Effect Of Chinese Characters’orthography,Phonology And Meaning On The Recognition Without Cued Recall Phenomenon

The recognition without cued recall (RWCR) phenomenon means that people can discriminate between the studied item and the unstudied item even when they cannot recall the studied item. Some studies have demonstrated that English word features, that is, orthography, phonology and meaning can give rise to this phenomenon. Besides, existing research shows that acoustic coding for the short-term memory of English, while visual coding is advantageous to the short-term memory of Chinese. However, few study has explored whether the RWCR phenomenon exist in ideograph and the effect of experience of coding on this phenomenon.Our study was going to investigate these issues by using the recognition without cued recall (RWCR) paradigm, with Chinese characters as experimental materials. Experiment1,2,3explored whether the orthography, phonology and meaning of Chinese characters give rise to the RWCR phenomenon respectively. And participants who skill at Wubi typewriting were recruited in Experiment4. Further, the results of Experiment4compared with Experiment3to find out whether the long-term using of input methods may affect the RWCR phenomenon.Results indicated that word features of Chinese characters can give rise to the RWCR phenomenon as English words, that is, the RWCR phenomenon is universal acrossing ideograph and phonography. In addition, the RWCR phenomenon is unaffected by the experience of coding.Our study first explored the RWCR phenomenon in Chinese characters, and expanded studies on RWCR phenomenon to research field on Chinese characters recognition.