Two-character Chinese Words Research Articles

Unconscious Grouping of Chinese Characters: Evidence from Object-based Attention

To show that, in reading, a fundamental and unconscious perceptual process occurs beyond the current fixation, we examined whether peripherally presented characters of Chinese words in such extreme viewing conditions could be grouped when some characters were rendered invisible while others were visible. We presented a pair of two-character Chinese words and indexed whether the visible and invisible characters that formed a word could be grouped together by the effect of same-object advantage- an index used to indicate the formation of perceptual grouping and the basis for attentional selection (i.e. object-based attention). Results revealed a difference in the judgments of prior entry that would otherwise be equivalent between two concurrent targets in a cued temporal-order judgment task: the target that appeared in the cued word was judged to appear first more frequently than the other target that appeared in the uncued word. The results suggest that a perceptual grouping was formed for two-character words between visible and invisible constituent characters. While grouping within two-character words occurred, the invisible characters remained invisible in most of the trials, suggesting that this grouping occurred unconsciously. This implies that, in reading, characters presented in the peripheral region can be grouped into words even without the readers' awareness of all the constituent characters, and such unconscious grouping can facilitate fluent reading by aggregating the texts into fewer meaningful units and thus reduce the number of fixations needed.

The modulation of semantic transparency on the recognition memory for two-character Chinese words

This study demonstrated that semantic transparency as a linguistic property modulates the recognition memory for two-character Chinese words, with opaque words (i.e., words whose meanings cannot be derived from constituent characters-e.g., "[/guang/, light][/gun/, stick]", bachelor) remembered better than transparent words (i.e., words whose meanings can be derived from constituent characters-e.g., "[/cha/, tea][/bei/, cup]", teacup). In Experiment 1, the participants made lexical decisions on transparent words, opaque words, and nonwords in the study and then engaged in an old/new recognition test. Experiment 2 employed a concreteness judgment as the encoding task to ensure equivalent semantic processing for opaque and transparent words. In Experiment 3, the neighborhood size of the two-character words was manipulated together with their semantic transparency. In all three experiments, opaque words were found to be better remembered than transparent words. We concluded that the conceptual incongruence between the meanings of a whole word and its constituent characters made opaque words more distinctive and, hence, better remembered than transparent words.

Two-Character Chinese Compound Word Processing in Chinese Children With and Without Dyslexia: ERP Evidence

Using event-related potential (ERP) measures, we examined the time course of Chinese compound word processing in 15 dyslexic and 10 normal children in a lexical decision task with three conditions including real words (e.g., (house)), reversed nonwords (e.g., can be transposed to a real word (ocean)) and random nonwords (e.g., is not a real word when transposing). Behavioral results showed that dyslexic children performed slower and less accurately than normal children did across conditions. ERP data revealed that normal children exhibited significant N400 effects across conditions. The dyslexics did not show any difference on N400, however, suggesting a possible weakness of morphological processing in dyslexic children.

A Study of the Relationships Among Chinese Multicharacter Words, Subtypes of Readers, and Instructional Methods

This article reports the results of two studies examining the effectiveness of the whole-word and analytic instructional methods in teaching different subtypes of readers (students with normal reading performance, surface dyslexics, phonological dyslexics, and both dyslexic patterns) and four kinds of Chinese two-character words (two regular [RR], two irregular [II], one regular, one irregular [RI], and one irregular, one regular [IR]). The approaches employed were the analytic method, which focuses on highlighting the phonological components of words, and the whole-word method, which focuses on learning by sight. Two studies were conducted among a sample of 40 primary school students with different reading patterns. The aim was to examine the relationships among different subtypes of readers, two-character words, and instructional methods. In general, students with a surface dyslexic pattern benefited more from the analytic methods. Regarding combinations of different kinds of two-character words, all subtypes of students performed better in reading RR words than in reading II words.

