context), participants judged as quickly and accurately as possible whether the final character, presented subsequently (SOA = 1000 ms) as the target, could combine and form a real word. Analyses of the N400 effect indicated that, even when integrating a one-character target into a one-character context, schizophrenic patients demonstrated lower efficiency than healthy controls, possibly due to deficiency in sustained attention and memory maintenance. However, their sensitivity to different levels of compositional difficulty seemed to be preserved. Specifically, as the initial characters of binding nouns could generate strong expectancies for their respective final characters, there was a processing advantage (greater N400 effect) of binding nouns over compound nouns, which was observed in both healthy and schizophrenic participants. Implications for the mechanisms underlying impairment of semantic composition in schizophrenia are discussed.