New Verification Of The Laterality Of Chinese Character Recognition

The lateralization of Chinese characters is a main subject in cognitive psychology. Tachitoscopic half visual field technique is the main research method usually being adopted to examine the lateralization of the brain in this field. However, there are some important details which required improvement. The current research improves the experimental method and gives new evidence to verify the lateralization.Those details that need improvement include: no mask in the experiment, imprecise control of the presentation time and inaccurate report of the response time, besides the careful control of the above details.This research composes of three experiments: Chinese character-Chinese character similarity identification experiment; figure-figure similarity identification experiment and Chinese numbers-Arabic digital similarity identification experiment. The experimental result of college students shows that there is difference between the left and right hemisphere as to the first and third experiments, but there is no difference in the second experiment.The first experiment requires the participants to discriminate whether the two Chinese characters share the same components. To examine whether it is caused by the lateralization of form cognition, the second experiment is conducted, using geometric figures. The participants are asked to identify whether the two figures are identical. The result shows that there is no lateralization in recognizing geometric figures. This indicates that the lateralization in experiment 1 is not caused by shape, but by the attribute of Chinese characters (information about meaning). Experiment 3 further examines the lateralization of the meaning on the number concept, asking the participants to determine whether the Chinese characters match the Arabic digital correspondingly. The result shows there is lateralization in Chinese number cognition.