Does N200 Reflect Semantic Processing?—An ERP Study on Chinese Visual Word Recognition

Recent event-related potential research has reported a N200 response or a negative deflection peaking around 200 ms following the visual presentation of two-character Chinese words. This N200 shows amplitude enhancement upon immediate repetition and there has been preliminary evidence that it reflects orthographic processing but not semantic processing. The present study tested whether this N200 is indeed unrelated to semantic processing with more sensitive measures, including the use of two tasks engaging semantic processing either implicitly or explicitly and the adoption of a within-trial priming paradigm. In Exp. 1, participants viewed repeated, semantically related and unrelated prime-target word pairs as they performed a lexical decision task judging whether or not each target was a real word. In Exp. 2, participants viewed high-related, low-related and unrelated word pairs as they performed a semantic task judging whether each word pair was related in meaning. In both tasks, semantic priming was found from both the behavioral data and the N400 ERP responses. Critically, while repetition priming elicited a clear and large enhancement on the N200 response, semantic priming did not show any modulation effect on the same response. The results indicate that the N200 repetition enhancement effect cannot be explained with semantic priming and that this specific N200 response is unlikely to reflect semantic processing.

ERP evidence for the time course of mental rotation in the mirror reading of Chinese words

The present study investigated the neuro-mechanism of mirror reading using two-character Chinese words and event related potentials (ERPs). Seventeen Chinese participants performed a lexico-semantic decision task on normal or reversed words (presented normally or in mirror images). Behavioral results showed a clear processing advantage for the normal words, compared with the reversed ones. ERP components including N200, N400, and LPC showed differences between the two word types, indicating the presence of mental rotation and its overlap in time with the two major stages of word recognition, namely word form identification and lexico-semantic processing. The results support parallel processing models proposing that mental rotation takes place parallelly with word recognition in mirror reading.

The Neuromechanism Underlying Language Analogical Reasoning: Evidence from An ERP Study

Analogical reasoning as the mechanism of acquisition of new information by inspection of specific instances, is clearly at the heart of advanced human cognitive capabilities and creativity. Especially, language analogical reasoning, as an important part of everyday discourse, is the most common one. Only a few brain imaging studies have used verbal analogies to explore the neural substrates of analogical thinking. Nevertheless, hemodynamic techniques have excellent spatial resolution but poor temporal resolution; hence, these results could not clearly reflect different substeps of analogical processes. Compared with hemodynamic techniques, event-related potentials (ERPs), as an electromagnetic technique, are sensitive to the time course of cognitive processes. However, there has no ERP study on this matter so far. Using the A:B::C:D paradigm, this study investigated the neuromechanism underlying language analogical reasoning by ERPs. Six hundred two-character Chinese noun words were chosen from the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (the fifth edition) to serve as experimental stimuli. One hundred fifty trials consisting of four noun words were used in three analogy tasks with three semantic relations: metaphor, category and isomorphism, each analogy task had 50 trials. Fourteen undergraduate students participated in the study. Subjects were asked to judge whether one word pair was semantically analogous to another word pair. The EEG was recorded from 64 scalp channels using electrodes mounted in an elastic cap. ERPs were calculated for a 3200 ms epoch including a 200 ms pre-stimulus baseline. Results showed that the schema induction stage elicited N400 and P300 components, which possibly attributable to semantic processing of word pairs and the formation of a relational category. The analogy mapping stage elicited a N400, which might indicate the semantic retrieval of the antecedent word of target domain. The N400 was then followed by a late negative component (LNC), which might indicate the processing of analogical transfer the schema from the source domain to the target domain and reasoning the suitable answer. The study also compared processing of the analogy mapping under different conditions. The results showed that the amplitude of LNC component was smaller and distributed over anterior scalp sites when the relations of analogy mapping were simpler, while the amplitude of LNC component was larger and widely distributed when the relations of analogy mapping were complex. The results suggest that the substages of analogical reasoning, schema induction, analogy mapping, are complex processes. The processing of the analogy mapping stage is close with the LNC component. The amplitude and scalp distribution of the LNC are modulated by the complexity degree of the relations of analogy mapping.

