The Role Of Pronunciation In Orthographic Neighborhood Word Start

Orthography and phonology are the tow focus of Chinese character. And the researchers put forward phonologically mediated access theory. This theory argued that orthography play a important part in the recognization of character, and the phonology mediate the progress too. If we recognise tow character orthographically similar or both orthographically and phonologically similar, what role the orthography and phonology will play? In this study we adopted priming paradigm to examine orthographic neighbour and orthographic-phonologic neighbour.In experiment1we adopted mask priming to determine whether there is orthographic neighbour priming effect in Chinese character. And the effect is promoted or inhibited? There are two factors (prime type vs relatively frequency) and every factor include tow levels (prime type:orthography neighbour/orthographic-phonologic neighbour vs unrelated character; relatively frequency:the frequency of prime stimuli is low and the frequency of target stimuli is high vs the frequency of prime stimuli is high and the frequency of target stimuli is low). There are48students take part in the tow experiment. The results indicated that both in the masked paradigm,the reaction time of high frequency target is shorter significantly, and the correct ratio is higher. And the priming effect is significant in mask paradigm, and the present of orthography neighbour inhibited the recognise of target character. And there is no interaction.Our results is not consistent with the results of Segui et al.(1990), and we think maybe the complexity of Chinese character influencing the result for the60ms present time of priming character maybe too long to be masked. So in experiment2the present time of priming character is35ms (experiment2a) or50ms (experiment2b). The apparatus, procedure and stimuli is the same to experimentlb. The results showed that the frequency effect appeared too, but the priming effect is not stable, and there is no interaction either.Combining the results of experiment2a (35ms), experiment2b (50ms) and experimentl (60ms), we found although the priming effect appeared in different SOA but is not stable. We concluded that the time course of progress of orthography and phonology is different and this maybe account for our results. So in experiment3we examined the influence of phonology. The present time of priming is70ms or50ms.Experiment3is the same to experiment1except the stimuli and priming time. In this experiment, we studied the orthographic-phonologic neighbour. And the results showed that the frequency effect appeared here too. The priming effect is significant, namely the presentation of orthographic-phonologic neighbour promote the recognise of target character. And the interaction is not significant yet.We examined orthographic neighbour effect in different paradigm and different SOA separately in first2experiments. And in experiment3we examined the role of phonology. The results showed that when we study tow orthographically similar characters, the orthography may play a inhibited role. And when we study tow orthographic-phonologically similar characters,the phonology can help us.