An N400-like Effect Of Radicals On Complex Chinese Characters

Compound characters are composed with two or several single characters (or radicals). The vast majority of Chinese characters is compound characters. In recent years, research hotspot of Chinese character recognition has been developed from the exploration of the entire Chinese characters to exploration of sublexical radical.There are two inconsistent assumptions of recognition of Chinese compound character--the the whole word assumption and the radical intermediary assumption. The whole word assumption considers that the recognition of compound Chinese characters has two process levels--the level of feature processing and the level of whole word processing. The radical intermediary assumption considers that the recognition of compound characters must be based on the recognition of sublexicals, which exists between the level of feature processing and the level of whole word processing.When the word and the sentence was intended to inconsistent (ie semantic reverse) at the end of the sentence, there will appear a large negative component in the parietal cortex, and peak at400ms, named N400. According to previous studies,N400is sensitive to contextual or semantic information.Recent years, many studies have shown that lexical features, such as word frequency, words true and false and the orthography family size can affect the N400component. There are differences and similarities between various theories about the N400component.At preseng, the theoretical debate of the N400component theories is focus on vocabulary level and semantic level, that is,whether the N400component reflect the processing of lexical representation or the processing of semantic.In the experiment1, more radicals are available in the radical-deleted (RD) condition than in the stroke-deleted (SD) because fewer (i.e., only one) radicals were destroyed and could provide higher relative activation. Thus, smaller N400amplitudes and better performance in the RD condition are expected.Experiment2used the semantic decision task, select the characters (such as "姐")that shared the same radical and related semantical information with the prime fragment (such as "女") as the semantic transparency condition.And select the characters(such as "始")that shared the same radical but no related semantical information with the prime fragment (such as "女") as the semantic intransparency condition. Then select the characters (such as "级")that shared the different radical and no related semantical information with the prime fragment (such as "女") as the semantic unrelated condition. By comparing three conditions, explore the specific role of the radicals in the whole word processing.The results show that:(1) The radical-deleted fragments, although containing more radicals, elicited a smaller N400-like component than the stroke-deleted fragments. Higher accuracy was observed in the radical-deleted condition than in the stroke-deleted condition. These results indicate that simple radicals have an intermediate role or sublexical function in Chinese character recognition, and that characters with fewer radicals destroyed exhibit stronger competitiveness over their neighbors in a multilayer interactive-activation model;(2) Compared to the semantic unrelated condition, the semantic transparency condition and the semantic intransparency condition cognitive consume more recognition resources, while the semantic transparency condition and the semantic intransparency condition has no significant difference. It is mean that semantic transparency does not affect whole word recognition;(3) the N400component reflects the representation of lexical feature processing.