The Timing of Sentence Meaning Establishment During Sentence Comprehension

Many studies suggested the establishment of sentence meaning in sentence comprehension was based on lexical integration, which reflected on N400 starting around 250ms after the onset of an incoming word. However, research related to the semantic P600 effect proposed that there might be other route (s) for meaning establishment besides lexical integration, which might start earlier than the onset of the processing reflected on N400. Here four experiments were conducted to investigate whether there are other route (s) earlier than the processing indexed by N400 and when they begin. In Experiment 1, a paradigm related to Perceptual Symbol Theory (PST) was used for study. Participants were asked to read Chinese sentences like 天空中有一只老鹰 (In the sky there is an eagle) word by word, and then to judge whether the pictured objects that followed without interval had been mentioned in the preceding sentences ignoring their shape and state. The reaction times for judgment were recorded. The last word of each sentence which was a two-character word was the critical word. All critical words were presented in three different time durations: 550ms, 250ms and 200ms. According to previous studies and PST, when the critical word was presented at 550ms, participants could have established the sentence meaning and a mismatch effect would appear. The mismatch effect is an effect that the reaction time is shorter when the sentence matches the following picture. The result found that mismatch effect also appeared in both 250ms and 200ms durations, and their reaction times were similar to those of 550ms duration. The result suggested that participants could establish sentence meaning even when the critical word was presented at 200ms, which indicated that sentence meaning establishment started before the onset of N400. Experiments 2 and 3 aimed at revealing a more precise time point at which readers began to relate the last word of a sentence to the preceding linguistic input and establish sentence meaning. The experimental methods were the same to that of Experiment 1 except for shortening the duration of the critical word. The results suggested that participants began to establish sentence meaning after the critical word was presented at 150ms. Experiment 4 was conducted to counter some possible explanations for the experimental effects of Experiment 1~3. Doubters might think that the mismatch effects in Experiments 1~3 came from prime effect but not sentence meaning establishment. That is, the first word might prime the processing of the critical word or/and the following picture in the match condition. Experiment 4a was conducted to deal with this challenge. Participants were presented with Chinese word pairs like 天空-老鹰 (sky-eagle), and then asked to complete a judgment task as in Experiments 1~3. All word pairs were constructed based on Experiments 1~3 by combining the first word and critical word of each sentence. The results showed that the mismatch effect did not appear in Experiment 2, which supported the findings of Experiments 1~3. One might also doubt whether readers could establish sentence meaning in the short critical word present time conditions, like 150ms and 200ms, and think that the reason for the appearance of the mismatch effects was that the sentential context facilitated the access or selection of the critical word’s perceptual symbol which was consistent with it. In Experiment 4b, participants were asked to complete experimental tasks similar to Experiments 1~3. Unlike Experiments 1~3, sentences were reconstructed, the critical words were moved away from the sentence end, and the last words were present at 150ms or 200ms. The results showed that in both the duration conditions, mismatch effect was present, which also supported Experiments 1~3. In conclusion, the results suggested that during sentence comprehension, readers could relate an incoming two-character Chinese sentence-end word to the preceding linguistic input about 150ms after its presentation and establish the sentence meaning, and sentence meaning establishment started before the onset of the processing reflected on N400.

Is syntactic-category processing obligatory in visual word recognition? Evidence from Chinese

Three experiments were conducted to investigate how syntactic-category and semantic information is processed in visual word recognition. The stimuli were two-character Chinese words in which semantic and syntactic-category ambiguities were factorially manipulated. A lexical decision task was employed in Experiment 1, whereas a semantic relatedness judgment task and a syntactic-category judgment task were adopted in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively. A semantic ambiguity disadvantage was observed in all three experiments, whereas a syntactic-category ambiguity disadvantage was only found in Experiment 3. In addition, no significant semantic ambiguity×syntactic-category ambiguity interaction was obtained across the three experiments. These results are consistent with the view that in isolated visual word recognition, the semantic information is crucial, but the syntactic-category information is not, at least in Chinese.

