The Mechanism Of Semantic Association In Chinese Vocabulary Recognition

Vocabulary acquisition plays an important role in language learning.Because of the semantic association between words,when individuals learn a word,they can associate with other words according to the meaning of the word,which has an impact on the learning of the word.Therefore,how to use semantic association between words to promote individual’s vocabulary acquisition is an interested research issue for the researchers.In the latest research on alphabetic characters,researchers used co-occurrence association method to establish semantic association between words,and used DRM paradigm to explore the influence of semantic association on word recognition and its neural mechanism.However,there is no similar research on ideographic characters.It is not clear whether the behavioral rules and neural mechanism of semantic association on Chinese vocabulary processing are consistent with those of alphabetic characters.This study mainly used co-occurrence association method and DRM paradigm to explore the role of semantic association in the recognition of Chinese one-character words and its neural mechanism.The research was divided into three parts:Study 1: standardization of experimental materials.In this study,160 Chinese one-character words were selected from Leipzig corpus,which provided semantic association information between words.The purpose of this study was to obtain standardized experimental materials for use in Study 2 and Study 3.The 160 words was divided into four categories,40 more-semantic associative new words,40 less-semantic associative new words,40 more-semantic associative old words and 40 less-semantic associative old words.There were no differences in the following variables: stroke number,structure,vocabulary frequency,concreteness,arousal,emotional valence.This set of materials meets the requirements of psychological experiments for standardized materials.Study 2: the influence of semantic association on the recognition of Chinese one-charater words.2(vocabulary type: new words,old words)× 2(number of semantic associations:more,less)in subject design was used.The dependent variables were reaction time and error recognition rate.The results showed that the reaction time of old words was shorter and the error recognition rate was higher than that of new words.The response time and error rate of more-semantic association words were longer than that of less-semantic association words,but the difference of response time and error rate of semantic association between word recognition was only observed in new words.Since the role of semantic association in Chinese vocabulary recognition was observed in Study 2,further study 3 was carried out to explore the neural mechanism of the effect of semantic association on vocabulary recognition.Study 3: the neural mechanism of semantic association on Chinese one-character word recognition.In this study,2(vocabulary type: new words,old words)× 2(number of semantic associations: more,less)were used to investigate the neural mechanism of the influence of semantic association on the recognition of Chinese one-character words.The results showed that in the posterior brain region,new words produced larger N170 amplitude than old words,and more-semantic associative new words produced larger N170 amplitude than less-semantic associative new words.In the midline and prefrontal regions,old words produced larger LPC amplitudes than new words,and less-semantic associative words lead to larger LPC amplitudes than more-semantic associative words.The conclusions are as follows.Semantic association affects the recognition of Chinese one-character words.Specifically,semantic association promotes the old words recognition and hinders the memory performance of new words.The influence of semantic association on the recognition of Chinese one-character words is reflected in the amplitude changes of N170 and LPC components.Semantic association has a moderating effect on word processing at about 170 ms,and the effect of semantic association is mainly indicated in the late stage of word processing.