The Role Of Hierarchical Organization Of Chinese Character Components In Vocabulary Recognition

Visual word recognition is the important question of psychological linguistic and cognitive neuroscience of language.Evidences from alphabetic languages indicate the hierarchical organization of the visual word recognition,and construct the corresponding model of neural physiology.Comparing with alphabetic languages,Chinese characters have complex spatial structure.Prior studies of Chinese character recognition mostly focus on the basic units of Chinese character recognition,whether the hierarchical organization influences the recognition of Chinese character radicals is not clear yet.The current study addressed this issue in two experiments and one ERP experiment using radical detection task.Experiment 1 examined whether the hierarchical organization structure influence Chinese character recognition.Experiment 2 we increased the levels of hierarchical to further test the influences of hierarchy organization of radicals.Experiment 3 investigated the neural mechanism of the hierarchy organization.Experiment 1 examined the influence of structures(left,right)and radical positions(independent,top and bottom radicals)information in Chinese character recognition.We found right radicals recognition was faster than the left radicals.The independent radicals recognition was faster than both top and bottom radicals,and the top radicals recognition was faster than the bottom radicals.Results revealed that both the positions and structures influenced Chinese character recognition.Experiment 2 increased the levels of hierarchical,investigated whether the hierarchy organization influenced the recognition of three right-hand radicals.We found position sequence effect for the three radicals split at the first level.For three radicals split at two levels,we found the recognition of the radicals at first level was faster than radicals split at second level.The result indicated the hierarchical organization influenced the Chinese character recognition.Experiment 3 investigated the neural mechanism of the hierarchy organization.Materials and task were same as the experiment 2.The results revealed that different in N170 of the radicals spilt at the first level were not significant.The different of N170 between radicals split at two level were significant.In summary,Chinese character recognition was not only influenced by the positions or structures of radicals,but also influenced by the hierarchical organization of radicals.Our findings provided the first empirical and neural evidences of the hierarchy processing in Chinese character recognition.On the one hand,our research can complete and develop the cognitive model of Chinese characters recognition.On the other hand,the results provided evidences of Chinese education and guidance of language recovery and rectification means.