Differentiating A Semantic And An Orthographic Account Of Satiation In Chinese Characters:Evidence From Lexical And Sub-lexical Processing

For more than a century,psycholinguistic literature has reported a reduction in the meaningfulness of any stimulus material upon its continued perception(Severance&Washburn,1907;Yuan et al.,2017).This temporal impairment in meaning retrieval,caused by overt verbal repetition,prolonged visual inspection,or excessive writing of a word,has been termed as semantic satiation in English literature(Jakobovits,1962;Smith&Klein,1990;Tian&Huber,2010)and orthographic satiation in Mandarin Chinese studies(Cheng&Wu,1994;Lee,2007;Lan,2007;Cheng&Lai,2012;Cheng&Lin,2012).Is satiation semantic or orthographic in nature?Researchers adopting different paradigms hold a conflicting,three-fold ground:the theory of lexical satiation,the theory of meaning satiation,and the theory of associative satiation,rooting respectively for orthographic satiation,semantic satiation,and a third possibility.To test these three theories for Mandarin Chinese characters,the present research runs four experiments in a category-matching task under a speeded repetition paradigm,which has been successful in eliciting satiation in previous studies.A 2(repetition status)*2(match status)*3(position)factorial design is used.All sub-experiments in Experiment 1 use lists of 20 trials in which participants are asked to decide whether the cue and the target belong to the same category(match).InExperiment la,lb,and 1c,the cues are respectively repeated category labels(e.g.,蔬菜-香菇,蔬菜-芹),non-repeated exemplars(e.g.,西芹-香菇,南瓜-豌豆),andrepeated exemplars(e.g.,南瓜-南瓜).A significant two-way interaction between repetition status and position in Experiment la rather than in lb or in lc yields evidence of associative satiation in Chinese lexical units.In Experiment 2,a different set of data is used in a procedure similar to that of Experiment 1.Participants are asked to decide whether two monosyllabic words thatmay or may not share a semantic radical(e.g.,狼-猫;狗-独)belong to the same category(match).Again,a significant two-way interaction between repetition status and position points to the possibility of satiation occurring in radicals of a character rather than in the character as a whole,i.e.,in sub-lexical units rather than lexical units.By suggesting that sub-lexical units per se may be vulnerable to satiation,the present research offers a different perspective to the current debate on the three theories of satiation.Meanwhile,it supports a two-way Gestalt processing model;therefore,the present research may also advance current understanding of character processing in regards to top-down and bottom-up processing.