An Associative Account Of Orthographic Satiation In Chinese Characters

Prolonged inspection of a Chinese character induces a feeling of uncertainty of the character, a phenomenon named as Orthographic Satiation. However, there has not been any direct evidence showing that such satiation does occur at the orthographic level. To investigate whether Chinese satiation really occurred at the orthographic level or at other levels such as semantic level, the present study applied to Chinese a speeded repetition priming paradigm that has been successfully used to examine Semantic Satiation phenomenon in English. When judging whether a category name matched an exemplar word, participants showed gradually slower responses as the character standing for the category name was repeated, indicating the occurrence of satiation (Exp. 1). However, repetition of a character without accessing its meaning, or repeated access to its meaning without repeating the character itself, did not elicit satiation (Exp. 2, 3). The results suggest that Orthographic Satiation occurs not at the orthographic level, but at a level associating orthography and meaning during Chinese character processing.