Acquisition of linguistic information to the left of fixation during the reading of Chinese text

The linguistic properties of the first (critical) character of a two-character Chinese word were manipulated when the eyes moved to the right of the critical character during reading to determine whether character processing is strictly unidirectional. In Experiment 1, the critical character was replaced with a congruent or incongruent character or left unchanged. Critical character changes did not influence the fixation duration, but incongruent changes led to more regressions than congruent changes. In Experiment 2, the critical character was replaced with either a homophonic or a non-homophonic character when it was to the left of fixation. The fixation following the change was now longer when the replaced character and the critical character were homophones than when they were phonologically dissimilar. These results indicate that readers obtain phonological and semantic information to the left of a fixated character and that the recognition of consecutive Chinese characters is not strictly unidirectional.

The Effect of Word Structure on the Acquisition of Chinese Two-Character Compound Words Across Grades

This study investigated the hypothesis that the main component character which contributes more to the whole-word meaning is used as an access code in reading. Grade 1, 3, and 5 readers were asked to read aloud two-character Chinese compound words (modifier, supplement, and coordinative words) with four patterns of component character frequency (high-high, high-low, low-high, and low-low). Results showed that the main component character effect was present for all three types of word structures, and the use of the main component character as a reading strategy was found in grade 3 and 5 children in their reading. It was proposed that representations of low-frequency Chinese compounds are stored in morphologically decomposed form and that word structure information has a role in the processing of compound words.

Orthographic neighborhood effects in reading Chinese two-character words

The present study investigates the effects of neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency in reading Chinese two-character words. The neighborhood size of a word is defined as the summation of neighbors sharing the first constituent (neighborhood size 1) and the second constituent (neighborhood size 2) characters. The first experiment found two opposite neighborhood size effects in lexical decision of high-frequency and low-frequency words. The regression analysis showed that neighborhood size 1 influenced word reading more than the neighborhood size 2. The second experiment confirmed this finding and showed that reading words with higher frequency neighbors took a longer time and elicited greater N400 and LPC than those without higher frequency neighbors. These findings indicate that, when reading Chinese two-character words, all words sharing the first constituent character are activated in the early stage of word recognition and the existence of high-frequency words among neighbors leads to greater competition in the stage of semantic integration and response selection.

Differential activity in left inferior frontal gyrus for pseudowords and real words: An event‐related fMRI study on auditory lexical decision

After Newman and Twieg and others, we used a fast event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design and contrasted the lexical processing of pseudowords and real words. Participants carried out an auditory lexical decision task on a list of randomly intermixed real and pseudo Chinese two-character (or two-syllable) words. The pseudowords were constructed by recombining constituent characters of the real words to control for sublexical code properties. Processing of pseudowords and real words activated a highly comparable network of brain regions, including bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, superior, middle temporal gyrus, calcarine and lingual gyrus, and left supramarginal gyrus. Mirroring a behavioral lexical effect, left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was significantly more activated for pseudowords than for real words. This result disconfirms a popular view that this area plays a role in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, as such a conversion process was unnecessary in our task with auditory stimulus presentation. An alternative view was supported that attributes increased activity in left IFG for pseudowords to general processes in decision making, specifically in making positive versus negative responses. Activation in left supramarginal gyrus was of a much larger volume for real words than for pseudowords, suggesting a role of this region in the representation of phonological or semantic information for two-character Chinese words at the lexical level.

Consistency effects on lexical decision and naming of two-character Chinese words

This study with three experiments examined thenotion inherent in the Interactive ConstituencyModel of Perfetti and colleagues [Perfetti, C.A.,Liu, Y. & Tan, L.H. (2002) In H.S.R. Kao, C.K. Leong D Perfetti, C.A. & Tan, L.H. (1999) In J. Wang,A.W. Inhoff & H.-C. Chen (Eds.), ReadingChinese script: A cognitive analysis (pp. 115–134).Mahwah, New Hersey: Lawrence Erlbaum] thatin reading 2-character Chinese wordsphonology is activated at the character levelrather than at the word level. Specifically,the effect of phonological inconsistency(multiple pronunciations) of constituentcharacters on the visual recognition of2-character Chinese words found by Tan andPerfetti (Experiment 2) [(1999) Journal ofExperimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, andCognition, 25, 382–393] was furthertested in 2 lexical decision experiments (1and 2a) with sample sizes of 42 and 47 nativeCantonese-speaking Chinese university students.Using the same stimulus materials with someneeded slight variations, the two experimentsfound the target items with the constituentinconsistent characters were processed fasterthan the control two-character words withconsistent characters and this inconsistencyeffect of heterophonic homographs would stillbe compatible with character-level phonology. The words with the consistent constituentcharacter on the left (inconsistency on theright constituent) were processed faster thanthose with the consistent constituent characteron the right (inconsistency on the leftconstituent). In Experiment 2b the control orconsistent words were named faster than thecorresponding inconsistent words and there wasno left–right positional difference for theinconsistency. Taken together, the two lexicaldecision experiments and the naming experimentuphold the generality of character-levelconsistency effect of heterophonic homographs,even though there are some slight variationsfrom the original study.

A left-lateralized network for reading Chinese words: a 3 T fMRI study.

fMRI was used to investigate brain organization for reading in Chinese. Subjects were shown two-character Chinese words. A control task was used to eliminate the non-linguistic visual and motor confounds. Results show that naming of Chinese logographs is characterized by left-lateralized neuronal networks for the processing of orthographic, phonological, and semantic attributes. The orchestration of the middle frontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, superior parietal cortex, basal temporal area and extrastriate cortices of the left hemisphere may manifest the particularity of the central representation of simple word naming in Chinese.

Brain activation in the processing of Chinese characters and words: A functional MRI study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to identify the neural correlates of Chinese character and word reading. The Chinese stimuli were presented visually, one at a time. Subjects covertly generated a word that was semantically related to each stimulus. Three sorts of Chinese items were used: single characters having precise meanings, single characters having vague meanings, and two-character Chinese words. The results indicated that reading Chinese is characterized by extensive activity of the neural systems, with strong left lateralization of frontal (BAs 9 and 47) and temporal (BA 37) cortices and right lateralization of visual systems (BAs 17-19), parietal lobe (BA 3), and cerebellum. The location of peak activation in the left frontal regions coincided nearly completely both for vague- and precise-meaning characters as well as for two-character words, without dissociation in laterality patterns. In addition, left frontal activations were modulated by the ease of semantic retrieval. The present results constitute a challenge to the deeply ingrained belief that activations in reading single characters are right lateralized, whereas activations in reading two-character words are left lateralized.

Phonological activation in visual identification of Chinese two-character words.

Phonological activation in visual identification of Chinese two-character words.

Phonological activation in visual identification of Chinese two-character words.

Evidence for phonological activation in the recognition of 2-character Chinese words was discovered in 2 experiments. In a meaning-judgment task, Experiment 1 exposed two words with stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 0, 71, and 157 ms. At al13 SOAs, times to make a no meaning judgment were longer for words that were homophones than for unrelated controls. In a lexical-decision task, Experiment 2 manipulated the phonological consistency of 1 of the 2 characters. Responses to words with a phonologically inconsistent character were slower, regardless of the left-right position of the character. These results add to previous results for l-character words, suggesting that phonology is an obligatory constituent of word identification in Chinese. A proposed theoretical framework for 2-character word identification accounts for the results.

Reversibility of reversible Chinese words.

Reversible Chinese words are words which can be read either from left to right or vice versa. The reversibility of reversible two-character Chinese words for 101 women and 73 men, native speakers of Chinese, was estimated.

Right hemisphere advantage in lexical decision with two-character Chinese words

It has been suggested that the right hemisphere advantage reported in the literature for single Chinese or kanji characters is the result of perceptual factors rather than unique linguistic features of the orthography. However, no similar right hemisphere advantage for two-character words has ever been found. This study reports on a right hemisphere advantage for high stroke number low frequency two-character Chinese words with short exposure time and low luminance. While there is support for the perceptual-factors explanation for some findings of right hemisphere advantage for Chinese, it is suggested that linguistic factors can still play a part.